A Pint of Globalisation?

In his first week, new UK PM Burnham proclaimed himself protector of pubs, in a signal he believes the politics of the pub within the UK is worthy of concern. He is right. Yet the pint of lager on the bar can also be considered within an international frame. If you want to understand why the globalised world economy leaves people confused and feeling dislocated, then sit down, have a beer, and it might start to become clearer. The world’s brewing industry giants offer reflection on today’s global economy – replete with consumer-unfriendly tactics to gobble up market share, according to some. 

It appears that more than ever we have a panoply of beer available from all corners of the world and everywhere in between on our bars and shelves today. I’m not even talking here about the ‘craft’, ‘artisan’, or ‘indie’ beer market, which tends to come with a consciously internationalist philosophy. Within the market of a few mass-produced beer brands that represent by far the largest volumes sold today, the UK consumes brands that come from countries all across Europe, the Americas, Asia, as well as the UK itself. It appears to represent a great success of global economic liberalisation, that citizens of the world can get drunk on one another’s favourite brew. 

But in large part the international aspect is flimsy. Many of the European brands are brewed under license at a brewery plant in the UK, as are many ‘world’ brands, with other ‘world’ brands locating production for Europe and the UK in the EU. Often this is quite easy to facilitate because so many of these brands belong under the same market-dominating multinationals as one another. A handful of giant companies have formed over the years through international mergers and acquisitions of smaller beer brands and brewers across the globe, accelerating with the liberalisation of international trade from the 1990s onwards, and continuing today. Reaching a commercial deal for another brewery site to produce what was your beer in a distant market of the world is generally easier when you are all part of the same controlling interest.

And it makes sense to produce your beer this way. Rather than inefficiently shipping finished product half way round the world (and in heavy, fragile containers in the case of imported glass bottles) there are often better margins to be found if you can produce a product closer to the target market. For economic as well as regulatory purposes, the most efficient way of doing it will typically be to use the supply chains for raw materials and perhaps even distribution already established in that region. Why go through the significant hassle and costs of attempting to also import raw ingredients into the market unnecessarily? If needs be, just buy up an already established regional brewery and put your product out through your newly acquired subsidiary. The exact recipe, technical specifications, and quality control for the product will be dictated as part of the licensing conditions, but the raw material supply chains will almost certainly be the regional brewery’s own. 

And so we get to the illusion of choice. CAMRA – a UK-based organisation somewhere between a beer fan club, a cultural preservation society, and a consumer rights group – recently complained to the Competition and Markets Authority with a number of grievances against major international brewing conglomerates. They argue – amongst other things – that these behemoths of brewing misleadingly claim foreign provenance for their product. To others, there is nothing noteworthy in this; this is just how we do business in the twenty-first century. But where does it leave consumers? 

I recently ordered a Japanese lager in noodle bar and saw it was brewed under license in the EU. So, what about it exactly was Japanese, if the labour and materials were European? And as far as being a product of globalisation is concerned, the fact it was a lager points more to the continuing significance today of the previous great age of globalisation in the modern era – when Europeans and Americans transformed the world through projects of imperial ambition. Many skilled travelling German and central European technicians effectively exported their favourite beer style across the globe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

In 2022, Shannon O’Neil wrote a book in which she argued something similar: economic regionalisation has actually been the true engine of what we see as globalisation today. Though globalisation of trade is undeniable, so is the fact that capital and information move faster and more easily than people and raw materials. This means that for labour and our essential raw materials like agricultural produce, we have to think much more in terms of things like distance, geography, and even seasonality, than when considering corporate ownership, licensing, and branding. But this makes questions of provenance and scale – and therefore in a way identity – difficult to grasp in everyday life. 

There is an increasing backlash in many wealthy western societies against a perceived faceless globalism that erodes our ties to the traditional products of our land and culture. But this is at most only partly true. Capital and ideas move quickly to where they can sell people visions and dreams for a quick payday – sometimes ones that confound and mislead. But we must not forget labour and material objects, even in a globalised economy, cannot be made to defy physics and geography.

Image: Flickr/Alan Nakkash

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