ABSTRACT
When in 1990 the two largest Dutch banks (ABN and Amro Bank) announced their merger, chairman of the management board Jan Nelissen claimed that ABN-Amro was becoming a ‘global player’. The merger was to create the world's sixteenth largest bank with a 1992 capital of US$9.4 billion in equity and reserves and an ECU200 billion turnover (The Economist, 1994: 51). ABN-Amro offices were to be found in almost every major city in the world. At the time, Nelissen particularly meant to emphasise ABN-Amro's US position. ABN-Amro had managed to become one of the largest foreign banks in the USA, where it realised around 20 per cent of its 1993 business and revenues. 1 Only three years later, however, Jan Kalff, the new chairman of the ABN-Amro board, regretted that the image of the bank as a ‘global player’ had ever been made, since it conveyed a wrong impression of ABN-Amro's actual international position. The bank still is a European player at most, with solid Dutch roots: all members of the board of directors are Dutch, and the bulk of its turnover is obtained in Europe. Then what made Nelissen decide to drop the G-word? The answer is as banal as it is revealing to the 1990s newspeak of international business: the very morning of the press conference, Nelissen had read a Financial Times article about a firm which wanted to become a ‘global player’. The word had such appeal to him that he dropped it casually during the press meeting – and ABN-Amro had jumped on to the globalisation bandwagon.
