Jihad vs. McWorld:
The Battle For Democracy Joined
by Benjamin
R. Barber
On September 11,
Jihad's long war against McWorld culminated in a fearsomely unprecedented
and altogether astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise
in New York City and the cathedral of American military might
in Washington, D.C. In bringing down the twin towers of the World
Trade Center and destroying a section of the Pentagon with diabolically
contrived human bombs, Jihadic warriors reversed the momentum
in the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, writing a new page
in what, however, was an ongoing story. For until that day, history's
seemingly ineluctable march into a complacent post-modernity had
seemed to favor McWorld's ultimate triumph ' a historical victory
for modernity, free market institutions and McWorld's assiduously
commercialized and ambitiously secularist materialism. Today,
the confrontation between the future and radical reaction seems
far less certain in outcome. As the world enters a novel stage
of shadowed warfare against an invisible enemy, the clash between
Jihad and McWorld is again poignantly relevant in understanding
why the modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military
or tactical, but must entail a commitment to democracy and justice
even where they are in tension with the commitment to cultural
expansionism and global markets. The war against terrorism will
have also to be a war for justice if it is to succeed, and not
just in the sense President Bush used the term in his address
to Congress.
A week after the
trauma of the first large scale assault on the American homeland,
more successful than even its scheming perpetrators could possibly
have hoped for, the President joined the abruptly renewed
combat with Jihadic terrorists by deploying the rhetoric of retributive
justice: 'We will bring the terrorists to justice,' he said gravely
to a joint session of Congress, 'or we will bring justice to the
terrorists.' The language of justice was surely the appropriate
context for the American response, but it will remain appropriate
only if the compass of its meaning is extended from retributive
to distributive justice.
The collision between
the forces of disintegral tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism
I called Jihad (Islam was not the issue) and the forces of
integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural
globalization (America was not alone responsible) I called McWorld
has been brutally exacerbated by the dialectical interdependence
of these two seemingly oppositional sets of forces. In Jihad
vs. McWorld, I hence warned that democracy, caught between
a clash of movements each of which for its own reasons seemed
indifferent to freedom's fate, might suffer grievously. It now
is apparent, as we mount a new military offense against Jihad
(understood not as Islam but as militant fundamentalism) that
democracy rather than terrorism may become the principal victim
of the battle currently being waged.
Only the globalization
of civic and democratic institutions is likely to offer a way
out of the global war between modernity and its aggrieved critics.
For democracy responds both to Jihad and to McWorld. It responds
directly to the resentments and spiritual unease of those for
whom the trivialization and homogenization of values is an affront
to cultural diversity and spiritual and moral seriousness. But
it also answers the complaints of those mired in poverty and despair
as a consequence of unregulated global markets and of a capitalism
run wild because it has been uprooted from the humanizing constraints
of the democratic nation state. By extending the compass of democracy
to the global market sector, it can promise to those wishing to
join the modern world and take advantage of its economic blessings
opportunities for accountability, participation and governance;
by securing cultural diversity and a place for worship and faith
insulated from the shallow orthodoxies of McWorld's cultural monism,
it can address the anxieties of those who fear secularist materialism
and are fiercely commited to preserving their cultural and religious
distinctiveness. On the capacity of moderns to make the world
safe for women and men in search of both justice and faith will
depend the outcome of the cruel battle between Jihad and McWorld,
which will be won only if democracy is the victor.
If democracy is to
be the instrument by which the world avoids the stark choice between
a sterile cultural monism (McWorld) and a raging cultural fundamentalism
(Jihad), neither of which service diversity or civic liberty,
then America, Britain and their allies will have to open a crucial
second civic and democratic front aimed not against terrorism
per se but against the anarchism and social chaos -- the economic
reductionism and its commercializing homogeneity -- that have
created the climate of despair and hopelessness which terrorism
has so effectively exploited. A second democratic front will be
advanced not only in the name of retributive justice and secularist
interests, but in the name of distributive justice and religious
pluralism.
The democratic front
in the war on terrorism is not a battle to dissuade terrorists
from their campaigns of annihilation. Their deeds are unspeakable,
and their purposes can neither be rationalized nor negotiated.
When they hijacked innocents and turned civilian aircraft into
lethal weapons, these self-proclaimed 'martyrs' of faith in truth
subjected others to a compulsory martyrdom indistinguishable from
mass murder. The terrorists offer no terms and can be given none
in exchange. When Jihad turns nihilistic, bringing it to justice
can only take the form of extirpation -- root, trunk, and branch.
Eliminating terrorists will depend on professional military, intelligence
and diplomatic resources whose deployment will leave the greater
number of citizens in America and throughout the world sitting
on the sidelines, anxious spectators to a battle in which they
cannot participate, a battle in which the nausea that accompanies
fear will dull the appetite for revenge. The second front, however,
engages every citizen with a stake in democracy and social justice
whether within nation states or in the relations between them.
It transforms anxious and passive spectators into resolute and
engaged participants ' the perfect antidote to fear.
The first military
front must be prosecuted, both because an outraged and wounded
American nation demands it and because terrorists bent on annihilation
will not yield to blandishments or inducements. They are looking
not for bargains but for oblivion. Yet it will be the successful
prosecution of a second civic front in the war rather than the
strictly military campaign that will determine the outcome.
It, too, in President Bush's words, will be a war for justice,
but a war defined by a new commitment to distributive justice:
a readjudication of North-South responsibilities, a redefinition
of the obligations of global capital as it faces the claims of
global justice and comity, a repositioning of democratic institutions
as they follow markets from the domestic to the international
sector, a new recognition of the place and requirements of faith
in an aggressively secular market society. The war against Jihad
will not, in other words, succeed unless McWorld is also addressed.
To be sure, democratizing
globalism and rendering McWorld less homogenizing and trivializing
to religion and its accompanying ethical and spiritual values
will not appease the terrorists, who are scarcely students of
globalization's contractual insufficiencies. Jihadic warriors
offer no quarter, whether they are the children of Islam, of Christianity
or of some found blood tribalism, they should be given none.
I described these warriors in Jihad vs. McWorld as people
who detest modernity -- the secular, scientific, rational
and commercial civilization created by the Enlightenment as it
is defined by both in its virtues (freedom, democracy, tolerance
and diversity) and its vices (inequality, hegemony, cultural imperialism
and materialism). What can enemies of the modern do but seek to
recover the dead past by annihilating the living present?
Terrorists then cannot
themselves be the object of democratic struggle. They swim in
a sea of tacit popular support and resentful acquiescence, however,
and these waters -- roiling with anger and resentment ' prove
buoyant to ideologies of violence and mayhem. Americans were themselves
first enraged and then deeply puzzled by scenes from Islamic cities
where ordinary men, women and children who could hardly be counted
as terrorists nonetheless manifested a kind of perverse jubilation
in contemplating the wanton slaughter of American innocents. How
could anyone cheer such acts? Yet an environment of despairing
rage exists in too many places in the third world and as well
as in too many third world neighborhoods of first world cities,
enabling terrorism by endowing it with a kind of a quasi-legitimacy
it does not deserve. It is not terrorism itself but this facilitating
environment against which the second front battle is directed.
Its constituents are not terrorists for they are themselves terrified
by modernity and its costs, and as a consequence vulnerable
to meliorative actions if those who embrace democracy can find
the will to take such actions. What they seek is justice not vengeance.
Their quarrel is not with modernity but with the aggressive neo-liberal
ideology that has been prosecuted in its name in pursuit of a
global market society more conducive to profits for some than
justice for all. They are not even particularly anti-American:
rather they suspect that what Americans understand as prudent
unilateralism is really a form of arrogant imperialism,
what Americans take to be a kind of cynical aloofness is
really self-absorbed isolationism and what Americans think of
as pragmatic alliances with tyrannical rulers in Muslim nations
such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are really a betrayal of the
democratic principles in which Americans claim to believe.
Hyperbolic commentators
such as Samuel Huntington have described the current divide in
the world as a global clash of civilizations, and warn of a cultural
war between democracy and Islam, perhaps even between 'the West
and the rest.' But this is to ape the messianic rhetoric of Ossama
Bin Laden ' who has called for precisely such a war. The difference
between Bin Laden's terrorists and the poverty-stricken Third
World constituents he tries to call to arms, however, is the difference
betweeen radical Jihadic fundamentalists and ordinary men and
women concerned to feed their children and nurture their religious
communities. Fundamentalists can be found among every religious
sect and represent a tiny, aggravated minority whose ideology
contradicts the very religions in whose names they act. The remarkable
comments of the American fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell
interpreting the attacks on New York and Washington as the wrath
of God being vented on abortionists, homosexuals and the American
Civil Liberties Union.no more defines Protestantism than the Talibans
define Islam. The struggle of Jihad against McWorld is not a clash
of civilizations but a dialectical expression of tensions built
into a single global civilization as it emerges against a backdrop
of traditional ethnic and religious divisions many of which are
actually created by McWorld and its infotainment industries and
technological innovations. Imagine Bin Laden without modern media:
he would be an unknown desert rat. Imagine terrorism without its
reliance on credit cards, global financial systems, modern technology
and the internet: it would be reduced to throwing stones at local
sheiks. It is the argument of this study then that what we face
is not a war of civilizations, but a war within civilization,
a struggle that expresses the ambivalence within each culture
as it faces a global, networked, material future and wonders whether
cultural and national autonomy can be retained; the ambivalence
within each individual juggling the obvious benefits of modernity
with its equally obvious costs.
From Seattle and
Prague to Stockholm and Genoa, street demonstrators have been
protesting the costs of this civilizational globalization. Yet
though President Chirac of France acknowledged after the dissident
violence of Genoa months before the attacks in New York and Washington
that 100,000 protestors do not take to the streets unless something
is amiss, they have mostly been written off as anarchists or know-nothings.
More media attention has been paid to their theatrics than to
the deep problems those theatrics are intended to highlight. After
September 11, some critics even tried to lump the anti-globalization
protestors in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible
destablizers of world order. But the protestors are the children
of McWorld and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic.
Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and
if the mostly young demonstrators are a little foolish in their
politics, a little naïve in the analyses and a little short
on viable solutions they understand with a sophistication their
leaders apparently lack that globalization's current architecture
breeds anarchy, nihilism and violence. They know too that the
greater number of those in the third world who seem to welcome
American suffering are at worst reluctant adversaries whose principal
aim is to make clear that they too suffer from violence, even
if it is less visible and destroys with greater stealth and over
a longer period of time than the murderous schemes of the terrorists.
They do not want to belittle American suffering but to use its
horrors to draw attention to their own. How many of these 'enemies
of McWorld,' given the chance, would prefer to enjoy modernity
and its blessings if they were not so often the victims of modernity's
unevenly distributed costs? How many are really fanatic communists
and how many are merely instinctive guardians of fairness who
resent not capitalism's productivity but only the claim that in
the absence of global regulation and the democratic rule of law
capitalism can possibly serve them. It is finally hypocrisy rather
than democracy that is the target of their rage.
Too often for those
living in the second and third worlds to the South of the United
States, Europe and Japan, globalization looks like an imperious
strategy of a predominantly American economic behemoth; too often
what we understand as the opportunities to secure liberty and
prosperity at home seems to them but a rationalization for exploitation
and oppression in the international sphere; too often what we
call the international order is for them an international disorder.
Our neo-liberal antagonism to all political regulation in the
global sector, to all institutions of legal and political oversight,
to all attempts at democratizing globalization and institutionalizing
economic justice looks to them like brute indifference to their
welfare and their claims for justice. Western beneficiaries of
McWorld celebrate market ideology with its commitment to the privatization
of all things public and the commercialization of all things private,
and consequently insist on total freedom from government interference
in the global economic sector (laissez-faire). Yet total freedom
from interference -- the rule of private power over public goods
-- is another name for anarchy. And terror is merely one
of the many contagious diseases that anarchy spawns.
What was evident
to those who, before September 11, suffered the economic consequences
of an undemocratic international anarchy beyond the reach of democratic
sovereignty was that while many in the first world benefited from
free markets in capital, labor and goods, these same anarchic
markets left ordinary people in the third world largely unprotected.
What has become apparent to the rest of us after September 11
is that that same deregulated disorder from which financial and
trade institutions imagine they benefit is the very disorder on
which terrorism depends. Markets and globalized financial
institutions, whether multi-national corporations or individual
currency speculators, are deeply averse to oversight of nation
states. McWorld seeks to overcome sovereignty and makes its impact
global. Jihad, too, makes war on sovereignty, using the
interdependence of transportation, communication and other modern
technological systems to render borders porous and sovereign oversight
irrelevant. Just as jobs defy borders, hemorrhaging from one country
to another in a wage race to the bottom; just as safety, health
and environmental standards lack an international benchmark against
which states and regions might organize their employment; so too
anarchistic terrorists with loyalty to no state and accountable
to no people range freely across the world, knowing no borders
can detain them, no united global opinion can isolate them, no
international police or juridical institutions can interdict them.
The argument laid out in what follows then proposes that both
Jihad and McWorld undermine the sovereignty of nation states,
dismantling the democratic institutions that has been their finest
achievement without discovering ways to extend democracy either
downwards to the subnational religious and ethnic entities that
now lay claim to people's loyalty or upwards to the international
sector in which McWorld's pop culture and commercial markets operate
without sovereign restraints.
Unlike America, which
pretends it still enjoys sovereign independence, taking responsibility
neither for the global reach of its popular culture (McWorld)
nor for the secularizing and trivializing character of its adamant
materialism, the terrorists acknowledge and exploit the actual
interdependence that characterizes human relations in the twenty-first
century. Theirs, however, is a perverse and malevolent interdependence,
one in which they have learned to use McWorld's weight jujitsu
style against its massive power. Ironically even as it fosters
an anarchic absence of sovereignty at the global level, the United
States has resisted the slightest compromise of its national sovereignty
at home. America has complained bitterly in recent years about
the prospect of surrendering a scintilla of its own sovereignty,
whether to NATO commanders, to supranational institutions such
as the international criminal tribunal, or to international treaties
such as those banning landmines or regulating fossil fuels (global
warming). Even today as the United States launches a military
campaign against terrorism surrounded by a prudently constructed
coalition, it has made clear that it prefers 'coalitions' to 'alliances'
because it wants to be free to target objectives, develop strategy
and wage war exactly as it wishes.
Yet terrorism has
already made a mockery of sovereignty. What was the hijacking
of airliners, the calamitous razing of the World Trade Towers,
the brash attack on the Pentagon, but a profound obliteration
of American sovereignty? Terrorism is the negative and depraved
form of that interdependence which in its positive and beneficial
form we too often refuse to acknowledge. As if still in
the Nineteenth Century, America has persuaded itself that its
options today are to preserve an ancient and blissfully secure
independence that puts us in charge of American destiny, or to
yield to a perverted and compulsory interdependence that puts
foreigners and alien international bodies like the U.N. or the
World Court in charge of American destiny. In truth, however,
Americans have not enjoyed a real independence since sometime
before the great wars of the last century. Certainly not since
the advent of AIDs and the West Nile virus, of global warming
and an ever more porous ozone layer, of a job 'mobility' that
has decimated America's industrial economy and of restive speculators
who have made 'capital flight' a more 'sovereign' reality
that any conceivable government oversight. Interdependence is
not some foreign adversary against which citizens need to muster
resistance. It is a domestic reality that already has compromised
the efficacy of citizenship in scores of unacknowledged and uncharted
ways.
It was the interdependence
of America with the world and the interdependence of shared economic
and technological systems everywhere on which the Jihadic warriors
counted when they brought terror to the American homeland.
They not only hijacked America's air transportation system, turning
its airplanes into deadly missiles; they provoked the nation into
closing it down entirely for nearly a week. They not
only destroyed the cathedral of American capitalism at the World
Trade Center, they forced capitalism to shut down its markets
and they shocked the country into deep recession of which the
stock market in free fall was only a leading indicator. How can
any nation claim independence under these conditions?
In the world before
McWorld, there was genuine independence for democratic sovereign
nations, and sovereignty represented a just claim by autonomous
peoples to autonomous control over their lives. In Andrew Jackson's
pre-modern, rural America where communities existed in isolation,
where there was no national system of transportation or communication,
systematic terror was simply not an option: there was no system.
There was no way to bring America to its knees because in a crucial
sense America did not exist, not at least as a collectivity of
interdependent regions with a single interest ' not until after
the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution that followed it.
Today there is so much systemic interactivity, so highly integrated
a global network, so finely tuned an integral communications technology,
that it has become as easy to paralyze as to use the multiple
systems and networks. Hence, the decision would-be sovereign peoples
face today it not the felicitous choice between secure independence
and an unwanted interdependence. It is only the sobering
choice between, on the one hand, a relatively legitimate and democratic
and useful interdependence which, however is still to be constructed
and which leaves sovereignty in tatters; and, on the other hand,
a radically illegitimate and undemocratic interdependence on the
terms of criminals, anarchists and terrorists, an interdependence
that is already here and which will triumph in the absence of
a democratizing political will. In short we can allow either McWorld
and Jihad -- Hollywood cowboys and international desperadoes --
to set the terms of our interdependence; or we can leave those
terms to transnational treaties, new global democratic bodies,
and a new creative common will. We can have our interactivity
dictated to us by violence and anarchy or we can construct it
on the model of our own democratic aspirations. We can have a
democratic and useful interdependence on whatever common ground
we can persuade others to stand on, or we can stand on the brink
of anarchy and try to prevent criminals and terrorists from pushing
us into the abyss.
It will be hard for
defenders of modernity ' whether of McWorld's markets or democracy's
citizenship ' to have it both ways. Terrorism turns out to be
a depraved version of globalization no less vigorous in its pursuit
of it own special interests than are global markets, no less wedded
to anarchist disorder than are speculators, no less averse to
violence when it serves their ends than marketers are averse to
inequality and injustice when they represents the 'costs of doing
business.' It is their instinctive reading of this equation that
turns poor people into cheering mobs when American experience
grievous losses. It is their perception of overwhelming hypocrisy
that leads them to exult where we would wish for them to grieve.
In his address to
Congress, President Bush said 'you are with us or you are
with the terrorists.' Americans may appreciate the impulse to
divide the world into good and evil (though it smacks of the Manicheanism
for which Americans excoriate their fundamentalist adversaries),
but America's enemies (and more than a few of its friends) are
likely to find this discourse misleading if not hubristic. For
an America that comprehends the realities of interdependence and
wishes to devise a democratic architecture to contain its disorder
cannot ask others to join it or 'suffer the consequences.' It
is not for the world to join America: McWorld already operates
on this premise and the premise is precisely the problem, certainly
anything but a key to the solution. It is rather for America to
join the world on whatever terms it can negotiate on an equal
footing with the world. Whether a product of arrogance or prudence,
the demand that the world join the United States simply
will not secure results. It defies the very interdependence to
which it is addressed. It assumes a sovereign autonomy the United
States does not and cannot enjoy.
In Jihad vs. McWorld,
I worried that a pervasive culture of fast food, fast computers
and fast music advanced by an infotainment industry rooted in
the spread of brands could homogenize global markets and render
taste not merely shallow but uniform. McWorld's culture represented
a kind of soft imperialism to which those who are colonized are
said to 'choose' their commercial indenture. But real choice demands
real diversity and civic freedom (public choice ' a point explored
below). It also requires a willingness by the United States to
work multilaterally and internationally to build global democratic
infrastructures that rise up next to McWorld and offset its trivial
but pervasive hegemonies.
Yet in the last ten
years the United States has intensified its commitment to a political
culture of unilateralism and faux autonomy that makes reenforce
rather than attentuate the effects of McWorld. There is hardly
a multilateral treaty of significance to which the United States
has willingly subscribed in recent times ' whether it is the Kyoto
protocol on global warning or the ban on landmines or the comprehensive
test ban treaty. Indeed, at the time of the terrorist attack the
United States was threatening to unilaterally abrogate the ABM
treaty in order to be able to develop and deploy its missile defense
shield. There is hardly a single international institution that
has not been questioned, undermined or outright abandoned by the
United States in the name of its 'need' to protect its sovereign
interests. Only the competing need to gather a coalition to underwrite
its anti-terrorist military strike compelled the American government
finally to pay its U.N. dues and to commit to modest amounts of
simple humanitaarian aid that should have been a function of normalcy
(the United States still pays a smaller percentage of its GNP
to foreign aid than any other developed nation in the world).
The Bretton Woods
institutions such as the IMF and the WTO (heir to the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) might have been of some succor
in the effort to construct a more democratic globalism, that they
been put to the kinds of developmental and democratic purposes
for which they were designed in post-war Europe. Instead they
have been cast by the democratic governments that control them
as undemocratic instruments of private interest ' seeming tools
of banks, corporations and investors which to an untoward degree
also control the policies of those governments. Anarchism in the
global sector is no accident: it has been assiduously cultivated.
Yet terrorism can
be understood in part as a depraved version of this global anarchism
' one which, for all its depravity, is as vigorous and self-justifying
as global markets. It, too, profits from the arrogant pretense
of claims to national sovereignty. It too benefits by the
absence of international executive police and juridical institutions.
It too exploits global anarchy to ferment national anarchy and
the further weakening of the capacity of nations to control their
own destinies, either apart or together. In late 19th
century America when the Federal government was markedly weaker
than it is today, America looked locally rather like social relations
look today globally. Lawlessness came easy, both to the robber
barons of growing capitalist metropolises and the robber desperadoes
of the western prairies. Then too the outlaws prospered
in the suites as well as in the streets.
The global sector
today seems driven by the same anarchy in which burgeoning forces
of what our own bankers have called wild capitalism spread both
their productivity, which we welcome, and their injustices which
we try to ignore. Wild capitalism is not alone: along side
it rage reactionary forces of wild terrorism. Against capitalism's
modern message, Jihadic fundamentalism spreads its anti-modern
message, sowing fear and nurturing chaos, hoping to bring
democracy no less than capitalism to its knees. The war between
Jihad and McWorld takes no prisoners. It cannot serve democracy,
however it turns out.
The democratic project
is to globalize democracy as we have globalized the economy; to
democratize the globalism that has been so efficiently marketized.
The issue is no longer utopian longing for global democracy against
the siren call of consumerism or the passionate war cries of Jihad;
it is the securing of safety. Following September 11, Global governance
has become a sober mandate of political realism.
Mandate or not, it
will not be easy for America to overcome the reassuring myth of
national independence and innocence with which it has lived so
comfortably for two hundred years. Before it traded in the currency
of McWorld that made it the global merchadizer, America had invented
a simpler story about itself. In the Puritan myth of the City
on the Hill, in the Enlightenment conceit of a tabula rasa (blank
tablet) on which a new people would inscribe a fresh history,
Americans embraced Tom Paine's quaint and revolutionary notion
that on the new continent humankind could literally go back and
start over again as if at the beginning of the world. Europe's
cruel torments, the ancient prejudices and religious persecutions
would be left behind. Safeguarded by two immense oceans, at home
on a bountiful and empty continent (the red man was part of the
new world's flora and fauna), Americans would devise a new experimental
science of government, establish a new constitution fortified
by rights, and with the innocence of new born peoples, write a
new history. Slavery, a great civil war, two world conflagrations,
totalitarian regimes abroad could not dissuade America from its
precious self-definition. Even as the oceans became mere streams
that could be crossed in an instant by invisible adversaries,
even as the pressures of an impinging world too grew too complex
to yield to simplicity, America imagined it might with its vaunted
technology recreate virtual oceans, deploying a magic missile
shield that would ward off foreign evil.
Was America ever
really a safe haven island in the tainted streams of world history?
Was it ever any more innocent than the children of every nation
are innocent? Human nature is everywhere morally ambivalent, the
better angels cooing into one ear, their demonic cousins crowing
into the other. Americans seem to know no evil, even when they
do it. To others the claim to innocence is an assertion of hypocrisy
' again hypocisy, among the deadliest of sins for Muslims and
others who watch America demonize others and forgive itself.
Terrorism brought
the age of innocence, if such there ever really was, to a close.
How can the myth of independence survive September 11? The Declaration
of Independence that announced a new coming, a new kind of society,
has achieved its task of nation-building. To build the new world
that is now required calls for a new Declaration of Interdependence,
a declaration recognizing the interdependence of a human race
that can no longer survive in fragments ' whether the pieces are
called nations or tribes, peoples or markets. There are no oceans
wide enough to protect a nation from a tainted atmosphere or a
spreading plague, no walls high enough to defend a people against
a corrupt ideology or a vengeful prophet, no security strict enough
to keep a determined martyr from his sacrificial rounds. Nor is
any nation ever again likely to experience untroubled prosperity
and plenty unless others are given the same opportunity; suffering
too has been democratized and those most likely to experience
it will find a way to compel those most remote from it to share
the pain. If there cannot be an equity of justice there will be
an equity of injustice, if all cannot partake in plenty, impoverishment
' both material and spiritual -- will be the common lot. That
is the hard lesson of interdependence.
To declare interdependence
is then in a sense merely to acknowledge what is already a reality.
It is to embrace willingly and constructively a fate terrorists
would like to shove down our throats. Their message is: 'your
sons want to live, ours are ready to die.' Our response must be:
'we will create a world in which the seductions of death hold
no allure because the bounties of life are accessible to everyone.'
Such grand notions
must start with the mundane, however. America is perhaps the most
parochial empire that has ever existed and Americans ' though
harbingers of McWorld's global culture ' are the least cosmopolitan
and traveled of peoples. Is there another democratic legislature
that has so many members without passports? There is certainly
no democratic nation that pays a smaller percentage of its GNP
for foreign aid (a third of what other democracies pay). And for
an remarkably multicultural nation, how is it that the American
image is so monocultural, the inhabitants so averse to the study
of foreign languages? Such.a nation, even if it cultivates
the will to a constructive and benevolent interdependence, will
have a difficult time meeting its demands. Military strategists
complain America does not speak the languages of its enemies.
In America's universities, they no longer even teach the languages
of its friends. Too many Ph.d. programs have given up language
requirements, often allowing 'methods' courses or statistics to
stand in their stand. Statistics may help us count the bodies,
but it will do little to prevent the slaughter.
In the wake of two
centuries of either isolationism or unilateralism, with only a
few war time pauses for coalition building and consultation, the
United States is inexperienced in the hard work of creative interdependence
and international partnership.
When it discerns
problems in international treaties (the Kyoto protocol on global
warming, the Landmine Ban, the International Criminal Tribunal),
and it cannot negotiate its way in, it simply walks out. When
international institutions like UNESCO and the United Nations
and international conferences like the Durban Racism meeting resonate
with hostility, it withdraws in an arrogant pique instead of participating
with a view to make its influence felt. The missile shield with
its attendant requirement that we abandon the ABM treaty is a
typically unilateral and hubristic instance of America's inclination
to go it alone. Aside from its technological infeasibility ' we
cannot keep terrorists off of airplanes or individual 'sleepers'
from engaging in biological and chemical warfare but we will intercept
multiple warheads and their multiplying decoys without a hitch
' the missile shield once again isolates America from a world
it ought to be participate in changing. Ronald Reagan imagined
a virtual bubble that would keep the nation safe from foreign
nightmares, but the nightmares have come to our shores in the
bright light of morning and there is no shield against terror
except a confrontation with its complex global genealogy. It is
a peculiarly American conviction that technology can take the
place of human ingenuity and action in warding off trouble. Smart
bombs are given preference over smart people, missiles that think
take the place of policymakers who think, electronic listening
posts replace culturally and linguistically adept human agents.
Technology is the last redoubt of our vanishing independence,
the means by which America aspires to keep alive the fading dream
of sovereign autonomy. Yet technology itself, like the science
from which it arises, is a product of transnational communities
and is a better symbol of interdependence than independence. McWorld
itself, with it reliance on global communications technology,
teaches that lesson.
When America finally
turns from its mythic independence and acknowledges the real world
of interdependence, it will face an irony it helped create: the
international institutions available to those who wish to make
interdependence a tool of democracy and comity are far and few
between. McWorld is everywhere, CivWorld is nowhere. But Nike
and McDonald's and Coke and MTV can contribute nothing to the
search for democratic alternatives to criminal terrorism. They
inadvertently contribute to its causes: that is the melancholy
dialectic of Jihad vs. McWorld that is a the heart of this book.
The encompassing
practices of globalization we have nurtured have in fact created
a radical asymmetry: we have managed to globalize markets in goods,
labor, currencies and information without globalizing the civic
and democratic institutions that have historically comprised the
free market's indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed
capitalism from the institutional 'box' that has (quite literally)
domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human
face. To understand why taking capitalism 'out of the box' has
been so calamitous, we need to recall that the history of capitalism
and free markets has been one of synergy with democratic institutions.
Free economies have grown up within and been fostered and contained
and controlled by democratic states. Democracy has been a precondition
for free markets ' not, as economists try to argue today, the
other way round. The freedom of the market that has helped sustain
freedom in politics and a spirit of competition in the political
domain has been nurtured in turn by democratic institutions. Contract
law and regulation as well as cooperative civic relations have
attenuated capitalism's Darwinism and contained its irregularities,
its contradictions, and its tendencies towards self-destruction
around monopoly and the eradication of competition. On the global
plane today, the historical symmetry that paired democracy and
capitalism has gone missing. We have globalized the marketplace
willy nilly because markets can bleed through porous national
boundaries and are not constrained by the logic of sovereignty;
but we have not even begun to globalize democracy, which -' precisely
because it is political and is defined by sovereignty ' is 'trapped'
inside the nation'state box.
The resulting global
asymmetry, in which both states and markets serve only the interests
of markets, damages not only a well functioning democratic civic
order, but a well'functioning international economic order as
well. The continuing spread of the new globalization, has only
deepened the asymmetry between private vices and public goods.
McWorld in tandem with the global market economy has globalized
many of our vices and almost none of our virtues. We have globalized
crime, globalized the rogue weapons trade, globalized drugs, pornography
and the trade in women and children made possible by 'porn tourism.'
Indeed, the most egregious globalization has been the globalization
of the exploitation and abuse of children in war, pornography,
poverty and sex tourism. This aspect of globalization entails
that slow suffering, the deliberately paced violence, that has
created so fertile a ground for recruiting terrorists. Indeed,
it is terrorism itself long with its propaganda that has
been most effectively globalized 'sometimes (ironically) using
the modern technologies of the world wide web and the world wide
media to promote ideologies hostile both to technology and to
anything smacking of the world'wide or the modern. Following September
11, Osama Bin Laden became a regular on CNN, the channels of McWorld
transformed into conduits for an attack on it.
Globalization has
been complete in the private sector then, but lacks anything resembling
a civic envelope. And so it cannot support the values and institutions
associated with civic culture, religion and the family; nor can
it enjoy their potentially softening, domesticating and civilizing
impact on raw market transactions. No wonder Pope John Paul said
in his Apostolic Exhortation on the Mission of the Roman Catholic
Church in the Americas: 'If globalization is ruled merely by the
laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences
cannot but be negative.' [1] Of course one expects the Pope to moralize
in this fashion. More startling is a similar message from another
more powerful Pope of the secular world, who wrote recently: 'You
hear talk about a new financial order, about an international
bankruptcy law, about transparency, and more' but you don't hear
a word about people'. Two billion people live on less than two
dollars a day'. We live in a world that gradually is getting worse
and worse and worse. It is not hopeless, but we must do something
about it now.' The moralist here is the hardheaded
James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, who has begun to
replace the bank's traditional energy and industrialization projects
thought to favor the interests of foreign investors with environmental
and health projects aimed at the interests of the populations
being directly served.
[2]
There are of course
extant international institutions that might serve as building
blocks for a global democratic box into which the economy could
safely be put. The international financial institutions conceived
at Bretton Woods after World War Two to oversee the reconstruction
of the shattered European and Asian economies were intended originally
to function as regulatory agencies to assure peaceful, stable
and democratic redevelopment under the watchful eye of the victorious
allied powers. Though the World Bank and the I.M.F. (and later
the GATT and the W.T.O. that grew out of it in 1995) were ostensibly
forged as instruments of democratic sovereign nations designed
to guide and regulate private sector interests in the name
of public sector reconstruction, over a period of time they became
instruments of the very private sector interests they were meant
to channel and keep in check. Those who today call for their elimination
in the name of transparency, accountability and democracy might
be surprised to learn that these norms were once regarded as among
the post-war financial order's primary objectives. Given the role
the modern institutions representing this order play as potential
pieces in a global regulatory infrastructure, one way to begin
the process of global democratization would be to redemocratize
them and subordinate them to the will of democratic peoples.
Globalization does
not of course occur in a vacuum. Its corrosive impact on democratic
governance and our inability to put international financial institutions
that are nominally already at the service of democracy to real
democratic use is augmented by a cognate ideology of privatization
that is prevalent both in the international scene and within the
countries whose economies are being globalized. McWorld is accompanied
by this ideology of privatization ' what Europeans often call
neo-liberalism, and George Soros has labeled market fundamentalism
(an appropriate implicit comparison to Jihadic fundamentalism
-- is an ideology that saps democracy by attacking government
and its culture of public power. By arguing that markets can do
everything government once did better than government, and with
more freedom for citizens, privatization within nation states
opens the way for a deregulation of markets that in turn facilitates
the globalization of the economy. It softens up citizens
to accept the decline of political institutions and tries to persuade
them that they will be better off'more 'free' ' when their collective
democratic voice is stilled, when they think of themselves not
as public citizens but private consumers. Consumers are poor substitutes
for citizens, however, as corporate CEOs are poor substitutes
for statesmen. It is telling that on the morning of September
12, no American called Bill Gates or Michael Eisner to ask for
assistance in dealing with terrorism. Long neglected public institutions
reacquired overnight their democratic legitimacy and their role
as defenders of public goods. Can this renewed legitimacy be employed
on behalf of international institutions dedicated to public rather
than private goods? If it can, new forms of civic interdependence
can be quickly established. For the ideology of privatization
has always confounded private and public modes of choosing. Consumer
choice is always and necessarily private and personal choice.
Private choices, autonomous or not, cannot affect public outcomes.
Democratic governance is not just about choosing, it is about
public choosing, about dealing with the social consequences of
private choices and behavior. In the global sector this is crucial,
because only public and democratic decisions can establish social
justice and equity. Private markets cannot, not because they are
capitalist but because they are private. In Rousseau's language,
through participation in the general will global citizens can
regulate the private wills of global consumers and global corporations.
It is both a noxious
tribute to the power of privatization and a marker of our deep
confusion about the difference between public and private goods
in the new century that there is a question (as the headline of
a recent Newsweek article had it) about 'Who should own the code
of life?' [3] Currently,
the inclination is to answer 'private biotech companies' ' a contradiction
of everything we know about the public character of our species
being. Under the rules of both democracy and morality, the code
of life presumably belongs to some version of 'us' rather than
to some corporate 'me.' There is something comically childish
about adult scientists arguing over who owns the human genome,
as it were a stray Pokeman card found on the playground, just
one more commercial product in McWorld's bag of tricks.
This critique points
to the crucial difference between public and private liberty,
a difference that may go to the heart of Pope John Paul's complaint
that 'the human race is facing forms of slavery which are new
and more subtle than those of the past, and for far too many people,
freedom remains a word without meaning.' To think that shopping
is what freedom means is to embrace the slavery against which
the Pope warns (though of course the Pope is a thoroughly unmodern
man, if not yet a Jihadic warrior.
There are many things government cannot do
very well but there are many others that only government
can do, such as regulate, protect and sometimes subsidize and
redistribute'not because it does them particularly well, or even
'better' than the market, but because they are public things for
which only 'we' (the public) can be held accountable. These 'res
publica' (literally 'things of the public') include education,
culture, incarceration, transportation, defense, health care and,
yes, the human genome. The include the war on terrorism. And they
include the construction of a fair and equitable international
order that offers every people (and every person) equal access
and equal opportunity. Put simply, the struggle against Jihad
(which is itself a holy 'struggle' against us) can succeed only
if it also is a struggle on behalf of genuine transnational public
goods against the private interests manifest in McWorld.
Capitalism is an
extraordinarily productive system. There is no better way to organize
human labor for productivity than mobilizing a billion private
wills motivated self-interest. It fails miserably at distribution,
however, which is necessarily the object of our public institutions,
motivated by the search for common ground and a way to overcome
the private conflicts and private inequalities that arise out
of private production. Domestically, most nation states have struck
the balance: that is the meaning of democratic capitalism. Internationally,
there is only a raging asymmetry that is the first and last cause
of that anarchism in which terror flourishes and terrorist make
their perverse arguments about death to young men and women who
have lost hope in the possibilities of life.
This book describe
a war between then between Jihad and McWorld that cannot be won.
Only a struggle of democracy against not only Jihad but also McWorld
can achieve a just victory for the planet. A just, diverse, democratic
world will put commerce and consumerism back in its place and
make space for religion; it will combat the terrors of Jihad not
by making war on it but by creating a world in which the practice
of religion is as secure as the practice of consumption and in
which the defense of cultural values is not in tension with liberty
but part of how liberty is defined. Terror feeds off of the parasitic
dialectics of Jihad and McWorld. In a democratic world order,
there will be no need for militant Jihad because belief will have
a significant place; and there will be no advantage to McWorld
because cultural variety will confront it on every television
station and at every mall, the world over. When Jihad and McWorld
have vanished as primary categories, terror may not wholly disappear
(it is lodged in a small but impregnable crevice in the dark regions
of the human soul), but it will become irrelevant to the hopes
and aspirations of women and men who will have learned to love
life too much to confuse religion with the courtship of death.
