Jedediah Purdy. The Paradox of Scale. Cristina M. The Heart That Bleeds. Alma Guillermoprieto. In Defense of Liberal Democracy. Manuel Hinds. World on Fire. Utopia or Bust. Benjamin Kunkel. Sam Pizzigati. The Empire of Civil Society. Justin Rosenberg. Economics for the Many. Conflict in Ukraine. Eugene B.
Rumer and Rajan Menon. Legislature by Lot. John Gastil and Erik Olin Wright. The Resurgent Liberal. Robert B. Co-ed Combat. Kingsley Browne. The Arrogance of Power.
William Fulbright. The Path to Hope. Stephane Hessel and Edgar Morin. When Corporations Rule the World. David C. The Extreme Future. James Canton. David Harvey.
The Self-Made Myth. Most moderns who I know live in large, cosmopolitan cities and are drawn to the effortlessness of their technology-driven world and the ease with which they can communicate or travel, by jet or, indeed, instantaneously via the Internet, to any country on the planet. At the same time, many of them have a feeling of loss that stems from the absence of the tight-knit family and neighborhood ties that so many of us grew up with and that represented a kind of parochial but nourishing sense of community.
In other words, jihad vs. McWorld is a kind of clash between the values of a global, cosmopolitan, free-market society on the one hand, and the precious and intimate values of the family, neighborhood, and clan that all of us still feel some attachment to.
Moreover, in writing about jihad , I wasn't referring only to Islam but, for example, to Protestant fundamentalists within the United States, two million of whom have opted out of the public school system and, because they are so appalled by what they regard as a public culture dominated by the corrupt values of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the mall, home-school their children instead.
I mean, if you read Pat Buchanan or Bill Bennett or some of the other so-called cultural conservatives on the right, their critiques of American culture are not too much different than the critique you might hear from a mullah in a Wahabbi mosque who preaches against the corruption and aggressive secular materialism of the West. That said, my analysis did suggest that as time progressed, the contest between these two sets of forces would grow more and more intense and was likely to erupt in various ways, some of which could involve material violence.
You know, infection is a manifestation of a systemic illness that has not been remediated, medically. If you don't do that, the infection can get worse and can even cause a fever that can kill you. In a sense, terrorism is a kind of fever associated with the growing tensions between jihad and McWorld. And, to extend the analogy, if those tensions are not remediated by forms of democratic medicine, they are increasingly likely to erupt in pathological ways.
Now, who could have predicted that the pathology that erupted on September 11 would be quite so complete and devastating? I mean, even Osama bin Laden was surprised by the efficacy and success that his agents achieved. But the fact that a clash of this kind will erupt in violence, if not dealt with by other means, can hardly have come as a surprise to anyone who has thought about the collision of these forces.
And if those tensions are not remediated, they are increasingly likely to erupt in pathological ways PND: In the days immediately following September 11, many Americans were stunned by the images broadcast on network television of ordinary Arab women and children celebrating the success of the attacks and, by extension, the deaths of thousands of American civilians.
What did those images say to you? BB: Well, a couple of things. I mean, there's a tendency to think somehow that there's no boundary at all between such people, but I don't think that's true. The second thing we have to acknowledge is that if thousands, even tens of thousands, of people seem to be taking some pleasure in what was obviously, even to them, a horrendous event in which thousands of civilians — not just from the United States but from something like sixty other countries and including many Muslims — perished, then clearly a lot more is going on here that we need to be thinking about.
And I think what it points to is the fact that an awful lot of people around the world — and, by the way, the celebrations weren't confined to Arab or Muslim countries — clearly see America as not the solution to the world's problems, as we like to think it is or want it to be, but as part of the problem.
In particular, I think there are many people around the world who feel that the United States has been much too insulated from the pain that so many people around the world suffer on a daily basis. I mean, one person I know from a developing country said that while he didn't take pleasure in what happened on September 11, a part of him was glad that the United States got a taste of the suffering that his friends and their families experience as a matter of course.
In one horrendous hour or two, he said, you experienced what our children, our mothers, and our fathers experience, slowly, over decades of starvation, impoverishment, injustice, and oppression. You now live in a world whose interdependence means that if our children are not safe, maybe your children won't be safe anymore. So, I think a lot of what we saw in those images of celebrating women and children was not so much a vulgar or evil pleasure in our pain as it was a kind of satisfaction that maybe, finally, America would begin to appreciate how insecure so many people around the world feel and would begin to understand that it had to do more than it was doing to address the problems that affect other people, in other countries.
In fact, I would say that that's the central meaning of the term "interdependence," which is a term I didn't speak much about in Jihad vs. McWorld but have been writing about more recently. It's the sense that we're all passengers on a single vessel, and if steerage is flooding and the people in fourth and fifth class are going to drown, so are the people up in first class.
PND: In a new introduction to Jihad vs. Is that still your view? BB: Well, actually what I'd said in the original book was that although the two forces were manifestations of common, central developments in our civilization and to some extent would always co-exist, I believed that in the long term McWorld and modernity would overcome the forces of anti-modernity represented by jihad. Ultimately, in other words, we wouldn't go backward; we would go forward.
But I also said there might be some mighty dangerous curves along the road. And that suggests that, if we continue on the course we're on without altering some of our strategies and taking more into account the just claims and needs of people around the world, we are likely to be in for a very, very bumpy ride.
PND: Is it your belief that a U. BB: I've just completed a book on what I call the profound mistake of the new preventive-war doctrine unveiled by the Bush administration as its chief instrument against terrorism. And in that vein I would certainly make the argument that a war on Iraq, though I believe it is being pursued for better motives than just those of oil or vengeance, is nonetheless a catastrophe for the long-term interests of democracy and justice around the world — not least because the war is, in effect, directed against the wrong enemy.
Terrorists are not states. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld himself said, "Terrorists are stateless individuals without fixed interests or addresses. However, because they are stateless, and because they are without fixed interests and addresses, it's very hard to find them, let alone take them out, as we learned in Afghanistan, where most of the Qaeda cadres, including Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, got away. And to now move on to the next state, Iraq, and think that by knocking out the regime of Saddam Hussein we're going to get al Qaeda is simply a deep and disastrous mistake.
Whom do we go after next? Maybe Egypt, or Indonesia followed by the Philippines? I mean, if we're really going to try to take out every state that harbors terrorists, we're going to have to take out New Jersey and Florida as well. Let me be clear. You cannot make war on an invisible enemy that inhabits the interstices of the international system by attacking states, even if you can prove a link between those states and terrorism.
Terrorists are like parasites; they move into a host body, where they are harbored and maybe even nourished, but when the host dies or, as often happens, the parasite kills the host, the parasite just move onto the next body. That's why it's the wrong war against the wrong target. Of course many Americans and, I think, many Europeans feel that instinctively.
What about al Qaeda? Isn't this just going to encourage the terrorists? So in many different ways, the Bush administration's current policy vis-a-vis Saddam Hussein and Iraq seems to be disastrous. Don't get me wrong — I'm not a pacifist. I'm not arguing that America doesn't have a right to strike back at terrorists and terrorism.
The problem, simply put, is that Iraq is not a terrorist state, and even if it harbors and supports terrorists, states are not surrogates for the terrorist enemy we're after. PND: If, as you've suggested, an exclusively military response to the phenomenon of global terrorism is as bad as the disease itself, what should the West's response to the terrorist threat focus on?
BB: Well, there's a saying that goes, "If you want to kill the mosquitos, drain the swamp," and I think that's a pretty useful way to look at the problem. You're never going to get anywhere swatting one mosquito after another, because even if you swat a whole bunch of them, they'll continue to breed as long as the swamp is still there. The swamp in this case is — to mix my own metaphors — the so-called "axis of evil. But to some degree it's the brutal reflection of what I would call an axis of inequality, an axis of impoverishment.
There's no question that unstable, undemocratic, impoverished states are the best breeding ground for terrorism, particularly states that feel threatened by secular, materialist, global markets — in other words, by McWorld. And if we're serious about getting rid of the conditions that breed terrorism, then we need to begin to address the questions of global inequality, of predatory capitalist speculators around the world, of the deep inequalities between rich and poor.
It's not just an economic issue, although that's an important piece of it. There's also an important cultural component — and this comes back to our Protestant fundamentalist, to Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, to Hindi fundamentalists in India, as well as Islamic fundamentalists, all of whom see in our aggressively secular, aggressively materialist, entertainment-saturated culture a violent, sexualized, corrupt society bent on undermining the values they hold most dear.
Most of us completely ignore the fact that, in many ways, our culture is corrupt, even though we know it had something to do with what happened in Columbine, we know it has something to do with the persistent violence in our society, we know it has something to do with the corruption of ethics in religion, we know that predatory capitalism, unrestrained by regulation, can lead to Enron-style greed and lying. But we continue, heedlessly, to export this same culture via the global marketplace to countries where there is no regulation, where there is no SEC, where there is no democratic oversight and then are amazed that people in those countries fail to welcome it as something that liberates and enriches them — even though it can, in fact, do that — but instead see it as an aggressive assault on the values they hold dear and wish to pass on to their children.
Do we really need a Starbucks on every corner of every city in the world? That's not economic competition; that's cultural monopoly So until we begin to operate on the world stage with some self-restraint and moderation and understand that the secular materialism we export so aggressively is viewed elsewhere as a corrupting influence, I think we're going to have a lot of trouble.
We need to begin to understand that rather than simply relying on a single-minded military response to the phenomenon of terrorism, we need to respond to it economically, diplomatically, and culturally. I mean, it's fine for McDonald's to open a couple of franchises in Beijing and maybe even a hundred in China as a whole. But do we really need to have nine hundred McDonald's franchises in Beijing? Is that really good for the Chinese and Chinese culture?
That's not economic competition; that's cultural monopoly, and it ends up destroying local cultures. The free market flourished in junta-run Chile, in military-governed Taiwan and Korea, and, earlier, in a variety of autocratic European empires as well as their colonial possessions. The impact of globalization on ecology is a cliche even to world leaders who ignore it. We know well enough that the German forests can be destroyed by Swiss and Italians driving gas-guzzlers fueled by leaded gas.
We also know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because Brazilian farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are burning down tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plough, and because Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungle into toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen balance and in effect puncturing our global lungs.
Yet this ecological consciousness has meant not only greater awareness but also greater inequality, as modernized nations try to slam the door behind them, saying to developing nations, "The world cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry! Each of the four imperatives just cited is transnational, transideological, and transcultural. Each applies impartially to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists; to democrats and totalitarians; to capitalists and socialists.
The Enlightenment dream of a universal rational society has to a remarkable degree been realized—but in a form that is commercialized, homogenized, depoliticized, bureaucratized, and, of course, radically incomplete, for the movement toward McWorld is in competition with forces of global breakdown, national dissolution, and centrifugal corruption. These forces, working in the opposite direction, are the essence of what I call Jihad. But they often appear as ineffective reactors to the world's real actors: national states and, to an ever greater degree, subnational factions in permanent rebellion against uniformity and integration—even the kind represented by universal law and justice.
The headlines feature these players regularly: they are cultures, not countries; parts, not wholes; sects, not religions; rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Abkhasians, Kurile Islander Japanese, the Zulus of Inkatha, Catalonians, Tamils, and, of course, Palestinians—people without countries, inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that will seal them off from modernity.
A powerful irony is at work here. Nationalism was once a force of integration and unification, a movement aimed at bringing together disparate clans, tribes, and cultural fragments under new, assimilationist flags.
But as Ortega y Gasset noted more than sixty years ago, having won its victories, nationalism changed its strategy. In the s, and again today, it is more often a reactionary and divisive force, pulverizing the very nations it once helped cement together. The force that creates nations is "inclusive," Ortega wrote in The Revolt of the Masses.
But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania This mania has left the post-Cold War world smoldering with hot wars; the international scene is little more unified than it was at the end of the Great War, in Ortega's own time. There were more than thirty wars in progress last year, most of them ethnic, racial, tribal, or religious in character, and the list of unsafe regions doesn't seem to be getting any shorter.
Some new world order! The aim of many of these small-scale wars is to redraw boundaries, to implode states and resecure parochial identities: to escape McWorld's dully insistent imperatives. The mood is that of Jihad: war not as an instrument of policy but as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an end in itself.
Even where there is no shooting war, there is fractiousness, secession, and the quest for ever smaller communities. Add to the list of dangerous countries those at risk: In Switzerland and Spain, Jurassian and Basque separatists still argue the virtues of ancient identities, sometimes in the language of bombs.
Hyperdisintegration in the former Soviet Union may well continue unabated—not just a Ukraine independent from the Soviet Union but a Bessarabian Ukraine independent from the Ukrainian republic; not just Russia severed from the defunct union but Tatarstan severed from Russia. Yugoslavia makes even the disunited, ex-Soviet, nonsocialist republics that were once the Soviet Union look integrated, its sectarian fatherlands springing up within factional motherlands like weeds within weeds within weeds.
Kurdish independence would threaten the territorial integrity of four Middle Eastern nations. Well before the current cataclysm Soviet Georgia made a claim for autonomy from the Soviet Union, only to be faced with its Ossetians , in a republic of 5. The Abkhasian minority in Georgia has followed suit.
Even the good will established by Canada's once promising Meech Lake protocols is in danger, with Francophone Quebec again threatening the dissolution of the federation. In South Africa the emergence from apartheid was hardly achieved when friction between Inkatha's Zulus and the African National Congress's tribally identified members threatened to replace Europeans' racism with an indigenous tribal war.
After thirty years of attempted integration using the colonial language English as a unifier, Nigeria is now playing with the idea of linguistic multiculturalism—which could mean the cultural breakup of the nation into hundreds of tribal fragments. Even Saddam Hussein has benefited from the threat of internal Jihad, having used renewed tribal and religious warfare to turn last season's mortal enemies into reluctant allies of an Iraqi nationhood that he nearly destroyed.
The passing of communism has torn away the thin veneer of internationalism workers of the world unite! Europe's old scourge, anti-Semitism, is back with a vengeance, but it is only one of many antagonisms. It appears all too easy to throw the historical gears into reverse and pass from a Communist dictatorship back into a tribal state.
Among the tribes, religion is also a battlefield. Strictly applied to religious war, it is used only in reference to battles where the faith is under assault, or battles against a government that denies the practice of Islam.
My use here is rhetorical, but does follow both journalistic practice and history. Remember the Thirty Years War? Whatever forms of Enlightenment universalism might once have come to grace such historically related forms of monotheism as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in many of their modern incarnations they are parochial rather than cosmopolitan, angry rather than loving, proselytizing rather than ecumenical, zealous rather than rationalist, sectarian rather than deistic, ethnocentric rather than universalizing.
As a result, like the new forms of hypernationalism, the new expressions of religious fundamentalism are fractious and pulverizing, never integrating. This is religion as the Crusaders knew it: a battle to the death for souls that if not saved will be forever lost. The atmospherics of Jihad have resulted in a breakdown of civility in the name of identity, of comity in the name of community. International relations have sometimes taken on the aspect of gang war—cultural turf battles featuring tribal factions that were supposed to be sublimated as integral parts of large national, economic, postcolonial, and constitutional entities.
These rather melodramatic tableaux vivants do not tell the whole story, however. For all their defects, Jihad and McWorld have their attractions. Yet, to repeat and insist, the attractions are unrelated to democracy.
Neither McWorld nor Jihad is remotely democratic in impulse. Neither needs democracy; neither promotes democracy. McWorld does manage to look pretty seductive in a world obsessed with Jihad.
It delivers peace, prosperity, and relative unity—if at the cost of independence, community, and identity which is generally based on difference. The primary political values required by the global market are order and tranquillity, and freedom—as in the phrases "free trade," "free press," and "free love.
Multinational corporations sometimes seem to prefer doing business with local oligarchs, inasmuch as they can take confidence from dealing with the boss on all crucial matters. Despots who slaughter their own populations are no problem, so long as they leave markets in place and refrain from making war on their neighbors Saddam Hussein's fatal mistake. In trading partners, predictability is of more value than justice. The Eastern European revolutions that seemed to arise out of concern for global democratic values quickly deteriorated into a stampede in the general direction of free markets and their ubiquitous, television-promoted shopping malls.
East Germany's Neues Forum, that courageous gathering of intellectuals, students, and workers which overturned the Stalinist regime in Berlin in , lasted only six months in Germany's mini-version of McWorld. Then it gave way to money and markets and monopolies from the West. By the time of the first all-German elections, it could scarcely manage to secure three percent of the vote.
Elsewhere there is growing evidence that glasnost will go and perestroika—defined as privatization and an opening of markets to Western bidders—will stay. So understandably anxious are the new rulers of Eastern Europe and whatever entities are forged from the residues of the Soviet Union to gain access to credit and markets and technology—McWorld's flourishing new currencies—that they have shown themselves willing to trade away democratic prospects in pursuit of them: not just old totalitarian ideologies and command-economy production models but some possible indigenous experiments with a third way between capitalism and socialism, such as economic cooperatives and employee stock-ownership plans, both of which have their ardent supporters in the East.
Jihad delivers a different set of virtues: a vibrant local identity, a sense of community, solidarity among kinsmen, neighbors, and countrymen, narrowly conceived. But it also guarantees parochialism and is grounded in exclusion.
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