-Caveat Lector-
http://www.theatlantic.com/election/connection/foreign/barberf.htm
Published originally in the March, 1992 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Revised as the introduction to Jihad Versus McWorld (Times Books, 1995), a
volume that discusses and extends the themes of the original article. Not to
be reproduced in any form without the premission of the author.
Jihad Vs. McWorld
The two axial principles of our age--tribalism and globalism--clash at every
point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
by Benjamin R. Barber
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political
futures--both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of
large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization
of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people
against people, tribe against tribe--a Jihad in the name of a hundred
narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind
of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being
borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand
integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music,
fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing
nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied
together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is
falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same
moment.
These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same
instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is
exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as
the world's largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist
parties like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, along with
nationalist assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States are
breaking up or joining up: the Soviet Union has disappeared almost
overnight, its parts forming new unions with one another or with like-minded
nationalities in neighboring states. The old interwar national state based
on territory and political sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional
development.
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces
of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one
driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one
re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other
making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common:
neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern
themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's
centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome
is unlikely to be democratic--or so I will argue.
McWorld, or the Globalization of Politics
Four imperatives make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market imperative, a
resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological
imperative. By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of national
borders, these imperatives have in combination achieved a considerable
victory over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their
most virulent traditional form--nationalism. It is the realists who are now
Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent England or
Germany, perhaps even a resurgent Wales or Saxony. Yesterday's wishful cry
for one world has yielded to the reality of McWorld.
THE MARKET IMPERATIVE. Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed
that the quest for ever-expanding markets would in time compel nation-based
capitalist economies to push against national boundaries in search of an
international economic imperium. Whatever else has happened to the
scientistic predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved
farsighted. All national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of
larger, transnational markets within which trade is free, currencies are
convertible, access to banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under
law. In Europe, Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such
markets are eroding national sovereignty and giving rise to
entities--international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies
like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and
multinational corporations that increasingly lack a meaningful national
identity--that neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or
regulative principle.
The market imperative has also reinforced the quest for international peace
and stability, requisites of an efficient international economy. Markets are
enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, war. Market psychology
attenuates the psychology of ideological and religious cleavages and assumes
a concord among producers and consumers--categories that ill fit narrowly
conceived national or religious cultures. Shopping has little tolerance for
blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing British paternalism,
Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox fundamentalism, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales
Massachusetts puritanism. In the context of common markets, international
law ceases to be a vision of justice and becomes a workaday framework for
getting things done--enforcing contracts, ensuring that governments abide by
deals, regulating trade and currency relations, and so forth.
Common markets demand a common language, as well as a common currency, and
they produce common behaviors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life
everywhere. Commercial pilots, computer programmers, international bankers,
media specialists, oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts,
demographers, accountants, professors, athletes--these compose a new breed
of men and women for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only
marginal elements in a working identity. Although sociologists of everyday
life will no doubt continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode,
shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynics might even say
that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe have had as their true
goal not liberty and the right to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to
shop (although the vote is proving easier to acquire than consumer goods).
The market imperative is, then, plenty powerful; but, notwithstanding some
of the claims made for "democratic capitalism," it is not identical with the
democratic imperative.
THE RESOURCE IMPERATIVE. Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political
autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized
what they called autarky, and tried for a while to create a way of life
simple and austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient. To be
free meant to be independent of any other community or polis. Not even the
Athenians were able to achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out,
is dependency. By the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably
bound up with a flowering empire held together by naval power and
commerce--an empire that, even as it appeared to enhance Athenian might, ate
away at Athenian independence and autarky. Master and slave, it turned out,
were bound together by mutual insufficiency.
The dream of autarky briefly engrossed nineteenth-century America as well,
for the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural
resources, and the natural barriers of a continent walled in by two great
seas led many to believe that America could be a world unto itself. Given
this past, it has been harder for Americans than for most to accept the
inevitability of interdependence. But the rapid depletion of resources even
in a country like ours, where they once seemed inexhaustible, and the
maldistribution of arable soil and mineral resources on the planet, leave
even the wealthiest societies ever more resource-dependent and many other
nations in permanently desperate straits.
Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some nations
have almost nothing they need.
THE INFORMATION-TECHNOLOGY IMPERATIVE. Enlightenment science and the
technologies derived from it are inherently universalizing. They entail a
quest for descriptive principles of general application, a search for
universal solutions to particular problems, and an unswerving embrace of
objectivity and impartiality.
Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, a common
discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy and regular flow
and exchange of information. Such ideals can be hypocritical covers for
power-mongering by elites, and they may be shown to be wanting in many other
ways, but they are entailed by the very idea of science and they make
science and globalization practical allies.
Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information flow and are
facilitated by new communication technologies. The hardware of these
technologies tends to be systemic and integrated--computer, television,
cable, satellite, laser, fiber-optic, and microchip technologies combining
to create a vast interactive communications and information network that can
potentially give every person on earth access to every other person, and
make every datum, every byte, available to every set of eyes. If the
automobile was, as George Ball once said (when he gave his blessing to a
Fiat factory in the Soviet Union during the Cold War), "an ideology on four
wheels," then electronic telecommunication and information systems are an
ideology at 186,000 miles per second--which makes for a very small planet in
a very big hurry. Individual cultures speak particular languages; commerce
and science increasingly speak English; the whole world speaks logarithms
and binary mathematics.
Moreover, the pursuit of science and technology asks for, even compels, open
societies. Satellite footprints do not respect national borders; telephone
wires penetrate the most closed societies. With photocopying and then fax
machines having infiltrated Soviet universities and samizdat literary
circles in the eighties, and computer modems having multiplied like rabbits
in communism's bureaucratic warrens thereafter, glasnost could not be far
behind. In their social requisites, secrecy and science are enemies.
The new technology's software is perhaps even more globalizing than its
hardware. The information arm of international commerce's sprawling body
reaches out and touches distinct nations and parochial cultures, and gives
them a common face chiseled in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in Silicon
Valley. Throughout the 1980s one of the most-watched television programs in
South Africa was The Cosby Show. The demise of apartheid was already in
production. Exhibitors at the 1991 Cannes film festival expressed growing
anxiety over the "homogenization" and "Americanization" of the global film
industry when, for the third year running, American films dominated the
awards ceremonies. America has dominated the world's popular culture for
much longer, and much more decisively. In November of 1991 Switzerland's
once insular culture boasted best-seller lists featuring Terminator 2 as the
No. 1 movie, Scarlett as the No. 1 book, and Prince's Diamonds and Pearls as
the No. 1 record album. No wonder the Japanese are buying Hollywood film
studios even faster than Americans are buying Japanese television sets. This
kind of software supremacy may in the long term be far more important than
hardware superiority, because culture has become more potent than armaments.
What is the power of the Pentagon compared with Disneyland? Can the Sixth
Fleet keep up with CNN? McDonald's in Moscow and Coke in China will do more
to create a global culture than military colonization ever could. It is less
the goods than the brand names that do the work, for they convey life-style
images that alter perception and challenge behavior. They make up the
seductive software of McWorld's common (at times much too common) soul.
Yet in all this high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks
particularly democratic. It lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty,
to new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of
participation, to skewed, unjust market outcomes as well as greater
productivity. The consumer society and the open society are not quite
synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is
something less than a marriage. An efficient free market after all requires
that consumers be free to vote their dollars on competing goods, not that
citizens be free to vote their values and beliefs on competing political
candidates and programs. 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 ecological imperative. 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.
Jihad, or the Lebanonization of the World
Opec, the world bank, the united nations, the International Red Cross, the
multinational corporation...there are scores of institutions that reflect
globalization. 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 1920s, 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. "In periods of
consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard.
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 (164,000 in a republic of 5.5 million) demanding their own
self-determination within Georgia. 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!) to reveal ethnic prejudices that are not only
ugly and deep-seated but increasingly murderous. 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. ("Jihad" is a rich word
whose generic meaning is "struggle"--usually the struggle of the soul to
avert evil. 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.
The Darkening Future of Democracy
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." Human rights are needed to a degree, but not
citizenship or participation--and no more social justice and equality than
are necessary to promote efficient economic production and consumption.
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 1989, 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.
Solidarity is secured through war against outsiders. And solidarity often
means obedience to a hierarchy in governance, fanaticism in beliefs, and the
obliteration of individual selves in the name of the group. Deference to
leaders and intolerance toward outsiders (and toward "enemies within") are
hallmarks of tribalism--hardly the attitudes required for the cultivation of
new democratic women and men capable of governing themselves. Where new
democratic experiments have been conducted in retribalizing societies, in
both Europe and the Third World, the result has often been anarchy,
repression, persecution, and the coming of new, noncommunist forms of very
old kinds of despotism. During the past year, Havel's velvet revolution in
Czechoslovakia was imperiled by partisans of "Czechland" and of Slovakia as
independent entities. India seemed little less rent by Sikh, Hindu, Muslim,
and Tamil infighting than it was immediately after the British pulled out,
more than forty years ago.
To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a NATURAL politics, it has
turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is the
antipolitics of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic,
focused (as Marx predicted it would be) on the administration of
things--with people, however, among the chief things to be administered. In
its politico-economic imperatives McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire
market principles that privilege efficiency, productivity, and beneficence
at the expense of civic liberty and self-government.
For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly
antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military junta,
theocratic fundamentalism--often associated with a version of the
F�hrerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule on behalf of a people.
Even the government of India, struggling for decades to model democracy for
a people who will soon number a billion, longs for great leaders; and for
every Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by
zealous assassins, the Indians appear to seek a replacement who will deliver
them from the lengthy travail of their freedom.
The Confederal Option
How can democracy be secured and spread in a world whose primary tendencies
are at best indifferent to it (McWorld) and at worst deeply antithetical to
it (Jihad)? My guess is that globalization will eventually vanquish
retribalization. The ethos of material "civilization" has not yet
encountered an obstacle it has been unable to thrust aside. Ortega may have
grasped in the 1920s a clue to our own future in the coming millennium.
"Everyone sees the need of a new principle of life. But as always happens in
similar crises--some people attempt to save the situation by an artificial
intensification of the very principle which has led to decay. This is the
meaning of the 'nationalist' outburst of recent years....things have always
gone that way. The last flare, the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On
the very eve of their disappearance there is an intensification of
frontiers--military and economic."
Jihad may be a last deep sigh before the eternal yawn of McWorld. On the
other hand, Ortega was not exactly prescient; his prophecy of peace and
internationalism came just before blitzkrieg, world war, and the Holocaust
tore the old order to bits. Yet democracy is how we remonstrate with
reality, the rebuke our aspirations offer to history. And if retribalization
is inhospitable to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic
government that can accommodate parochialism and communitarianism, one that
can even save them from their defects and make them more tolerant and
participatory: decentralized participatory democracy. And if McWorld is
indifferent to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic
government that suits global markets passably well--representative
government in its federal or, better still, confederal variation.
With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities, and the
universal rule of law, a confederalized representative system would serve
the political needs of McWorld as well as oligarchic bureaucratism or
meritocratic elitism is currently doing. As we are already beginning to see,
many nations may survive in the long term only as confederations that afford
local regions smaller than "nations" extensive jurisdiction. Recommended
reading for democrats of the twenty-first century is not the U.S.
Constitution or the French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen but the
Articles of Confederation, that suddenly pertinent document that stitched
together the thirteen American colonies into what then seemed a too loose
confederation of independent states but now appears a new form of political
realism, as veterans of Yeltsin's new Russia and the new Europe created at
Maastricht will attest.
By the same token, the participatory and direct form of democracy that
engages citizens in civic activity and civic judgment and goes well beyond
just voting and accountability--the system I have called "strong
democracy"--suits the political needs of decentralized communities as well
as theocratic and nationalist party dictatorships have done. Local
neighborhoods need not be democratic, but they can be. Real democracy has
flourished in diminutive settings: the spirit of liberty, Tocqueville said,
is local. Participatory democracy, if not naturally apposite to tribalism,
has an undeniable attractiveness under conditions of parochialism.
Democracy in any of these variations will, however, continue to be
obstructed by the undemocratic and antidemocratic trends toward
uniformitarian globalism and intolerant retribalization which I have
portrayed here. For democracy to persist in our brave new McWorld, we will
have to commit acts of conscious political will--a possibility, but hardly a
probability, under these conditions. Political will requires much more than
the quick fix of the transfer of institutions. Like technology transfer,
institution transfer rests on foolish assumptions about a uniform world of
the kind that once fired the imagination of colonial administrators. Spread
English justice to the colonies by exporting wigs. Let an East Indian
trading company act as the vanguard to Britain's free parliamentary
institutions. Today's well-intentioned quick-fixers in the National
Endowment for Democracy and the Kennedy School of Government, in the unions
and foundations and universities zealously nurturing contacts in Eastern
Europe and the Third World, are hoping to democratize by long distance. Post
Bulgaria a parliament by first-class mail. Fed Ex the Bill of Rights to Sri
Lanka. Cable Cambodia some common law.
Yet Eastern Europe has already demonstrated that importing free political
parties, parliaments, and presses cannot establish a democratic civil
society; imposing a free market may even have the opposite effect. Democracy
grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil
society has to be built from the inside out. The institutional
superstructure comes last. Poland may become democratic, but then again it
may heed the Pope, and prefer to found its politics on its Catholicism, with
uncertain consequences for democracy. Bulgaria may become democratic, but it
may prefer tribal war. The former Soviet Union may become a democratic
confederation, or it may just grow into an anarchic and weak conglomeration
of markets for other nations' goods and services.
Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses. There is always a
desire for self-government, always some expression of participation,
accountability, consent, and representation, even in traditional
hierarchical societies. These need to be identified, tapped, modified, and
incorporated into new democratic practices with an indigenous flavor. The
tortoises among the democratizers may ultimately outlive or outpace the
hares, for they will have the time and patience to explore conditions along
the way, and to adapt their gait to changing circumstances. Tragically,
democracy in a hurry often looks something like France in 1794 or China in
1989.
It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic ideal in the
face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull realities of McWorld will
be a confederal union of semi-autonomous communities smaller than
nation-states, tied together into regional economic associations and markets
larger than nation-states--participatory and self-determining in local
matters at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The
nation-state would play a diminished role, and sovereignty would lose some
of its political potency. The Green movement adage "Think globally, act
locally" would actually come to describe the conduct of politics.
This vision reflects only an ideal, however--one that is not terribly likely
to be realized. Freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, is a food easy to
eat but hard to digest. Still, democracy has always played itself out
against the odds. And democracy remains both a form of coherence as binding
as McWorld and a secular faith potentially as inspiriting as Jihad.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Benjamin R. Barber is Whitman Professor of Political Science and director of
the Whitman Center at Rutgers University and the author of many books
including Strong Democracy (1984), An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992), and
Jihad Versus McWorld (Times Books, 1995)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Copyright �, 1992, Benjamin R. Barber. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; March 1992; Jihad Vs. McWorld; Volume 269, No. 3;
pages 53-65.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ps what other alternative pathways away from the masonic anti sectarian
conspiracy(McWorld where the highest level of spirituality is snow white and
the 7 dwarves and thre prevalent religion is modernism) and malevolant
ethnic/religious struggles(radical ethnic struggles leading to destruction
of prosperity)
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