Jihad vs. McWorld (3 page)

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 its 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 are conceptualized as the “costs of doing business.” It is their instinctive reading of this equation that turns poor people abroad into cheering mobs when Americans experience grievous losses at home. 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 was speaking to the world at large when he 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 some will think that it smacks of the very 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 unfortunate and misleading if not hubristic. An America that comprehends the realities of interdependence and wishes to devise a democratic architecture to contain its global disorder cannot ask others to either join it or else “suffer the consequences.” It is not that the world must join America: McWorld already operates on this premise, and the premise is precisely the problem. Rather, America must 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 cannot 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 worry that a pervasive culture of fast food, fast computers, and fast music advanced by an infotainment industry rooted in the spread of brands tend to homogenize global markets and render taste not merely shallow but uniform. McWorld’s culture represents a kind of soft imperialism in 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 next to McWorld and offset its trivial and bottom-up but all-too-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 reinforces rather than attenuates 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 warming, the ban on land mines, 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 antiterrorist military strike compelled the American government finally to pay its UN dues and to commit to modest amounts of simple humanitarian aid that should have been a function of normalcy (the United States still devotes a smaller percentage of its GNP to foreign aid than any other developed nation in the world).

The Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (heir to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) might have been of some succor in the effort to construct a more democratic globalism if they had been used for the kinds of developmental and democratic purposes for which they were designed in postwar Europe. Instead they have been cast by the democratic governments that control them as undemocratic instruments of private interest—seemingly the tools of banks, corporations, and investors that to an untoward degree also control the policies of the governments that nominally control them. 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 that, for all its depravity, is as vigorous and self-justifying as the global markets. It too profits from the arrogant pretense of claims to national sovereignty that turn out to be indefensible. 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-nineteenth-century America, when the federal government was markedly weaker than it is today, social relations looked rather like global relations do today. Lawlessness came easily, both to the robber
barons of growing capitalist metropolises and to the robber desperadoes of the western prairies. 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 many American bankers have called wild capitalism spread both productivity, which we welcome, and injustice, which we try to ignore. But alongside wild capitalism rage the reactionary forces of wild terrorism. Against capitalism’s modern message, Jihadic fundamentalism spreads its antimodern message, sowing fear and nurturing chaos, hoping to bring both democracy and capitalism to their 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 the 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 began to trade in the international currency of McWorld that made it the global merchandiser, 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 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, its ancient prejudices and religious persecutions, would be left behind. Safeguarded by two immense oceans, at home on a bountiful and empty continent (the native inhabitants were part of the new world’s flora and fauna), Americans would devise a new and experimental science of government, establish a new constitution fortified by rights, and with the innocence of a newborn people write a new history. Slavery, a great civil war, two world conflagrations, and 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 grew too complex to yield to simplicity, America imagined that it could safeguard its autonomy, deploying its vaunted technology to re-create virtual oceans, fantasizing a magic missile shield that would ward off foreign evil.

Was America ever really a safe haven 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 know no evil, even when they do it. To others their claim to innocence is an assertion of hypocrisy—among the deadliest of sins for Muslims and others who watch America demonize others and exonerate itself.

Terrorism has brought the age of innocence, if there ever really was one, to a close. How could the myth of independence survive September 11? The Declaration of Independence, which 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, 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 equity of justice, there will be equity of injustice; if all cannot partake of plenty, impoverishment—both material and spiritual—will be the common lot. That is the hard lesson of interdependence, taught by terror’s unsmiling pedagogues.

To declare interdependence, then, is 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 this: “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 who husband such expansive power. 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 a remarkably multicultural nation, how is it that the American image is so monocultural, its 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 or statistics courses to take their place. 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 wartime pauses for coalition building and consultation, the United States is today inexperienced in the hard work of creative interdependence and international partnership. When America discerns problems in international treaties (the Kyoto Protocol, the land mine ban, the International Criminal Tribunal) and cannot negotiate its way in, it simply walks out. When international institutions such as UNESCO and the United Nations and international conferences such as the racism discussions in Durban resonate with hostility (as they often do), the United States withdraws in arrogant pique instead of participating with a view toward making 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—if we cannot keep terrorists off airplanes or individual “sleepers” from engaging in biological and chemical
warfare, how can we imagine that we can intercept multiple warheads and their multiplying decoys without a hitch?—the missile shield once again isolates America from a world it ought to participate in in changing. In Ronald Reagan’s vivid fantasies that resonated so powerfully with the American public, a virtual bubble would envelop the good nation and keep it safe from foreign nightmares. But the nightmares have come to our shores in the bright light of morning, and there is no shield against their terror except a confrontation with Jihad’s complex global genealogy.

Technology is at best a tool. It is a peculiarly American conviction that engineering 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 policy makers who judge, electronic listening posts replace culturally and linguistically adept human agents. Technology is the last redoubt for 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; instead, these corporations sometimes inadvertently contribute to the causes of terrorism. That is the melancholy dialectic of Jihad vs. McWorld that is at the heart of this book.

The encompassing practices of globalization we have nurtured under the archs of McWorld and the banner of global markets 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 constituted 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, contained, and controlled by democratic states. Democracy has been a precondition for free markets—not, as economists try to argue today, the other way around. 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, contradictions, and tendencies toward self-destruction around monopoly and the eradication of competition that leads to uncapitalist monopolies. 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.