Jihad vs. McWorld (32 page)

China is of course a very special case: huge, ancient, highly civilized, Communist, traditionally hostile to foreigners and their barbarian cultures, and, though historically decentralized with a strong village culture, never at any moment in its long history really democratic. Its variations on both Jihad and McWorld are likely to have a distinctive look. What is striking is that even here where a native culture might be thought to have its greatest chances against the children of the Western Enlightenment, McWorld seems irresistible. Like Catalonia and Quebec, the provinces waging the most successful struggle for autonomy from central government interference and Communist Party busybodiness are those that have joined McWorld rather than those that fear it. Suzhou comes to look like Nanjing, Nanjing like Shanghai, and Shanghai like Hong Kong. And so, day by day, China looks more and more like it is fulfilling what the diplomat cited earlier called its dream: to become some elephantine version of Singapore where, as long as you keep your mouth shut and your politics neuter, you can do anything you want, above all make money by the boxcar.

Certainly China has been more successful in containing both internal Jihad and external McWorld than, say, Sri Lanka, where the government of what was once the island paradise of Ceylon has been kept busy by a revolt of ethnic Tamils in the north (the so-called
Liberation Tigers) and by an extremist counter-Jihad among its own Sinhalese majority;
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or Indonesia, a simmering Asian Yugoslavia where 350 distinct ethnic groups, most with their own language, occupy thirteen thousand islands in an archipelago held together primarily by the military force of an authoritarian regime under the command of its founder, Suharto.
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Suharto is the efficient dictator known equally for his early liquidation of a half million Communists in the 1960s, his bloody military invasion of East Timor in the 1970s (which has been compared to Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait), and his remarkable success in jump-starting the Indonesian economy in the 1980s. While perhaps best known as a site for the cheap-labor manufacture of Western apparel and shoes (workers make $700 a year), under B. J. Habibie, the German-trained minister for research and technology, Indonesia has also decided to pursue the high-tech end of McWorld. It already manufactures small commuter planes and helicopters, and is hoping to leapfrog other industrialized nations by stepping smartly into twenty-first-century high-technology domains. With its disparate multicultures, Indonesia is less worried about McWorld’s cultural values than about Western multicultural and democratic political ideals. Demography and topography favor fragmentation so that for Suharto the struggle is to hold the parts together by economic progress and military force.

The Asian democracies Japan, India, and (recently) Korea are special cases for a different reason than China. As committed democracies, they have already acknowledged the power of Western ideology, whose ideals they prize—if only because they were once colonial subjects of or defeated in combat by the West. Their struggle is exactly the reverse of China’s. They distrust not Western political ideas but the kind of Western culture advanced by aggressive commerce and the kind of laissez-faire economics fostered by liberal markets. India faces an internal Jihad from both Hindi and Muslim fundamentalists who detest one another perhaps even more than they fear the encroaching McWorld, as well as from separatists in Assam.

Japan would seem to be the Asian nation that has succeeded best in first modernizing its economy and then assuming a position of global economic leadership without succumbing to wholesale Westernization. Democracy has been inflected with a Japanese accent
and even the economy has been nurtured with policies that temper crude Western market capitalism with a careful mixture of mercantilist state support and corporatist paternalism. Indeed, the more communitarian, consensual, even familial character of Japanese corporate style has been imitated in the West by bemused admirers of the Japanese economic miracle that once was. Though not quite as ethnically homogenous as some imagine, Japan has also managed to avoid even the gentler forms of Jihad we have seen in France or Italy or China. As James Fallows has persuasively shown, its powerful and insular culture has diminished the impact of economic theory and created a distance from the cultural artifacts of McWorld seen nowhere else.
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Yet Japan is not wholly exempt and the case for its supposed immunity to McWorld may reflect Western fears of Japanese superiority rather than a realistic assessment of its cultural autonomy. After all, Japan has been assimilating American culture at least since the long and influential post—World War II American occupation. Karl Taro Greenfeld offers a stunning portrait of “gangsters, rock musicians, hostesses, porn stars, junkies, computer hackers, night-clubbers, drug dealers and bikers,” which suggests that Japan’s current Generation X—Greenfeld calls them the Speed Tribes—may represent a dividing point between a traditional and insular Japanese past and a startlingly assimilationist global (McWorldian) future.
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Japanese rock bands (with names like S.O.B. and the Blue Hearts) are multiplying, but in music critic Neil Strauss’s gloss they are “cultural sponges, soaking up Brazilian bossa nova, British hard core and American rockabilly … borrowing pop idioms from everywhere except Japan.”
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It should be left to those with a keener knowledge of Japan to judge how pervasive the changes signaled by recent Japanese music, literature, and pop culture really are, and to assess whether the behavior modification resulting from the climb of McDonald’s and KFC into (respectively) first and second place in Japan’s restaurant industry will trickle down into Japan’s cultural bedrock and rot out the ancient stone.
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Like so many nations facing McWorld with a suspicion that impels them to struggle diplomatically (a kind of soft Jihad) against its cultural encroachments, Japan faces its own internal protests from minorities hoping to detach themselves from it. It appears to them as
McWorld appears to it, and McWorld becomes their ally against it. Okinawa, for example, annexed by Japan in 1879 and returned to it by the United States (who had taken it in World War II) in 1972, has aroused anxieties in Japan with its attempts at reviving the Okinawan language and the practice of local customs. The Okinawan movement follows those peculiarly feudal dynamics we have seen elsewhere in cases where an ethnic fragment of a plural nation-state uses world culture and global economics to make its own claim for self-determination against a mother country that in the name of its own autonomy may be opposing world culture and global economics. In their struggle for an identity apart from Japan, Okinawans have turned to a hybrid form of rock music, drawing on Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bob Marley to “jack up” a local folk music “into a band context.”
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In marching resolutely backward into its own history, little Okinawa seems to be marching brazenly forward into McWorld. Such are Jihad’s ironies.

What the general case of Japan suggests, even to casual observers, is that in the Japanese context Jihad—with or without its ironies—denotes not simply an internal struggle of minorities against a majority Japanese culture, but the struggle by official Japan itself against the corrupting influences of the global culture into which its economic success has thrust it. But what is true for most peoples struggling ambivalently against McWorld is particularly true for the Japanese: the carriers of corruption are finally neither outsiders nor barbarians but Japan’s own youth, who even as the indigenous culture works to socialize them as native Japanese, have proved themselves adept apprentices of the global practices of McWorld.

Indeed, as we complete this brief tour of the struggle against McWorld
within
the nations where capitalism has been most successful, what becomes apparent is that the confrontation of Jihad and McWorld has as its first arena neither the city nor the countryside, neither pressured inner cities nor thriving exurbia, but the conflicted soul of the new generation. Nations may be under assault, but the target audience is youth. In Okinawa, in Tokyo, in every country around the world the young generation is being fractured by the contrary pulls of past and future. For it is the young who carry the guns for the I.R.A. and the Serbian militias and the young who wear the headphones of the Sony Corporation and Nintendo. It is the young
who rock to the hard music of MTV and Star Television and the young who roll to the still harsher siren song of ethnic identity and other-hatred. They run to do battle with corrupting commercial colonialists on swift synthetic cushions manufactured by Nike and Reebok. They pause amidst the tribal carnage to refresh themselves with a world beverage like Pepsi or Coke. They shake their local folk zithers at a centralist and encroaching French or German or Japanese culture they despise, and then hammer out the tunes of an even more centralist and encroaching global culture on their quaint instruments. They hatch plots against immigrant foreigners via laptop computer modems made by foreigners and assembled by immigrants in their own land. They yearn for the collective intimacy of the tribe and the gang yet groove on the anonymity and solitude of cyberspace. Fascinated equally by the blood that binds them and the blood they spill, they nevertheless navigate the bloodless world of promotion and product as if they were born to it (they were). Whether they hang with South Central L.A.’s Bloods or Cripps, belong to Berlin’s neo-Nazi National Alternative, or run with Tokyo’s Speed Tribes, whether they shoot at teens trying to get out of the Bosnian dead zones or are the teens being shot at, whether they are Hutu minors murdering Tutsis or twenty-year-old French paratroopers trying to come between the murderous brothers, they will be the twenty-first century’s makers—and its victims. They hold Jihad and McWorld suspended in rent souls that can neither eject one or the other nor accommodate both. Dragged reluctantly from a past defined by culture and tribe into a future where velocity is becoming an identity all its own, they are accelerating toward the limits of nature—the speed of light that defines the interactions of cyberspace—in quest of a palliative to (or is it a catalyst for?) their restlessness. The outcome inside their struggling souls will likely condition the outcome for global civilization, whose prospects, consequently, do not seem terribly promising.

T
HE PARADOXICAL INTERFACE
of Jihad and McWorld is nowhere more in evidence than behind the crumpled iron curtain in the “transitional” or “emerging democracies”—which though they most certainly are emerging from communism and in transition to somewhere, are for the most part neither democratic nor very likely to become so any time soon. If anything, they are regressing rather than progressing. Dragoslav Bokan, an editor and film director who became a leader of the Serbian private militia known as the White Eagles, confesses: “I don’t believe in democracy because I don’t believe any group at any time can change the course and goals of their ancestors by their own free will.”
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Another spent local academic concludes: “… too much history in too little room. There are no liberals here, there are only nationalists. We are victims of a long-lasting nationalist idea, impossible to get rid of.”
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The nationalist idea so many Eastern Europeans manage at once both to fear and to cherish is not the nineteenth-century ideal of integration and nation building. Yugoslavia, insists Zarko Domljan, Croatia’s Assembly president elected in 1991, “is not a nation—it is a mixture
of ancient tribes,” and newspaper headlines regularly feature the region in terms of a “whirlwind of hatreds.”
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Within the developed world, to which these jagged middle European shards of the ex-Soviet empire affect to belong, there is no region in which Jihad has an uglier or more disintegral presence. Both as a struggle against multicultural nation-states, states that once managed to sublimate ethnicity such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union once were, and as a battle to contain the cultural inroads of McWorld’s implacable markets, Jihad has found its natural home in Central Europe and Western Asia. Its compass is described by that great arc of warring tribes that rises off the Adriatic through Albania and Yugoslavia, and—flanked by Bulgaria to the south and Hungary to the north—pushes northeast through Romania and Transylvania to Moldavia and Bessarabia and into the Ukraine and the Crimea, wrapping itself around the Black Sea and finally dropping down again into Transcaucasia, where Azerbaijanis and Armenians do battle right up to the edge of the Caspian Sea as Europe gives way to Asia. This bloody crescent has always been the heartland of Europe’s zone of tumult. Above it there is a secondary arc, scarcely less bloody, whose trajectory runs from Czechoslovakia and Poland up through the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in the north, and then plunges down into Belarus, Great Russia proper, and the Ukraine, which features its own multicultural nightmares.

Under the great empires of the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Russians, these tribally supersaturated regions were neatly segmented into pluralistic zones of tolerance where local culture flourished under the watchful eye of monarchies that would brook no bloodshed other than the bloodshed that emanated from their own policies. The neo-imperial Communists also enforced a nationalities doctrine that was repressive and intolerant of parochialism. Today this imperial handiwork has come wholly unraveled, leaving behind two rabid versions of Jihad—antipluralist and antimodern—that have turned the rout of Communist imperialism into a victory for irredentism and genocide and left democracy out in the cold.

In this bloody arc, McWorld is both the target and the cause of irrepressible Jihad. Widespread criminality, sometimes indistinguishable from anarchic new markets, is providing anti-Western hot
heads and new/old breed Communist-nationalists with powerful ideological ammunition. The free market in Russia has become associated with bankrupt pyramid schemes that have sucked up the savings of millions of people and turned them forever against what they perceive as an unregulated and depraved—what Solzhenitsyn calls “wild”—capitalism.
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In the Ukraine, according to one estimate, up to one-half of “all economic activity is illegal.”
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Crime has become so pervasive in the ex-Soviet lands that at least one commentator has suggested that it be legitimized at the highest levels since “Russians are used to firm control from the top. If domination by a mafia bureaucracy offered a return to the relative order enjoyed by many under the Communist rule, many would embrace it.”
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