Jihad vs. McWorld (36 page)

T
HE TALK AMONG
quarreling nations is about a new world order, but the clash of Jihad and McWorld foments a new world disorder in which democracy is occluded. The nation-state certainly has not in and of itself guaranteed a democratic civil society, and is probably something less than an indispensable condition for the flourishing of free women and men. After all, democracies of one kind or another arose in small city-state polities—for which they seem ideally suited—before there were nation-states, as well as under empires that had swallowed up nation-states. However, in the last several hundred years, democratic and egalitarian institutions have for the most part been closely associated with integral nation-states, and citizenship (democracy’s sine qua non) has been an attribute of membership in such states. The twin assault on democratic citizenship from the fractious forces of Jihad and the spreading markets of McWorld in effect cuts the legs out from under democratic institutions. Whether or not they can secure new foundations either in the parochialism of ethnic identity (and its accompanying politics of
resentment) or in the universalism of the profit motive (and its accompanying politics of commodities) is the crucial question.

The bare bones answer, on which I hope presently to put some flesh, is simply this: neither Jihad nor McWorld promises a remotely democratic future. On the contrary, the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggest new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbarism. The market’s invisible hand is attached to a manipulative arm that, unguided by a sovereign head, is left to the contingencies of spontaneous greed. Tyranny here is indirect, often even friendly. Alexis de Tocqueville first captured its character 160 years ago when he wrote: “Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself…. Monarchs had … materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind…. [T]he body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.”
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The ideology of choice seems to liberate the body (you can choose sixteen brands of toothpaste, eleven models of pickup truck, seven brands of running shoes) but fatally constricts the possibility of real freedom for the soul (you cannot choose
not
to choose, that is, you cannot choose to withdraw from the market or reject the demands of the body).

McWorld’s markets surrender judgment and abjure common willing, leaving public goods to private interests and subordinating communities and their goods to individuals and their interests. The apparent widening of individual consumer choices actually shrinks the field of social choices and forces infrastructural changes no public community ever consciously either selects or rejects. For example, the American’s freedom to choose among scores of automobile brands was secured by sacrificing the liberty to choose between private and public transportation, and mandated a world in which strip malls, suburbs, high gas consumption, and traffic jams (to name just a few) became inevitable and omnipresent without ever having been the willed choice of some democratic decision-making body—or for that matter of individuals who liked driving automobiles and chose to buy one. This politics of commodity offers a superficial expansion of options within a determined frame in return for surrendering the right to determine the frame. It offers the feel of freedom while
diminishing the range of options and the power to affect the larger world. Is this really liberty?

Internationally, much the same thing is occurring. McWorld speaks the language of choice but severs the “freedom” to buy and sell from the right of women and men to choose in common their common goods or the social character of their shared world. The IMF and the World Bank promote markets but are interested only prudentially if at all in promoting democracy. Indeed, they have shown themselves willing to sacrifice civic equilibrium and social equality for purely economic goals like privatization and free trade. They impose on fragile new would-be democracies economic crash plans that, while they suit the investment strategies of their member nations (and, more important, their member banks), also guarantee popular resentment and generate a nostalgia for the old Communist safety nets. Neo-tribalism and Jihad are often the final beneficiaries. In the near run, agreements like GATT may seem to have a regulative impact since they place power in collectivities of nations—the new World Trade Organization created by GATT, for example—and impose an internationalist majoritarianism on individual nations. Although this compromises the capacity of individual states to regulate their own economies, it supposedly does so in the name of global distributive justice and transnational public goods.
²
In the long run, however, as national sovereignty weakens, the new arrangements actually cede power to markets susceptible to no democratic supervision whatsoever and shrink the global possibilities for public choosing on behalf of fundamental social values.

Jack Heinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, has complained that the GATT agreement legitimizes the exploitation of up to 200 million children, while the insidious environmental consequences of the surrender of sovereignty have been widely denounced in Europe and in America.
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Further down the road, however, it is not increasingly less sovereign nations quarreling among themselves but multinational firms and their global markets that will dictate to America and other countries what is and is not possible: whether or not five-year-olds will work thirteen-hour shifts in Pakistan for 20 cents a day, whether or not scrubless on-the-cheap smokestacks in one Asian country will be allowed to undo the good work of conscientiously (and expensively) built facilities in
another.
⁴
Even responsible American firms like Levi Strauss and Company, which has developed voluntary “Global Sourcing Guidelines” for its overseas facilities, are driven by competition and profits to seek cheap labor markets, where exploitation is endemic and regulation mainly a public relations afterthought.
⁵

Jihad does little better. It identifies the self by contrasting it with an alien “other,” and makes politics an exercise in exclusion and resentment. It promotes community but usually at the expense of tolerance and mutuality and hence creates a world in which belonging is more important than empowerment and collective ends posited by charismatic leaders take the place of common grounds produced by democratic deliberation. Jihad speaks the language of self-determination, but severs collective independence from the active liberty of individual citizens. Bosnian Serbia buys a certain version of “self-determination” by forfeiting the liberties of its people.

In Central Europe and Asia, the fall of the iron curtain opened myriad peoples at once both to Jihad and McWorld. The end of Marxism did not spell the end of history, but only the end of Soviet imperialism. In the ragged cohort of states of the ex-Communist empire, it has naturally opened some doors. For as a political practice, Marxism functioned to suppress the liberty in whose name its revolutions were conducted. But the end of Marxism also represented a victory for some of the Enlightenment’s more hollow values—materialism, solipsism, and radical individualism—over certain of its nobler aspirations: civic virtue, just community, social equality, and the lifting of the economic yoke from what were once known as the laboring classes. These aspirations had arisen out of the Age of Reason’s faith in the emancipatory power of economics and the progressive democratic thrust of history; they had inspired social revolutions in France and later Germany and Russia, none of which proved notably successful. To the extent that the failure of Marxism’s revolutions (which began with the failure of Marxism’s parent revolution in Jacobin France) is a failure of the Enlightenment, the fiasco has tainted Enlightenment idealism and its faith in progress, leaving us today in a more cynical and selfish world where our aspirations have shrunk to match the diminutive scale of our petty greed and the foreshortened grasp of our visible consumer’s
hand. The public faith of democracy sometimes seems to have been lost in the baggage thrown overboard when the public faith of socialism was jettisoned.
⁶

By democracy, I understand not just government by, for, and of the people, but government by, for, and of citizens. Citizenship is power’s political currency and is what gives democracy its civic solvency. Neither Jihad nor McWorld cares a fig about citizens. Thomas Friedman, in a version of the McWorld argument, has suggested that the fratricidal warriors facing one another in Ireland, South Africa, and the Middle East may have been lured from their intractable internecine struggles by the global marketplace, all of them “compelled to beat their swords into plowshares simultaneously by economic forces.”
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But peace is not democracy. McWorld’s denizens are consumers and clients whose freedom consists of the right to buy in markets they cannot control and whose identity is imposed on them by a consumerism they scarcely notice. Palestinians and Zulus and North Ireland Catholics will be freer to do business in and outside of their stabilized countries, but they will not necessarily be any freer.

Not long after World War II, Victor Lebow recognized that “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and selling of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.”
⁸
Today, as Alan Durning remarks, “the words ‘consumer’ and ‘person’ have become virtual synonyms. The world economy,” Durning concludes, “is currently organized to furnish I. I billion people with a consumer life-style long on things but short on time High consumption is a precondition to neither full employment nor the end of poverty.”
⁹
It is this world that the consumers of Ireland and Palestine and South Africa are now free to join. But full employment and social justice, or a lifestyle that leaves time to enjoy the goods wealth and education produce, are the concerns of citizens, not consumers, and the release from Jihad will not automatically make them citizens. Until McWorld finds a way to nurture citizens as successfully as it nurtures buyers and sellers, such aims will be systematically neglected, whatever innovative transnational institutions are introduced. Not
that citizenship flourishes under conditions of nationalist civil war or ethnic fratricide.

Jihad in fact has little more use for citizens than does McWorld. Its denizens are blood brothers and sisters defined by identities they also are not permitted to choose for themselves. It is possible to be both a sister and a producer, a brother and a consumer, but neither identity affords individuals any real sovereignty over their life plans, which are busily arranged for them by roots and blood on the one hand, or production and consumption on the other. Sovereignty is the provenance of citizenship. The sovereignty of democratic states, which gives politics a regulative function with respect to all other domains, is nothing other than the sovereignty of citizens who, in their civic capacity, make advertent common decisions that regulate the inadvertent consequences of their conduct as private individuals and consumers. In a future world where the only available identity is that of blood brother or solitary consumer, and where these two paltry dispositions engage in a battle for the human soul, democracy does not seem well placed to share in the victory, to whomsoever it is delivered. Neither the politics of commodity nor the politics of resentment promise real liberty; the mixture of the two that emerges from the dialectical interplay of Jihad versus McWorld—call it the commodification of resentment—promises only a new if subtle slavery.

Nonetheless, for all my skepticism about the dialectic of Jihad and McWorld, I do not think that democracy is impossible in an era after the eclipse of the nation-state. Democratic success stories suggest that democracy is a slow, developmental process that comes into being not through a single magical moment of founding, but through a long evolution in which the founding is usually only a culminating symbolic moment. Those who would construct some form of global democracy require patience. They also require stubbornness, however, for to preserve, let alone extend, democracy under these rapidly evolving conditions will require acts of bold political imagination and self-conscious political willing that cannot in themselves be expected to emerge from the dialectical interplay of Jihad and McWorld. Patience, political will, and boldness: not an easy combination of traits to cultivate, above all when democracy is under duress.

T
HE EASY ANSWER
to the hard question of how to order a supranational world has often been: globalize law!—establish new international institutions or fortify traditional ones like the United Nations and the World Court. From the nineteenth-century faith in the Concert of Powers and its balance of power politics, to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations (which America never joined) that grew from its following World War I, and on down to the United Nations established after World War II as a manifestation of the cooperation of the Allies in overcoming fascism, the hope has been that sovereign states will somehow overcome their national interests and sectarian policies; that they will cede a degree of their sovereignty to supranational bodies capable of ensuring peace and cooperation among them. Although law speaks the voice of sovereign authority, the quest for world order has placed its faith in a global law whose voice will not be muted by the absence of a global sovereignty. Unhappily, however, while law is power’s solemn voice that legitimizes its brute force, power is law’s indispensable condition without which its legitimacy has no muscle. Consequently, the law has always been the destitute camp follower of the itinerant armies of transnationalism—earlier, the armies of imperialism, communism, international commerce and markets; today, those of telecommunications, ecology, financial and currency markets, and global pop culture. It facilitates rather than constrains the powers it serves. As go the fortunes of nation-states, so go the fortunes of international law.