Jihad vs. McWorld (49 page)

Our indices suggest that Jihad tends to impair economic efficiency, lowering a nation’s ranking on the GDP scale, but that it also diminishes overall energy usage, improving the nation’s ranking on the population scale. The forces of McWorld increase energy usage, lowering the ranking on the population scale; but they can improve efficiency, increasing the ranking on the GDP scale. Finally, neither Jihad nor McWorld has any intrinsic interest in the fairness question and here, as in other domains, the poorest nations with neither energy reserves nor a productive economy do the worst. They are “good energy citizens” by default, because in the cruel competition of McWorld they are not citizens at all.

TWENTY-TWO COUNTRIES’ TOP TEN GROSSING FILMS, 1991

  1.
Francis Fukuyama, in
The End of History and the Last Man
, (New York: Free Press, 1992), although he is far less pleased by his prognosis in his book than he seemed in the original
National Interest
essay that occasioned all the controversy; and Walter B. Wriston,
Twilight of Sovereignty
(New York: Scribner’s, 1992).

  2.
See Georgie Anne Geyer, “Our Disintegrating World: The Menace of Global Anarchy,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Book of the Year, 1985
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11-25. Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Scribner’s, 1993). Also see Tony Judt, “The New Old Nationalisms,”
The New York Review of Books
, May 26, 1994, pp. 44–51.

  3.
Two recent books, the one by Zbigniew Brzezinski cited above about the “global turmoil” of ethnic nationalism (Jihad), the other by Kevin Kelly about computers and “the rise of neo-biological civilization [McWorld]” both carry the title “Out of Control.” See Brzezinski,
Out of Control;
and Kevin Kelly,
Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). The metaphor is everywhere: for example,
in Andrew Bard Schmookler’s
The Illusion of Choice
(Albany: State University of New York at Albany Press, 1993),
Part III
on runaway markets is also entitled “Out of Control.”

  4.
In its “new tack on technology,” writes
New York Times
reporter Edmund L. Andrews, the Clinton administration wants only to avoid doing anything “to spook investors with heavy-handed regulatory brow-beating,” hoping rather to reduce “the regulatory barriers that have prevented competition.” Edmund L. Andrews, “New Tack on Technology,”
The New York Times
, January 12, 1994, p. A 1. At the end of the 1994 congressional session, a Communications Bill that would have imposed some controls on the information superhighway expired quietly.

  5.
Rohatyn cited by Thomas L. Friedman, “When Money Talks, Governments Listen,”
The New York Times
, July 24, 1994, p. E 3.

  6.
Steiner writes that the new Eastern European democratic revolutions of recent years were not “inebriate with some abstract passion for freedom, for social justice.” Consumer culture, “video cassettes, porno cassettes, American-style cosmetics and fast foods, not editions of Mill, Tocqueville or Solzhenitsyn, were the prizes snatched from every West[ern] shelf by the liberated.” George Steiner, in
Granta
, cited by Anthony Lewis, “A Quake Hits the Summit,”
International Herald Tribune
, June 2-3, 1990.

  7.
Cited by Aleksa Djilas, “A House Divided,”
The New Republic
, January 25, 1993, p. 38.

  8.
In February 1994 there were about eighty thousand U.N. troops deployed in eighteen countries; a handful are on the borders between Israel and its hostile neighbors (Syria and Lebanon) and on the frontiers dividing India and Pakistan and Iraq and Kuwait. But in their greatest numbers, they can be found trying (unsuccessfully) to separate rival factions in Somalia (over twenty-six thousand) and former Yugoslavia (over twenty-five thousand) as well as in Georgia, Cyprus, Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda, the western Sahara, Haiti, El Salvador, and Cambodia. For a report see Brian Hall, “Blue Helmets, Empty Guns,”
The New York Times Magazine
, January 2, 1994, pp. 18-25, 30, 38, 41.

  9.
David Binder, “Trouble Spots: As Ethnic Wars Multiply, U.S. Strives for a Policy,”
The New York Times
, February 7, 1993, p. A 1.

10.
Muslim users at times intentionally obfuscate the difference between meanings; thus, speaking to an Arab audience in mid-1994 just as the accord over Jericho and Gaza went into effect, Yassar Arafat spoke militantly to a Palestinian audience of a Jihad to recapture Jerusalem—only to “explain” later to agitated Israelis and Westerners that he meant only to call for a peaceful struggle.

11.
See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
Disuniting America
(New York: Norton, 1993).

12.
A minimalist’s list would include the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Portugal representing less than 1 percent of the world’s population. Japan is sometimes also included in the list, which brings the number to under 5 percent.

13.
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, December 21–27, 1992, p. 28.

14.
Cited by David Binder, “Trouble Spots.” Of course Lansing was no friend of Wilson’s vision, and actually worked to undermine aspects of his policies. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is persuaded that Wilson himself came to see the dangers of self-determination, since toward the very end Wilson admitted he had developed the rhetoric of self-determination “without the knowledge that nationalities existed” and thus without foreseeing the destructive forces the idea could unleash. Moynihan,
Pandaemonium
, p. 85.
  Even Amitai Etzioni, an ardent American supporter of communitarian-ism, worries about the “evils of self-determination.” Amitai Etzioni, “The Evils of Self-Determination,”
Foreign Policy
, No. 89, Winter, 1992–93, pp. 21–35.

15.
The map on which the warring parties settled for a brief time in 1994 was still more egregious in its surrender to the Serbian aggressors, though it at least tried to connect the isolated ethnic dots with lifelines of contiguity. At this writing, both NATO and the United Nations appear to have surrendered to the logic of force altogether.

16.
British diplomat and historian Harold Nicholson gives a notoriously tragicomic account of one of those 1919 post—World War I meetings in which the Balkans were carved up, during which Prime Minister David Lloyd George mistakes the standard geographer’s colors green (for valleys) and brown (for mountains) for Greeks and Turks and, pointing at Scala Nova, colored green, tells the Italian delegates, “You can’t have that—it’s full of Greeks!” Full of green valleys, Nicholson tells his boss, but very few Greeks. The negotiations continue to their melancholy conclusion, which, both “immoral and impractical,” are to doom Europe to another war. Harold George Nicholson,
Peace-Making: 1919
(New York: Harcourt and Brace & Co., 1939).

17.
In
Blood and Belonging
, his recent book on nationalism that accompanied the affecting television series, Michael Ignatieff looks not only at the obviously fratricidal spectacle of Eastern Europe but at Ireland, Quebec, and Germany as well, aware that the most toxic cases may simply be advanced instances of a disease infecting healthy nations too. Michael Ignatieff,
Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).

18.
Günter Grass cited by Marla Stone, “Nationalism and Identity in (Former) East Germany,”
Tikkun
, Vol. 7, No. 6, November/December 1992, pp. 41–46.

19.
See Orlando Patterson, “Global Culture and the American Cosmos,” Paper No. 2 in the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Paper Series.

20.
This is the theme of Walter B. Wriston,
Twilight
. “How does a national government measure capital formation when much new capital is intellectual?” Wriston asks (p. 12). The answer: they don’t. Wriston, who is the former chairman of Citicorp, is a little too much of a technological Pangloss, however, and his tendency to think it will all turn out in the end, as long as
we recognize the new realities, detracts a little from his careful analysis of those realities. He relies heavily on earlier books on the information revolution and its effect on nationhood, like Ithiel de Sola Pool’s
Technologies Without Boundaries
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Peter Drucker’s
The New Realities
(New York: Harper & Row, 1989); and George Gilder’s
Microcosm
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). An early study is F. A. Hayek’s
Denationalisation of Money
(London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976).

21.
Former Secretary of State George Shultz as cited by Wriston,
Twilight
, p. 10.

22.
The return of the Democratic Party to executive power in the United States thus changed nothing with respect to this market ideology. President Clinton was closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council whose research arm was keen to put aside traditional democratic antibusiness rhetoric and make markets and government serve one another. In a widely discussed major foreign policy statement for the Clinton administration, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake indulged in a veritable celebration of the marriage of markets and democracy, using the phrase
market democracy
as if it were some ur-original formulation that could be found in the Magna Carta or the
Federalist Papers
. To an academic audience at Johns Hopkins University, he said “we contained a global threat to
market democracies
.” America must “consolidate new democracies
and
market economies …” and “help democracy
and
market economics take root in regions of greatest humanitarian concern” [emphasis added]. These “liberating forces” are what “create wealth and social dynamism.” On the other hand “backlash states” that resist these forces “tend to rot from within both economically and spiritually.” “Verbatim: A Call to Enlarge Democracy’s Reach,”
The New York Times
, September 26, 1993, Section 4, p. 3.

23.
President Clinton’s secretary of state thus avowed in 1993 that his meeting with Boris Yeltsin had to be regarded as “an endorsement of democracy and free-market reform in Russia.” Warren Christopher, cited in Elaine Sciolino, “Clinton Will Visit Yeltsin,”
The New York Times
, October 23, 1993, p. A
I
.

24.
The New York Times
ran a front-page business section article by Philip Henon urging the Clinton administration to open the Vietnamese market under the unambiguous title: “Missing Out on a Glittering Market,” September 12, 1993, Section 3, p. i. Subsequently, that happened.