Jihad vs. McWorld Read online

  Too often for those living in the second and third worlds to the south of the United States, Europe, and Japan, globalization looks like an imperious strategy of a predominantly American economic behemoth; too often what we understand as the market-driven opportunities to secure liberty and prosperity at home seems to them nothing but a rationalization for exploitation and oppression in the international sphere; too often what we call the international order is for them an international disorder. Our neoliberal antagonism to all political regulation in the global sector, to all institutions of legal and political oversight, to all attempts at democratizing globalization and institutionalizing economic justice looks to them like brute indifference to their welfare and their claims for justice. Western beneficiaries of McWorld celebrate market ideology with its commitment to the privatization of all things public and the commercialization of all things private, and consequently insist on total freedom from government interference in the global economic sector (laissez-faire). Yet total freedom from interference—the rule of private power over public goods—is another name for anarchy. And terror is merely one of the many contagious diseases that anarchy spawns.

  What was evident to those who, before September 11, suffered the economic consequences of an undemocratic international anarchy beyond the reach of democratic sovereignty was that while many in the first world benefit from free markets in capital, labor, and goods, these same anarchic markets leave ordinary people in the third world largely unprotected. What has become apparent to the rest of us after September 11 is that that same deregulated disorder from which financial and trade institutions imagine they benefit is the very disorder on which terrorism depends. Markets and globalized financial institutions, whether multinational corporations or individual currency speculators, are deeply averse to oversight by nation-states. McWorld seeks to overcome sovereignty and make its impact global. Jihad too makes war on sovereignty, using the interdependence of transportation, communication, and other modern technological systems to render borders porous and sovereign oversight irrelevant. Just as jobs defy borders, hemorrhaging from one country to another in a wage race to the bottom, and just as safety, health, and environmental standards lack an international benchmark against which states and regions might organize their employment, so too anarchistic terrorists loyal to no state and accountability to no people range freely across the world, knowing that no borders can detain them, no united global opinion can isolate them, no international police or juridical institutions can interdict them. The argument laid out in what follows proposes that both Jihad and McWorld undermine the sovereignty of nation-states, dismantling the democratic institutions that have been their finest achievement without discovering ways to extend democracy either downward to the subnational religious and ethnic entities that now lay claim to people’s loyalty or upward to the international sector in which McWorld’s pop culture and commercial markets operate without sovereign restraints.

  Unlike America, which pretends to still enjoy sovereign independence, taking responsibility neither for the global reach of its popular culture (McWorld) nor for the secularizing and trivializing character of its adamant materialism, the terrorists acknowledge and exploit the actual interdependence that characterizes human relations in the twenty-first century. Theirs, however, is a perverse and malevolent interdependence, one in which they have learned to use McWorld’s weight jujitsu-style against its massive power. Ironically, even as the United States fosters an anarchic absence of sovereignty at the global level, it has resisted even the slightest compromise of its national sovereignty at home. America has complained bitterly in recent years about the prospect of surrendering a scintilla of its own sovereignty, whether to NATO commanders, to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal, or to international treaties such as those banning land mines or regulating emissions. Even as I write, with the United States launching a military campaign against terrorism surrounded by a prudently constructed coalition, it has made clear that it prefers “coalitions” to “alliances” because it wants to be free to target objectives, develop strategy, and wage war exactly as it wishes.

  Yet terrorism has already made a mockery of sovereignty. What were the hijacking of airliners, the calamitous attack on the World Trade Center, and the brash attack on the Pentagon if not a profound obliteration of American sovereignty? Terrorism is the negative and depraved form of that interdependence, which in its positive and beneficial form we too often refuse to acknowledge. As if still in the nineteenth century, America has persuaded itself that its options today are either to preserve an ancient and blissfully secure independence that puts us in charge of American destiny, or to yield to a perverted and compulsory interdependence that puts foreigners and alien international bodies such as the United Nations or the World Court in charge of American destiny. In truth, however, Americans have not enjoyed genuine independence since sometime before the great wars of the last century—certainly not since the advent of AIDS and West Nile virus, global warming and an ever more porous ozone layer, job “mobility” that has decimated America’s industrial economy, and restive speculators who have made capital flight more of a sovereign reality than any conceivable government oversight could be. Interdependence is not some foreign adversary against which citizens need to muster resistance. It is a domestic reality that already has compromised the efficacy of citizenship in scores of unacknowledged and uncharted ways.

  It was the interdependence of America with the world and the interdependence of shared economic and technological systems everywhere on which the Jihadic warriors counted when they brought terror to the American homeland. They not only hijacked American airplanes, turning them into deadly missiles, but provoked the nation into closing down its air transportation system for nearly a week. They not only destroyed the temple of American capitalism at the World Trade Center but forced capitalism to shut down its markets and shocked the country into a recession, of which the stock market in free fall was only a leading indicator. How can any nation claim independence under these conditions?

  In the world before McWorld, democratic sovereign nations could claim to be independent autonomous peoples exercising autonomous control over their lives. In Andrew Jackson’s premodern, largely rural America, where communities existed in isolation, where there was no national system of transportation or communication, systematic terror was simply not an option, as there was no system. There was no way to bring America to its knees because in a crucial sense America did not exist, at least not as an integral collectivity of interdependent regions with a single interest, until after the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution that followed it. Today there is so much systemic interactivity, so highly integrated a global network, so finely tuned an integral communications technology, that it has become as easy to paralyze as to use the multiple systems and networks. Hence, the decision would-be sovereign peoples face today is not the felicitous choice between secure independence and unwanted interdependence. It is only the sobering choice between, on the one hand, a relatively legitimate, democratic, and useful interdependence (which, however, is still to be constructed and which leaves sovereignty in tatters) and, on the other hand, a radically illegitimate and undemocratic interdependence on the terms of criminals, anarchists, and terrorists (an interdependence that is already here and which will triumph in the absence of a democratizing political will). In short, either we can allow McWorld and Jihad—Hollywood cowboys and international desperadoes—to set the terms of our interdependence, or we can leave those terms to new transnational treaties, new global democratic bodies, and a new creative common will. We can have our interactivity dictated to us by violence and anarchy, or we can construct it on the model of our own democratic aspirations. We can have a democratic and useful interdependence on whatever common ground we can persuade others to stand on, or we can stand on the brink of anarchy and try to prevent criminals and terrorists from pushing us into the abyss.

  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 indepe
ndence 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.