Jihad vs. McWorld Read online

  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.

  The resulting global asymmetry, in which diminished states and augmented markets serve only private, economic interests, damages not only a well-functioning democratic civic order but a well-functioning international economic order as well. The continuing spread of the new globalization has only deepened the asymmetry between private vices and public goods. McWorld in tandem with the global market economy has globalized many of our vices and almost none of our virtues. We have globalized crime, the rogue weapons trade, and drugs; we have globalized prostitution and pornography, and the trade in women and children made possible by “porn tourism.” Indeed, the most egregious globalization has been of the exploitation and abuse of children in war, pornography, poverty, and sex tourism. Children have been soldiers and victims in the raging ethnic and religious wars; children are the majority of the global cohort that suffers poverty, disease, and starvation. Children are our terrorists-to-be because they are so obviously not our citizens-to-come. How can this starkly asymmetrical globalization, one that entails such slow suffering, such deliberately paced violence, be anything other than fertile ground for recruiting terrorists? Indeed, it is terrorism itself along with its propaganda that has been most effectively globalized by the softening of sovereignty and the adjuration of democracy—sometimes (ironically) using the modern technologies of the World Wide Web and the worldwide media to promote ideologies hostile both to technology and to anything smacking of the worldwide or the modern. Following September 11, Osama bin Laden became a regular on CNN; the channels of McWorld transformed into conduits for an attack on it.

  Privatized, marketized globalization lacks anything resembling a civic envelope. As a result, it cannot support the values and institutions associated with civic culture, religion, and the family. Nor can it enjoy their potentially softening, domesticating, and civilizing impact on raw market transactions. No wonder Pope John Paul said in his Apostolic Exhortation on the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church in the Americas: “If globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negat
ive.”1 Of course, one expects the pope to moralize in this fashion. More startling is a similar message from another, more powerful pope of the secular world, who wrote recently: “You hear talk about a new financial order, about an international bankruptcy law, about transparency, and more … but you don’t hear a word about people Two billion people live on less than two dollars a day…. We live in a world that gradually is getting worse and worse and worse. It is not hopeless, but we must do something about it now.” The moralist here is the hardheaded James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, who has begun to replace the bank’s traditional energy and industrialization projects, thought to favor the interests of foreign investors, with environmental and health projects aimed at the interests of the populations being directly served.2

  There are, of course, extant international institutions that might serve as building blocks for a global democratic box into which the economy could safely be put. The international financial institutions conceived at Bretton Woods after World War II to oversee the reconstruction of shattered European and Asian economies were intended originally to function as regulatory agencies to ensure peaceful, stable, and democratic redevelopment under the watchful eye of the victorious Allied powers. Though the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization, which grew out of GATT in 1995) were ostensibly forged as instruments of democratic sovereign nations designed to guide and regulate private-sector interests in the name of public sector reconstruction, over a period of time they became instruments of the very private-sector interests they were meant to channel and keep in check. Those who today call for their elimination in the name of transparency, accountability, and democracy might be surprised to learn that these norms were once regarded as among the postwar financial order’s primary objectives. Given the role modern institutions representing this order play as potential pieces in a global regulatory infrastructure, one way to begin the process of global democratization would be to redemocratize them and subordinate them to the will of democratic peoples.

  Globalization does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Its corrosive impact on democratic governance and our inability to put to real democratic use international financial institutions that are nominally already at the service of democracy is augmented by a cognate ideology of privatization that is prevalent both on the international scene and within the countries whose economies are being globalized. McWorld is accompanied by this ideology of privatization—what Europeans often call neoliberalism and George Soros has labeled market fundamentalism (an appropriate implicit comparison to Jihadic fundamentalism)—that saps democracy by attacking government and its culture of public power. By arguing that markets can do everything government once did, and better, with more freedom for citizens, privatization within nation-states opens the way for a deregulation of markets that in turn facilitates the globalization and hence privatization of the economy. It softens up citizens to accept the decline of political institutions and tries to persuade them that they will be better off—more “free”—when their collective democratic voice is stilled, when they think of themselves not as public citizens but as private consumers. Consumers are poor substitutes for citizens, however, just as corporate CEOs are poor substitutes for democratic statesmen. It is telling that on the morning of September 12, 2001, America did not call Bill Gates or Michael Eisner to ask for assistance in dealing with terrorism. A privatized airport security system turned out to be fallible because it was more attuned to costs than to safety. Long-neglected public institutions reacquired overnight their democratic legitimacy and their role as defenders of public goods.

  Can this renewed legitimacy be employed on behalf of international institutions dedicated to public rather than private goods? If it can, new forms of civic interdependence can be quickly established.

  The ideology of privatization has always confounded private and public modes of choosing. Consumer choice is always and necessarily private and personal choice. Private choices, autonomous or not, cannot affect public outcomes. Democratic governance is not just about choosing; rather, it is about public choosing, about dealing with the social consequences of private choices and behavior. In the global sector this is crucial, because only public and democratic decisions can establish social justice and equity. Private markets cannot, not because they are capitalist but because they are private. In the language of the great social contract theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through participation in the general will, global citizens can regulate the private wills of global consumers and global corporations. They can tame Jihad and interdict terrorism even as they regulate markets and civilize their consequences.

  It is both a noxious tribute to the power of privatization and a marker of our deep confusion about the difference between public and private goods in the new century that the question of “who should own the code of life” (as the headline of a recent Newsweek article had it)3 is being asked. Currently, the inclination is to answer, “Private biotech companies”—a contradiction of everything we know about the public character of our species being. Under the rules of both democracy and morality, the code of life presumably belongs to some version of “us” rather than to some corporate “me.” There is something comically childish about adult scientists arguing over who owns the human genome as if it were a stray Pokémon card found on the playground, just one more commercial product in McWorld’s bag of tricks. If the genetic code of the species can be sold for profit, why shouldn’t women and children be sold for profit? And if there is no rational answer to this question, how can we defeat the cold logic of terror, which evinces the same righteous devotion to anarchy.

  This critique points to the crucial difference between public and private liberty, a difference that goes to the heart of Pope John Paul’s warning that “the human race is facing forms of slavery that are new and more subtle than those of the past, and for far too many people, freedom remains a word without meaning.” To think that shopping is what freedom means is to embrace the slavery against which the pope warns (though of course the pope is a thoroughly unmodern man, if not yet a Jihadic warrior).

  There are many things government cannot do very well, but there are many others that only government can do, such as regulate and protect, and sometimes subsidize and redistribute—not because it does them particularly well, but because they are public things for which only we, the public, can be held accountable. These res publicae (literally, “public things”) include education, culture, incarceration, transportation, defense, health care, social justice, and, yes, the human genome. They include the war on terrorism. And they include the construction of a fair and equitable international order that offers every person and every group equal access and equal opportunity. Put simply, the struggle against Jihad (which some claim it to be a holy struggle against us) can succeed only if it is also a struggle on behalf of genuine transnational public goods against the private interests manifest in McWorld.

  Capitalism is an extraordinarily productive system. There is no better way to organize human labor for productivity than mobilizing a billion private wills motivated by self-interest. Capitalism fails miserably at distribution and hence at safety and justice, however, which are necessarily the objects of our public institutions, motivated by the search for common ground and ways to overcome the conflicts and inequalities that arise out of private production. Domestically, most nation-states have struck the balance that is the meaning of democratic capitalism. Internationally, there is only a raging asymmetry that is the first and last cause of an anarchism in which terror flourishes and terrorists make their perverse arguments about death to young men and women who have lost hope in the possibilities of life.

  This book depicts a war then between Jihad and McWorld that cannot be won. Only a struggle of democracy against not solely Jihad but also against McWorld can achieve a just victory for the planet. A just, diverse, democratic world will put commerce and consume
rism back in their place and make space for civil society religion; it will combat the terrors of Jihad not only by making war on it but by creating a world in which the practice of religion is as secure as the practice of consumption and the defense of cultural values is not in tension with the defense of liberty but part of how liberty is defined (the true meaning of multiculturalism). Terror feeds off the parasitic dialectics of Jihad and McWorld. In a democratic world order, there will be no need for militant Jihad because belief will have a significant place without the aid of self-serving warriors; and there will be no advantage to McWorld because cultural variety will confront it on every television station and at every mall the world over. When Jihad and McWorld have vanished as primary categories, terror may not wholly disappear (it is lodged in a small but impregnable crevice in the dark regions of the human soul), but we can hope it will become less relevant to the hopes and aspirations of women and men who will have learned to love life too much to confuse religion with the courtship of death.