“McWorld is the universe of manufactured needs, mass consumption, and mass infotainment. It is motivated by profits and driven by the aggregate preferences of billions of consumers. Jihad is shorthand for the fierce politics of religious, tribal, and other zealots. In its most extreme manifestations—in the ultra nationalism of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Russia, for example, or the balkanization of the Balkans—it counters McWorld’s centrifugal pull and bloodless calculation.
Although some countries or parts of countries fit into one or the other category, Jihad and McWorld are not so much places as reactions to experience and attitudes of mind. As Mr. Barber provocatively puts it: ‘Belonging by default to McWorld, everyone is a consumer; seeking a repository for identity, everyone belongs to some tribe. But no one is a citizen.’”
—The Economist
“Jihad vs. McWorld is that rare phenomenon—a book that is immensely readable, yet with a serious theme.”
—Government & Opposition
“Challenging and instructive.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Stimulating, tartly written.”
—Publishers Weekly
A BOOKLIST EDITORS’ CHOICE
BOOKS BY BENJAMIN R. BARBER
The Truth of Power (2001)
A Passion for Democracy (1998)
A Place for Us (1998)
Jihad vs. McWorld (1995)
An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992)
The Conquest of Politics (1988)
Strong Democracy (1984)
Marriage Voices (A Novel) (1981)
Liberating Feminism (1975)
The Death of Communal Liberty (1974)
Superman and Common Men (1971)
COLLABORATIONS
The Struggle for Democracy
with Patrick Watson (1989)
The Artist and Political Vision
edited with M. McGrath (1982)
Totalitarianism in Perspective
with C. J. Friedrich and M. Curtis (1969)
To the Memory of Judith N. Shklar
Acknowledgments
I was given extraordinary support by two research assistants. Carolyn Nestor did extensive work preparing the empirical materials for the chapters on McWorld, and also reviewed and corrected the notes and bibliographic materials on a crash schedule whose deadlines she met with remarkable aplomb. She acted as a sounding board for ideas and contributed far more than would be expected from a research assistant. I am very much in her debt. Mark Button helped develop research materials, theoretic and empirical, for the Jihad chapters, and was particularly astute in getting to the heart of alternative historical readings. Although the errors remain my own doing, the work of Nestor and Button saved me from what I know would have been many more.
Kathleen Quinn gave the finished manuscript several ruthless readings and readers owe her much for whatever fluency and continuity the text now has. Had she had her way, the book would have been even shorter and more readable, but someone had to take a stand for prolixity and I managed in the end to ignore rather too many of her sound editorial judgments.
Steve Wasserman at Times Books called me in Paris not long after my article on Jihad and McWorld appeared in The Atlantic and initiated a process of persuasion and discussion that led to this book. I am grateful to him for his enthusiasm and commitment, without which I would not have written the book. The same can be said of my old friend at The Atlantic, Jack Beatty, who encouraged me in developing a provocative idea into a sustainable argument.
Many friends, colleagues, associates, and anonymous commentators—both in the United States and abroad—have responded to the original Atlantic article, scholarly and popular presentations of the argument as it developed, and sections of the manuscript as it was being written. I feel lucky to have had so many astute critics who were also friends, among them Michael Kustow, François D’Alancon, Bhikhu Parekh, Ivan Vitanyi, Jean Leca, Preston King, Michael Greven, Bruce Ackerman, Ghita Ionescu, Brian Barry, Chantal Mouffe, George Kateb, Nina Belyaeva, Harry Boyte, Richard Lehne, Seyla Benhabib, Alan Ryan, and the consummate scholar and dear friend to whom the book is dedicated, Judith N. Shklar—who feared Jihad, distrusted McWorld, and, ever so carefully, worked to clear a space for freedom and democracy.
Had I heeded these friendly critics more consistently, I would have certainly written a better book.
To my wife Leah and my daughter Nellie I owe an apology, though they have asked none of me. Without the labors of this project, I would have been better able to repay their indulgent tolerance. The guilt I feel arises not from complaint, but from how much too lovingly understanding they have been.
Contents
Acknowledgments
2001 Introduction
Introduction
PART I. THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD
1. The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld
2. The Resource Imperative: The Passing of Autarky and the Fall of the West
3. The Industrial Sector and the Rise of the East
4. From Hard Goods to Soft Goods
5. From Soft Goods to Service
6. Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology
7. Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul
8. Teleliterature and the Theme Parking of McWorld
9. Who Owns McWorld? The Media Merger Frenzy
PART II. THE OLD WORLD OF JIHAD
10. Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld?
11. Jihad Within McWorld: The “Democracies”
12. China and the Not Necessarily Democratic Pacific Rim
13. Jihad Within McWorld: “Transitional Democracies”
14. Essential Jihad: Islam and Fundamentalism
PART III. JIHAD VS. MCWORLD
15. Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder
16. Wild Capitalism vs. Democracy
17. Capitalism vs. Democracy in Russia
18. The Colonization of East Germany by McWorld
19. Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld
Afterword
Appendix A. Justice-of-Energy-Distribution Index
Appendix B. Twenty-two Countries’ Top Ten Grossing Films,
1991
Notes
2001 Introduction
Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy
ON SEPTEMBER 11, Jihad’s long war against McWorld culminated in a fearsomely unprecedented and altogether astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise in New York City and the cathedral of American military might in Washington, D.C. In bringing down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and destroying a section of the Pentagon with diabolically contrived human bombs, Jihadic warriors reversed the momentum in the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, writing a new page in an ongoing story. Until that day, history’s seemingly ineluctable march into a complacent postmodernity had appeared to favor McWorld’s ultimate triumph—a historical victory for free-market institutions and McWorld’s assiduously commercialized and ambitiously secularist materialism. Today, the outcome of the confrontation between the future and the radical reaction to it seems far less certain. As the world enters a novel stage of shadowed warfare against an invisible enemy, the clash between Jihad and McWorld is again poignantly relevant in understanding why the modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military or tactical, but rather must entail a commitment to democracy and justice even when they are in tension with the commitment to cultural expansionism and global markets. The war against terrorism also will have to be a war for justice if it is to succeed, and not just in the sense in which President George W. Bush used the term in his address to Congress.
A week after the trauma of the first large-scale assault on the American homeland, more successful than even its
scheming perpetrators could possibly have hoped for, the president joined the abruptly renewed combat with Jihadic terrorists by deploying the rhetoric of retributive justice: “We will bring the terrorists to justice,” he said gravely to a joint session of Congress, “or we will bring justice to the terrorists.” The language of justice was surely the appropriate context for the American response, but it will remain appropriate only if the compass of its meaning is extended from retributive to distributive justice.
The collision between the forces of disintegral tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism I have called Jihad (Islam is not the issue) and the forces of integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural globalization I have called McWorld (for which America is not solely responsible) has been brutally exacerbated by the dialectical interdependence of these two seemingly oppositional sets of forces. In Jihad vs. McWorld, I warn that democracy is caught between a clash of movements, each of which for its own reasons seems indifferent to freedom’s fate, and might suffer grievously. It is now apparent, as we mount a new military offense against Jihad (understood not as Islam but as militant fundamentalism) that democracy rather than terrorism may become the principal victim of the battle currently being waged.
Only the globalization of civic and democratic institutions is likely to offer a way out of the global war between modernity and its aggrieved critics, for democracy responds both to Jihad and to McWorld. It responds directly to the resentments and spiritual unease of those for whom the trivialization and homogenization of values is an affront to cultural diversity and spiritual and moral seriousness. But it also answers the complaints of those mired in poverty and despair as a consequence of unregulated global markets and of a capitalism run wild because it has been uprooted from the humanizing constraints of the democratic nation-state. By extending the compass of democracy to the global market sector, civic globalization can promise opportunities for accountability, participation, and governance to those wishing to join the modern world and take advantage of its economic blessings; by securing cultural diversity and a place for worship and faith insulated from the shallow orthodoxies of McWorld’s cultural monism, it can address the anxieties of those who fear secularist materialism and are fiercely committed to preserving their cultural and religious distinctiveness. The outcome of the cruel battle between Jihad and McWorld will depend on the capacity of moderns to make the world safe for women and men in search of both justice and faith, and can be won only if democracy is the victor.
If democracy is to be the instrument by which the world avoids the stark choice between a sterile cultural monism (McWorld) and a raging cultural fundamentalism (Jihad), neither of which services diversity or civic liberty, then America, Britain, and their allies will have to open a crucial second civic and democratic front aimed not against terrorism per se but against the anarchism and social chaos—the economic reductionism and its commercializing homogeneity—that have created the climate of despair and hopelessness that terrorism has so effectively exploited. A second democratic front will be advanced not only in the name of retributive justice and secularist interests, but in the name of distributive justice and religious pluralism.
The democratic front in the war on terrorism is not a battle to dissuade terrorists from their campaigns of annihilation. Their deeds are unspeakable, and their purposes can be neither rationalized nor negotiated. When they hijacked innocents and turned civilian air-crafts into lethal weapons, these self-proclaimed “martyrs of faith” in truth subjected others to a compulsory martyrdom indistinguishable from mass murder. The terrorists offer no terms and can be given none in exchange. When Jihad turns nihilistic, bringing it to justice can only take the form of extirpation—root, trunk, and branch. Eliminating terrorists will depend on professional military, intelligence, and diplomatic resources whose deployment will leave the greater number of citizens in America and throughout the world sitting on the sidelines, anxious spectators to a battle in which they cannot participate, a battle in which the nausea that accompanies fear will dull the appetite for revenge. The second front, however, engages every citizen with a stake in democracy and social justice, both within nation-states and in the relations between them. It transforms anxious and passive spectators into resolute and engaged participants—the perfect antidote to fear.
The first military front must be prosecuted, both because an outraged and wounded American nation demands it and because terrorists bent on annihilation will not yield to blandishments or inducements. They are looking not for bargains but for oblivion. Yet it will be the successful prosecution of a second civic front in the war rather than the strictly military campaign that will determine the outcome. It too, in President Bush’s words, will be a war for justice, but a war defined by a new commitment to distributive justice: a readjudication of North-South responsibilities, a redefinition of the obligations of global capital to include global justice and comity, a repositioning of democratic institutions as they follow markets from the domestic to the international sector, a new recognition of the place and requirements of faith in an aggressively secular market society. The war against Jihad will not, in other words, succeed unless McWorld is also addressed.
To be sure, democratizing globalism and rendering McWorld less homogenizing and trivializing to religion and its accompanying ethical and spiritual values will not appease the terrorists, who are scarcely students of globalization’s contractual insufficiencies. Jihadic warriors offer no quarter, whether they are the children of Islam, Christianity, or some blood tribalism, and they should be given none. I describe these warriors in Jihad vs. McWorld as people who detest modernity—the secular, scientific, rational, and commercial civilization created by the Enlightenment as it is defined by both its virtues (freedom, democracy, tolerance, and diversity) and its vices (inequality, hegemony, cultural imperialism, and materialism). What can these enemies of the modern do but seek to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present?
Terrorists, then, cannot themselves be the object of democratic struggle. They swim in a sea of tacit popular support and resentful acquiescence, however, and these waters—roiling with anger and resentment—prove buoyant to ideologies of violence and mayhem. Americans were themselves first enraged and then deeply puzzled by scenes from Islamic cities where ordinary men, women, and children who could hardly be counted as terrorists nonetheless manifested a kind of perverse jubilation in contemplating the wanton slaughter of American innocents. How could anyone cheer such acts? Yet an environment of despairing rage exists in too many places in the third world as well as in too many third-world neighborhoods of first-world cities, enabling terrorism by endowing it with a kind of quasilegitimacy it does not deserve. It is not terrorism itself but this facilitating environment against which the second-front battle is directed. Its constituents are not terrorists, for they are terrified by modernity and its costs and, consequently, vulnerable to ameliorative actions if those who embrace democracy find the will to take such actions. What they seek is justice, not vengeance. Their quarrel is not with modernity but with the aggressive neoliberal ideology that has been prosecuted in its name in pursuit of a global market society more conducive to profits for some than to justice for all. They are not even particularly anti-American; rather, they suspect that what Americans understand as prudent unilateralism is really a form of arrogant imperialism, that what Americans take to be a kind of cynical aloofness is really self-absorbed isolationism, and that what Americans think of as pragmatic alliances with tyrannical rulers in Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are really a betrayal of the democratic principles to which Americans claim to subscribe.
Hyperbolic commentators such as Samuel Huntington have described the current divide in the world as a global clash of civilizations, and warn of a cultural war between democracy and Islam, perhaps even between “the West and the rest.” But this is to ape the messianic rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, who has called for precisely such a war. The differe
nce between bin Laden’s terrorists and the poverty-stricken third-world constituents he tries to call to arms, however, is the difference between radical Jihadic fundamentalists and ordinary men and women concerned to feed their children and nurture their religious communities. Fundamentalists can be found among every religious sect and represent a tiny, aggravated minority whose ideology contradicts the very religions in whose names they act. The remarkable comments of the American fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell interpreting the attacks on New York and Washington as the wrath of God being vented on abortionists, homosexuals, and the American Civil Liberties Union no more defines Protestantism than the Taliban defines Islam.
The struggle of Jihad against McWorld is not a clash of civilizations but a dialectical expression of tensions built into a single global civilization as it emerges against a backdrop of traditional ethnic and religious divisions, many of which are actually created by McWorld and its infotainment industries and technological innovations. Imagine bin Laden without modern media: He would be an unknown desert rat. Imagine terrorism without its reliance on credit cards, global financial systems, modern technology, and the Internet: Terrorists would be reduced to throwing stones at local sheiks. It is the argument of this study that what we face is not a war between civilizations but a war within civilization, a struggle that expresses the ambivalence within each culture as it faces a global, networked, material future and wonders whether cultural and national autonomy can be retained, and the ambivalence within each individual juggling the obvious benefits of modernity with its equally obvious costs.
From Seattle and Prague to Stockholm and Genoa, street demonstrators have been protesting the costs of this globalization. Yet though President Chirac of France acknowledged after the dissident violence of Genoa months before the attacks in New York and Washington that a hundred thousand protesters do not take to the streets unless something is amiss, they have mostly been written off as anarchists or know-nothings. More media attention has been paid to their theatrics than to the deep problems those theatrics are intended to highlight. After September 11, some critics even tried to lump the antiglobalization protesters in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible destablizers of world order. But the protesters mostly are the children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naive in their analyses, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaders apparently lack that globalization’s current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence. They know too that those in the third world who seem to welcome American suffering are at worst reluctant adversaries whose principal aim is to make clear that they too suffer from violence, even if it is less visible and destroys with greater stealth and over a longer period of time than the murderous schemes of the terrorists. They want not to belittle American suffering but to use its horrors to draw attention to their own. How many of these “enemies of McWorld,” given the chance, would prefer to enjoy modernity and its blessings if they were not so often the victims of modernity’s unevenly distributed costs? How many are really fanatic communists and how many are merely instinctive guardians of fairness who resent not capitalism’s productivity but only the claim that, in the absence of global regulation and the democratic rule of law, capitalism can serve them? It is finally hypocrisy rather than democracy that is the target of their rage.
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