Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Even traditionally homogenous integral nations have reason to feel anxious about the prospect of Jihad. The rising economic and communications interdependence of the world means that such nations, however unified internally, must nonetheless operate in an increasingly multicultural global environment. Ironically, a world that is coming together pop culturally and commercially is a world whose discrete subnational ethnic and religious and racial parts are also far more in evidence, in no small part as a reaction to McWorld. Forced into incessant contact, postmodern nations cannot sequester their idiosyncracies. Post-Maastricht Europe, while it falls well short of earlier ambitions, has become integrated enough to force a continent-wide multicultural awareness whose consequences have by no means been happy, let alone unifying. The more “Europe” hoves into view, the more reluctant and self-aware its national constituents become. What Günter Grass said of Germany—“unified, the Germans were more disunited than ever”—applies in spades to Europe and the world beyond: integrated, it is more disintegral than ever.18

  Responding to McWorld, parochial forces defend and deny, reject and repel modernity wherever they find it. But they also absorb and assimilate, utilizing the native’s strategy against every colonizer to have crossed a border since the Romans came to Gaul. When the Hilton came to the Hills of Buda, a local architect grafted the new structure onto a thirteenth-century monastery. When the French restored the Champs Élysées to its former glory, they banished the arch from McDonald’s. When American music invaded the Caribbean, Orlando Patterson reminds us, the Caribbean reacted with enormous music production of its own, of which reggae is only one well-known example.19 Yet to think that indigenization and globalization are entirely coequal forces that put Jihad and McWorld on an equal footing is to vastly underestimate the force of the new planetary markets. The Budapest Hilton’s “monastery” houses a casino; Paris’s McDonald’s serves Big Macs and fries with or without the arch; reggae gets only a tiny percentage of MTV play time even in Latin markets. It’s no contest.

  A pattern of feudal relations does, however, persist. And so we are returned to the metaphor of feudalism, that puzzling world of fragments knit together by the abstraction of Christianity. Today’s abstraction is the consumers’ market, no less universal for all its insistent materialist secularism. Following McDonald’s golden arch from country to country, the market traces a trajectory of dollars and bonds and ads and yen and stocks and currency transactions that reaches right around the globe. Grass’s observation works the other way around as well: disunited, pulled apart by Jihad, the world is more united than ever. And more interdependent as well.

  The Smalling World of McWorld

  EVEN THE MOST DEVELOPED, supposedly self-sufficient nations can no longer pretend to genuine sovereignty. That is the meaning of ecology, a term that marks the final obsolescence of all man-made boundaries. When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or toxic wastes or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simply irrelevant. Toxins don’t stop for customs inspections and microbes don’t carry passports. North America became a water and air free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

  The environmental tocsin has been sounded, loudly and often, and there is little to add here to the prodigious literature warning of a biospherical Armageddon. We have learned well enough how easily the German forests can be devastated by Swiss and Italians driving gas-guzzling roadsters fueled by leaded gas (the Europeans are far behind the Americans in controlling lead). We know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases because Brazilian farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are burning down their tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plow, and because many Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungles into toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen balance and puncturing our global lungs.

  Ecological interdependence is, however, reactive: a consequence of natural forces we cannot predict or fully control. But McWorld’s interdependence and the limits it places on sovereignty is more a matter of positive economic forces that have globalism as their conscious object. It is these economic and commercial forces—the latest round in capitalism’s long-standing search for world markets and global consumers—that are the primary subject of this book.

  Every demarcated national economy and every kind of public good is today vulnerable to the inroads of transnational commerce. Markets abhor frontiers as nature abhors a vacuum. Within their expansive and permeable domains, interests are private, trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to banking is open, contracts are enforceable (the state’s sole legitimate economic function), and the laws of production and consumption are sovereign, trumping the laws of legislatures and courts. In Europe, Asia, and the Americas such markets have already eroded national sovereignty and given birth to a new class of institutions—international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations—institutions that lack distinctive national identities and neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or a regulative principle. While mills and factories sit somewhere on sovereign territory under the eye and potential regulation of nation-states, currency markets and the Internet exist everywhere, but nowhere in particular. Without an address or a national affiliation, they are altogether beyond the devices of sovereignty.20 Even products are becoming anonymous: whose national workforce do you fault on a defective integrated circuit labeled:

  Made in one or more of the following countries: Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Mauritius, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines. The exact country of origin is unknown.21

  How are the social and political demands of responsibility preserved under such remarkable circumstances?

  The market imperative has in fact reinforced the quest for international peace and stability, requisites of an efficient international economy, without improving the chances for civic responsibility, accountability, or democracy, which may or may not benefit from commerce and free markets and which, although it depends on peace, is not synonymous with it. The claim that democracy and markets are twins has become a commonplace of statesmanship, especially in light of the demise of state socialism, which has left capitalism’s zealots free to regard themselves not only as victors in the Cold War but as the true champions of a democracy that (they are certain) markets alone make possible. Thus have they managed to parlay the already controversial claim that markets are free into the even more controversial claim that market freedom entails and even defines democracy. President Clinton employed the phrase democratic markets as a mantra during his historic visit to Eastern Europe and Russia at the beginning of 1994.22 His foreign policy aides have consistently done the same.23

  This stealth rhetoric that assumes capitalist interests are not only compatible with but actively advance democratic ideals, translated into policy, is difficult to reconcile with the international realities of the last fifty years. Market economies have shown a remarkable adaptability and have flourished in many tyrannical states from Chile to South Korea, from Panama to Singapore. Indeed, the state with one of the world’s least democratic governments—the People’s Republic of China—possesses one of the world’s fastest-growing market economies. “Communist” Vietnam is not far behind, and was opened to American trade recently, presumably on the strength of the belief that markets ultimately defeat ideology.24 Capitalism requires consumers with access to markets and a stable political climate in order to succeed: such conditions may or may not be fostered by democracy, which can be disorderly and even anarchic, especially in its early stages, and which often pursues public goods costly to or at odds with private-market imperatives—environmentalism or full employment for example. On the level of the individual, capitalism seeks consumers susceptible to the shaping of their needs and the manipulation of t
heir wants while democracy needs citizens autonomous in their thoughts and independent in their deliberative judgments. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wishes to “tame savage capitalism,” but capitalism wishes to tame anarchic democracy and appears to have little problem tolerating tyranny as long as it secures stability.25

  Certainly the hurried pursuit of free markets regardless of social consequences has put democratic development in jeopardy in many nations recently liberated from communism.26 Social insecurity and rampant unemployment for peoples accustomed to the cradle-to-the-grave ministrations of paternalistic socialist bureacracies are unlikely to convert them to a system of democracy for which they have otherwise had no preparation. This is perhaps why majorities in all but a handful of ex-Soviet lands have been busy reelecting former Communist officials (usually wearing new party labels and carrying new ideological doctrines) to their new democratic legislatures. In economist Robert McIntyre’s blunt words: “Communists and former Communists are winning because the Western economic advice has led to pointless, dysfunctional pain, while failing to set the foundations for politically and socially viable future growth.”27 The right to choose between nine VCR models or a dozen automobile brands does not necessarily feel like freedom to workers whose monthly salaries can hardly keep up with the rising price of bread, let alone to women and men with no jobs at all. Capitalists may be democrats but capitalism does not need or entail democracy. And capitalism certainly does not need the nation-state that has been democracy’s most promising host.

  This is not to criticize capitalism in and of itself: joint-stock, limited-liability corporations are quite properly interested primarily in profits and pursue civic liberty and social justice only where they do not interfere with the bottom line. Indeed, they have certain conspicuous virtues beyond their intrinsic economic utilities like efficiency, productivity, elasticity, profitability. They are enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, and war and are hostile to constraints on economic choice and social mobility, although this hardly makes them friends of justice. Market psychology also can attenuate the psychology of ideological and religious cleavages and nurture concord among producers and consumers, identities that ill-suit Jihad’s narrowly conceived ethnic or religious cultures. But it also undermines the psychology of skeptical inquiry upon which autonomous judgment and resistance to manipulation are founded. In the world of McWorld, the alternative to dogmatic traditionalism may turn out to be materialist consumerism or relativistic secularism or merely a profitable corruption.28 Democracy’s ties to McWorld are at best contingent. Shopping, it is true, has little tolerance for blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing British paternalism, Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodoxy, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales Massachusetts Puritanism; but intolerance for blue laws is hardly a condition for constitutional faith or a respect for due process. In the context of common markets, international law has largely ceased to be a vision of justice and has become a workaday framework for getting things done: enforcing contracts, certifying deals, regulating trade and currency relations, and supervising mergers or bankruptcies. Moralists used to complain that international law was impotent in curbing the injustices of nation-states, but it has shown even less capacity to rein in markets that, after all, do not even have an address to which subpoenas can be sent. As the product of a host of individual choices or singular corporate acts, markets offer no collective responsibility. Yet responsibility is the first obligation of both citizens and civic institutions.

  While they produce neither common interests nor common law, common markets do demand, along with a common currency, a common language; moreover, they produce common behaviors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere. Commercial pilots, computer programmers, film directors, international bankers, media specialists, oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts, movie producers, demographers, accountants, professors, lawyers, athletes—these compose a new breed of men and women for whom religion, culture, and ethnic nationality are marginal elements in a working identity. Although sociologists of everyday life will continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode, shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynics might even suggest that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe had as their true goal not liberty and the right to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to shop. Shopping means consumption and consumption depends on the fabrication of needs as well as of goods in what I will call the infotainment telesector of the service economy.

  McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like Harley-Davidson’s and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle. You don’t drive them, you feel their vibes and rock to the images they conjure up from old movies and new celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to the wildly popular international café chain Planet Hollywood. Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks—the new churches of a commercial civilization in which malls are the public squares and suburbs the neighborless neighborhoods—are all constructed as image exports creating a common world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles, and trademarks. Hard power yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into a kind of videology that works through sound bites and film clips. Videology is fuzzier and less dogmatic than traditional political ideology: it may as a consequence be far more successful in instilling the novel values required for global markets to succeed.

  McWorld’s videology remains Jihad’s most formidable rival, and in the long run it may attenuate the force of Jihad’s recidivist tribalisms.29 Yet the information revolution’s instrumentalities are also Jihad’s favored weapons. Hutu or Bosnian Serb identity was less a matter of real historical memory than of media propaganda by a leadership set on liquidating rival clans. In both Rwanda and Bosnia, radio broadcasts whipped listeners into a killing frenzy. As New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles has noticed, “regionalism in pop music has become as trendy as microbrewery beer and narrowcasting cable channels, and for the same reasons.”30 The global culture is what gives the local culture its medium, its audience, and its aspirations. Fascist pop and Hasid rock are not oxymorons; rather they manifest the dialectics of McWorld in particularly dramatic ways. Belgrade’s radio includes stations that broadcast Western pop music as a rebuke to hard-liner Milosevic’s supernationalist government and stations that broadcast native folk tunes laced with antiforeign and anti-Semitic sentiments. Even the Internet has its neo-Nazi bulletin boards and Turk-trashing Armenian “flamers” (who assail every use of the word turkey, fair and fowl alike, so to speak), so that the abstractions of cyberspace too are infected with a peculiar and rabid cultural territoriality all their own.

  The dynamics of the Jihad-McWorld linkage are deeply dialectical. Japan has, for example, become more culturally insistent on its own traditions in recent years even as its people seek an ever greater purchase on McWorld. In 1992, the number-one restaurant in Japan measured by volume of customers was McDonald’s, followed in the number-two spot by the Colonel’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.31 In France, where cultural purists complain bitterly of a looming Sixième République (“la République Américaine”), the government attacks “franglais” even as it funds EuroDisney park just outside of Paris. In the same spirit, the cinema industry makes war on American film imports while it bestows upon Sylvester Stallone one of France’s highest honors, the Chevalier des arts et lettres.32 Ambivalence also stalks India. Just outside of Bombay, cheek by jowl with villages still immersed in poverty and notorious for the informal execution of unwanted female babies or, even, wives, can be found a new town known as SCEEPZ—the Santa Cruz Electronic Export Processing Zone—
where Hindi-, Tamil-, and Mahratti-speaking computer programmers write software for Swissair, AT&T, and other labor-cost-conscious multinationals. India is thus at once a major exemplar of ancient ethnic and religious tensions and “an emerging power in the international software industry.”33 To go to work at SCEEPZ, says an employee, is “like crossing an international border.” Not into another country, but into the virtual nowhere-land of McWorld.

  More dramatic even than in India, is the strange interplay of Jihad and McWorld in the remnants of Yugoslavia. In an affecting New Republic report, Slavenka Drakulic recently told the brief tragic love story of Admira and Bosko, two young star-crossed lovers from Sarajevo: “They were born in the late 1960’s,” she writes. “They watched Spielberg movies; they listened to Iggy Pop; they read John le Carré; they went to a disco every Saturday night and fantasized about traveling to Paris or London.”34 Longing for safety, it seems they finally negotiated with all sides for safe passage, and readied their departure from Sarajevo. Before they could cross the magical border that separates their impoverished land from the seeming sanctuary of McWorld, Jihad caught up to them. Their bodies lay along the riverbank, riddled with bullets from anonymous snipers for whom safe passage signaled an invitation to target practice. The murdered young lovers, as befits émigrés to McWorld, were clothed in jeans and sneakers. So too, one imagines, were their murderers.