Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  In his seminal study in social anthropology Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), the nineteenth-century sociologist Ferdinand Toennies concluded that the requisites of traditional blood and clan communities tended inevitably to yield to the requisites of voluntary and contractual societies in an evolution that pointed only forward; an evolution away from tradition, religion, and mystery toward contract, secularism, and rationality whose final destination could only be what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world. The yearning for a reconstructed and remystified community was both fostered and contradicted by modern society’s cold rationalism, just as more recently Jihad has been both fostered and contradicted by McWorld’s postmodernity.

  Indeed, by the end of the last century the experiment with liberal nationalism, though it perdured in France and America, had largely failed elsewhere, displaced by Ortega’s “mania” for fragmentation. Empire had made nationalism more rabid and parochially oppositional and capitalism had driven it away from liberal individuals—agents of the bourgeois market—toward blood brothers: heirs to imagined ancient clans. Modernity meant modernization, which meant the aggressive expansion of practical mentalities of rationalization, bureaucratization, and secularization. These conditions in turn not only disenchanted and demythologized the world, but increasingly created a psychology of being in which individual self determination and commercial consumption displaced community identity and group belonging. The consumer is perhaps modernity’s most notable achievement and the consumer is finally a solitary being. While Joel Kotkin—stretching metaphor to the breaking point—has pretended to find newfangled “tribes” in the peoples who run McWorld’s economic infrastructure (e.g., Jews, Japanese, Indians, Brits, and Americans [sic!]), buyers and sellers are not particularly well understood by being cast as blood-brother parochials.15

  Many postmoderns have tried to reinvent community in the pallid face of contract relations. They all use history, but as Eric Hobsbawm noticed, “history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin-addiction,” and since “in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past,” where necessary “it can always be invented.”16 Community too is often a contrivance of willed grievances, drawing on an invented past. “Most Hungarians,” Tony Judt suggests, “did not know that their nation had been born in AD 896 until late-nineteenth-century patriots told them so.”17 That version of multiculturalism that infiltrates the pluralist “many” with a new ideology of, say, white Protestant or African-American monoculture offers one example of fictive historical communities—Max Weber’s myths of common descent—invented to serve the need for a modern political base for group identity. Ethnic “nationalism” offers another far more toxic instance. Polish editor and social theorist Adam Michnik notes wryly that in Poland, putatively free of ethnic problems, “we can produce a Polish-Lithuanian conflict, a Polish-Belorussian conflict and a Polish-Ukrainian conflict, to say nothing of a Polish-German quarrel in Oppeln, a pogrom against the gypsies in Mlawa and an anti-Semitic campaign in a country which has virtually no Jews.”18 In matters of nationalism, necessity apparently remains the mother of invention.

  More than a hundred years ago, Marx had observed that the breaking of feudal bonds by modern capitalism had decisively fragmented traditional community. He spoke of the sundering of all bonds and prophesied ongoing cultural meltdown: “All that is solid,” he warned, “melts into air.”19 A half century later modernist anxieties had become popularized, so that one of American playwright William Saroyan’s characters could repeat over and over again in the prewar stage classic The Time of Your Life, “no foundation, all the way down the line,” and expect full sympathy from audiences already exasperated by modernity even before it had produced the Holocaust and the atomic bomb.

  In Germany they did not just whine about it: reacting against what they took to be the stultifying leveling (gleichschaltung) of bourgeois society, the Nazi party revived medieval myths of Teuton morality (a feudal version of family values) and of Germanic identity (ironically reaching back not just to a second Empire of the German Nation but a first quite non-German Roman Empire). Eventually, it rode to power on a reactive ideology of grievance dressed up in the claims of an invented past in a manner not so different from the one currently being fashioned by the far Right in France, Italy, and the United States as well as, once again, in Germany. That the Nazis managed only to further the annihilation of intermediate associations of the kind that had once made genuine community feasible was an ironic compliment to their own unintentional complicity in the modernization they reviled. The irony is repeated today in the stellar rise and rapid fall of Silvio Berlusconi in Italian politics: a global corporate media mogul who owns Italy’s premier AC Milan soccer team, using his media-made preeminence to give demagogic voice to the very parochial constituencies his media world is systematically destroying; and then being brought down by media-driven charges of corruption that make him look like any other politician. The same irony is visible in the startling juxtaposition in the new reunified Germany of heavy metal rock rhythms that are MTV’s specialty and punk lyrics of which the young Goebbels might have been proud. Here is a piece of reactionary Jihad all decked out in the metered hip-hop of McWorld, as written by the German band Final Stage:

  Times are tough for the German people

  Foreign troops still occupy our land

  Forty years of calamity and corruption …

  It’s winter in the F.R.G.

  Will there ever be a Germany again

  Worth living in?

  German culture—where is it these days?

  We meet at a dump called McDonald’s

  Lust for profits and power poisons our environment…

  This state is ashamed of German history …

  We’ve got as many foreigners as grains of sand

  Pimps, junkies—it’s all forbidden

  Believe me, Christians, praying won’t do any good

  It’s winter in the F.R.G.

  Will there ever be a Germany again

  Worth living in?20

  Today, the forces I identify with Jihad are impetuously demanding to know whether there will ever be a Serbia again, a Flanders again, a Quebec again, an Ossetia or Tsutsiland or Catalonia again, that is worth living in. Immigrants from old to New Orleans, from old to New England, from old to New Zealand, want to know whether the lands of origin that fire their imagination can be made real. And they gather, in isolation from one another but in common struggle against commerce and cosmopolitanism, around a variety of dimly remembered but sharply imagined ethnic, religious, and racial identities meant to root the wandering postmodern soul and prepare it to do battle with its counterparts in McWorld. “Let’s slip the fighting dog’s leash” and loose the “savage beast of German blood” on all the “scum,” sings the band Stoerkraft (Destructive Force).21 Not every partisan of Jihad is so menacing (or so blunt), and this particular band subsequently betrayed the Right and today sings songs urging tolerance and social comity.22 But if democracy does not always necessarily appear as an adversary it is rarely deemed an ally. Even among new nationalists who proclaim no animus against it, the bargain has been struck: if to overcome modernity, the modern liberal nation state must be jettisoned along with its democratic institutions, that will be a justifiable cost of the war to revive community and insulate it from McWorld.

  The language most commonly used to address the ends of the reinvented and self-described tribes waging Jihad—whether they call themselves Christian fundamentalists or Rwandan rebels or Islamic holy warriors—remains the language of nationalism. Religion may represent a more profound force in the human psyche, but as politics it finds its vessel in nationalism.23 Yet nationalism can be elusive and its many usages are so variously inflected that it is not clear if a common language is actually being spoken. If, as Michael Ignatieff suggests, “the key narrative of the new world or
der is the disintegration of states” and the “key language” of that dissolution is ethnic nationalism, are we to assume that this is the nationalism of Mazzini and Yael Tamir?24 Or the nationalism of the Nazis and Vladimir Zhirinovsky? Ignatieff speaks cautiously of a “new” nationalism, but strictly speaking, the sundry opponents of McWorld appear to be neither nationalists nor religious zealots. Their rhetoric is too worldly for true religion and far too sectarian and exclusive to be nationalist. The Crusades were murderous in their fanaticism but universalist and expansionist in aspiration—more imperialist than reactionary—which indeed accounts for their bloodiness. Universal ideals can create universal mayhem while the effects of parochial ardor are often far more modest. Our new tribes are murderous and fanatical but small-minded and defensive: trying to secure islands of parochial brotherhood in a sea that relentlessly leaches away essence and washes away fraternal bonds.

  The critical question is whether postmodern “new” nationalism, with the nation-state as its target, is assimilable to traditional nationalism, on which the nation-state was founded. Rather than offer either a phenomenological answer (both varieties count as nationalism) or an essentialist answer (only this one or only that one counts as nationalism), I want to suggest here a more dialectical response. Nationalism clearly has now and has perhaps always had two moments: one of group identity and exclusion but another, equally important, of integration and inclusion. Today’s “nationalists” boast about their deconstructive potential and revel in hostility to the state and other constituencies that make up the state. In its early modern manifestation, however, nationalism permitted Europe to emerge from feudalism and facilitated the architecture of the nation-state. Early European atlases like the sixteenth-century Cosmography show Macedonians and Bulgarians, Danes and Vandals, Sicilians and Hungarians, both as constituent pieces of a larger body (a feudal empire) and inclusionary national wholes that assembled parochial tribes into national entities like Italia and Germania.

  Thus it is that the two moments of nationalism reflect the two moments of the feudalism against which early nationalism reacted.25 The political entities that brought down and succeeded feudalism had at once to divide and to integrate old Europe: at one and the same time to dismantle the empire of the church and to weld together the provincial neighborhoods. Clannish loyalty and blood oaths were too narrow a basis for new national states, imperial contract and theological fealty too broad a basis. The nation seemed a perfect integer, holding together the tribes in larger entities that nonetheless permitted something resembling common culture and civic reciprocity.26 The new relationship was one not of fealty but contract, one that in the novel language of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury pictured the king’s power as embodying the wills of people understood as individuals rather than as blood brothers. The sovereign’s authority derived directly from a contract among his subjects, who thus become his authors, his obedient but ultimately sovereign subjects. Emancipated from parochial fealty to kin and clan as well as from ascriptive subservience to vassal lords, newly created subjects of the British realm or of the French nation were little by little able to transform themselves from individual subjects into individual freemen whose obedience to the crown and responsibility to others grew out of rights they now understood themselves as possessing by birth and liberties they conceived as belonging to them by nature. Essex defined a parochial brotherhood: England defined the liberties of Englishmen. The feudal towns of Burgandy and Basque were walled: France was an idea that opened out to the cosmopolis. Feudal vassalage had created an intricate network of obligations in which birth inexorably controlled identity and identity in turn conditioned freedom (liberty being a hereditary characteristic of a single class). The new nation-state turned bondsmen into nationals and, in putting men on an equal footing, set the stage for a political theory of rights, resistance, and social contract, and thus for a political practice that would eventually become both egalitarian and democratic.

  Nationalism is a kind of group remembering of ancient stories of founding, and foundings were often midwifed by fratricide. But, as the historian Michelet had learned from the bloody lessons of the St. Bartholomew’s Night Massacre (in which Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered in their beds), it also requires self-conscious group obliviousness: not just common remembering but common forgetting.27 Differences are held in suspension in successful communities of difference—what civic nations are when they succeed—and that entails a certain amount of studied historical absentmindedness. Injuries too well remembered cannot heal. The greatest peril to American civic culture today is the memory of slavery, kept alive by ongoing prejudice and persistent institutional racism. Without an opportunity to forget slavery, there can never be a chance for racial harmony. The burden, of course, is on the heirs to the slaveholders, not the heirs to slavery.

  In the peculiar transformation of nationalism in the nineteenth century, imperialism played a special mollifying role. The great empires spawned by Austro-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottomans (and to a lesser degree, the overseas empires of France, Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands) repressed the political expression of cultural identity and enforced a mutuality that made possible a more inclusive solidarity. Yet the empires afforded culture its own zone, and seemed to neutralize its toxicity without quashing its tastes. Ignatieff and others have perhaps overstressed the ways in which empire kept Kulturkampf under wraps and ethnicity at bay, yet there is little question that they contained Jihad.

  Whether the ideological empire of the Communists or the economic empire of the capitalists can be said to have done the same is more controversial. Certainly under communism the nationalities question that had so perplexed Lenin and frightened Stalin was kept under control, if only by propaganda and brute force.28 As the collapse of the great European empires of the nineteenth century following World War I catalyzed the balkanization that had so worried Ortega, so the collapse of the Communist empire seems to have unleashed the new forces of Jihad we see at work in Eastern Europe and European Asia. Whether that is because Communist repression worsened things (repression leading ineluctably to explosion) or contained forces in a fashion that might ultimately have eliminated them is a contentious question we cannot settle. What is clear is that even communism’s version of empire deferred the issue for several generations, sparing parents and grandparents the bloodshed being visited today on their grandchildren (though communism certainly exacted its own price in blood).

  Capitalist empire was less successful as a governor on the whirling dervishes of ethnic nationalism since its hold was less explicitly coercive and since, as we have seen here, commerce and markets can arouse as well as placate ethnicity and its countermaterialist zeal. That is precisely what Jihad is all about.

  Yet times change quickly. Just a few years ago, astute commentators like Conor Cruise O’Brien pointed a warning finger at the Middle East, South Africa, and Ireland as the world’s leading flash points; who would want to make that claim now? Yesterday, Libya was Europe’s prime headache; today, Algeria causes more concern though just yesterday it was France’s most “successful” ex-colony. The devil may be in the details, but in world politics the devil is a chameleon and no theory that dwells on one or another particular case is likely to survive the next political surprise.29

  Hence, I hope in what follows to sketch a typology of Jihad with at best what can only claim to be transient illustrative evidence. The data are too protean to be definitive and the events too vulnerable to distortion by the very probes that affect to explain them to be detachable from the normative frames by which we try to capture them. This is the general problem with pretending that social and political theory can be “scientific.” Although I can give neither the case studies I sketch nor the conundrums they raise anything like their full due, I focus then, without pretending to science, on four different versions of the reaction to modernity representing four distinct perspectives on Jihad.

  11

  Jihad Within McWorld
:

  The “Democracies”

  IN THE WELL-ESTABLISHED European democracies, the temptation to resist modernity is modernity’s nervous commentary on itself. Europe’s rather pallid version of Jihad takes two intersecting forms: provincialism, which sets the periphery against the center; and parochialism, which disdains the cosmopolitan. Both are hostile to the capital city and all it stands for. Both understand decentralized power as less threatening to liberty and more susceptible to control than central power. Provincialism shares the democratic spirit of Jefferson. It prizes the sanctity of town or ward government and, with Tocqueville, understands liberty to be an essentially local or municipal notion unlikely to thrive under the pressures of large-scale governance and wholly contractual social relations. By this logic, Barcelona and Lyons are more likely to be free than Madrid or Paris, and the villages at their doorstep will in turn feel even freer than Barcelona and Lyons.