Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Parochialism adds to provincialism a cultural critique, descrying in the cosmopolitanism and commercialism of capital cities forces deeply corrupting to human association: atomism, agnosticism, anarchy, and anomie—a series of terms whose “a” prefix stresses the deracination or “withoutness” of a modern society reduced to its slightest particles and thus without communal coherence because it is without God and without order, without law and without justice. Rousseau’s acerb portrait of eighteenth-century capital cities captures the visceral force of the parochial critique: “In a big city,” thunders Rousseau, “full of scheming, idle people without religion or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes.”1

  Occitan France

  THE FRANCE THAT is Paris and the France that is the provinces (“la France profonde”) have been at odds for most of the nation’s history, the regional parlements against the Bourbon monarchy, the landed aristocracy and their supported church against the Jacobins. When in World War II the French national center collapsed and Paris and the north were occupied by the army of the Third Reich, it was the periphery under the collaborationist Vichy regime that took on the tasks of conservator for France, redefining its spirit along the way With agriculture the only honest culture the French could afford to recognize under Nazi occupation, Parisians who in the 1920s and 1930s had despised village life, in the 1940s suddenly discovered long-lost relatives in the provinces, country cousins with whom a newly unearthed cultural identity could be affirmed.

  Even today, Parisians seek second homes in peripheral villages where they can escape not just French modernity, but McWorld’s tawdry intrusions into Paris or the grinning visage of Mickey mocking them from EuroDisney just a few miles to the east. The irony is that the fast trains and superhighways by which these weekend traditionalists render the periphery accessible to Paris are destroying the rural landscape they wish to honor, just as their ex-urban occupation of quiet farm villages infects these hamlets with a corrosive cosmopolitanism even as it gives the cosmopolitans the illusion of a respite from McWorld. Here Jihad and McWorld intersect: McWorld’s spent consumers, who cannot do for more than a long weekend without the twin fixes of twentieth-century consumerism and twenty-first-century technology, periodically excuse themselves from the city and its suburbs to inhabit Jihad’s contrived ethnic identities “dans la compagne” or “auf das Land.”

  To provide the illusion of a cultural identity, McWorld goes slumming in Jihad while its rootless denizens play at being “locals” in a manner that is almost entirely spurious, vicarious, unearned. In Europe, where they coexist cheek by jowl with centralized national power, such local identities as have been preserved are predominantly linguistic and the trade-off with McWorld still under negotiation. If, as Ignatieff has it, “the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism,” then the key to ethnic nationalism is language.2 In Western Europe’s gentle Jihad, language is how the parts detach themselves from the whole. It is not only Americans who worry about a primary or mother language. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, provincials have rediscovered language (dialect) and made it the talisman of their reawakened cultural subnationalism, leaving modern French patriots to wonder what will be left of France if it is carved back up into its Norman and Breton and Basque parts.

  The irony is that French itself is under siege and the National Cultural Ministry in Paris has actually prevailed upon the legislature to outlaw popular foreign terms, in particular, the multiplying Americanisms of McWorld. Talk show, chewing gum, software, prime time, and cheeseburgers inter alia will now be denoted by the terms causerie, gomme à mâcher, logiciels, heures de grande écoute, and … well, quelque chose (something or other) “à la fromage” (the equivalent will have to be invented) or such commodities will be mute (not an acceptable mode for a commodity). Ads using fashionable anglicisms will have to be translated, and scientific terms from the new global technology will have to find French neologisms if French scientists want to write or speak about them.3 In this mini-Jihad of the French government against McWorld’s bold Esperanto (recently softened by compromise) can be seen at the national level the parochial spirit of provincial efforts to hold a regional line against French. Two lines in the sand: one drawn by France to keep out McWorld; the other drawn by France’s provinces to keep the French at bay.

  The Basque region is the best known separatist entity (it exists on both sides of the Spanish/French border, where until very recently campaigns of terror have been conducted). But there are other less notorious and thus more telling instances of cultural and linguistic Jihad. In Brittany, though the old separatist bomb-throwers are gone and secession is no longer an issue, Breton cultural nationalism is probably running “stronger today than at any other time this century.”4 French bagpipes? Well hardly: but there are Breton bagpipes in the little Celtic town of Quimper, and Brittany, which immediately after World War II had only one hundred bagpipers, today boasts five thousand.5

  In Provence, the story is much the same. Modern purveyors of gentle Jihad are trying to undo at least certain features of a four-hundred-year-old French history and relegitimize the dialects and cultures of the ancient region of Occitan. Occitan encompassed the Provençal, the Catalan, and the Basque regions of southern France along the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, and featured “oc” (“yes”) dialects quite distinctive from the “oui” (“yes”) version of French spoken in the north. The French government, like so many harried denizens of McWorld trying to prove their traditionally parochial multicultural credentials without actually giving up their place at modernity’s banquet table, now supports indigenous languages. Perhaps it does so because it appreciates that McWorld’s global American-speak can use all the enemies it can get.

  Provincial dialects may threaten French centralist culture but they also constitute multicultural France and so are at once a weapon of French nationalism and a weapon pointed at integral nationalism’s heart. Europe, France’s rival for the affection of the newly legitimized localities, is also supportive. The Western European Language Bureau, created in 1982, encourages the provinces in their cultural conceits, supporting not only Provençal and other Oc dialects in France but also, in the Netherlands, Frisian, in Ireland, Gaelic, and in other places, the linguistic flavor of the day.6 Its activities and the realities they acknowledge have led some critics to refer to the new Europe as “a new tower of Babel.”7 Others see in its work a subtle strategy of national deconstruction by which the European whole nurtures the subnational fragments, all the better to undercut the resistance to wholeness on the part of the nation-states. In holding French centralists at bay, Provence may thus welcome support from Europe.

  Whatever strategies are at work, parochial culture is not much enhanced. Despite support, and the opening of new bilingual schools in Nîmes and elsewhere, Provençal has hardly become a living language. Less than fifty thousand speak Breton and only half of those can write it. The model, unfortunately, is not the Flemish spoken at Dunkirk nor the French version of Catalan nor the German spoken in Italy’s Alto Adige, France’s Alsace, or Russia’s Kaliningrad; in each of these cases, a local language survives because it is spoken by a substantial population across a proximate border. Breton and Provençal, on the other hand, like Corsican and Ladin, exist in splendid isolation, fragments of an otherwise vanished cultural legacy. Whether or not there are as many as 3 million, as some claim, who speak some words of one of the six dialects of Occitan, and whether or not the nominal Occitan dialect news programs being broadcast from Toulouse and Marseille really have listeners, the focus on Occitan revival is part of a larger campaign to vitalize and legitimize the provinces against McWorld’s Parisian center, and parallels similar efforts in Belgium and in Switzerland. In the Alps, for example, there are fewer than forty thousand speakers of Raeto-Romantsch and Ladin left in the canton of Graubünden, and despite official efforts on behalf of pluralism, su
rviving latinate dialects seem unlikely ever to be more than a cantonal museum culture.8

  Spanish (?) Catalonia

  THE INTELLECTUALS INVOLVED in the Western European local cultural revival are deeply ambiguous about what they are doing. On the one hand, they do not necessarily see themselves as enemies of cosmopolitanism and they deny that there is any relationship between what they advocate and the kinds of ethnic warfare being conducted further to the east. Some see themselves as securing bastions of local democracy, seedbeds for real participation in the all-European federation that will presumably emerge, if not immediately, sometime in the next millennium. Catalonia boasts that it is a “country in Europe,” and thereby can claim to serve both Jihad and McWorld: for it integrates itself into Europe precisely by segregating itself from Spain. We are not Spaniards, we are Catalonians; but Catalonians are Europeans—better Europeans than the Spanish!

  In an ongoing advertising campaign that began before the 1992 Barcelona summer Olympics and continues into the present, the provincial government of Catalonia managed to have it both ways, outraging Madrid by printing maps that highlight Catalonia as part of Europe but omit Spain altogether. It would be as if California ran ads in Japan portraying itself as a vital appendage of the Pacific Rim installed by inadvertence on a nameless North American continent.9 Catalan nationalist leader and provincial president Jordi Pujol has played a noisy role in Spanish politics and created pressures that moved Spain’s crafty King Juan Carlos to address the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic games in Catalan dialect. Courtesy of Señor Pujol, the well-liked monarch had been booed only three years earlier at the Barcelona Olympic stadium dedication, and many Catalonians had demanded that their athletes be permitted to compete separately from the Spanish team!10 Pujol himself is a viperous nationalist who not only helped make Catalan the official language of schools and universities (non-Catalans must use it if they wish to teach in Catalonia) but insisted “Catalonia is as much a nation as Slovenia or Estonia.”11 As happens with so many of Western Europe subnationalists, the Catalonian’s nominal bow toward Europe and McWorld is accompanied by a withdrawal from national sovereignty—in this case, Spain’s. Far from resisting McWorld’s markets, Catalonia seeks a special relationship with them.

  Unlike Catalonia, the Occitan regions have not yet quite realized they can blockade the capital without turning their backs on McWorld. Gerard Gouiran, a professor of Occitan at Montpellier University, insists his concern with local language is free of exclusivist animus. But, he explains, “the strengthening of the local language [is] vital to preserving the region’s character because the south of France is changing so rapidly. New high-technology industries are settling in France’s version of the sun-belt; outsiders are buying up entire villages as vacation spots, and television is barraging young people with images in which their own world never appears.”12 Gouiran does not quite specify that the enemy is McWorld, but he is explicit about “containing” the Americanization of France and of Europe. Unlike Pujol, he has not yet grasped that “sun-belt” industries rooting in France’s southwest can actually catalyze local pride and give economic sustenance to parochial pretensions to autonomy. Nonetheless, like partisans of local culture elsewhere, Gouiran does confront McWorld with a profound ambivalence that is evident in Switzerland as well as in North America’s most dramatic case of separatism, Quebec.

  German-Switzerland

  SWITZERLAND EXEMPLIFIES THE problems Europe faces as a whole, for as a nation it has chosen to defy Europe and the supposedly irreversible pressures of McWorld’s markets from the contradictory stance of a highly successful practitioner of market economics. In doing so it has also managed to open up deep inner fissures that threaten to destabilize Switzerland’s own confederal equilibrium. Long a loosely federated neutral nation forged from German, French, and Italian (and Raeto-Romantsch) fragments, the Swiss (like the Americans) have seen themselves as an exceptionalist country—Sonderfall Schweiz!—and on the basis of their unique geographical position astride Europe and their long-standing armed neutrality, have resisted efforts at integration into a greater Europe, and refused entry into the United Nations in a 1967 national referendum. At the end of 1992, following an unnerving Danish “no” to the Maastricht Treaty, the Swiss also voted no on membership in the European Free Trade Association (as a preamble to membership in the Common Market). Their negative vote followed cultural fault lines with the French Swiss voting overwhelmingly for Europe and the German Swiss overwhelmingly against.13 It had been hard enough for the German Swiss to surrender their precious semisovereignty to a new federal government back in 1848 when the “modern” constitution eroded certain crucial cantonal privileges. In 1992 it was not so much Switzerland, whose elites—the federal government, the major parties both conservative and liberal, as well as corporate, banking, and even many union leaders—fully supported Europe, but rather the cantons and communes that led the obstinate resistance. The elites spent millions trying to prod the citizenry out of its democratic parochialism, warning them that a “no” vote could put the Swiss multinationals out of business (or at least out of Switzerland) and turn Switzerland into “the Nepal of Europe.”14

  Europhile observers, that is to say the greater part of the European press, were utterly befuddled, muttering darkly about Switzerland’s “reflexive traditionalism” and its self-defeating “neo-isolationism,” and predicting that unless it permitted itself to be awoken by Europe’s economic “electroshock” it was doomed to become a “third-world country.”15 Yet the Swiss have one of the highest standards of living in the world (higher than the United States), are committed free traders, and have been participants in the building of the financial ectoskeleton of McWorld. They are not stupid. What was at stake for Switzerland’s reluctant “Europeans” was not a reactionary Jihad against modernity. Rather, the German Swiss in particular, but also the Italian Swiss who in the canton of Ticino voted nearly 62 percent no, were struggling against Europe in the name of cultural autonomy and regional democracy—two frequently disjunctive values that for unique historical reasons have intersected in Switzerland. Indeed, in Europe’s oldest and most decentralized democracy, not just the cantons but the communes enjoy prerogatives few other constitutions in the world afford to people locally. Gemeindefreiheit (communal liberty) and kantönligeist (the local spirit of the canton) apparently remain values worth fighting for, even at the cost of the rewards of economic integration. But the tradition to which the Swiss cling is local democracy, and their loyalty may in part be due to the powerful impression left by Euro-technocrats and McWorld marketeers that democracy is simply not part of the global game they are playing.

  In Switzerland, then, the struggle against McWorld is to a degree a self-conscious struggle on behalf of a parochial culture that happens to be generically associated with self-government and regional liberty. Perhaps alone among the partisans of Jihad, the Swiss are struggling to preserve a traditional culture against modernity in the name of democracy. Where elsewhere isolationists fight against both markets and democracy as twin products of a homogenizing modernity they fear, in the Alps they oppose homogeneity because it imperils democracy. Since it came to Switzerland long before the Enlightenment, even the Enlightenment’s most savage critics can count democracy as their ally rather than their enemy.

  The refusal of the Swiss to buy into the McWorld for which their economic success has prepared them was again underscored in February 1994 when, in still another display of referendum obstinacy, they voted to ban all heavy cargo truck traffic through the Alps, ruling that by the year 2004 cargo must be carried exclusively by rail. In doing so, they turned the clock back nearly a century to the time when the citizens of the canton of Graubünden legislated a ban on all automobile traffic from that canton’s extensive and still virgin territory (a quarter of Switzerland’s land mass). The automobile, the denizens of Davos and St. Moritz and Chur had agreed, was a threat to regional autonomy and local liberty.16 Switzerland
remains to most Europeans an inexplicable maverick: a rich nation that seems prepared to put its wealth at risk for principle; a stubborn nation whose obstinacy sometimes looks like prescience, and whose prescience is often written off as obstinacy.

  For all their brave pre-Enlightenment wisdom in resisting McWorld, however, along the way the Swiss are jeopardizing their prudent multicultural equilibrium. The francophone Swiss are far less attached to German Swiss localist traditions and far more anxious to follow France into a greater Europe than their German, Italian, or Ladin cousins. With only some of the parts willing to fight for the continuing national autonomy of the whole, the whole risks dis-integration—a development that would defeat Switzerland’s confederal democracy as surely as abject surrender to Europe.

  A Sovereign Quebec Inside Canada?

  MUCH THE SAME ambivalence can be found across the Atlantic among the Quebecois separatists, where federal Canada faces a Quebec province whose separatist leanings have actually been magnified by its recent economic successes. If anything, the resistant part of the whole here is actually as much or even more in tune with McWorld than the whole represented by the Canadian government that Quebec resists.17 Quebec would seem to want it both ways: “a sovereign Quebec inside a united Canada,” as the telling quip goes. Perhaps this is because the Quebecois can be seen (and sometimes see themselves) less as nearly 7 million francophone Canadians (with another million in Canada outside Quebec Province), but as a French diaspora in North America. The struggle for cultural autonomy on the part of diaspora—communities that define themselves by reference to a distant homeland from which they once originated—looks rather different than the struggle of indigenous peoples conquered by or absorbed into a larger entity.