Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Minority diasporas like the French in Canada, the overseas Indian or Chinese populations, and Jews outside of Israel have forged a friendlier and more economically progressive relationship to McWorld than others, perhaps because they depend on trade for their sustenance and foreign lifelines for their continuing cultural identity. A Quebecois who tries to pretend France does not matter, like a Polish Jew who lives as if there were no Israel, is vulnerable. Security lies in embracing an interdependent McWorld within which the mother cultures can root their legitimacy.18 Quebec thus favors its francophone cultural roots at the same time it celebrates its emerging economic status as a highly productive economic partner—no longer just of Canada’s other provinces, but of the behemoth to the south and multiple overseas partners as well. “Quebec libre” is no longer a francophone entity caught up in poverty and backwardness compelled to retreat from an economically prosperous anglophone Canada into a new isolationism; rather it is a proud French enclave on an English continent deploying a vigorous and growing economy on behalf of its burgeoning linkages to the world beyond Canada. Jihad here embraces economic modernism even as it rejects the multicultural nation-state.

  Quebec’s place in Jihad is complicated by the dilemmas it creates for two related peoples: its own native Cree Indian population, and a million or so nonseparatist, non-Quebecois Canadian French who rely on Quebec for their status in Canada as Quebec relies on France. Native American Crees have made their own case for separatism within Quebec, although in the language of a people who see themselves more as guests on the land than its “owners.” They have been greeted with an intensely hypocritical lack of sympathy by Quebecois who somehow cannot grasp the connection between their own suit against Canada and that of the Cree against them. The case of the million or so francophone Canadians living outside of Quebec is perhaps even more embarrassing. To the 300,000 Acadians of New Brunswick Province, for example, Quebec as part of Canada secures equal treatment for all francophones. Acadians have lived successfully along the shores of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for nearly four hundred years, and survived their dispersal by the English following the defeat of France by English armies in North America in 1763 (when many Acadians found their way to New Orleans where, as “Cajuns,” they established another sanctuary). Now they face a paradox: Quebec’s tribalism imperils their own.19

  Jihad, even in its most pacific manifestations, almost always turns out to be not simply a struggle on behalf of an ethnic fragment for self-determination, but a compound struggle within that fragment that risks still greater fragmentation and plenty of confusion as well. Once the parts feel justified in jettisoning the whole, the logic of Jihad does not necessarily stop with the first and primary layer of fragments. If Quebec leaves Canada, non-Quebecois francophones may lose their equal place in New Brunswick. And if Quebec leaves Canada, why should not the Cree leave Quebec? And why then should not anglophone villages leave Quebec or opt out of a self-determining Cree nation if it is such they find themselves inhabiting? And if a few francophones reside in the predominantly English villages in the predominantly Cree region of predominantly French Quebec, what about their status? It was to such absurdities as these that the multicultural, civic constitutional nation-state addressed itself. Dismantle it and all the paradoxes come crashing back with an ardor commensurate to their centuries-long repression.

  Germans: East and West, Old and New,

  Right and Red, Guilty and True

  GERMANY WOULD SEEM a poor candidate for Jihad. It is still caught up in historical guilt and, more than any other nation in the world, has had reason to hold nationalism at bay; for nationalism is a concept that, as the source for so many of the historical catastrophes that have befallen Germany, remains forever suspect. Moreover, Germany is newly reunited, it is democratic, and it is as heavily invested in McWorld and the American pop culture that promotes McWorld as any country. Yet Jihad, perhaps because it is McWorld’s ally and twin as well as its adversary, stalks the new Germany with astonishing ferocity.20 Those in today’s Germany who want Deutschland to retrieve echt Deutschland yearn to rip down all the foreign, all the commercial, all the materialist banners; and in their place:

  Give Adolf Hitler the Nobel Prize

  Raise the red flag, raise the red flag,

  Raise the red flag with the swastika …

  As on the German flags of old

  It leads me down the right roads

  For me, what matters hasn’t changed:

  Race and pride and swastika!21

  The new nationalists are not daunted by the official shame associated with taking Germany too seriously, dead seriously. Rather, such pusillanimity incites them to feel ashamed of feeling ashamed. Where else, they ask, are the most innocuous displays of national sentiment to be treated as provocations worthy only of banishment? Why must the recent past be taboo? Even the Japanese are permitted their emperor and their cultural superiority and their celebration of a mostly decensored history including their own version of the “Day of Infamy.” So the skinhead punk rockers offer a crude but searingly frank version of views framed more diplomatically by Franz Schoenhuber’s far right-wing Republican Party, singing “This state is ashamed of German history….”22 Many of the far right groups like National Alternative have been outlawed, but this only succors them in their sense of resistant alienation.

  Poverty, I have suggested, deepens the rage of holy warriors and makes them more desperate enemies of a McWorld that has refused to succor them. German enragees are often if not always unemployed or underemployed in lower-paying jobs, often if not always young people with little education and few prospects, often if not always Ossi’s or Easterners from the old German Democratic Republic, deprived overnight both of jobs and the social safety nets that might cushion their joblessness.23 They would perhaps join McWorld if they could, and they are happy enough to use its instrumentalities (whether these take the form of British fashion statements, commercially rewarding rock bands, or Internet bulletin boards like The Thule Network) as weapons in their struggle.24

  In a sense, the German neo-fascists are a counterreaction to reunification that filled the void when the primary anti-Communist revolution failed. Had the indigenous political movements that helped bring down first the iron curtain and then the Berlin Wall survived the traumatic passage to German reunification and been even a little successful in the West-dominated elections that came soon afterwards, Ossi extremism might have been averted. But the citizens’ movement that constituted itself as Neues Forum (New Forum) and the intellectuals and workers who had sought a “third way,” some version of civil society between state-coercive communism and private market capitalism, drown in what we might call liberty’s second wave.25 Privatization quickly displaced democratization on the German agenda, which for East Germans meant that the price they had to pay for individual liberty was a total loss of regional autonomy. After four years of this experience, it is not so surprising that many East Germans, disgusted by the West and fearful of the Rightists in their midst, have realigned themselves with a revamped Communist Party that has itself become a voice against McWorld. With civil society’s third way out of the question, and the second (capitalist) way so disappointing, they are renegotiating the first (communist) way. In the June 1994 German local elections (as in Hungary, Latvia, and a number of other nations) Communists running on the renamed Democratic Socialist Party ticket emerged as the most powerful entity in a number of localities and won the mayoralty campaign in the Saxon town of Hoyerswerda (which had experienced skinhead violence against foreigners earlier in the year).26

  Where the old Left is regrouping around opposition to the vices of capitalism, the new Right, resentment transformed into pathology, is waging an antiforeign, antimaterialist Kulturkampf. Today, most neo-Nazis and skinheads seem well beyond the ministrations of either McWorld or the democratic socialist opposition to it. To those who are East Germans, impoverished and increasingly nostalgic, with unemployment at 16 percen
t or worse (over double the national norm, and far worse still among the young), it is easy to regard West Germans as an “other”—aggressive agents of McWorld and traitors to the real Germany (rather like the Jews were made out to be in the 1920s). Up to 25 percent of East Germans under twenty-five are thought to harbor right-wing sentiments. And for those unwilling to revile their West German cousins, Germany’s labor minions (foreign workers from Turkey and points east and south) give to “otherness” a distinctively alien character—different habits and mores, a foreign accent, darker skin tones—as well as a corporal embodiment that invites violent retribution.27 Poverty roughens the already jagged edges of alienation. We can again turn to the Right’s rancorous rock lyrics (cited above) to hear the economic side of the story:

  Times are tough for the German people

  Foreign troops still occupy our land

  Forty years of calamity and corruption …

  The hostile warriors are blackshirt Greens—“lust for profits poisons our environment,” they groan—and though their own taste is teen tawdry and calculated more to shock their peers than to embrace their forebears (no traditional lederhosen shorts or student fraternity caps here!), they know McDonald’s is “a dump” and resent the incursions of global culture that to them are perhaps most paradoxically evident in their own inability to resist them.

  The real foreigners (as against the symbolic foreigners: rich West Germans, Yanks, the merchants of McWorld) are another matter. “Foreigners Out!” is an easier slogan to sell than “McDonald’s Out!” There are nearly 2 million Turks in Germany, 140,000 in Berlin alone, and they can be not only resisted but trashed, assaulted, and incinerated in their squalid barracks.28 In 1990 there were a few hundred attacks; two years later there were several thousand—1,636 “rightist crimes” from January through October 1992 alone.29 There are probably not more than 50,000 right-wing extremists of whom not more than 6,500 are neo-Nazis in Germany today;30 but as the guerrilla swims in the sea of the people, so the radical Right in Germany gives voice to repressed resentments shared by many Germans (though, to be sure, only a minority). Indeed, there are far more intermarriages between Turks and Germans than assaults.31 Still, the German weekly Der Spiegel offered a survey showing that 73 percent of Germans thought foreigners were a “problem” on which the country had to “get a grip,”32 even though 85 percent of Germans consistently deplore violence against guest workers. Not all of the assailants are skinheads, and not all of the victims are foreigners. Jews, reporters, and liberals have also been attacked.

  The assaults on Turkish hostels in eastern towns like Magdeburg, Solingen, Moelln, or Rostock are a means to an end. Just as Poland has managed to cultivate a new antisemitism without Jews, German skinheads are capable of nurturing their resentment of foreigners without Turks, who are only obvious and vulnerable underclass symbols of the McWorld overclass (and in particular the West German overclass) that has sold them out. And because they are not just frustrated adolescents, but political warriors, their ultimate target is not really Turks or Greeks at all but Germany: the Germany that has surrendered to McWorld.33 Germany in turn reacts to its assailants not just by talking about justice and human rights: instead, it confirms a part of the right-wing critique by worrying about its image and its attractiveness to investors and wondering whether violence will jeopardize its Olympian (or, better, McWorldian) bid for the Olympic Games in the year 2000.34

  I am not among those who think the Germans are peculiarly vulnerable to the worst that is in their history and I suspect that the hundreds of thousands of German citizens who have marched in candlelight processions in condemnation of rightist violence and racism will win the struggle for the postmodern German soul. But I am less sanguine about the capacity of the Germans (or anyone else) to contain McWorld—or to render it democratic. And it may be the struggle against McWorld that will give Germany’s teen fascists and rock Nazis their most significant and dangerous following.

  12

  China and the Not Necessarily

  Democratic Pacific Rim

  IN AREAS OUTSIDE of Europe and North America that have been relatively successful in both economic and political terms, what is most offensive about McWorld to local protagonists of Jihad is its cultural aggressiveness. Indeed, in many Asian nations Jihad proceeds without fear of offending democrats since democracy has had little to do with modernization. The trick in that part of the world has been to figure out how to exploit the benefits of economic modernization and capitalist markets without capitulating to either the political values (openness, rights, liberty, democracy) or the cultural habits (suburban, materialist, consumerist) attached to them. On the whole it has been easier to counter the West’s political ideas than McWorld’s seductive lifestyles. The authoritarian experiments, Communist and non-Communist alike, in Vietnam, Singapore, Korea, and China are proof of how easy it is to sever free markets from free political institutions. Democratic India and Japan are proof of how difficult it is to sever free markets from McWorld’s way of life.

  In nondemocratic Asia, markets have been cautiously welcomed in the setting of a prudent, background mercantilism where governments first establish and then try to control the inchoate but productive forces markets unleash. The democratic institutions that (Westerners argue) are necessary to the operation of markets remain wholly unwelcome. Market liberals of Milton Friedman’s or Jeffrey Sachs’s persuasion have assured us that the two cannot be uncoupled in the long run, but the long run here may be several lifetimes—far too long to sustain the credibility of their argument.1 Indeed, there is no better refutation of the libertarian argument than the wildly successful controlled capitalist economies of Vietnam, China, Singapore, and Indonesia. “China’s dream,” says a Western diplomat in China, “is to become another Singapore,” where the attraction is “that it has achieved Western living standards without being infected by Western political standards.”2

  China has had the fastest growing economy in the world in recent years, despite—or is it because of?—the brutal repression of individual rights and political liberty during the horrendous events at Tiananmen Square and ever since.3 China, like its neighbors, struggles against Westernization at the same time it struggles for economic market productivity and for trade with the rest of McWorld. Understanding the priorities of its trading partners in Japan and the United States, as well as the logic of markets, which demands autonomy from politics and is thus indifferent to state organization, it refuses to budge on political rights. For rights, along with their accompanying ideology of political individualism, are seen as appurtenances of the resistible culture (easily separable from the irresistible market) and China’s successful pursuit of the latter without yielding to the former is proof of the accuracy of its leaders’ perceptions. As Perry Link describes it, the happy bargain Deng Xiaoping offered the Chinese was basically “Shut up and I’ll let you get rich,”4 a formula that worked not only for his own subjects but with the American State Department as well.5 In the spring of 1994, China won extension of its Most Favored Nation status with the United States (without which its exports to the United States would be subject to tariffs at least twice as large as they are) without it having to make a single significant political concession. Ironically, it was only its obstreperousness with respect to intellectual property rights (it refused to shut down pirate video and cassette operations) that finally elicited American trade sanctions and a clamp-down on the pirates in 1995.

  China specialist Thomas B. Gold is probably right to believe that “the Communist Party is going to concentrate on the things it thinks it can do best—presumably political control, media, education—and allow the economy to function by some of its own logic.”6 Yet ironically, while the struggle against democracy has so far succeeded, the struggle against lifestyle and culture is failing, precisely because the economy’s “own logic” is the logic of McWorld and seems far more likely to bring with it the vices of the West (its cultural imagery and the ideolo
gy of consumption as well as a “logical” tolerance for social injustice and inequality)7 than its virtues (democracy and human rights). Russia has acquired a Mafia well before it has established a free press. Vietnam is still governed by a hegemonic Communist Party, but also sports a five-star Hilton Hotel and seven golf courses to which its ranking members receive free memberships. You can buy almost anything in the world you want in Singapore other than a fair trial. The one thing that can be said with certainty about post-Deng China is that KFC will continue to open franchises at a record pace; there are twenty-eight in place in over a half dozen cities already.

  The struggle for partisans of cultural autonomy within ruling circles and among cultural elites beyond it, then, cannot just be against a democracy that has made few inroads but must be against a foreign culture that has made many. The real threat of the “barbarians”—the term the Chinese have used for foreigners for hundreds of years—is less their explicit campaign for democracy than their stealth program for McWorld. The Great Wall built millennia ago to keep the barbarians out now swarms with their heirs, the ever more ubiquitous tourists who are becoming the basis for a vital Chinese industry. The Chinese have responded to the challenge of McWorld with what the Chinese like to call “market socialism,” what the former New York Times Beijing bureau chief dryly calls “Market-Leninism.”8 Leninist political institutions can initially coexist very nicely with market capitalism, and the thirty or forty Rolls-Royces imported in each of the last few years have not shaken Communist rulership. However, Chinese-Communist and pre-Communist Chinese cultural values are vulnerable to the messages played in the CD players and to the images conveyed by the internal appointments of the Rolls-Royces (and Land Rovers and Mercedeses) being brought in. The Chinese hope to make foreign cultural imports their own, welding together the artifacts of McWorld and the images of traditional Chinese communism—as artist Wang Guangyi has done in his canvases integrating Western advertising logos into revolutionary posters or Feng Mengbo did in his Video End Game Series in which Mao’s revolutionary-model operas appear on canvas as video games.9