Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  Not long after World War II, Victor Lebow recognized that “Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and selling of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.”8 Today, as Alan Durning remarks, “the words ‘consumer’ and ‘person’ have become virtual synonyms. The world economy,” Durning concludes, “is currently organized to furnish I. I billion people with a consumer life-style long on things but short on time High consumption is a precondition to neither full employment nor the end of poverty.”9 It is this world that the consumers of Ireland and Palestine and South Africa are now free to join. But full employment and social justice, or a lifestyle that leaves time to enjoy the goods wealth and education produce, are the concerns of citizens, not consumers, and the release from Jihad will not automatically make them citizens. Until McWorld finds a way to nurture citizens as successfully as it nurtures buyers and sellers, such aims will be systematically neglected, whatever innovative transnational institutions are introduced. Not that citizenship flourishes under conditions of nationalist civil war or ethnic fratricide.

  Jihad in fact has little more use for citizens than does McWorld. Its denizens are blood brothers and sisters defined by identities they also are not permitted to choose for themselves. It is possible to be both a sister and a producer, a brother and a consumer, but neither identity affords individuals any real sovereignty over their life plans, which are busily arranged for them by roots and blood on the one hand, or production and consumption on the other. Sovereignty is the provenance of citizenship. The sovereignty of democratic states, which gives politics a regulative function with respect to all other domains, is nothing other than the sovereignty of citizens who, in their civic capacity, make advertent common decisions that regulate the inadvertent consequences of their conduct as private individuals and consumers. In a future world where the only available identity is that of blood brother or solitary consumer, and where these two paltry dispositions engage in a battle for the human soul, democracy does not seem well placed to share in the victory, to whomsoever it is delivered. Neither the politics of commodity nor the politics of resentment promise real liberty; the mixture of the two that emerges from the dialectical interplay of Jihad versus McWorld—call it the commodification of resentment—promises only a new if subtle slavery.

  Nonetheless, for all my skepticism about the dialectic of Jihad and McWorld, I do not think that democracy is impossible in an era after the eclipse of the nation-state. Democratic success stories suggest that democracy is a slow, developmental process that comes into being not through a single magical moment of founding, but through a long evolution in which the founding is usually only a culminating symbolic moment. Those who would construct some form of global democracy require patience. They also require stubbornness, however, for to preserve, let alone extend, democracy under these rapidly evolving conditions will require acts of bold political imagination and self-conscious political willing that cannot in themselves be expected to emerge from the dialectical interplay of Jihad and McWorld. Patience, political will, and boldness: not an easy combination of traits to cultivate, above all when democracy is under duress.

  Traditional Global Institutions in the New World Disorder

  THE EASY ANSWER to the hard question of how to order a supranational world has often been: globalize law!—establish new international institutions or fortify traditional ones like the United Nations and the World Court. From the nineteenth-century faith in the Concert of Powers and its balance of power politics, to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations (which America never joined) that grew from its following World War I, and on down to the United Nations established after World War II as a manifestation of the cooperation of the Allies in overcoming fascism, the hope has been that sovereign states will somehow overcome their national interests and sectarian policies; that they will cede a degree of their sovereignty to supranational bodies capable of ensuring peace and cooperation among them. Although law speaks the voice of sovereign authority, the quest for world order has placed its faith in a global law whose voice will not be muted by the absence of a global sovereignty. Unhappily, however, while law is power’s solemn voice that legitimizes its brute force, power is law’s indispensable condition without which its legitimacy has no muscle. Consequently, the law has always been the destitute camp follower of the itinerant armies of transnationalism—earlier, the armies of imperialism, communism, international commerce and markets; today, those of telecommunications, ecology, financial and currency markets, and global pop culture. It facilitates rather than constrains the powers it serves. As go the fortunes of nation-states, so go the fortunes of international law.

  Ironically, this linkage cripples law when states are strong since they refuse to allow global law to curb their sovereignty. Yet when they are weak, it leaves international law without an enforcer. Law does not lead but stumbles along behind real power in a manner that belies its claims to transnational regulatory competence. Fans point to the law of the seas, human rights conventions, space treaties, and the new thrust toward global environmental regulation (the Montreal or Rio treaties for example); they boast with some reason about the role the European Court of Justice has played in fostering European integration. Yet events in Europe since Maastricht—indeed, since the founding of the League of Nations10—suggest the continuing priority of power over law, whether it is the power of national sovereignty to obstruct and negate international law, or the power of international markets to deflate and circumvent international fishing or environmental regulations.

  Where positive international agreements are concluded, they reflect either a rare consensus of interests among signatory nations (as on the Law of the Seas) or the overriding interests of transnational entities like global firms that have persuaded their patron states to support them. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to take a recent example, actually utilizes its treaty provisions to prevent nations from taking environmental measures that interfere with trade, using “law” as a screen for the advancement of raw economic interests to which the treaty compels sovereign nations to acquiesce. The law is at best utilitarian—handmaiden to the interests of nations or markets—and at worst, a mere rationalization for covert force. Hobbes’s great lesson remains true today: “Covenants without the sword” are still but words, of no use at all to secure men or nations. International organizations have no swords but those of their sovereign members, and thus no capacity to enforce law against the more powerful among them. Multinational corporations are not armed, but operate under conditions of transnational political anarchy where economic force is force enough.

  Law has, in any case, moved beyond the Hobbesian imagination, primarily because international relations are no longer primarily a matter of relations among nations. International law journals today are at pains to emphasize how nations and their boundaries are being rendered permeable by ecological, commercial, and technological forces that, even as they call out for international regulation, necessarily defy it. Maurice F. Strong, for example, writes: “What is needed is recognition of the reality that in many fields, especially environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states.”11 As issues move beyond the competence of nation-states, there are no effective regulatory bodies to replace them. Oscar Schachter complains that environmental law has remained entirely “soft—composed of principles and standards of conduct not clearly accepted as obligatory and uncertain in application.”12 Geoffrey Palmer is more despairing still: “We lack the institutional and legal mechanisms to deal effectively with transboundary and biospheric environmental degradation…. As matters stand, we lack many of the necessary rules and the means for devising them, we lack institutions capable of ensuring that the rules we have are effective.”13 The appeal to traditional international institutions is an appeal on behalf o
f the weak to the goodwill of the powerless.

  What is true of environmental issues, where transnationalism and subnationalism threaten anarchy, is even more true in other domains. New telecommunications technologies cross borders at will without being technically susceptible to transnational regulation of any kind—even were there effective international regulators on the scene. The virtual networks such technologies create in stocks, bonds, and currencies are likewise beyond the rational control of any entity, national or international. If totalitarian command states like the Soviet Union and Albania were unable to control pirated videos, ubiquitous computer networks, multiplying photocopy and fax machines, and satellite television transmissions (all of which helped bring them down), are weakly motivated market-subordinated states like Britain or Canada likely to do so? And should we expect the still more anemic entities that pass as international organizations and are often little more than special interest trade and market promoters to fill the gaping breech pusillanimous sovereign states have left behind?14

  The conundrum on which the very idea of a transnational or international institution is founded is that the truly global institution depends on the cooperation of sovereign states whose sovereignty necessarily circumscribes its every move; yet its capacity to act internationally is radically undermined by the passing of the very national sovereignties that constrain it, because it has no alternative source of political legitimacy or executive enforcement. International institutions are consequently impotent as autonomous entities because of national sovereignty but are also impotent in the absence of national sovereignty; for without the agency, the goodwill, and, most critically, the capacity for armed intervention of the hegemons on which they depend, they cannot operate at all. International organizations can neither live with nor live without their obstreperous sovereign members, as the contrapuntal paralysis of the United Nations and NATO in Bosnia demonstrates.

  In his compelling book urging an end to laissez-faire ideology in global economics, Robert Kuttner calls for a “true world central bank” that “would require the ceding of a substantial degree of monetary sovereignty, which in turn would mean giving up a good deal of policymaking sovereignty as well.”15 But to whom is sovereignty to be ceded? The cohort of nations that funds the bank? Member national banks (which actually do the funding)? Individual bankers, who are natives of some country or other and have both interests and ideologies of their own? Kuttner speaks of the need for regulatory international institutions, but never addresses the question of democratic legitimacy. Who do such entities actually represent? To whom are they accountable? Whose interests are they supposed to advance? It is not even clear to whom such formed collective entities as the new “Europe” are to report. To member national governments? Or to the individual citizens national governments represent? Or, as the German Laender and other powerful regional entities like Lombardy and Catalonia are insisting, to provincial and confederal fragments of nation-states?16

  As presently organized, the European Union is accountable to elites: through the Council of Ministers, to the governments of its member states and through its burgeoning bureaucracies to technocrats and other professionals with norms and interests of their own. The European parliament may eventually come to represent people directly, but it is currently the product of highly politicized local elections in which elites and ideological parties continue to play a crucial role. A few maverick members have been chosen who represent a distinctive democratic viewpoint (usually Green rather than red or black)—for example, Eve Quistorp from Berlin, who works as a local Green movement organizer and has won a seat in the European parliament. But at this stage her case is the exception rather than the rule. Ultimately, a transnational form of sovereignty will have to spring from a transnational form of group identity and patriotism, but there is no appropriate form of international civil society in which such a citizenship, whether Green or communitarian or world federalist, might thrive at present. If, at the national level, citizenship comes first, and civic institutions only thereafter, where is the global citizen capable of struggling for a global democracy? Stoic cosmopolitanism has yet to fire the imagination or elicit the affections of ordinary women and men, making proposals for global government seem clever pipe dreams at best.17 Many local activists in Europe have set their democratic sails against the winds of integration.

  More than twenty years ago, James Tobin proposed a tithe on international currency transactions that could be applied to the development of disadvantaged nations. More recently Robert Reich, now secretary of labor, advanced a brilliant proposal for a “kind of GATT for direct investment” that would regulate bidding by individual nations for “high-value added investments by global corporations,” and develop “fair tactics” that barred “would be threats to close the domestic market unless certain investments were undertaken within it.”18 But to succeed, these proposals would have had to have been supported by the very nations that benefit from today’s unfair practices. These practices reward with fat contracts the nations willing to sacrifice the most in the way of cheap labor, high subsidies, low taxes, and environmental laissez-faire, and in effect compel peoples to barter away social justice and the common good for a stake in the international economy. Reich’s fair practices would preclude such competition but to work would have to be secured by an international institution capable of execution and enforcement. It was hard enough for the national government of the United States under the two Roosevelts to contain and regulate America’s early monopolies in oil, coal, steel, and railways. Where might we find political support and a mobilized citizenry for comparably muscular international organizations to contain and regulate, say, Microsoft or AT&T or Coca-Cola (which does 80 percent of its business outside of the United States) in their international ventures? Germany’s post-War Basic Law, like Denmark’s constitution, actually provides for the orderly ceding of certain sovereign competences to international institutions, but this provision certainly has not exempted Germany from the messy politics of the sovereign German state on matters affecting the German relationship with Europe. Nor has it given the European Union any distinctive power over German decision makers.19

  What is required by justice and the global public good is transparent enough: among other things, peace and protection from genocide and human rights violations, full employment within a fair wage structure, globally sustainable development policies within specified ecological limits, and an even playing ground among nations with different natural resources and in different stages of economic development. Enabling treaties like the ones Tobin or Reich offer are also not hard to envision. The problem is political will and that in turn depends on active citizenship and the civic and educational infrastructures (civil society and civic education) that sustain them. After all, the nations that are signatories to the Genocide Convention include all the Western countries that have sat by and dithered while genocide is being committed in places like Rwanda—itself also a signatory nation! Their compact, which might better employ the acronym KEGFAC (“Keep an Eye on Genocide From Afar Convention”), is not devoid of understanding; everyone knows what genocide looks like and affects to know it is wrong. But as a piece of parchment, the Genocide Convention cannot forge the will and the capacity to enforce much of anything at all.20

  In the countries where the United Nations currently has stationed troops—most often fronted by big powers like the United States and France—successes have been few and far between, with cases like Somalia and Bosnia all too typical. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali notes that most of the world’s local problems today could be solved by significant United Nations intervention, at a fraction of the cost of yesterday’s Cold War, but he is realist enough to admit “there is not the political will to do so.”21 The U.N. intervention in Somalia, like the parallel American operation (“Operation Restore Hope”), would have been downright comical in its futility had the tragedy not been so pervasive. American leaflets, translated into p
idgin Somalia by inept exiles and dropped prior to the American intervention identified the United Nations as the “Slave Nation.” Understandably, the only part of Somalia where relative peace and order have been secured are in the northeast and northwest where there was no significant foreign presence of any kind.22

  Finally, the task of traditional international institutions trying to intervene in crisis situations is still further complicated by the absence, in many cases, of any clear pressure point. Where the culprits in need of remonstrance are neither nations nor tribes, the crisis may be real but the perpetrators are invisible. Genocide at least offers a target in the form of the slaughtering army or its surrogate irregulars. But with terrorists it is not so simple. And in the international markets to which Robert Kuttner directs his attention, where are the leverage points? Many of the transnational forces eroding national civil societies are not susceptible to interdiction at all. What just a few years ago Robert Reich called “the coming irrelevance of corporate nationality,” is not coming any more.23 It is here.

  Thomas Jefferson’s warning that merchants have no country has become a literal truth for the multinational corporations of McWorld. And the markets they ply nowadays are more anonymous still. How are nations to control the market in pirated software or smuggled plutonium? Who can police the world currency exchange? Has it even got an address? In order to confront Jihad, to whom does one write? And in what tone? “Dear nuclear terrorist, perhaps-covertly-supported-by-Iran, perhaps-trained-in-Ireland (or is it Libya?), probably-buying-in-Russia-or-Ukraine, possibly-associated-with-Hamas, but then again maybe not …? Please cease and desist or we will …” Then there remains the embarrassing question of what exactly it is we can or will do. While the corporations that pollute the global environment have addresses, their handiwork is hard to identify or specify and depends on biological interactions with the products of others so that responsibility cannot really be attributed or sanctions imposed.