Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  There does not finally seem to be much hope for traditional international institutions as saviors of democracy on a transnational scale in an era poised between Jihad and McWorld. Europe, which has achieved significant economic integration organized around regional councils, parliaments, and courts, still lacks democratic credibility with the citizens of its member countries. Most of them neither participate in its fledgling politics nor feel anything like a European civic identity to match their well-felt transnational commercial and commodity identities, let alone their identity as Bavarians or Walloons or Basques or Lombardians. Our question then becomes whether Jihad and/or McWorld can themselves promise to safeguard common liberty in a postnational era. Can they provide subnational or transnational political solutions to the subnational and transnational dilemmas they raise? The answer would seem to be that while ethnicity and parochialism on the one hand, and markets on the other, are nurtured by conditions that need not always be antagonistic to democracy and under some circumstances may even encourage democracy, neither is synonymous with democracy and each in its own way obstructs the global path to human liberty.

  Jihad in the Global Disorder

  WE HAVE UNDERSTOOD Jihad as the struggle of local peoples to sustain solidarity and tradition against the nation-state’s legalistic and pluralistic abstractions as well as against the new commercial imperialism of McWorld; as such, it is not necessarily inhospitable to conditions that support democracy, which is after all much older than the nation-state. Ancient Greek democracy rested on a politics of the homogenous polis—small city-states tied together by common language, religion, and history. European democracy emerged from the Middle Ages in Helvetic cantons and Italian and German commercial towns with a local, even clannish character well before it found a home in larger national states. The tribal clan manifests a fraternal solidarity and devotion to assembly-style debate that points forward to an elementary direct democracy. Jefferson’s imagined “ward republics” were utopian democratic models organized around local government and, some thought, echoed organization drawn from the Iroquois Federation, while the original Russian soviet, prior to its takeover by the Bolsheviks, was a local council representing diversified worker interests. The New England town also was rooted in the participatory predilections of parochialism.24 In his beguiling account of civic tradition in Italy, Robert Putnam discovers a relationship between traditional choral societies in Italian villages and their later propensity for democracy, showing that with the appropriate civic institutions, small, homogenous communities are more than capable of developing democratic forms of life.25

  In short, the limited scale and relative homogeneity of the entities whose antistatist and antimodern struggles incline them to Jihad can potentially incline them to local participatory democracy. Even their toxic exclusivity, based on rejection of “others,” can contribute to the internal consensus necessary to forging a common will. As modernity has created institutions on a scale too large to sustain face-to-face deliberation and community interaction, the antimodern forces associated with Jihad hold out the promise of a scale of communal life more conducive to democracy.

  Yet in facilitating a reduced scale for political life, Jihad in fact can simultaneously destroy the mind-set that allows democracy to function. The villages of Switzerland and Italy notwithstanding, traditional Gemeinschaft communities were for the most part rigorously undemocratic: closed, conformist, and hierarchical. Their exclusivity meant they were sealed against outsiders and intolerant of diversity; their ascriptive basis in a “given” identity (blood, race, religion) inured them to voluntary identities and held in check any notion that women and men might freely choose their social relations or join contrived social groupings at will; the hierarchical structure and dependency on charismatic leadership of traditional communities rendered them inegalitarian and resistant to social mobility; and their personalistic, noncontractual mode of relations rendered them prone to prejudice, gossip, argumentativeness, and corruption. Rural villages in Wisconsin too easily become havens of suicide, incest, and death while Vermont towns celebrated for their New England freedoms become coffins of conformity.26

  Jihad’s parochialism also limits its access to real power in a centralized, interdependent world. The Hutus can massacre Tutsis, but cannot deal with Pan-African environmental despoilation. Bosnian Serbs can unilaterally make war on Muslims but they cannot unilaterally increase VCR imports. In the world of McWorld, like it or not, though participation remains local, power is ever more central. The Green adage “think globally, act locally” is contradicted by the reality that local action rarely can impinge on truly global problems. Tribes pursuing NIMBY tactics (“not in my back yard!”) with respect to regional policies (where do we put the petroleum refinery? the drug rehabilitation center? the refugees?) are themselves the impotent victims of other organizations’ regional, national, and international policies over which local community or tribal institutions, even when democratic, provide them little control.

  Ethnic tribes and religious clans are not then without democratic possibilities, but Jihad is unlikely to provide the kinds of democratic values and institutions that traditional democratic nation-states of the sort they help undo once offered. Is there today a single entity that has been created by the breakdown of nation-states associated with Jihad’s multiple ethnicities, fratricides, and civil wars that looks remotely democratic? Even where they import democracy’s political structures—say, a multiparty, parliamentary system or an independent judiciary or regular elections or a nominally free press—they lack the attitudinal resources to build the kind of democratic civil society that in turn makes democratic citizenship possible and lets democratic political institutions function effectively. Tribalism is little less hostile to civil society than consumerism. Without civil society, there can be no citizens, and thus no meaningful democracy.

  We can admire the efforts of Western constitutional lawyers to export their own legalistic traditions to fledgling postnational countries in Eastern Europe and the ex—Soviet Union. The Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe housed at the University of Chicago Law School and Central European University (which was initially funded by financier and philanthropist George Soros and has campuses in Prague and Budapest) has put constitution building at the center of its work. It offers a welcome contrast to the economic reductionism of those who think free markets and privatization are all there is to democracy. But a purely legalistic approach is no more likely to succeed than a purely economistic approach. A thin layer of parliamentarianism laid over a raging neotribal society cannot produce democracy.

  Stephen Holmes, a principal at the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe, understands these limits, acknowledging that among the impediments to democratization is the “underreported obstacle” of “current-day Western advice,” presumably including his own. Holmes proposes that Eastern Europe might benefit from a certain degree of “constitutional postponement” in which flexibility and adaptability to local conditions are favored over the formulaic applications of abstract constitutional principles.27 However, while he regrets the passing of spontaneous local movements like Solidarity and Civic Forum, he still believes civil society can be established top-down by appropriate if supple and deliberate constitutional innovation, slighting the need to establish a bottom-up foundation in schools, voluntary associations, foundations, and other communal institutions that might in turn support a democratic constitutional edifice. Westerners either regret the absence of or simply ignore civil society in Russia, oblivious to the proliferating non governmental organizations that have sprung up and constitute the glimmering of a new post-Soviet “third sector.”

  The media have focused on the explosive relationship between President Yeltsin’s reform-minded executive and the nationalist-conservative-Communist parliament: how would interested observers know then that dozens of nonprofits now dot the landscape and problematize the bipolarity of party
rivals? These nonprofits include not only well-publicized foreign ventures like Big Brother/Big Sister but (to name only a few) such domestic institutions as the Rainbow Pedagogical Association, the Man’s Soul Charitable Foundation, the all-Russia Foundation for Social and Legal Protection of the Disabled, the Social Ecological Union, the International Bank of Ideas, the Christian Mercy Charitable Society, the Foundation for International Diplomacy and Cooperation, ANIKA (the Association of Civilian Women in the Military Establishment), the Russian Human Rights Association “Fathers and Sons,” the Independent Women’s Forum, the Association of Parents of Deaf Children, the Social Development Charitable Center and Interlegal: An International Foundation for Political and Legal Studies.28

  The emergence in Russia of this new nongovernmental infrastructure suggests that local organization and parochial community are capable of generating not just local Jihad but new local forms of civil society. However, such developments do not happen spontaneously. Left to its own devices, Jihad neither generates its own democracy nor permits others to democratize it merely by importing the constitutional mechanisms devised by others over many centuries in nation-states with long-standing and historically well-developed civil societies. On the contrary, it tends to undermine the fledgling institutions of the young civil society Russia has just begun to nurture.

  16

  Wild Capitalism vs. Democracy

  AWKWARD AS IT may be to tease democratic potentialities out of the debris of nation-states left behind by Jihad, it is still more difficult to grasp how democracy is to be won by campaigning single-mindedly for the liberated markets of McWorld, what Solzhenitsyn aptly has called “savage capitalism.” For markets do not appear in any obvious way to be ideal instruments for the regulation and control of public goods, and would-be democrats who look to them as a source of regulatory norms and democratic values would at first glance seem to have lost their marbles. Historian John Pocock asks “whether the subordination of the sovereign community of citizens to the international operation of post-industrial market forces” is a “good or bad step in the architecture of a post-modern politics.”1 My answer here is: bad. No, not bad, disastrous.

  This is not to suggest that market forces and the ideology of libertarianism are not intellectually in fashion among postindustrial postmoderns or that they do not serve long-term productivity and wealth creation. Yet as advanced by pre-postmoderns such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the laissez-faire ideology assumes an endless “battle between collectivism and individualism” in which “any expansion of government,” whether by a Stalinist autocracy or a democratic town, is “collectivist” and thus, a priori, an assault on liberty.2 Government, including democratic government, is in this view always suspect, whereas markets are always benign. For libertarians, the extension of democracy can only mean the limitation of government and is understood to depend less on the establishing of an independent civil society than on the extension of markets via the dismantling of government, the privatization of industry, and the widening of free trade. When economistic reformers think about government at all, it is in terms of negative constitutionalism—politics as antipolitics, law as a set of limits on popular rule rather than as a set of populist enabling principles.3

  Serious students of the market who distinguish between totalitarian collectivism and the democratic search for common goods will want to dispute these quasi-anarchist libertarian dogmas.4 Notwithstanding the renewed popularity of the laissez-faire creed in England and America over the last few decades, amplified by a deeply felt repugnance for politics and politicians, there is a long and respectable tradition that is neither collectivist nor even welfare statist that disputes the putative sufficiency of markets and challenges their vaunted capacity for economic self-regulation.5 Contemporary critics like Andrew Bard Schmookler and Robert Kuttner are fierce critics of the social costs of applied laissez-faire policies in the Reagan-Thatcher era, but not even Adam Smith thought the market could do everything.6

  Market relations are simply not a surrogate for social relations, let alone for democratic social relations, and it is only the zealous proponents of capitalism in its extreme laissez-faire version (what Robert Kuttner calls its utopian incarnation) who pretend otherwise. Although there is a discernible historical correlation between democracy and capitalism, it is democracy that produced capitalism rather than the other way round. A seventeenth-century mercantilist England was in the course of the eighteenth century democratized; only in the nineteenth century did a democratized England embark on policies of full-scale industrialization, free trade (the revocation of the Corn Laws in 1846), and economic empire. To this day, the economies of capitalist nations depend on activist democratic governments, which not only play a vital countervailing role in checking market excesses and attending to common and civic values in which capitalism quite properly has no interest, but which continue to nurture markets as well. The most successful “capitalist” states with well-advertised miracle economies have in truth laced their markets with a thin but sinewy mercantilism.

  Under cover of their post—World War II “free market” revolutions, both Japan and Germany actually pursued aggressive national economic policies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal did as much to save capitalism from self-annihilation as it did to save the American people from capitalism’s social ruthlessness. Neither Reagan’s America nor Thatcher’s England could have pursued the illusion of a return to pure laissez-faire without all of the benefits of several generations of an interventionist government and a mixed economy (as Reagan learned when he toyed briefly with a revision of the Social Security system). Truly free economies in this century have always been mixed economies in which democratic governments have balanced the interests of economic utility and social justice. Norman Birnbaum portrays the West German economy of the economic miracle as, in actuality, a market “inextricably bound to the state. Subsidies and tax incentives, a substantial public sector, considerable state support for research, a large state role in occupational training, the provision of export credits, were coordinated elements of national economic policy. The major private banks … the government and the Federal Bank worked together…. [Much of all of this was merely] a continuation of welfare state traditions modernized by Bismarck.”7

  What was true for the Germans, was true for all of the successful postwar capitalist nations. For they understood well enough that a pure laissez-faire economy quickly breaks and then self-destructs along the fissures introduced by labor strife, unemployment, trade cycles, and monopoly. Only the new transitional democracies have been talked by foreign advisors or bullied by international banks into thinking that laissez-faire capitalist economics is a self-sufficient social system. Predictably, the results have been catastrophic. As we will see below, what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn calls “savage capitalism”—a system “fraught with unproductive, savage and repulsive forms of behavior, the plunder of the nation’s wealth”—has turned the new Russia into a place where “the brazen use of social advantage and the inordinate power of money” (the very problems the collapse of communism was supposed to cure!) are today worse than ever.8

  Even under ideal conditions, where the depredations of wild capitalism are controlled and the economy achieves a certain self-regulation, markets have a limited capacity to generate what a society needs.9 Ideal conditions only mean that sellers and buyers interact in accord with prices whose fluctuating levels keep goods, consumers, and laborers interacting productively. At best, this only secures maximum economic efficiency in producing and distributing hard (durable) goods. Nothing else. Advocates of laissez-faire as a political strategy claim far more, however. And therein lies the problem.

  There is today a disastrous confusion between the moderate and mostly well-founded claim that flexibly regulated markets remain the most efficient instruments of economic productivity and wealth accumulation, and the zany, overblown claim that naked, wholly unregulated markets are the sole means by which
we can produce and fairly distribute everything human beings care about, from durable goods to spiritual values, from capital investment to social justice, from profitability to sustainable environments, from private wealth to the essential commonweal. This second claim has moved profit-mongering privateers to insist that goods as diverse and obviously public as education, culture, penology, full employment, social welfare, and ecological equilibrium be handed over to the profit sector for arbitration and disposal.10 It has also persuaded them to see in privatization not merely a paring knife to trim the fat from overindulgent state bureaucracies but a cleaver with which democracy can be chopped into pieces and then pulverized.

  In America, the confidence in the omnipotence of markets has been transformed into a foreign policy that assumes internationalizing markets is tantamount to democratizing them and that human freedom is secured the minute nations or tribes sign on to the dogmas of free trade. The Friedmans called their celebration of markets Free to Choose, as if choosing brands or trademarks and choosing life-plans or common cultural norms were kindred activities.11 More recently, Jeffrey Sachs, a zealous Friedman clone and the ambitious first consul of capitalist reform in transitional societies, has argued that Eastern Europe “shed the communist system” not to create an open society but “to adopt capitalism.” That being the case, its goal must be “economic harmonization with Western Europe”—some-thing requiring radical economic reform (a “Big Bang” as the Poles called it) and ongoing economic “shock therapy.”12 Laissez-faire doctrines can imperil the nation-state, but at least the nation-state possesses a sovereign power capable of countering raw capitalism’s materialistic, privatizing consequences. In the international economy, laissez-faire doctrines are fatal, for here sovereignty vanishes and aggressive transnational bodies pursue market strategies in the absence of any countervailing regulatory bodies whatsoever. Kuttner notices that “as the ethic of laissez-faire gained ground, it did so almost in lockstep with the relative decline of its prime sponsor”—the United States.13 While earlier incarnations of international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank permitted the flexing of American muscle in a world arena, America’s diminishing power leaves such institutions at the mercy of the true multinationals of our epoch, the transnational corporations and thousands upon thousands of nongovernmental interest groups and associations that constitute the international market.