Jihad vs. McWorld
Page 35
Paradoxically, once civil society had been privatized and commercialized, groups organized in desperate defense of the public interest found themselves cast as mere exemplars of plundering private interest lobbies. Unions, for example, though concerned with fair compensation, full employment, and the dignity of work for all became the private sector counterparts of the corporations, and in time learned all too well how to act the part. When they tried to break the stranglehold of corporations over labor, they were deemed another “special interest” group no better than those against whom they struck, and perhaps worse (since the companies struck were productive contributors to the wealth of America). Environmental groups have undergone the same transmogrification more recently. Although pursuing what for all the world looks like a public agenda of clean air for all including the polluters, they are cast as the polluters’ mirror-image twin—another special interest group whose interests are to be arbitrated alongside those of toxic-waste dumpers. The media surrendered their responsibility to inform democracy’s proprietors and became sellers of gossip and wholly owned subsidiaries of private sector proprietors with no responsibilities at all other than to their profit margins. Under such conditions, the “public good” could not and did not survive as a reasonable ideal. Its epitaph was written by David B. Truman, who in his influential 1951 primer The Governmental Process, a book that helped establish the dominant paradigm in social science throughout the 1960s and 1970s, wrote summarily that in dealing with the pluralist pressure system of private interests that is America, “we do not need to account for a totally inclusive interest, because one does not exist.”17 McWorld has only dropped an exclamation point into Truman’s assertion.
We are left stranded by this melancholy history in an era where civil society is in eclipse and where citizens have neither home for their civic institutions nor voice with which to speak, even within nation-states nominally committed to democracy. Be passively serviced (or passively persecuted) by the massive, busybody, bureaucratic state where the word citizen has no resonance; or sign onto the selfishness and radical individualism of the private sector where the word citizen has no resonance. Vote the public scoundrels out of public office and/or vote your private interests into office by voting your dollars for the scoundrels willing to work for you: those are the only remaining obligations of the much diminished office of citizen in what are supposed to be the best established democracies.
If these cheerless observations are at all well grounded, and democracy suffers from the polarizing effects of a vanished civil society in America and other Western democracies, surely those looking to create new democracies under the conditions either of Jihad or of McWorld face formidable challenges. Their first priority surely must be the reconstruction of civil society as a framework for the reinvention of democratic citizenship, a mediating third domain between the overgrown but increasingly ineffective state governmental and the metastasizing private market sectors. Our choices need not be limited by the zero-sum game between government and commercial markets in which growth for the one spells encroachment for the other: a massive statist bureaucracy or a massive McWorld. Although that is precisely the choice that has been offered to peoples in Russia and East Germany, we need not opt either for some caricatured Big Brother government that enforces justice but in exchange plays the tyrant, or for some caricatured runaway free market that secures liberty but in exchange fosters inequality and social injustice and doggedly abjures the public weal. For this leaves us only with the choice between McWorld or tyranny. Indeed, as the nation-state loses its sovereignty, it is not so much the choice between tyranny and McWorld but the tyranny of McWorld itself that becomes our destiny. Only some version of a global civil society can hope to counter its inadvertent despotism.
Civil society grounds democracy as a form of government in which not politicians and bureaucrats but an empowered people use legitimate force to put flesh on the bones of their liberties; and in which liberty carries with it the obligations of social responsibility and citizenship as well as the rights of legal persons. Civil society offers us a single civic identity that, belonging neither to state bureaucrats nor private consumers but to citizens alone, recouples rights and responsibilities and allows us to take control of our governments and our markets. Civil society is the domain of citizens: a mediating domain between private markets and big government. Interposed between the state and the market, it can contain an obtrusive government without ceding public goods to the private sphere. At the same time it can dissipate the atmospherics of solitariness and greed that surround markets without suffocating in an energetic big government’s exhaust fumes. In the international domain, where states are weak and markets dominant, civil society can offer an alternative identity to people who otherwise are only clients or consumers—or passive spectators to global trends they can do nothing to challenge. It can make internationalism a form of citizenship. Within national states, both government and the private sector can be humbled a little by a growing civil society that absorbs some of the public aspirations to self-government, without casting off its liberal character as a noncoercive association of equals. Because they tend to their own affairs and take more responsibility on themselves, citizens inhabiting a vibrant civil society worry less about elections and leaders and term limits and scandals; and they simultaneously free themselves from the “free” markets that otherwise imprison them in a commercial mentality that leaves no room for community or for spirit.
To re-create civil society on this prescription does not entail a novel civic architecture; rather, it means reconceptualizing and repositioning institutions already in place, or finding ways to re-create them in an international setting.18 In the United States, for example, this suggests turning again to schools, foundations, voluntary associations, churches and temples and mosques, community movements, and the media, as well as myriad other civil associations and removing them from the private sector, repositioning them instead in civil society. It suggests helping citizens to reclaim their rightful public voice and political legitimacy against those who would write them off as representing only hypocritical special interests. In Russia and other transitional societies it means supporting the new civic infrastructure and worrying more about getting people involved in local civic associations than about the outcome of elections or the vicissitudes of competing nationalist, socialist, capitalist, and reformist parties playing at parliamentary politics. For McWorld, it means seeking countervailing institutions not in international law and organization but in a new set of transnational civic associations that afford opportunities for nationally based civil societies to link up to one another and for individual citizens of different countries to cooperate across national boundaries in regional and global civil movements. Civil society needs a habitation; it must become a real place that offers the abstract idea of a public voice a palpable geography somewhere other than in the twin atlases of government and markets.
More than anything else, what has been lost in the clash of Jihad and McWorld has been the idea of the public as something more than a random collection of consumers or an aggregation of special political interests or a product of identity polititcs. The public voice turns out to be the voice of civil society, the voice of what we can call variously an American civic forum, a Russian civic forum, or a global civic forum—civil society’s own interactive representative assembly. We have noted that the democratic citizen must precede the democratization of government. It now becomes clear that civil society offers conditions for the creation of democratic citizens. A citizen is an individual who has acquired a public voice and understands himself to belong to a wider community, who sees herself as sharing goods with others. Publicity is the key to citizenship. The character of the public voice is thus essential in defining the citizen. For a public voice is not any old voice addressing the public. The divisive rant of talk radio or the staccato crossfire of pundit-TV are in fact perfect models of everything that public talk is not.
If civil society is one key to democracy, then global strong democracy needs and depends on a methodical internationalization of civil society. Civil society in turn must again discover adequate incarnations at the national level to become susceptible to globalization. For a historical model we might look back at the American Committees of Correspondence founded in the Revolutionary War era by citizens without legitimate political outlets (the British controlled the formal institutions of government); these committees allowed them to gather together informally in bodies that were neither governmental nor private but that together forged the civic matériel by which the new Republic was first fought for and won and then established and constituted. Are virtual committees of correspondence possible on the Internet? Can citizens log on to a civic bulletin board across national boundaries? Here is a starting point for a genuinely civic telecommunications.
Not so long after the Committees of Correspondence inaugurated their successful revolution against English tyranny, Thomas Jefferson had proposed local civic assemblies as a continuation of direct and decentralized self-government: “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic,” he had written, “and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of him sooner than his power be wrested from him.”19 Only at the local and regional levels where Jihad plays out its game can an alternative form of identity be won that can ultimately contain McWorld at the global level. Neither the tribal circle nor the traffic circle, neither the clan nor the mall, offers adequate public space to the kind of democratic community that can provide citizens both identity and inclusion. The affinities that spring from local association must not barricade the way to regional affections, national identification, and global alliances, as tribes and clans (whether historical or invented) too often do. Technology may permit us to reconstruct electronic wards and teleassemblies linking together distant neighbors. But this will happen only if markets are not left to determine how these technologies will be developed and deployed, and if global communication is disciplined by prudent deliberation and civility. How civil society can be forged in an international environment is an extraordinary challenge. Recognizing that it needs to be forged is, however, the first step toward salvaging a place for strong democracy in the world of McWorld.
There is a second, more institutional step as well. The parts may become more civil and participatory, their members more civic; yet they must be aligned by some form of global organization that permits cooperation without destroying their autonomy. A global civil society is a foundation for but not yet the same thing as a global democratic government.
Democracy and Confederalism
How IS A world integrated by markets but otherwise utterly disintegral to be held together if not by global government and unmediated international law—neither of which, I have suggested, hold out realistic promise? The primary form of reorganization in recent years, thanks to the politics of Jihad, has been partition. What is the alternative? Federalism is probably too aggressive and centralist a solution for countries as fractured as Croatia or Afghanistan and cannot even guarantee the integrity of, say, Switzerland, India, or Germany. Confederalism offers a more promising strategy, for it permits the nation-states already in existence to create, bottom-up, a global association. The alternative, a centralized, top-down governing frame, requires an international sovereign—some global legislator—to establish it; and the international sovereign is the very entity that is missing.
The Federalist Papers have been required reading for desperate governments seeking to slow the pace of partition and civil disintegration. The Articles of Confederation make far more relevant reading. Article III of the Articles, in conjunction with a revitalization of civil society locally, provides a modest framework for holding rival national fragments together in a loose alliance rather like the one that “united” the three original cantons of Switzerland in 1291 at the Rütli. Article III provides for the full autonomy of the member states and honors their independence (indispensable to those pursuing a politics of identity), but also declares that:
The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade or any other pretense whatsoever.
This would seem to offer a starting place to defend against the depredations both of Jihad and McWorld. The Article assumes a certain root citizenship within each of the states, and probably would be effective only under conditions where civil society had set down such roots. Article IV provides that “the free inhabitants of each” state “shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states, and the people of each state shall have ingress and regress to and from any other state, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce.” Ethnic cleansing and involuntary refugees would be barred, equal citizenship and free movement enjoined.
Similar provisions held together the Helvetic Confederation that made the Swiss such an extraordinary example of democratic association (if not of inclusive citizenship) long before parliamentary institutions elsewhere had found their way to genuine representative government. The splintered factions of many a ruptured nation could do worse than reconceive themselves in terms of a “firm league of friendship” around their common liberties (if they have any!). Quebec and the Anglophone provinces of Canada may well be compelled to such a solution if they are to avoid a costly struggle. Confederalism is no panacea but it may offer a viable alternative to more centralist, coercive, and thus futile solutions to national disintegration. Modeled not on the American Federalist constitution but its confederalist predecessor, which gave the colonies sufficient time to live together to discover the need for more integrative remedies—and to acquire the trust and tolerance on which such remedies depend—this solution offers a gradualist, voluntary, trust-building strategy of supranationality. Like democracy itself, such inclusive forms of confederal association are evolutionary in nature and depend on the success of ties that are initially much looser. The model is Switzerland prior to 1800 rather than the European Union, for Switzerland assured the civic vitality of the parts before crowding them into a larger whole; it took citizenship as a set of local attributes (to become a Swiss one must still acquire communal citizenship first, the
national passport comes only afterwards) and by securing them in participatory institutions guaranteed that the confederal whole would be democratic.
The new Europe has in fact seemed most democratic not in its rigid representation of national states and their governments and certainly not in its technocratic dependence on market forces, but rather in its representation of the regions. We have seen how German Laender and Spanish provinces have striven for a European membership that has a strongly confederal feel to it. Closer to their own peoples, their potential association with Europe (if it ever is permitted by their own national governments) can effect ties that their member citizens may regard as relevant to them.
The problem of democracy under modern conditions is immensely complicated. In the context of the dialectical interplay of Jihad and McWorld, reformist arguments tend to chase their own tails. Strong democracy needs citizens; citizens need civil society; civil society requires a form of association not bound by identity politics; that form of association is democracy. Or: global democracy needs confederalism, a noncompulsory form of association rooted in friendship and mutual interests; confederalism depends on member states that are well rooted in civil society, and on citizens for whom the other is not synonymous with the enemy; civil society and citizenship are products of a democratic way of life. Yet the circle of democracy is unbroken, and perhaps the first and last and only lesson this book can teach is that until democracy becomes the aim and end of those wrestling with the terrors of Jihad and the insufficiencies of McWorld, there is little chance that we can even embark on the long journey of imagination that takes women and men from elementary animal being (the thinness of economics) to cooperative human living (the robustness of strong democracy). Thus, in Rwanda or in Bosnia or in East Timor or in Haiti, we perhaps misconceive the challenge when we ask how to partition or internationalize or pacify a disintegrating country; perhaps the real challenge is how to make it democratic. Democracy is to be sure already the sought-after final outcome for those trying to rescue the planet: but it must also be the guiding principle going in.