Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  It is not a central concern of this study’s examination of energy usage, but there is a radical injustice in patterns of production, distribution, and usage of energy resources that undermines the kinds of global integration toward which McWorld is supposed to tend. Using just two indices (based on statistics in The Economist Book of Vital World Statistics: 1990, New York: Times Books, 1990), we can see clearly the extent of this injustice among nations.

  If we compare the amount of energy a nation uses as a percentage of world usage to that nation’s percentage of world population, we get a justice-of-energy-distribution index (JEDI-A) that, if greater than I, suggests injustice pure and simple (see Table 1. Energy Usage and Population). The forty-seven nations surveyed represent a cross section of First, Second, and Third World countries, some of which are producers and exporters, and some merely importers of fossil fuels.

  JEDI TABLE 1. ENERGY USAGE AND POPULATION (1990)

  If we compare the amount of energy a nation uses as a percentage of world usage to that nation’s percentage of world Gross Domestic Product, we get a justice-of-energy-distribution index (JEDI-B) that, if greater than I, suggests economic inefficiency that is also a form of injustice (see Table 2. Energy Usage and Gross Domestic Product). The standard here is not absolute justice; it asks only that if a nation consumes more than its fair share by population, it justify that usage by its economic productivity.

  JEDI TABLE 2.

  ENERGY USAGE AND GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (1990)

  In a perfectly just world, a nation would consume a percentage of the globe’s energy equivalent to or less than its share of the world’s population and would require no more of the world’s energy to sustain its GDP than its proportionate share of global GDP. In an imperfectly just world, nations might consume more than their fair share as measured by population but would at least consume no more than their fair share as measured by GDP. But as the JEDI tables for population and for GDP indicate, most of the world’s developed nations and not a few of its less developed nations consume radically disproportionate quantities of energy as measured by population; and some also score badly on the efficiency rating and are hence doubly unjust. Saudi Arabia, despite its enormous reserves (or because of them?) uses more than three times its fair share as measured by population, and is inefficient to boot, using more than twice its fair share as measured by GDP. The United States and Canada are horrendously unjust in their usage by population (five times what they deserve and ranked 46th and 47th out of the 47 nations surveyed), but are at least efficient and thus fair in their usage as measured by GDP. Likewise Japan consumes too much by population but is extremely efficient (ranking third) by GDP.

  Among the seven nations that are unjust on both scales, the ex-Soviet Union (as it was constituted when these 1990 statistics were compiled), is the global energy villain, using three and a half times more energy than its population warranted and nearly seven times as much as its GDP warranted. Some of Russia’s former allies, like ex-Yugoslavia and Hungary, did little better, and overendowed Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were not far behind. South Africa and North Korea round out the group of seven that are both unjust and inefficient. Of course nations like ex-Yugoslavia and Russia that are today in transition would score better in 1995 than they did earlier, not because their efficiency has grown but because—as a result of anarchy, civil war, and rapid privatization (the twin evils of Jihad and McWorld being experienced simultaneously)—their GDPs have plummeted.

  China is a nightmare waiting to happen on energy usage. At present, it uses far less than its population warrants; but its radical inefficiency of usage (46th of 47) suggests that as its GDP continues to grow at better than 14 percent a year and as it realizes its plan to make automobile manufacturing a key to its development, it will not only use a radically disproportionate percentage of the world’s energy, but may threaten to tap out global resources completely. Would that it might imitate Hong Kong, which uses only a third of what it deserves by the measure of its GDP, and uses an exactly fair share (one to one) by the measure of its population!

  The story of the West is mixed. Although almost all of the Western democracies are fair with respect to GDP, there are significant differences among them, with France and Sweden ranked sixth and seventh, and the United States and Canada (though still “efficient” with a JEDI of less than 1) ranked 25th and 27th. Yet while France is extremely efficient, using less than half of what its GDP warrants, it still consumes twice what its population warrants. Spain is Europe’s energy saint, using just a tiny bit more energy than its population warrants (best among the Western nations at number 27) and less than half of what its GDP warrants (ranked eighth). Worldwide, Chad is saintly beyond all reason, proving perhaps only that poverty is the primary predicate of justice on these indices, where so many of the world’s poorest nations are compulsory practitioners of energy altruism.

  Our indices suggest that Jihad tends to impair economic efficiency, lowering a nation’s ranking on the GDP scale, but that it also diminishes overall energy usage, improving the nation’s ranking on the population scale. The forces of McWorld increase energy usage, lowering the ranking on the population scale; but they can improve efficiency, increasing the ranking on the GDP scale. Finally, neither Jihad nor McWorld has any intrinsic interest in the fairness question and here, as in other domains, the poorest nations with neither energy reserves nor a productive economy do the worst. They are “good energy citizens” by default, because in the cruel competition of McWorld they are not citizens at all.

  APPENDIX B

  TWENTY-TWO COUNTRIES’ TOP TEN GROSSING FILMS, 1991

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992), although he is far less pleased by his prognosis in his book than he seemed in the original National Interest essay that occasioned all the controversy; and Walter B. Wriston, Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner’s, 1992).

  2. See Georgie Anne Geyer, “Our Disintegrating World: The Menace of Global Anarchy,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Book of the Year, 1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11-25. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1993). Also see Tony Judt, “The New Old Nationalisms,” The New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994, pp. 44–51.

  3. Two recent books, the one by Zbigniew Brzezinski cited above about the “global turmoil” of ethnic nationalism (Jihad), the other by Kevin Kelly about computers and “the rise of neo-biological civilization [McWorld]” both carry the title “Out of Control.” See Brzezinski, Out of Control; and Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). The metaphor is everywhere: for example, in Andrew Bard Schmookler’s The Illusion of Choice (Albany: State University of New York at Albany Press, 1993), Part III on runaway markets is also entitled “Out of Control.”

  4. In its “new tack on technology,” writes New York Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews, the Clinton administration wants only to avoid doing anything “to spook investors with heavy-handed regulatory brow-beating,” hoping rather to reduce “the regulatory barriers that have prevented competition.” Edmund L. Andrews, “New Tack on Technology,” The New York Times, January 12, 1994, p. A 1. At the end of the 1994 congressional session, a Communications Bill that would have imposed some controls on the information superhighway expired quietly.

  5. Rohatyn cited by Thomas L. Friedman, “When Money Talks, Governments Listen,” The New York Times, July 24, 1994, p. E 3.

  6. Steiner writes that the new Eastern European democratic revolutions of recent years were not “inebriate with some abstract passion for freedom, for social justice.” Consumer culture, “video cassettes, porno cassettes, American-style cosmetics and fast foods, not editions of Mill,
Tocqueville or Solzhenitsyn, were the prizes snatched from every West[ern] shelf by the liberated.” George Steiner, in Granta, cited by Anthony Lewis, “A Quake Hits the Summit,” International Herald Tribune, June 2-3, 1990.

  7. Cited by Aleksa Djilas, “A House Divided,” The New Republic, January 25, 1993, p. 38.

  8. In February 1994 there were about eighty thousand U.N. troops deployed in eighteen countries; a handful are on the borders between Israel and its hostile neighbors (Syria and Lebanon) and on the frontiers dividing India and Pakistan and Iraq and Kuwait. But in their greatest numbers, they can be found trying (unsuccessfully) to separate rival factions in Somalia (over twenty-six thousand) and former Yugoslavia (over twenty-five thousand) as well as in Georgia, Cyprus, Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda, the western Sahara, Haiti, El Salvador, and Cambodia. For a report see Brian Hall, “Blue Helmets, Empty Guns,” The New York Times Magazine, January 2, 1994, pp. 18-25, 30, 38, 41.

  9. David Binder, “Trouble Spots: As Ethnic Wars Multiply, U.S. Strives for a Policy,” The New York Times, February 7, 1993, p. A 1.

  10. Muslim users at times intentionally obfuscate the difference between meanings; thus, speaking to an Arab audience in mid-1994 just as the accord over Jericho and Gaza went into effect, Yassar Arafat spoke militantly to a Palestinian audience of a Jihad to recapture Jerusalem—only to “explain” later to agitated Israelis and Westerners that he meant only to call for a peaceful struggle.

  11. See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Disuniting America (New York: Norton, 1993).

  12. A minimalist’s list would include the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, and Portugal representing less than 1 percent of the world’s population. Japan is sometimes also included in the list, which brings the number to under 5 percent.

  13. The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, December 21–27, 1992, p. 28.

  14. Cited by David Binder, “Trouble Spots.” Of course Lansing was no friend of Wilson’s vision, and actually worked to undermine aspects of his policies. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is persuaded that Wilson himself came to see the dangers of self-determination, since toward the very end Wilson admitted he had developed the rhetoric of self-determination “without the knowledge that nationalities existed” and thus without foreseeing the destructive forces the idea could unleash. Moynihan, Pandaemonium, p. 85.

  Even Amitai Etzioni, an ardent American supporter of communitarian-ism, worries about the “evils of self-determination.” Amitai Etzioni, “The Evils of Self-Determination,” Foreign Policy, No. 89, Winter, 1992–93, pp. 21–35.

  15. The map on which the warring parties settled for a brief time in 1994 was still more egregious in its surrender to the Serbian aggressors, though it at least tried to connect the isolated ethnic dots with lifelines of contiguity. At this writing, both NATO and the United Nations appear to have surrendered to the logic of force altogether.

  16. British diplomat and historian Harold Nicholson gives a notoriously tragicomic account of one of those 1919 post—World War I meetings in which the Balkans were carved up, during which Prime Minister David Lloyd George mistakes the standard geographer’s colors green (for valleys) and brown (for mountains) for Greeks and Turks and, pointing at Scala Nova, colored green, tells the Italian delegates, “You can’t have that—it’s full of Greeks!” Full of green valleys, Nicholson tells his boss, but very few Greeks. The negotiations continue to their melancholy conclusion, which, both “immoral and impractical,” are to doom Europe to another war. Harold George Nicholson, Peace-Making: 1919 (New York: Harcourt and Brace & Co., 1939).

  17. In Blood and Belonging, his recent book on nationalism that accompanied the affecting television series, Michael Ignatieff looks not only at the obviously fratricidal spectacle of Eastern Europe but at Ireland, Quebec, and Germany as well, aware that the most toxic cases may simply be advanced instances of a disease infecting healthy nations too. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994).

  18. Günter Grass cited by Marla Stone, “Nationalism and Identity in (Former) East Germany,” Tikkun, Vol. 7, No. 6, November/December 1992, pp. 41–46.

  19. See Orlando Patterson, “Global Culture and the American Cosmos,” Paper No. 2 in the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Paper Series.

  20. This is the theme of Walter B. Wriston, Twilight. “How does a national government measure capital formation when much new capital is intellectual?” Wriston asks (p. 12). The answer: they don’t. Wriston, who is the former chairman of Citicorp, is a little too much of a technological Pangloss, however, and his tendency to think it will all turn out in the end, as long as we recognize the new realities, detracts a little from his careful analysis of those realities. He relies heavily on earlier books on the information revolution and its effect on nationhood, like Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Peter Drucker’s The New Realities (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); and George Gilder’s Microcosm (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). An early study is F. A. Hayek’s Denationalisation of Money (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976).

  21. Former Secretary of State George Shultz as cited by Wriston, Twilight, p. 10.

  22. The return of the Democratic Party to executive power in the United States thus changed nothing with respect to this market ideology. President Clinton was closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council whose research arm was keen to put aside traditional democratic antibusiness rhetoric and make markets and government serve one another. In a widely discussed major foreign policy statement for the Clinton administration, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake indulged in a veritable celebration of the marriage of markets and democracy, using the phrase market democracy as if it were some ur-original formulation that could be found in the Magna Carta or the Federalist Papers. To an academic audience at Johns Hopkins University, he said “we contained a global threat to market democracies.” America must “consolidate new democracies and market economies …” and “help democracy and market economics take root in regions of greatest humanitarian concern” [emphasis added]. These “liberating forces” are what “create wealth and social dynamism.” On the other hand “backlash states” that resist these forces “tend to rot from within both economically and spiritually.” “Verbatim: A Call to Enlarge Democracy’s Reach,” The New York Times, September 26, 1993, Section 4, p. 3.

  23. President Clinton’s secretary of state thus avowed in 1993 that his meeting with Boris Yeltsin had to be regarded as “an endorsement of democracy and free-market reform in Russia.” Warren Christopher, cited in Elaine Sciolino, “Clinton Will Visit Yeltsin,” The New York Times, October 23, 1993, p. A I.

  24. The New York Times ran a front-page business section article by Philip Henon urging the Clinton administration to open the Vietnamese market under the unambiguous title: “Missing Out on a Glittering Market,” September 12, 1993, Section 3, p. i. Subsequently, that happened.

  25. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “To Tame Savage Capitalism,” The New York Times, November 28, 1993, p. E II.

  26. The Czech Republic boasts that its velvet revolution transformed “a totalitarian regime [in]to a democratic system and a profit-based economy,” but who exactly will profit remains to be seen. Cited from a Czech Republic advertising supplement in The New York Times (January 7, 1994) just prior to President Clinton’s meeting with President Havel in Prague in January 1994.

  27. Robert McIntyre, “Why Communism Is Rising from the Ash Heap,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, June 20–26, 1994, p. 24.

  28. Brzezinski is properly exercised by what he calls our modern world’s “permissive cornucopia,” though unlike Allan Bloom, he spends more time sounding the tocsin than examining the causes of the threat. His vague remedy is a Freudian reimposition of “self-restraint” that will curb a Western world as “out of control” in its own way as the Third World it faces.


  29. IRAN FIGHTS NEW FOE: WESTERN TELEVISION and FOR CLERICS, SATELLITES CARRYING MTV ARE DEADLIER THAN GUNS, scream Wall Street Journal headlines; The Wall Street Journal, August 8, 1994, above an article by Peter Waldman citing an Iranian cleric who complains that satellite dishes spread “the family-devastating diseases of the West,” p. A 10.

  30. Jon Pareles, “Striving to Become Rock’s Next Seattle,” The New York Times, July 17, 1994, Section 2, p. I.

  31. Of McDonald’s nearly 15,000 restaurants, nearly forty-five hundred, or one-third, are abroad; there are over one thousand in Japan alone. Gary Hoover, Hoover’s Handbook of American Business (Austin: Reference Press, 1994), pp. 746–747.

  32. Jack Lang, the culture minister of the socialist government deposed in 1993, was especially ambivalent, personally leading the campaign on “franglais” and its mangling of authentic French and calling for legislation to protect the French language (passed under the successor conservative government) as well as the fight to protect the French film industry against Hollywood in the GATT round, yet also proclaiming his affection for Americans and their culture.

  33. National Public Radio, All Things Considered, December 2, 1993, from the broadcast transcription.

  34. Slavenka Drakulic, “Love Story: A True Tale from Sarajevo,” The New Republic, October 26, 1993, pp. 14–16.

  35. There is also a Michael Jackson babushka that gradually turns into a panther and a chimpanzee.

  PART I. THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD

  Chapter 1. The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld

  1. He adds: “We decided not to tailor products to any marketplace, but to treat all marketplaces the same.” Cited in Louis Uchitelle, “Gillette’s World View: One Blade Fits All,” The New York Times, January 3, 1994, p. C 3.