Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  9. The declaration is offered as an appendix in Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990).

  10. Cited by Ken Auletta, “Under the Wire,” The New Yorker, January 17, 1994, p. 52. Gore genuinely believes in the role of government as a regulator and equalizer, but after the elections of November 1994, there is little to suggest he will get much support in Congress or the nation.

  PART II. THE OLD WORLD OF JIHAD

  Chapter 10. Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld?

  1. See David Gonzalez, “The Computer Age Bids Religious World to Enter,” The New York Times, July 24, 1994, Section 1, p. 1.

  2. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). I have explored the ironies of Bloom’s complaint elsewhere in An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), Chapter 5.

  3. The Rudolphs suggest that “Clinton and others too easily invoke ‘ancient hatreds’ to explain what are really contemporary conflicts. The question, in other words, is not why old conflicts are flaring up anew, but rather why traditionally harmonious mosaics have been shattered.” Susanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented,” The New Republic, March 22, 1993, p. 25.

  4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

  5. Walter Russell Mead in a review of William Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), The New York Times Book Review, November 7, 1993, p. 25.

  6. Observers like Liah Greenfeld try to elicit some consensus by persuading us that nationalism is a question of phenomenology: simply everything and anything people we call nationalists say and do. Her broad characterization permits nationalism to encompass multiple “roads” to modernity, certainly all of those alluded to above, new and old alike. Normative philosophers like Yael Tamir take a narrower “essentialist” view, insisting that we must first define the idea theoretically and then limit actual cases to those that conform to the normative concept. For her, “liberal nationalism” and “ethnic nationalism” are not two species of an underlying genus but rival understandings, only one of which can be tenable. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Even Greenfeld ultimately chooses to see nationalism as a forge of modernity and to this degree narrows her definition to exclude wholly reactionary visions of nationalism.

  7. In his chapter on “Nationality” in On Representative Government. Rousseau’s most eloquent argument on behalf of nationalism as a condition for republicanism comes in his essay Considerations on the Government of Poland, written in 1771. See The Government of Poland, edited by W. Kendall, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972).

  8. G. Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays, chapter III (London: Dent, 1917), cited in S. Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), p. 49. For a full account of Mazzini’s extraordinary role as a liberal revolutionary nationalist see Dennis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

  Anthony Smith is a neo-Mazzinian who believes there is no “alternative to the myth and ideal of nationalism as a cement and vision for large groupings of human beings, one which is both ideologically acceptable and sociologically feasible,” precisely because nations alone “can ground the inter-state order in the principles of popular sovereignty and the will of the people.” Anthony Smith, “Ties That Bind,” The LSE Magazine, Spring,1993, pp. 8–11.

  9. Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1972), pp. 471–472.

  10. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 121. With the transformation, ethnicity and language became the decisive hallmarks of the new nationalism.

  11. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1932), p. 83. Ortega hoped that the nationalist outburst of the twenties might signal its final passing: “The last flare, the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On the very eve of their disappearance there is an intensification of frontiers.” We might hope the same today, were not Ortega’s hopes so dismally contradicted by subsequent history.

  12. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, pp. 6, 14.

  13. Edmund Burke, The Works, London, 1907, VI, p. 155.

  14. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7.

  15. Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1993). “As the conventional barriers of nation-states and regions become less meaningful under the weight of global economic forces, it is likely such dispersed peoples [as Jews, Chinese, Indians, etc.]—and their worldwide business and cultural networks—will increasingly shape the economic destiny of mankind.” p. 4.

  16. Eric Hobsbawm, “The New Threat to History,” a lecture to the new Central European University in Budapest, reprinted in The New York Review of Books, December 16, 1993, pp. 62–63.

  17. Tony Judt, “The Old New Nationalism,” The New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994, p. 45.

  18. Adam Michnik in “‘More Humility, Fewer Illusions’—A Talk Between Adam Michnik and Jurgen Habermas,” The New York Review of Books, March 24, 1994, pp. 24–29.

  19. Marshall Berman used Marx’s phrase as the title to a perceptive book about the condition (and pathology) of urban America. See All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988).

  20. “Winter in the F.R.G.,” by the German band Endstufe (Final Stage), translated by Elizabeth A. Jackson for the London magazine Searchlight; reprinted in Stephen Silver, “The Music of Hate,” The New York Times, February 8, 1993, p. A 23.

  21. See Silver, “The Music of Hate,” ibid.

  22. At least two bands, Stoerkraft and Böse Onkelz (Destructive Force and Evil Uncle) have abandoned the Right: see Stephen Kinzer, “Berlin Journal,” The New York Times, February 2, 1994, p. A 4. See Chapter 11, note 21, below.

  23. The new realities nationalism is meant to address are not, however, really very well-suited to it. John Lukacs, for example, sees in nationalism “the main political force in the twentieth century.” John Lukacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), p. 8.

  24. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), p. 5.

  25. Feudalism had both an imperial and cosmopolitan moment, defined by the Holy Roman Church and the pan-German Empire and at the same time had a local and parochial moment manifested in, for example, France’s prenational provinces such as Burgundy and Provence or England’s prenational counties such as Essex and Dorset.

  26. Under the nominal suzerainty of distant emperors, Burgandians, Normans, Ouic northerners and Oc Franconian southerners had gone their parochial ways. Jeanne D’Arc strove to unite them through blood and battle in a “France” created from fratricide. This at least is how modern atavists like George Bernard Shaw tell the story in fictional re-creations like Saint Joan, where the maid of Orleans appears as both a nationalist and a Protestant. In England’s War of the Roses, chronicled dramatically by Shakespeare, from the corpses of feuding Dorsetmen and Lancastermen rose a new nation of Englishmen, whose clannish loyalties were replaced with the elementary obedience of subject to crown.

  27. The French historian Renan wrote: “Or, l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous assent oublie des choses.” Cited, Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 199.

  28. The after effects of population dispersals and Russian colonization are dirtying the transition of the Baltic states to independence and democracy today. Responding to Russian colonization under communism, which had left La
tvians nearly a minority in their own country and Lithuanians and Estonians with large minority Russian populations, the Baltic countries have today imposed monocultural citizenship laws that amount to a kind of constitutional ethnic cleansing that may force the Russians out.

  29. For this reason, I will not try here to reproduce the graphic studies of fratricide and civil war that have been recently offered by Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Ignatieff, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Lukacs, William Pfaff, and Walter Connor along with many other fine historians and social scientists. In addition to the titles already given above in the notes, see Walter Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Pfaff, Wrath of Nations.

  Nor do I want to reproduce the kind of detailed everyday pictures of life in the ex-Soviet world and Eastern Europe we have come to expect from discerning journalists like Timothy Garton Ash in his series for The New York Review of Books and Georgie Anne Geyer in her columns for the Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal. Geyer was an early and keen observer of the coming of Jihad: a decade before Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Zbigniew Brzezinski were worrying about planetary pandaemonium, Geyer had written a prescient essay called “Our Disintegrating World: the Menace of Global Anarchy,” Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year 1985 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 11–25.

  Chapter 11. Jihad Within McWorld: The “Democracies”

  1. J. J. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater (original published in 1758), Allan Bloom, editor, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 58.

  2. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), p. 5.

  3. French Minister of Culture Jacques Toubon worries about “tribal” tendencies in language, with executives speaking English, immigrants speaking their own languages, ordinary people speaking “the language of television,” and “in the middle the language of administration … and perhaps of intellectuals and professors”—all of which would result in a “catastrophe.” The Latest European News, published by United Airlines, November 29, 1994.

  4. According to Alan Riding, “Celts and Proud of It (Even if They Are French),” The New York Times, August 2, 1991, p. A 4.

  5. Of the 2.8 million who inhabit the peninsular fragment jutting out into the Atlantic, there are perhaps 100,000 involved in the local folk movement. Once the target of Nazis who promised them independence if they would ally themselves with the Germans, the Celts of Brittany actually forged a Brittany Liberation Front and talked revolution in 1968. Today, more intellectuals than peasants actually speak Breton, although there is a “seed” school (a “Diwan”) with one thousand children enrolled, and leaders encourage local playwrights to compose Breton plays and urge academics to plan Breton dictionaries.

  6. The bureau was founded in 1982 and in 1993 had a $4.2 million budget. Marlise Simons, “A Reborn Provençal Heralds Revival of Regional Tongues,” The New York Times, May 3, 1993, pp. A I, 8. The “conceit” here is not the importance of cultural identity, but the belief that a handful of intellectuals can revivify languages that have no practical use in schools, commerce, or the home.

  7. See André Frossard, “L’Europe: une nouvelle tour de babel,” Document, Paris Match, 1993/4.

  8. The Swiss offer a particularly interesting case of multiculturalism in which the French Swiss identify with the progressive interests of France and Europe while the German Swiss (those in the country, not the Zurich bankers and Basel corporation executives) see themselves as true Swiss (not ersatz Germans) hostile to Europe and the McWorld it represents. I have written at length about the Swiss case in The Death of Communal Liberty: the History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). See also the excellent compendium on Switzerland in Europe, Can the Confederatio Helvetica Be Imitated? Special issue of Government and Opposition, Vol. 23, No. I, Winter, 1988.

  9. The 1994 version of the advertisement, paid for by the Generalitat de Catalunya, offers a blank page and a point identified as Barcelona on it: “In which country would you place this point?” it mischievously asks. Several pages later comes the answer: Catalonia is “a country in Spain with its own culture, language and identity … a country in which many foreign enterprises have invested and are still heavily investing … a country with the know-how to get the Olympic Games for its capital.” An early advertisement appeared in The New York Times, July 17, 1992, pp. A 5, 7. The new campaign started in the spring of 1994 with an April 25 Newsweek advertisement. The ambivalence toward McWorld is expressed in the simultaneous focus on Catalonian separatism and the Catalonian cultural heritage and on Catalonia’s capitalist and commercial virtues and its role as a European economic center; Barcelona’s patron saint Sant Jordi and Catalan heroes like Dalí, Miró, and Casals somehow get mixed in a description of Catalan multinational corporations. The same ambivalence appears in another version of the advertisement, which begins with the headline: CATALONIA, A MODERN COUNTRY WITH CENTURIES OF TRADITION.

  10. Commentators have suggested King Juan Carlos may have bested Pujol in the short run by charming the crowds with his deferential Catalan and his good manners, and by making Pujol’s attempt to seize the Olympics look clumsy and fanatic; but his performance was in effect orchestrated by the Catalan nationalists to whom he was responding and they are surely the real long-term victors.

  11. Alan Riding, “The Olympics Crown a King with Laurels,” The New York Times, August 12, 1992, p. A 5. The special privileges Pujol gained for Catalonia are now being sought by ethnic nationalists from other regions of Spain.

  12. As paraphrased by Marlise Simons, “A Reborn Provençal,” pp. A 1, 8.

  13. The measure passed by a nearly 80 percent margin in Geneva and Neuchâtel and failed by nearly the same margin in the founding German Swiss cantons of Schwyz and Uri (approximately 75 percent).

  14. “Switzerland and Europe: Time to Join the Others?” The Economist, November 28, 1992, p. 52. The insufficiently docile masses, perched imperturbably on their European Himalayas, managed on December 6, 1992, to once again ignore their elites. Though only a bare popular majority of 50.3 percent had said no, eighteen of twenty-six cantons had stood firmly against while only eight (all francophone) had voted yes (fourteen were needed for passage).

  15. For example, see “La vieille tradition du chemin solitaire” (the old tradition of the solitary road), in the Left daily Libération, December 7, 1992, as well as the accompanying editorial by Gerard Dupuy, “Un Nouveau Coup Contre L’Europe” (a new blow against Europe). Dupuy wrote: “‘L’exception’ suisse, sa fonction de soupape, n’a plus grand sens dans un monde en voie d’homogèneisation, en particuliere dans sa partie européenne.”

  16. The ban lasted only a few years, and was supported for more cynical reasons by the local railway company, but the language used to justify the ban was remarkably prescient in its predictions of economic encroachment and environmental ruin. For the details, see Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty.

  17. On Quebec, see Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging. Because he is Canadian by birth, his treatment of Quebec is perhaps the most convincing section of his book.

  18. Joel Kotkin captures some of the ambivalence of diaspora peoples by using the term tribe to refer to transnational peoples operating on the new economic frontier of trade and commerce—i.e., Indians, Chinese, and Jews but also (rather oddly) Brits and Americans too. See Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1993).

  19. An Amendment to the Canadian Constitution guarantees the equality of English and French in New Brunswick, but it is a result of attempts to mollify the Quebecois. See Clyde Farnsworth, “Acadians Cling to Their Culture, and to Canada,” The New York Times, July 5, 1994, p. A 4.

  20. Perhaps it is not so surprising that some of the same weary people who reviled the
Communist symbols that dominated Communist East Berlin’s Karl Marx Platz should now revile the commercial symbols that dominate it (renamed Augustus Platz) today. Where the “imperialist” hammer and sickle once flew now sits the glitzy “imperialist” logo of Mercedes-Benz—much as, in today’s Budapest, the “Gold Star” logo of the South Korean electronics giant has been plastered across what was previously the apartment of Marxist theoretician George Lukacs.

  21. The band Radikahl’s song “Swastika.” There is a powerful paradox in the use of modernity’s commercial medium, rock music, by the enemies of modernity, who wear T-shirts bearing the logo: “Hitler: The European Tour.”

  There has been slippage, however, and bands like Stoerkraft and Böse Onkelz have moved away from the Right. Ingo Hasselbach, a founding member and vice chairman of the outlawed National Alternative recently published a book called The Reckoning: A Neo-Nazi Drops Out (Die Abrechnung: Eine Neonazi Steigt Aus) (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1994) that suggests the posturing of at least some neo-Nazis is born of economic frustration rather than deep ideological convictions.

  22. The band Final Stage’s “Winter in the F.R.G.” asks “Will there ever be a Germany again worth living in?” (see above). Schoenhuber eschews such neo-Nazi crudities in favor of such polite one-liners as: “Me, I love the Turks, but it is when they are in Turkey I love them the most.” Rather than celebrate Hitler, he speaks of the great fascist party that Hitler “betrayed.” Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, “Franz Schoenhuber: un SS trés frequentable,” Le Nouvel Observateur/Monde, April 16–22, 1992, p. 66 my translation.

  23. Between July 1991 and July 1992, East German manufacturing jobs were almost halved (45.6 percent) as compared with a reduction of 2.5 percent in comparable jobs in West Germany. The Week in Germany, September 25, 1992. In 1991, Treuhandanstalt (the West German privatization agency) facilitated the sale of ten East German newspapers to West German publishers. The Week in Germany, April 19, 1991.