Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  24. Ignatieff notes the tendency of German skinheads to borrow from the British, though he indulges in both exaggeration and a certain Canadian animus against England in quipping that: “Skin culture may just be Britain’s most enduring contribution to Germany and the new Europe.” Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, p. 83. For Nazis on-line, see Jon Wiener, “Free Speech on the Internet,” The Nation, June 13, 1994, pp. 825–828.

  25. For an account from a critical perspective, see Norman Birnbaum’s two-part essay, “How New the New Germany?” Part I, Salmagundi, Nos. 88–89, Fall 1990/Winter 1991, pp. 234–263; Part II, Salmagundi, Nos. 90–91, Spring/Summer 1991, pp. 131–178, 292–296. Also, Peter Rossman, “Dashed Hopes for a New Socialism,” The Nation, May 7, 1990, pp. 632–635.

  26. These victories occurred despite a united opposition joined by all other parties. The Democratic Socialists have a faction called “Communist Platform,” which remains Marxist-Leninist, but for the most part the party depends on East German local loyalty, the politics of personality, and a party philosophy that states: “Our goal is not the revolutionary overthrow of the democratic parliamentary order and the building of some kind of dictatorship, but rather the true democratization of Germany.” The party leader, Gregor Gysi, plays directly on East German resentments: “I accept the political freedom, the legal order and the democratic possibilities that this system offers. But I also maintain that people in eastern Germany have lost important rights, and that in this society there is much social injustice and much that needs to be fundamentally changed. We are not facing the global, social, ecological and cultural challenges that confront us. So for me there are still very good reasons to be anti-capitalist.” Stephen Kinzer, “In Germany, Communists Resurgent,” The New York Times, June 29, 1994, p. A 6.

  27. Next to workers from Greece, Italy, Turkey, and North Africa, are newer immigrants from Vietnam and India along with a burgeoning crowd of political refugees from Eastern Europe who make good use of Germany’s liberal asylum laws.

  28. Frankfurt, for example, is nearly a third foreign, and has over 140 nationalities, making it a rival of Los Angeles and New York as a center of multiculturalism. Germany’s other irony is that, like Israel, it has enacted a legal right of return for all ethnic Germans. Thus, in addition to the millions of East Germans, it has dealt with 100,000 ethnic Germans from the East. To West Germans, many of these returnees, and poor East Germans as well, are seen as “foreigners.” Naturally, the returnees resent the “real” Turkish and Greek “foreigners” just as much as they themselves are resented by the West Germans. Ignatieff tells the revealingly ironic story of the newly arrived ethnic German immigrant from Russia. “I thought I was coming to Germany, instead, it’s Turkey,” she says—in perfect Russian since she herself speaks no German (while many Turks, second and third generation, speak perfect German)! Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging.

  29. According to the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution. Ferdinand Protzman, “German Attacks Rise as Foreigners Become Scapegoats,” The New York Times, November 2, 1992, p. A 1.

  30. Ibid.

  31. In 1991, for example, there were about 44,000 marriages between a German and a foreigner (not quite 10 percent of the total number of marriages), including 3,500 between Turkish men and German women and 880 between German men and Turkish women. The Week in Germany, January 29, 1994.

  32. Der Spiegel, October 26, 1992.

  33. “The nightmare of the new Germany is that its teenage gangs talk politics,” writes Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, p. 84.

  34. The antiforeign climate “contradicts the Olympic spirit, since in the Olympic village everyone is a ‘foreigner,’” worries a key player in Stephen Kinzer, “German Violence Worries Investors,” The New York Times, January 1, 1993, p. A 3.

  Chapter 12. China and the Not Necessarily Democratic Pacific Rim

  1. Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) or Jeffrey Sachs in Poland’s Jump to the Market Economy, based on the Lionel Robbins Memorial lectures delivered at the school of economics, January 1991 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).

  2. Cited by Nicholas D. Kristof, “China Sees ‘Market-Leninism’ a Way to Future,” The New York Times, September 6, 1991, p. I. Also see Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Times Books, 1994) for a pointed if at times overly harsh and cynical treatment of China today.

  3. On the economic “miracle” in the “awakening dragon” of China, see William H. Overholt, The Rise of China: How Economic Reform Is Creating a New Superpower (New York: Norton, 1994). Overholt is among those who actually think authoritarianism in China, as in Taiwan and Singapore, is good for economic development since it frees the government from the need to kowtow to public opinion or interest groups. Overholt reports that “China’s Guangdong Province has become second only to the United States as a market for Procter & Gamble shampoos” and is Motorola’s “No. 2 market in the world for second generation cordless phones.” A similarly naïve enthusiasm is found in many journalists; see for example Joe Klein’s “Why China Does It Better,” Newsweek, April 12, 1993, p. 23.

  4. Perry Link, “The Old Man’s New China,” The New York Review of Books, June 9, 1994, p. 31–36.

  5. Remarkable proof of the impotence of sovereign states in the face of McWorld’s markets is offered by Link, who writes: “It is reliably reported that representatives of ten major US corporations, in a meeting with Chinese economic czar Zhu Rongji in Beijing early this year, actually urged Zhu to take a tough line with Clinton on MFN.” Official American policy falls not to Chinese obstinacy but to unofficial American corporate meddling. Link, “Old Man’s New China,” p. 34.

  6. Cited by Nicholas D. Kristof, “Chinese Communism’s Secret Aim: Capitalism,” The New York Times, October 19, 1992, p. A 6.

  7. The Chinese economic miracle, with a growth rate over 18 percent, is increasing social inequalities and income maldistribution: a meal served to a table of friends at a fancy restaurant can cost ten times the annual wage of most workers.

  8. Nicholas D. Kristof, “China Sees ‘Market-Leninism’ a Way to Future,” The New York Times, September 6, 1991, p. 1.

  9. The difficult position of artists in post-1989 China is described, and artwork displayed, by Andrew Solomon, “Their Irony, Humor (and Art) Can Save China,” The New York Times Magazine, December 19, 1993, pp. 42–51.

  10. Cited by Suzy Menkes, “Yuppie Shanghai Shows an Old Flair,” International Herald Tribune, May 25, 1993.

  11. Cited by Jianying Zha, “China Goes Pop: Mao Meets Muzak,” The Nation, March 21, 1994, pp. 373–376.

  12. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Satellites Bring Information Revolution to China,” The New York Times, April 11, 1993, pp. I, 12.

  13. Ibid. By the same token, the failure to acquire the 2000 Olympic games was an economic disaster for the Beijing region that would have profited economically, and a blow to China’s global image; but for officials worrying about insidious outside influences, it may have represented an inadvertent victory.

  14. Dave Lindorff, “China’s Economic Miracle Runs Out,” The Nation, May 30, 1994, pp. 742–744.

  15. Kristof, “China Sees ‘Market-Leninism’ a Way to Future,” The New York Times, September 6, 1991, p. 1.

  16. Sheryl WuDunn, “Clan Feuds,” The New York Times, January 17, 1993, p. A 10.

  17. It has responded to both provocations with a heavy-handed and brutal use of force—over sixty thousand are estimated to have been killed, including Sri Lanka’s president, who was assassinated by a terrorist on May Day 1993; in 1987, India was dragged into the Tamil conflict, sending over fifty thousand troops into northern Sri Lanka to enforce its own solution. The troops went home empty-handed, and for his trouble, Indian ex—Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by Tamil terrorists in 1991. In 1993 some progress was made toward resolving the dual Jihad of Tamils and extremist Sinhalese (see Edward A. Garg
an, “Sri Lanka Is Choking Off Long Ethnic Revolt,” The New York Times, March 20, 1993, p. 1). Yet most observers believe Sri Lanka’s multiculturalism may yet destroy it; see William McGowan, Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993).

  18. Indonesia is 85 percent Muslim, but 10 percent of the population are Christian, the rest falling into small Hindu, Buddhist, and animist minorities. Military intervention has been episodic and Suharto would like to convince his trading partners that his is a disciplinarian regime no worse, say, than Singapore’s or Taiwan’s. But repression is unceasing: most recently, three very influential magazines, including its best known newsmagazine Tempo (founded in 1971), were closed down without warning.

  19. James Fallows, Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Fallows is unpersuaded that the economic slump of 1994 is anything other than a small bump in Japan’s road, and contests those like Bill Emmott Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invincible Japanese, New York: Times Books, 1994) who think Japan is a country like any other (which in my terms would make it a better candidate for McWorld).

  20. Karl Taro Greenfeld, Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan’s Next Generation (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). There are, Greenfeld reminds us, 25 million Japanese between the ages of fifteen and thirty. They are “the children of the industrialists, executives and laborers who built Japan Inc.” and they are “as accustomed to hamburgers as to rice balls and are often more adept at folding a bundle of cocaine or heroin than creasing an origami crane.”

  21. Neil Strauss, “In Performance,” The New York Times, July 23, 1994, Section 1, p. 12.

  22. The most innocuous changes can signal the deepest challenges: for example, in 1994 economic pressures mounted to introduce Western-style self-service gas pumping at Japan’s sixty thousand gas stations. In the ensuing controversy focusing on safety and jobs, culture was hardly mentioned. Yet while self-service may be economically efficient, it problematizes the cultural ideal of full employment (see Part III) and the traditional Japanese concern for courtesy and service. The campaign to maintain full-service pumps is hardly likely to inspire a cultural Jihad, but perhaps it ought to. For a discussion, see Andrew Pollack, “Japan’s Radical Plan: Self-Service Gas,” The New York Times, July 14, 1994, p. D I.

  23. The quote is from Kina’s American producer Ry Cooder, cited by Neil Strauss in a fascinating account of the career of Shoukichi Kina, who played New York in the summer of 1994 and has made the new Okinawan hybrid a popular international sound. Cooder, who is also Kina’s lead guitarist on one of his albums, says, “Kina hybridized the Okinawan folk style and the folk instruments into this sort of pop or garage band setting, like everyone does in the modern era.” See Neil Strauss, “Okinawa Gives Its Flavor to Rock,” The New York Times, July 16, 1994, p. 11.

  Chapter 13. Jihad Within McWorld: “Transitional Democracies”

  1. Cited by John Kifner, “The World through the Serbian Mind’s Eye,” in the Week in Review, The New York Times, April 10, 1994, Section 4, p. 1.

  2. Vladimir Goati as cited in ibid.

  3. Domljan cited by Milton Viorst, “The Yugoslav Idea,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1991, pp. 58–79. “Whirlwind” citation from “A Whirlwind of Hatreds: How the Balkans Broke Up,” The New York Times, February 14, 1993, p. E 5.

  4. In the summer of 1994, Russia’s largest investment company witnessed the collapse of its stock from a high of $50 a share to less than 50 cents. The so-called MMM fund was in fact “built on sand,” having “reported no earnings, revealed no investments, explained no financial strategy.” Its soaring share prices resulted from the sale of more and more shares, new buyers in effect providing profits for old buyers in the classic pyramid scheme strategy. The company blamed the government both for interfering and for not regulating, while the millions of Russian shareholders blamed mainly the government. See Michael Specter, “10,000 Stampede as Russian Stock Collapses,” The New York Times, July 30, 1994, p. A 1.

  5. According to Alexander Paskhaver of The Center for Economic Reform in Kiev; cited by Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,” The New York Times, July 14, 1994, p. A 23.

  6. Nikolai Zlobin, “Mafiacracy Takes Over,” The New York Times, July 26, 1994, p. A 19. As surprising as the essay is The New York Times’s willingness to give it prominent Op Ed attention.

  7. On the forty-fifth anniversary (1991) of his execution as a war criminal, Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had joined Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II and was responsible for the death of 250,000 Jews, was honored by the new Romanian parliament. The legislative honors were unanimous and Prime Minister Iliescu, though he had expressed disapproval earlier, remained silent.

  8. Celestine Bohlen, “Zhirinovsky Cult Grows,” The New York Times, April 5, 1994, p. A 1, 12. Zhirinovsky speeches have been collected and annotated in Graham Frazer and George Lancelle, Absolute Zhirinovsky: A Transparent View of the Distinguished Russian Statesman (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

  9. Within a year of the collapse of communism, “GNP in every East European country has declined…. [I]ndustrial output fell 10% in Hungary, 28% in Romania, 30% in Bulgaria” and in every case ethnic tensions had augmented the impact of economic problems. Serge Schmemann, “For Eastern Europe, Now a New Disillusion,” The New York Times, November 9, 1990, p. A 1, 10.

  10. In addition to ferocious nationalist sentiments within Hungary, which often takes the form of Jew bashing, the Hungarians are making a cause of the millions who live outside of Hungary in Serbia, Romania (7 percent of the population), and Slovakia (11 percent)—outside of the Russians living beyond Russian borders, one of the largest minority groups in Europe. The cause of “greater Hungary” has become the rallying cry of internal zealots like Csurka who are calling (using the literal translation of the German term “lebensraum”) for Hungarian living space. See, for example, Stephen Engelberg, “Now Hungary Adds Its Voice to the Ethnic Tumult,” The New York Times, January 25, 1993, p. A 3. Istvan Csurka was in the Hungarian Democratic Forum (Hungary’s ruling party under Joseph Antall until the 1994 elections), and led Antall’s antipress campaign. Though once a friend of the dissidents, he has become distanced even from the conservatives. His media appointees did a great deal of damage, however. He’s known as “an idiot, and no one has ever taken him seriously.” Milos Vamos, “Hungary’s Media Apparatchiks,” The Nation, December 13, 1993, p. 725.

  11. So loyal that in 1989, when tribalism first peered out from the ruins of the Stalinist empire, nearly every observer thought that the army’s disciplined troops would contain its reawakened appetites inside of Yugoslavia itself.

  12. Just a few years ago, the Serbian slavophile, Vasily Belov, captured the sense of historical resentment perfectly: “The so-called UN sanctions in Yugoslavia—these are sanctions of the Vatican and a Germany united by Gorbachev.” Serge Schmemann, “From Russia to Serbia,” The New York Times, January 31, 1993, p. E 18.

  Popular Serb actor Nikolai Burlyaev wrote not too long ago in the Belgrade daily Den: “Today Serbia is alone. The whole world seems to have ganged up on it. The current Russian Government has betrayed it. It betrayed a people of the same blood and faith as the Orthodox Russian nation, it betrayed its own—Slavs, so similar to Russians …” Schmemann, ibid. Russia did finally give up on its Serbian friends after the Bosnian Serb legislature rejected a major power compromise that would have left the Serbs with much of the territory it conquered in Bosnia. Yeltsin had his own sentiments about the treason of the Serbs against its sponsors in Moscow.

  13. Misha Glenny, “Ukraine’s Great Divide,” The New York Times, Op-Ed, July 14, 1994, p. A 23.

  14. Russia has offered to cancel over $2.5 billion in debt. Meanwhile, the West voted to give $4 billion in aid (including $200 million to shut down and clean up Chernobyl). Unfortunately for Kravchuk, the vote came the day before he was ousted from office, and it is his succe
ssor Kuchman who will reap the political rewards of the prize.

  15. Cited by Misha Glenny, ibid.

  16. Steve Erlanger, “Ukraine Questions Price Tag of Independence,” The New York Times, September 8, 1993, p. A 8.

  17. In another of those special advertising supplements designed to seduce Western capitalists untutored in the history of Middle Europe to sink millions of dollars into the region; see “Romania: Rebuilding the Nation,” 1994.

  18. The accord was engineered in the spring of 1992 by a team from Princeton’s Project on Ethnic Relations, following decades of repression under Communist dictator Ceausescu. Hungary reciprocates the bloody sentiments, still calling the 1920 Treaty of Trianon that tore the Transylvanian Carpathians with its 600,000 Hungarians from it “bloody Trianon” and toying with scenarios that return the region to its sovereignty. Caryl Churchill’s documentary play Mad Forest captures many of the tensions in Romania just before the fall of Ceausescu, but it mostly overlooks ethnic rivalry and antigypsy bigotry.

  19. Toby F. Sonneman, “Old Hatreds and the New Europe: Roma after the Revolutions,” Tikkun, Vol. 7, No. I, January 1992, pp. 49–52.

  20. Gypsies arrived from India in the thirteenth century dispersing in two diaspora, the first in the Balkans, Moldavia, and Wallachia (Romania today) where from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century they were enslaved; the other dispersed as wanderers throughout Europe. Their Indian-based caste system kept them wholly insulated from their host countries, which in Germany, Finland, and Great Britain actually made it a capital offense to be born a gypsy. Nazi pogroms destroyed 70 to 80 percent of all gypsies, somewhere between a half million and a million (there was no gypsy census against which to measure the genocide).