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By Root 1418 0

cannot negotiate its way in, it simply walks out. When international institutions such as UNESCO and the United Nations and international conferences such as the racism discussions in Durban resonate with hostility (as they often do), the United States withdraws in arrogant pique instead of participating with a view toward making its influence felt. The missile shield with its attendant requirement that we abandon the ABM treaty is a typically unilateral and hubristic instance of America’s inclination to go it alone. Aside from its technological infeasibility—if we cannot keep terrorists off airplanes or individual “sleepers” from engaging in biological and chemical warfare, how can we imagine that we can intercept multiple warheads and their multiplying decoys without a hitch?—the missile shield once again isolates America from a world it ought to participate in in changing. In Ronald Reagan’s vivid fantasies that resonated so powerfully with the American public, a virtual bubble would envelop the good nation and keep it safe from foreign nightmares. But the nightmares have come to our shores in the bright light of morning, and there is no shield against their terror except a confrontation with Jihad’s complex global genealogy.

Technology is at best a tool. It is a peculiarly American conviction that engineering can take the place of human ingenuity and action in warding off trouble. Smart bombs are given preference over smart people, missiles that think take the place of policy makers who judge, electronic listening posts replace culturally and linguistically adept human agents. Technology is the last redoubt for our vanishing independence, the means by which America aspires to keep alive the fading dream of sovereign autonomy. Yet technology itself, like the science from which it arises, is a product of transnational communities and is a better symbol of interdependence than independence. McWorld itself, with it reliance on global communications technology, teaches that lesson.

When America finally turns from its mythic independence and acknowledges the real world of interdependence, it will face an irony it helped create: The international institutions available to those who wish to make interdependence a tool of democracy and comity are far and few between. McWorld is everywhere, CivWorld is nowhere. But Nike and McDonald’s and Coke and MTV can contribute nothing to the search for democratic alternatives to criminal terrorism; instead, these corporations sometimes inadvertently contribute to the causes of terrorism. That is the melancholy dialectic of Jihad vs. McWorld that is at the heart of this book.

The encompassing practices of globalization we have nurtured under the archs of McWorld and the banner of global markets have in fact created a radical asymmetry: We have managed to globalize markets in goods, labor, currencies, and information without globalizing the civic and democratic institutions that have historically constituted the free market’s indispensable context. Put simply, we have removed capitalism from the institutional box that has (quite literally) domesticated it and given its sometimes harsh practices a human face. To understand why taking capitalism out of the box has been so calamitous, we need to recall that the history of capitalism and free markets has been one of synergy with democratic institutions. Free economies have grown up within and been fostered, contained, and controlled by democratic states. Democracy has been a precondition for free markets—not, as economists try to argue today, the other way around. The freedom of the market that has helped sustain freedom in politics and a spirit of competition in the political domain has been nurtured in turn by democratic institutions. Contract law and regulation as well as cooperative civic relations have attenuated capitalism’s Darwinism and contained its irregularities, contradictions, and tendencies toward self-destruction around monopoly and the eradication of competition that leads to uncapitalist monopolies. On the global plane today,