Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [101]
In an ongoing advertising campaign that began before the 1992 Barcelona summer Olympics and continues into the present, the provincial government of Catalonia managed to have it both ways, outraging Madrid by printing maps that highlight Catalonia as part of Europe but omit Spain altogether. It would be as if California ran ads in Japan portraying itself as a vital appendage of the Pacific Rim installed by inadvertence on a nameless North American continent.9 Catalan nationalist leader and provincial president Jordi Pujol has played a noisy role in Spanish politics and created pressures that moved Spain’s crafty King Juan Carlos to address the opening ceremonies of the 1992 Olympic games in Catalan dialect. Courtesy of Señor Pujol, the well-liked monarch had been booed only three years earlier at the Barcelona Olympic stadium dedication, and many Catalonians had demanded that their athletes be permitted to compete separately from the Spanish team!10 Pujol himself is a viperous nationalist who not only helped make Catalan the official language of schools and universities (non-Catalans must use it if they wish to teach in Catalonia) but insisted “Catalonia is as much a nation as Slovenia or Estonia.”11 As happens with so many of Western Europe subnationalists, the Catalonian’s nominal bow toward Europe and McWorld is accompanied by a withdrawal from national sovereignty—in this case, Spain’s. Far from resisting McWorld’s markets, Catalonia seeks a special relationship with them.
Unlike Catalonia, the Occitan regions have not yet quite realized they can blockade the capital without turning their backs on McWorld. Gerard Gouiran, a professor of Occitan at Montpellier University, insists his concern with local language is free of exclusivist animus. But, he explains, “the strengthening of the local language [is] vital to preserving the region’s character because the south of France is changing so rapidly. New high-technology industries are settling in France’s version of the sun-belt; outsiders are buying up entire villages as vacation spots, and television is barraging young people with images in which their own world never appears.”12 Gouiran does not quite specify that the enemy is McWorld, but he is explicit about “containing” the Americanization of France and of Europe. Unlike Pujol, he has not yet grasped that “sun-belt” industries rooting in France’s southwest can actually catalyze local pride and give economic sustenance to parochial pretensions to autonomy. Nonetheless, like partisans of local culture elsewhere, Gouiran does confront McWorld with a profound ambivalence that is evident in Switzerland as well as in North America’s most dramatic case of separatism, Quebec.
German-Switzerland
SWITZERLAND EXEMPLIFIES THE problems Europe faces as a whole, for as a nation it has chosen to defy Europe and the supposedly irreversible pressures of McWorld’s markets from the contradictory stance of a highly successful practitioner of market economics. In doing so it has also managed to open up deep inner fissures that threaten to destabilize Switzerland’s own confederal equilibrium. Long a loosely federated neutral nation forged from German, French, and Italian (and Raeto-Romantsch) fragments, the Swiss (like the Americans) have seen themselves as an exceptionalist country—Sonderfall Schweiz!—and on the basis of their unique geographical position astride Europe and their long-standing armed neutrality, have resisted efforts