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By Root 1473 0

“McDonald’s Out!” There are nearly 2 million Turks in Germany, 140,000 in Berlin alone, and they can be not only resisted but trashed, assaulted, and incinerated in their squalid barracks.28 In 1990 there were a few hundred attacks; two years later there were several thousand—1,636 “rightist crimes” from January through October 1992 alone.29 There are probably not more than 50,000 right-wing extremists of whom not more than 6,500 are neo-Nazis in Germany today;30 but as the guerrilla swims in the sea of the people, so the radical Right in Germany gives voice to repressed resentments shared by many Germans (though, to be sure, only a minority). Indeed, there are far more intermarriages between Turks and Germans than assaults.31 Still, the German weekly Der Spiegel offered a survey showing that 73 percent of Germans thought foreigners were a “problem” on which the country had to “get a grip,”32 even though 85 percent of Germans consistently deplore violence against guest workers. Not all of the assailants are skinheads, and not all of the victims are foreigners. Jews, reporters, and liberals have also been attacked.

The assaults on Turkish hostels in eastern towns like Magdeburg, Solingen, Moelln, or Rostock are a means to an end. Just as Poland has managed to cultivate a new antisemitism without Jews, German skinheads are capable of nurturing their resentment of foreigners without Turks, who are only obvious and vulnerable underclass symbols of the McWorld overclass (and in particular the West German overclass) that has sold them out. And because they are not just frustrated adolescents, but political warriors, their ultimate target is not really Turks or Greeks at all but Germany: the Germany that has surrendered to McWorld.33 Germany in turn reacts to its assailants not just by talking about justice and human rights: instead, it confirms a part of the right-wing critique by worrying about its image and its attractiveness to investors and wondering whether violence will jeopardize its Olympian (or, better, McWorldian) bid for the Olympic Games in the year 2000.34

I am not among those who think the Germans are peculiarly vulnerable to the worst that is in their history and I suspect that the hundreds of thousands of German citizens who have marched in candlelight processions in condemnation of rightist violence and racism will win the struggle for the postmodern German soul. But I am less sanguine about the capacity of the Germans (or anyone else) to contain McWorld—or to render it democratic. And it may be the struggle against McWorld that will give Germany’s teen fascists and rock Nazis their most significant and dangerous following.

12

China and the Not Necessarily

Democratic Pacific Rim

IN AREAS OUTSIDE of Europe and North America that have been relatively successful in both economic and political terms, what is most offensive about McWorld to local protagonists of Jihad is its cultural aggressiveness. Indeed, in many Asian nations Jihad proceeds without fear of offending democrats since democracy has had little to do with modernization. The trick in that part of the world has been to figure out how to exploit the benefits of economic modernization and capitalist markets without capitulating to either the political values (openness, rights, liberty, democracy) or the cultural habits (suburban, materialist, consumerist) attached to them. On the whole it has been easier to counter the West’s political ideas than McWorld’s seductive lifestyles. The authoritarian experiments, Communist and non-Communist alike, in Vietnam, Singapore, Korea, and China are proof of how easy it is to sever free markets from free political institutions. Democratic India and Japan are proof of how difficult it is to sever free markets from McWorld’s way of life.

In nondemocratic Asia, markets have been cautiously welcomed in the setting of a prudent, background mercantilism where governments first establish and then try to control the inchoate but productive forces markets unleash. The democratic institutions that (Westerners argue)