Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [11]
The resulting global asymmetry, in which diminished states and augmented markets serve only private, economic interests, damages not only a well-functioning democratic civic order but a well-functioning international economic order as well. The continuing spread of the new globalization has only deepened the asymmetry between private vices and public goods. McWorld in tandem with the global market economy has globalized many of our vices and almost none of our virtues. We have globalized crime, the rogue weapons trade, and drugs; we have globalized prostitution and pornography, and the trade in women and children made possible by “porn tourism.” Indeed, the most egregious globalization has been of the exploitation and abuse of children in war, pornography, poverty, and sex tourism. Children have been soldiers and victims in the raging ethnic and religious wars; children are the majority of the global cohort that suffers poverty, disease, and starvation. Children are our terrorists-to-be because they are so obviously not our citizens-to-come. How can this starkly asymmetrical globalization, one that entails such slow suffering, such deliberately paced violence, be anything other than fertile ground for recruiting terrorists? Indeed, it is terrorism itself along with its propaganda that has been most effectively globalized by the softening of sovereignty and the adjuration of democracy—sometimes (ironically) using the modern technologies of the World Wide Web and the worldwide media to promote ideologies hostile both to technology and to anything smacking of the worldwide or the modern. Following September 11, Osama bin Laden became a regular on CNN; the channels of McWorld transformed into conduits for an attack on it.
Privatized, marketized globalization lacks anything resembling a civic envelope. As a result, it cannot support the values and institutions associated with civic culture, religion, and the family. Nor can it enjoy their potentially softening, domesticating, and civilizing impact on raw market transactions. No wonder Pope John Paul said in his Apostolic Exhortation on the Mission of the Roman Catholic Church in the Americas: “If globalization is ruled merely by the laws of the market applied to suit the powerful, the consequences cannot but be negative.”1 Of course, one expects the pope to moralize in this fashion. More startling is a similar message from another, more powerful pope of the secular world, who wrote recently: “You hear talk about a new financial order, about an international bankruptcy law, about transparency, and more … but you don’t hear a word about people Two billion people live on less than two dollars a day…. We live in a world that gradually is getting worse and worse and worse. It is not hopeless, but we must do something about it now.” The moralist here is the hardheaded James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, who has begun to replace the bank’s traditional energy and industrialization projects, thought to favor the interests of foreign investors, with environmental and health projects aimed at the interests of the populations being directly served.2
There are, of course, extant international institutions that might serve as building blocks for a global democratic box into which the economy could safely be put. The international financial institutions conceived at Bretton Woods after World War II to oversee the reconstruction of shattered European and Asian economies were intended originally to function as regulatory agencies to ensure peaceful, stable, and democratic redevelopment under the watchful eye of the victorious Allied powers. Though the World Bank and the International