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By Root 1498 0

democracies economic crash plans that, while they suit the investment strategies of their member nations (and, more important, their member banks), also guarantee popular resentment and generate a nostalgia for the old Communist safety nets. Neo-tribalism and Jihad are often the final beneficiaries. In the near run, agreements like GATT may seem to have a regulative impact since they place power in collectivities of nations—the new World Trade Organization created by GATT, for example—and impose an internationalist majoritarianism on individual nations. Although this compromises the capacity of individual states to regulate their own economies, it supposedly does so in the name of global distributive justice and transnational public goods.2 In the long run, however, as national sovereignty weakens, the new arrangements actually cede power to markets susceptible to no democratic supervision whatsoever and shrink the global possibilities for public choosing on behalf of fundamental social values.

Jack Heinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, has complained that the GATT agreement legitimizes the exploitation of up to 200 million children, while the insidious environmental consequences of the surrender of sovereignty have been widely denounced in Europe and in America.3 Further down the road, however, it is not increasingly less sovereign nations quarreling among themselves but multinational firms and their global markets that will dictate to America and other countries what is and is not possible: whether or not five-year-olds will work thirteen-hour shifts in Pakistan for 20 cents a day, whether or not scrubless on-the-cheap smokestacks in one Asian country will be allowed to undo the good work of conscientiously (and expensively) built facilities in another.4 Even responsible American firms like Levi Strauss and Company, which has developed voluntary “Global Sourcing Guidelines” for its overseas facilities, are driven by competition and profits to seek cheap labor markets, where exploitation is endemic and regulation mainly a public relations afterthought.5

Jihad does little better. It identifies the self by contrasting it with an alien “other,” and makes politics an exercise in exclusion and resentment. It promotes community but usually at the expense of tolerance and mutuality and hence creates a world in which belonging is more important than empowerment and collective ends posited by charismatic leaders take the place of common grounds produced by democratic deliberation. Jihad speaks the language of self-determination, but severs collective independence from the active liberty of individual citizens. Bosnian Serbia buys a certain version of “self-determination” by forfeiting the liberties of its people.

In Central Europe and Asia, the fall of the iron curtain opened myriad peoples at once both to Jihad and McWorld. The end of Marxism did not spell the end of history, but only the end of Soviet imperialism. In the ragged cohort of states of the ex-Communist empire, it has naturally opened some doors. For as a political practice, Marxism functioned to suppress the liberty in whose name its revolutions were conducted. But the end of Marxism also represented a victory for some of the Enlightenment’s more hollow values—materialism, solipsism, and radical individualism—over certain of its nobler aspirations: civic virtue, just community, social equality, and the lifting of the economic yoke from what were once known as the laboring classes. These aspirations had arisen out of the Age of Reason’s faith in the emancipatory power of economics and the progressive democratic thrust of history; they had inspired social revolutions in France and later Germany and Russia, none of which proved notably successful. To the extent that the failure of Marxism’s revolutions (which began with the failure of Marxism’s parent revolution in Jacobin France) is a failure of the Enlightenment, the fiasco has tainted Enlightenment idealism and its faith in progress, leaving us today in a more cynical and selfish