Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [131]
What is required by justice and the global public good is transparent enough: among other things, peace and protection from genocide and human rights violations, full employment within a fair wage structure, globally sustainable development policies within specified ecological limits, and an even playing ground among nations with different natural resources and in different stages of economic development. Enabling treaties like the ones Tobin or Reich offer are also not hard to envision. The problem is political will and that in turn depends on active citizenship and the civic and educational infrastructures (civil society and civic education) that sustain them. After all, the nations that are signatories to the Genocide Convention include all the Western countries that have sat by and dithered while genocide is being committed in places like Rwanda—itself also a signatory nation! Their compact, which might better employ the acronym KEGFAC (“Keep an Eye on Genocide From Afar Convention”), is not devoid of understanding; everyone knows what genocide looks like and affects to know it is wrong. But as a piece of parchment, the Genocide Convention cannot forge the will and the capacity to enforce much of anything at all.20
In the countries where the United Nations currently has stationed troops—most often fronted by big powers like the United States and France—successes have been few and far between, with cases like Somalia and Bosnia all too typical. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali notes that most of the world’s local problems today could be solved by significant United Nations intervention, at a fraction of the cost of yesterday’s Cold War, but he is realist enough to admit “there is not the political will to do so.”21 The U.N. intervention in Somalia, like the parallel American operation (“Operation Restore Hope”), would have been downright comical in its futility had the tragedy not been so pervasive. American leaflets, translated into pidgin Somalia by inept exiles and dropped prior to the American intervention identified the United Nations as the “Slave Nation.” Understandably, the only part of Somalia where relative peace and order have been secured are in the northeast and northwest where there was no significant foreign presence of any kind.22
Finally, the task of traditional international institutions trying to intervene in crisis situations is still further complicated by the absence, in many cases, of any clear pressure point. Where the culprits in need of remonstrance are neither nations nor tribes, the crisis may be real but the perpetrators are invisible. Genocide at least offers a target in the form of the slaughtering army or its surrogate irregulars. But with terrorists it is not so simple. And in the international markets to which Robert Kuttner directs his attention, where are the leverage points? Many of the transnational forces eroding national civil societies are not susceptible to interdiction at all. What just a few years ago Robert Reich called “the coming irrelevance of corporate nationality,” is not coming any more.23 It is here.
Thomas Jefferson’s warning that merchants have no country has become a literal truth for the multinational corporations of McWorld. And the markets they ply nowadays are more anonymous still. How are nations to control the market in pirated software or smuggled plutonium? Who can police the world currency exchange? Has it even got an address? In order to confront Jihad, to whom does one write? And in what tone? “Dear nuclear terrorist, perhaps-covertly-supported-by-Iran,