Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [132]
There does not finally seem to be much hope for traditional international institutions as saviors of democracy on a transnational scale in an era poised between Jihad and McWorld. Europe, which has achieved significant economic integration organized around regional councils, parliaments, and courts, still lacks democratic credibility with the citizens of its member countries. Most of them neither participate in its fledgling politics nor feel anything like a European civic identity to match their well-felt transnational commercial and commodity identities, let alone their identity as Bavarians or Walloons or Basques or Lombardians. Our question then becomes whether Jihad and/or McWorld can themselves promise to safeguard common liberty in a postnational era. Can they provide subnational or transnational political solutions to the subnational and transnational dilemmas they raise? The answer would seem to be that while ethnicity and parochialism on the one hand, and markets on the other, are nurtured by conditions that need not always be antagonistic to democracy and under some circumstances may even encourage democracy, neither is synonymous with democracy and each in its own way obstructs the global path to human liberty.
Jihad in the Global Disorder
WE HAVE UNDERSTOOD Jihad as the struggle of local peoples to sustain solidarity and tradition against the nation-state’s legalistic and pluralistic abstractions as well as against the new commercial imperialism of McWorld; as such, it is not necessarily inhospitable to conditions that support democracy, which is after all much older than the nation-state. Ancient Greek democracy rested on a politics of the homogenous polis—small city-states tied together by common language, religion, and history. European democracy emerged from the Middle Ages in Helvetic cantons and Italian and German commercial towns with a local, even clannish character well before it found a home in larger national states. The tribal clan manifests a fraternal solidarity and devotion to assembly-style debate that points forward to an elementary direct democracy. Jefferson’s imagined “ward republics” were utopian democratic models organized around local government and, some thought, echoed organization drawn from the Iroquois Federation, while the original Russian soviet, prior to its takeover by the Bolsheviks, was a local council representing diversified worker interests. The New England town also was rooted in the participatory predilections of parochialism.24 In his beguiling account of civic tradition in Italy, Robert Putnam discovers a relationship between traditional choral societies in Italian villages and their later propensity for democracy, showing that with the appropriate civic institutions, small, homogenous communities are more than capable of developing democratic forms of life.25
In short, the limited scale and relative homogeneity of the entities whose antistatist and antimodern struggles incline them to Jihad can potentially incline them to local participatory democracy. Even their toxic exclusivity, based on rejection of “others,” can contribute to the internal consensus necessary to forging a common will. As modernity has created institutions on a scale too large to sustain face-to-face deliberation and community interaction, the antimodern forces associated with Jihad hold out the promise of a scale of communal life more conducive to democracy.
Yet in facilitating a reduced scale for political life, Jihad in fact can simultaneously destroy the mind-set that