Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [157]
The creation of a public is the task of civil society. Only there are attitudes likely to emerge that favor democracy and counter the siren song of McWorld. Only there are communities possible that answer the human need for parochial interaction in ways that remain open to inclusion and to cosmopolitan civic sentiments. But how can civil society be constructed in an international arena? Those wishing to try—not just in Russia and Germany where patience and civic cunning are imperative, but in an America and Western Europe that have grown complacent about the civic domain—need both to recall the story of democracy’s founding, and at the same time to invent new institutions appropriate to novel global conditions. Old democrats often suffer from their civic longevity. They forget the lessons of their own history, forget how violent and disruptive democratization can be, how long it takes to construct a foundational free society before a democratic constitution can ever be raised up upon it. Like the cautious senator who cannot remember the risk-taking boy he once was, the modern democrat represses the memory of revolution and tumult in which he first reached his own uncertain majority, pretending that he was forever a prudent sage and that it did not take a prolonged and painful childhood to learn the arts of liberty (if they were learned at all).
Specialists seem persuaded that to construct a new democracy, whether for Russia, Somalia, or for the whole planet, requires nothing more than the export of prefabricated constitutions and made-to-order parliamentary systems. Joshua Muravchik is a perfect exemplar whose problems begin with the very title of his new book: Exporting Democracy.15 Fed Ex the Federalist Papers to Belorussia; send a multiparty system to Nigeria by parcel post; E-mail the Chinese the Bill of Rights; ship the U.N. a civilian-controlled, all-volunteer, obedient but conscience-sensitive peacekeeping force from a country with a high tolerance for casualties and no interests of its own … and in the flash of a laser beam: democracy! For global government, do exactly the same thing, globally.
Not quite. Democracies are built slowly, culture by culture, each with its own strengths and needs, over centuries, which is why the West Germans might have taken more care before expunging the novice civil institutions of the East German resistance movement like Neues Forum; and why the Russians might want to pay more attention to native institutions like the Russian mir (village commune) or soviet (council) and a little less to import Western institutions. For the lesson of Western democratic history is patience and self-reflection. Between Magna Carta’s first assertion of rights by the English king’s vassals and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 that ushered in the era of parliamentary supremacy, stretched 450 long, war-filled years; and it would be 150 years more before Parliament became even nominally “democratic.” Switzerland’s proto-democratic federal system took its first steps in 1291 but acquired a fully democratic constitution only in 1848 (totally revised in 1874), more than five hundred years later. France initially experimented with aristocratic regional parliaments hundreds of years before its revolution in 1789, and it required still another century for something resembling a workable democratic republic to come into being.
In the 150 years between the foundings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and the founding of the United States of America in 1789, colonial Americans had a half-dozen generations of experience with royal charters, commonwealth government, town meetings, and a frontier wilderness society that sharpened their