Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [161]
We are left stranded by this melancholy history in an era where civil society is in eclipse and where citizens have neither home for their civic institutions nor voice with which to speak, even within nation-states nominally committed to democracy. Be passively serviced (or passively persecuted) by the massive, busybody, bureaucratic state where the word citizen has no resonance; or sign onto the selfishness and radical individualism of the private sector where the word citizen has no resonance. Vote the public scoundrels out of public office and/or vote your private interests into office by voting your dollars for the scoundrels willing to work for you: those are the only remaining obligations of the much diminished office of citizen in what are supposed to be the best established democracies.
If these cheerless observations are at all well grounded, and democracy suffers from the polarizing effects of a vanished civil society in America and other Western democracies, surely those looking to create new democracies under the conditions either of Jihad or of McWorld face formidable challenges. Their first priority surely must be the reconstruction of civil society as a framework for the reinvention of democratic citizenship, a mediating third domain between the overgrown but increasingly ineffective state governmental and the metastasizing private market sectors. Our choices need not be limited by the zero-sum game between government and commercial markets in which growth for the one spells encroachment for the other: a massive statist bureaucracy or a massive McWorld. Although that is precisely the choice that has been offered to peoples in Russia and East Germany, we need not opt either for some caricatured Big Brother government that enforces justice but in exchange plays the tyrant, or for some caricatured runaway free market that secures liberty but in exchange fosters inequality and social injustice and doggedly abjures the public weal. For this leaves us only with the choice between McWorld or tyranny. Indeed, as the nation-state loses its sovereignty, it is not so much the choice between tyranny and McWorld but the tyranny of McWorld itself that becomes our destiny. Only some version of a global civil society can hope to counter its inadvertent despotism.
Civil society grounds democracy as a form of government in which not politicians and bureaucrats but an empowered people use legitimate force to put flesh on the bones of their liberties; and in which liberty carries with it the obligations of social responsibility and citizenship as well as the rights of legal persons. Civil society offers us a single civic identity that, belonging neither to state bureaucrats nor private consumers but to citizens alone, recouples rights and responsibilities and allows us to take control of our governments and our markets. Civil society is the domain of citizens: a mediating domain between private markets and big government. Interposed between the state and the market, it can contain an obtrusive government without ceding public goods to the private sphere. At the same time it can dissipate the atmospherics of solitariness and greed that surround markets without suffocating in an energetic big government’s exhaust fumes. In the international domain, where states are weak and markets dominant, civil society can offer an alternative identity to people who otherwise are only clients or consumers—or passive spectators to global trends they can do nothing to challenge. It can make internationalism a form of citizenship. Within national states, both government and the private sector can be humbled a little by a growing civil society that absorbs some of the public aspirations to self-government,