Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [163]
If civil society is one key to democracy, then global strong democracy needs and depends on a methodical internationalization of civil society. Civil society in turn must again discover adequate incarnations at the national level to become susceptible to globalization. For a historical model we might look back at the American Committees of Correspondence founded in the Revolutionary War era by citizens without legitimate political outlets (the British controlled the formal institutions of government); these committees allowed them to gather together informally in bodies that were neither governmental nor private but that together forged the civic matériel by which the new Republic was first fought for and won and then established and constituted. Are virtual committees of correspondence possible on the Internet? Can citizens log on to a civic bulletin board across national boundaries? Here is a starting point for a genuinely civic telecommunications.
Not so long after the Committees of Correspondence inaugurated their successful revolution against English tyranny, Thomas Jefferson had proposed local civic assemblies as a continuation of direct and decentralized self-government: “Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic,” he had written, “and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of him sooner than his power be wrested from him.”19 Only at the local and regional levels where Jihad plays out its game can an alternative form of identity be won that can ultimately contain McWorld at the global level. Neither the tribal circle nor the traffic circle, neither the clan nor the mall, offers adequate public space to the kind of democratic community that can provide citizens both identity and inclusion. The affinities that spring from local association must not barricade the way to regional affections, national identification, and global alliances, as tribes and clans (whether historical or invented) too often do. Technology may permit us to reconstruct electronic wards and teleassemblies linking together distant neighbors. But this will happen only if markets are not left to determine how these technologies will be developed and deployed, and if global communication is disciplined by prudent deliberation and civility. How civil society can be forged in an international environment is an extraordinary challenge. Recognizing that it needs to be forged is, however, the first step toward salvaging a place for strong democracy in the world of McWorld.
There is a second, more institutional step as well. The parts may become more civil and participatory, their members more civic; yet they must be aligned by some form of global organization that permits cooperation without destroying their autonomy. A global civil society is a foundation for but not yet the same thing as a global democratic government.
Democracy and Confederalism
How IS A world integrated by markets but otherwise utterly disintegral to be held together if not by global government and unmediated international law—neither of which, I have suggested, hold out realistic promise? The primary form of reorganization in recent years, thanks to the politics of Jihad, has been partition. What is the alternative? Federalism is probably