Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [165]
The problem of democracy under modern conditions is immensely complicated. In the context of the dialectical interplay of Jihad and McWorld, reformist arguments tend to chase their own tails. Strong democracy needs citizens; citizens need civil society; civil society requires a form of association not bound by identity politics; that form of association is democracy. Or: global democracy needs confederalism, a noncompulsory form of association rooted in friendship and mutual interests; confederalism depends on member states that are well rooted in civil society, and on citizens for whom the other is not synonymous with the enemy; civil society and citizenship are products of a democratic way of life. Yet the circle of democracy is unbroken, and perhaps the first and last and only lesson this book can teach is that until democracy becomes the aim and end of those wrestling with the terrors of Jihad and the insufficiencies of McWorld, there is little chance that we can even embark on the long journey of imagination that takes women and men from elementary animal being (the thinness of economics) to cooperative human living (the robustness of strong democracy). Thus, in Rwanda or in Bosnia or in East Timor or in Haiti, we perhaps misconceive the challenge when we ask how to partition or internationalize or pacify a disintegrating country; perhaps the real challenge is how to make it democratic. Democracy is to be sure already the sought-after final outcome for those trying to rescue the planet: but it must also be the guiding principle going in.
If the democratic option sounds improbable as a response to Jihad (it is!), think of the “realist” solutions currently being debated—peace and stabilization through foreign invasion, expulsion, partition, resettlement, United Nations Trusteeship, military intervention, or simple dismemberment. Will they contain the spreading global fires of Jihad? And if the democratic option sounds utopian as a response to the infotainment telesector with its infectious videology and its invisible electronic fingers curling around human minds and hearts wherever satellite transmissions can be received, think of the alternative: surrender to the markets and thus to the least noble aspirations of human civilization they so efficiently serve; and the shrinking of our vaunted liberty to Regis Debray’s wretched choice between “the local Ayatollah and Coca-Cola.”20
In a nation at war, Abraham Lincoln saw in democracy a last and best hope. On our paradoxical planet today, with nations falling apart and coming together at the same moment for some of the very same reasons, and with cowering national governments and toothless international law hardly able to bark, let alone bite, democracy may now have become our first and only hope.
Afterword
A YEAR AFTER the publication of Jihad vs. McWorld, both Jihad and McWorld are alive and well. The ironies that tie them together—for Jihad needs McWorld as shadows do the sun—continue to deepen. India has just elected a Parliament dominated by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. It also has its first Hindu nationalist Prime Minister in history (Atal Bihari Vajpayee) who, amidst fears of Hindi extremism, avows that his favorite movie is Walt Disney’s The Lion King. America’s anti-internationalist, corporation-baiting, Nafta-detesting right wing has made Patrick Buchanan, a former television pundit who has spent his entire life inside the Washington beltway establishment, its noisy antiestablishment candidate. Buchanan, in turn, like some mad apostate of the class that created him, decries the “myth of Economic Man