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By Root 1409 0

be defined by ethnic conflict: that is to say, by civil war.7 The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have together already produced twenty or more new (old) “nations” or national fragments. In the most egregious cases, the United Nations sends peacekeeping forces, although its member nations are increasingly loath to put their soldiers at risk. Currently, it has stationed troops in eighteen countries—in nearly every case, arrayed against forces of domestic insurrection and civil discord.8 The Carter Center in Atlanta has a still more nuanced and thus expansive list that is more or less mirrored in the forty-eight trouble spots charted by The New York Times at the beginning of 1993.9 Amnesty International reports political prisoners and political executions in more than sixty countries.

In this tumultuous world, the real players are not nations at all but tribes, many of them at war with one another. Their aim is precisely to redraw boundaries in order to divide—say in Kurdish Iraq or Muslim Sudan or Serbian-populated sections of Croatia. Countries like Afghanistan, recently fighting a foreign invader in the name of its national independence, have been effectively dismembered: divided among Panthans, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. This is ethnic membership enhanced via national dismemberment—or by expulsion or expunction of unwanted contaminators, as has occurred in slaughter-happy Rwanda. Is this pandaemonium just an extension of benign efforts at multiculturalism? A natural consequence of a centuries-old impulse to self-determination? Or the appearance of a new disease that has corrupted integral nationalism and opened the way to ethnic and religious Jihad?

Jihad is, I recognize, a strong term. In its mildest form, it betokens religious struggle on behalf of faith, a kind of Islamic zeal. In its strongest political manifestation, it means bloody holy war on behalf of partisan identity that is metaphysically defined and fanatically defended. Thus, while for many Muslims it may signify only ardor in the name of a religion that can properly be regarded as universalizing (if not quite ecumenical), I borrow its meaning from those militants who make the slaughter of the “other” a higher duty.10 I use the term in its militant construction to suggest dogmatic and violent particularism of a kind known to Christians no less than Muslims, to Germans and Hindis as well as to Arabs. The phenomena to which I apply the phrase have innocent enough beginnings: identity politics and multicultural diversity can represent strategies of a free society trying to give expression to its diversity. What ends as Jihad may begin as a simple search for a local identity, some set of common personal attributes to hold out against the numbing and neutering uniformities of industrial modernization and the colonizing culture of McWorld.

America is often taken as the model for this kind of benign multiculturalism, although we too have our critics like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., for whom multiculturalism is never benign and for whom it signals the inaugural logic of a long-term disintegration.11 Indeed, I will have occasion below to write about an “American Jihad” being waged by the radical Right. The startling fact is that less than 10 percent (about twenty) of the modern world’s states are truly homogenous and thus, like Denmark or the Netherlands, can’t get smaller unless they fracture into tribes or clans.12 In only half is there a single ethnic group that comprises even 75 percent of the population.13 As in the United States, multiculturalism is the rule, homogeneity the exception. Nations like Japan or Spain that appear to the outside world as integral turn out to be remarkably multicultural. And even if language alone, the nation’s essential attribute, is made the condition for self-determination, a count of the number of languages spoken around the world suggests the community of nations could grow to over six thousand members.

The modern nation-state has actually acted as a cultural integrator and has adapted well to pluralist ideals: civic ideologies