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By Root 1455 0

and constitutional faiths around which their many clans and tribes can rally. It has not been too difficult to contrive a civil religion for Americans or French or Swiss, since these “peoples” actually contain multitudes of subnational factions and ethnic tribes earnestly seeking common ground. But for Basques and Normans? What need have they for anything but blood and memory? And what of Alsatians, Bavarians, and East Prussians? Kurds, Ossetians, East Timorese, Quebecois, Abkhazians, Catalonians, Tamils, Inkatha Zulus, Kurile Islander Japanese—peoples without countries inhabiting nations they cannot call their own? Peoples trying to seal themselves off not just from others but from modernity? These are frightened tribes running not to but from civic faith in search of something more palpable and electrifying. How will peoples who define themselves by the slaughter of tribal neighbors be persuaded to subscribe to some flimsy artificial faith organized around abstract civic ideals or commercial markets? Can advertising divert warriors of blood from the genocide required by their ancient grievances?

Like McWorld, Jihad can of course be painted in bright as well as dark colors. Just as McWorld’s sometimes rapacious markets have been advanced in the name of democratic free choice, so Jihad’s combative interests can be touted in the name of self-determination. Indeed, the ideology of self-determination may be the source of more than a few of Jihad’s pathologies. President Woodrow Wilson’s own secretary of state, Robert L. Lansing, failed to share his chief’s enthusiasm for the idea, asking would not self-determination “breed discontent, disorder and rebellion? The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!”14

Lansing’s anxieties seem well justified. In Wilson’s own time, the politics of self-determination balkanized Europe, fanned nationalist wildfires, and created instabilities that contributed to the rise of fascism. Today there is no tribe, no faction or splinter group or neighborhood gang, that does not aspire to self-determination. “Don’t dis me!” shouts the gangsta rapper, “I gotta get some respect.” The futile Owen-Vance map for the partition of Bosnia, multiplying boundaries as it narrowed the compass of ethnic communities, finally seemed to give respectability to a gang logic, trying to write into law the absurdity of treating nearly each city block as a nation, almost every housing unit a potential sovereign. In other times, this bankrupt political arrangement, sanctioned for a considerable time by a desperate United Nations Security Council, would carry the name anarchy.15

One cannot really blame the cartographers or peacemakers for Jihad’s absurdity, however. They do not rearrange the scene, they just take snapshots of it. Multiculturalism has in some places conjured anarchy. Self-determination has at times amounted to little more than other-extermination. Colonial masters did still worse in their time, drawing arbitrary lines across maps they could not read with consequences still being endured throughout the ex-colonial world, above all in Africa and the Middle East.16 Jihad is then a rabid response to colonialism and imperialism and their economic children, capitalism and modernity; it is diversity run amok, multiculturalism turned cancerous so that the cells keep dividing long after their division has ceased to serve the healthy corpus.17

Even traditionally homogenous integral nations have reason to feel anxious about the prospect of Jihad. The rising economic and communications interdependence of the world means that such nations, however unified internally, must nonetheless operate in an increasingly multicultural global environment. Ironically, a world that is coming together pop culturally and commercially is a world whose discrete subnational ethnic and religious and racial parts are also far more in evidence, in no small part as a reaction