Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [195]
Chapter 11. Jihad Within McWorld: The “Democracies”
1. J. J. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater (original published in 1758), Allan Bloom, editor, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 58.
2. Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), p. 5.
3. French Minister of Culture Jacques Toubon worries about “tribal” tendencies in language, with executives speaking English, immigrants speaking their own languages, ordinary people speaking “the language of television,” and “in the middle the language of administration … and perhaps of intellectuals and professors”—all of which would result in a “catastrophe.” The Latest European News, published by United Airlines, November 29, 1994.
4. According to Alan Riding, “Celts and Proud of It (Even if They Are French),” The New York Times, August 2, 1991, p. A 4.
5. Of the 2.8 million who inhabit the peninsular fragment jutting out into the Atlantic, there are perhaps 100,000 involved in the local folk movement. Once the target of Nazis who promised them independence if they would ally themselves with the Germans, the Celts of Brittany actually forged a Brittany Liberation Front and talked revolution in 1968. Today, more intellectuals than peasants actually speak Breton, although there is a “seed” school (a “Diwan”) with one thousand children enrolled, and leaders encourage local playwrights to compose Breton plays and urge academics to plan Breton dictionaries.
6. The bureau was founded in 1982 and in 1993 had a $4.2 million budget. Marlise Simons, “A Reborn Provençal Heralds Revival of Regional Tongues,” The New York Times, May 3, 1993, pp. A I, 8. The “conceit” here is not the importance of cultural identity, but the belief that a handful of intellectuals can revivify languages that have no practical use in schools, commerce, or the home.
7. See André Frossard, “L’Europe: une nouvelle tour de babel,” Document, Paris Match, 1993/4.
8. The Swiss offer a particularly interesting case of multiculturalism in which the French Swiss identify with the progressive interests of France and Europe while the German Swiss (those in the country, not the Zurich bankers and Basel corporation executives) see themselves as true Swiss (not ersatz Germans) hostile to Europe and the McWorld it represents. I have written at length about the Swiss case in The Death of Communal Liberty: the History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). See also the excellent compendium on Switzerland in Europe, Can the Confederatio Helvetica Be Imitated? Special issue of Government and Opposition, Vol. 23, No. I, Winter, 1988.
9. The 1994 version of the advertisement, paid for by the Generalitat de Catalunya, offers a blank page and a point identified as Barcelona on it: “In which country would you place this point?” it mischievously asks. Several pages later comes the answer: Catalonia is “a country in Spain with its own culture, language and identity … a country in which many foreign enterprises have invested and are still heavily investing … a country with the know-how to get the Olympic Games for its capital.” An early advertisement appeared in The New York Times, July 17, 1992, pp. A 5, 7. The new campaign started in the spring of 1994 with an April 25 Newsweek advertisement. The ambivalence toward McWorld is expressed in the simultaneous focus on Catalonian separatism and the Catalonian cultural heritage and on Catalonia’s capitalist and commercial virtues and its role as a European economic center; Barcelona’s patron saint Sant Jordi and Catalan heroes