Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [196]
10. Commentators have suggested King Juan Carlos may have bested Pujol in the short run by charming the crowds with his deferential Catalan and his good manners, and by making Pujol’s attempt to seize the Olympics look clumsy and fanatic; but his performance was in effect orchestrated by the Catalan nationalists to whom he was responding and they are surely the real long-term victors.
11. Alan Riding, “The Olympics Crown a King with Laurels,” The New York Times, August 12, 1992, p. A 5. The special privileges Pujol gained for Catalonia are now being sought by ethnic nationalists from other regions of Spain.
12. As paraphrased by Marlise Simons, “A Reborn Provençal,” pp. A 1, 8.
13. The measure passed by a nearly 80 percent margin in Geneva and Neuchâtel and failed by nearly the same margin in the founding German Swiss cantons of Schwyz and Uri (approximately 75 percent).
14. “Switzerland and Europe: Time to Join the Others?” The Economist, November 28, 1992, p. 52. The insufficiently docile masses, perched imperturbably on their European Himalayas, managed on December 6, 1992, to once again ignore their elites. Though only a bare popular majority of 50.3 percent had said no, eighteen of twenty-six cantons had stood firmly against while only eight (all francophone) had voted yes (fourteen were needed for passage).
15. For example, see “La vieille tradition du chemin solitaire” (the old tradition of the solitary road), in the Left daily Libération, December 7, 1992, as well as the accompanying editorial by Gerard Dupuy, “Un Nouveau Coup Contre L’Europe” (a new blow against Europe). Dupuy wrote: “‘L’exception’ suisse, sa fonction de soupape, n’a plus grand sens dans un monde en voie d’homogèneisation, en particuliere dans sa partie européenne.”
16. The ban lasted only a few years, and was supported for more cynical reasons by the local railway company, but the language used to justify the ban was remarkably prescient in its predictions of economic encroachment and environmental ruin. For the details, see Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty.
17. On Quebec, see Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging. Because he is Canadian by birth, his treatment of Quebec is perhaps the most convincing section of his book.
18. Joel Kotkin captures some of the ambivalence of diaspora peoples by using the term tribe to refer to transnational peoples operating on the new economic frontier of trade and commerce—i.e., Indians, Chinese, and Jews but also (rather oddly) Brits and Americans too. See Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 1993).
19. An Amendment to the Canadian Constitution guarantees the equality of English and French in New Brunswick, but it is a result of attempts to mollify the Quebecois. See Clyde Farnsworth, “Acadians Cling to Their Culture, and to Canada,” The New York Times, July 5, 1994, p. A 4.
20. Perhaps it is not so surprising that some of the same weary people who reviled the Communist symbols that dominated Communist East Berlin’s Karl Marx Platz should now revile the commercial symbols that dominate it (renamed Augustus Platz) today. Where the “imperialist” hammer and sickle once flew now sits the glitzy “imperialist” logo of Mercedes-Benz—much as, in today’s Budapest, the “Gold Star” logo of the South Korean electronics giant has been plastered across what was previously the apartment of Marxist theoretician George Lukacs.
21. The band Radikahl’s song “Swastika.” There is a powerful paradox in the use of modernity’s commercial medium, rock music, by the enemies of modernity, who wear T-shirts bearing the logo: “Hitler: The European Tour.”
There has been slippage, however, and bands like Stoerkraft and Böse Onkelz have moved away from the Right. Ingo Hasselbach, a founding