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By Root 1339 0

a rationalization for exploitation and oppression in the international sphere; too often what we call the international order is for them an international disorder. Our neoliberal antagonism to all political regulation in the global sector, to all institutions of legal and political oversight, to all attempts at democratizing globalization and institutionalizing economic justice looks to them like brute indifference to their welfare and their claims for justice. Western beneficiaries of McWorld celebrate market ideology with its commitment to the privatization of all things public and the commercialization of all things private, and consequently insist on total freedom from government interference in the global economic sector (laissez-faire). Yet total freedom from interference—the rule of private power over public goods—is another name for anarchy. And terror is merely one of the many contagious diseases that anarchy spawns.

What was evident to those who, before September 11, suffered the economic consequences of an undemocratic international anarchy beyond the reach of democratic sovereignty was that while many in the first world benefit from free markets in capital, labor, and goods, these same anarchic markets leave ordinary people in the third world largely unprotected. What has become apparent to the rest of us after September 11 is that that same deregulated disorder from which financial and trade institutions imagine they benefit is the very disorder on which terrorism depends. Markets and globalized financial institutions, whether multinational corporations or individual currency speculators, are deeply averse to oversight by nation-states. McWorld seeks to overcome sovereignty and make its impact global. Jihad too makes war on sovereignty, using the interdependence of transportation, communication, and other modern technological systems to render borders porous and sovereign oversight irrelevant. Just as jobs defy borders, hemorrhaging from one country to another in a wage race to the bottom, and just as safety, health, and environmental standards lack an international benchmark against which states and regions might organize their employment, so too anarchistic terrorists loyal to no state and accountability to no people range freely across the world, knowing that no borders can detain them, no united global opinion can isolate them, no international police or juridical institutions can interdict them. The argument laid out in what follows proposes that both Jihad and McWorld undermine the sovereignty of nation-states, dismantling the democratic institutions that have been their finest achievement without discovering ways to extend democracy either downward to the subnational religious and ethnic entities that now lay claim to people’s loyalty or upward to the international sector in which McWorld’s pop culture and commercial markets operate without sovereign restraints.

Unlike America, which pretends to still enjoy sovereign independence, taking responsibility neither for the global reach of its popular culture (McWorld) nor for the secularizing and trivializing character of its adamant materialism, the terrorists acknowledge and exploit the actual interdependence that characterizes human relations in the twenty-first century. Theirs, however, is a perverse and malevolent interdependence, one in which they have learned to use McWorld’s weight jujitsu-style against its massive power. Ironically, even as the United States fosters an anarchic absence of sovereignty at the global level, it has resisted even the slightest compromise of its national sovereignty at home. America has complained bitterly in recent years about the prospect of surrendering a scintilla of its own sovereignty, whether to NATO commanders, to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal, or to international treaties such as those banning land mines or regulating emissions. Even as I write, with the United States launching a military campaign against terrorism surrounded by a prudently constructed coalition, it has