Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [6]
Yet terrorism has already made a mockery of sovereignty. What were the hijacking of airliners, the calamitous attack on the World Trade Center, and the brash attack on the Pentagon if not a profound obliteration of American sovereignty? Terrorism is the negative and depraved form of that interdependence, which in its positive and beneficial form we too often refuse to acknowledge. As if still in the nineteenth century, America has persuaded itself that its options today are either to preserve an ancient and blissfully secure independence that puts us in charge of American destiny, or to yield to a perverted and compulsory interdependence that puts foreigners and alien international bodies such as the United Nations or the World Court in charge of American destiny. In truth, however, Americans have not enjoyed genuine independence since sometime before the great wars of the last century—certainly not since the advent of AIDS and West Nile virus, global warming and an ever more porous ozone layer, job “mobility” that has decimated America’s industrial economy, and restive speculators who have made capital flight more of a sovereign reality than any conceivable government oversight could be. Interdependence is not some foreign adversary against which citizens need to muster resistance. It is a domestic reality that already has compromised the efficacy of citizenship in scores of unacknowledged and uncharted ways.
It was the interdependence of America with the world and the interdependence of shared economic and technological systems everywhere on which the Jihadic warriors counted when they brought terror to the American homeland. They not only hijacked American airplanes, turning them into deadly missiles, but provoked the nation into closing down its air transportation system for nearly a week. They not only destroyed the temple of American capitalism at the World Trade Center but forced capitalism to shut down its markets and shocked the country into a recession, of which the stock market in free fall was only a leading indicator. How can any nation claim independence under these conditions?
In the world before McWorld, democratic sovereign nations could claim to be independent autonomous peoples exercising autonomous control over their lives. In Andrew Jackson’s premodern, largely rural America, where communities existed in isolation, where there was no national system of transportation or communication, systematic terror was simply not an option, as there was no system. There was no way to bring America to its knees because in a crucial sense America did not exist, at least not as an integral collectivity of interdependent regions with a single interest, until after the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution that followed it. Today there is so much systemic interactivity, so highly integrated a global network, so finely tuned an integral communications technology, that it has become as easy to paralyze as to use the multiple systems and networks. Hence, the decision would-be sovereign peoples face today is not the felicitous choice between secure independence and unwanted interdependence. It is only the sobering choice between, on the one hand, a relatively legitimate, democratic, and useful interdependence (which, however, is still to be constructed and which leaves sovereignty in tatters) and, on the other hand, a radically illegitimate and undemocratic interdependence on the terms of criminals, anarchists, and terrorists (an interdependence that is already here and which will triumph in the absence of a democratizing political will). In short, either we can allow McWorld and Jihad—Hollywood cowboys and international desperadoes—to set the terms of our interdependence, or we can leave those terms to new transnational treaties, new global democratic bodies, and a new creative common will. We can have our interactivity dictated to us by violence and anarchy, or