Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [7]
It will be hard for defenders of modernity—whether of McWorld’s markets or democracy’s citizenship—to have it both ways. Terrorism turns out to be a depraved version of globalization, no less vigorous in its pursuit of its own special interests than are global markets, no less wedded to anarchist disorder than are speculators, no less averse to violence when it serves their ends than marketers are averse to inequality and injustice when they are conceptualized as the “costs of doing business.” It is their instinctive reading of this equation that turns poor people abroad into cheering mobs when Americans experience grievous losses at home. It is their perception of overwhelming hypocrisy that leads them to exult where we would wish for them to grieve.
In his address to Congress, President Bush was speaking to the world at large when he said, “You are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Americans may appreciate the impulse to divide the world into good and evil (though some will think that it smacks of the very Manicheanism for which Americans excoriate their fundamentalist adversaries), but America’s enemies (and more than a few of its friends) are likely to find this discourse unfortunate and misleading if not hubristic. An America that comprehends the realities of interdependence and wishes to devise a democratic architecture to contain its global disorder cannot ask others to either join it or else “suffer the consequences.” It is not that the world must join America: McWorld already operates on this premise, and the premise is precisely the problem. Rather, America must join the world on whatever terms it can negotiate on an equal footing with the world. Whether a product of arrogance or prudence, the demand that the world join the United States simply cannot secure results. It defies the very interdependence to which it is addressed. It assumes a sovereign autonomy the United States does not and cannot enjoy.
In Jihad vs. McWorld, I worry that a pervasive culture of fast food, fast computers, and fast music advanced by an infotainment industry rooted in the spread of brands tend to homogenize global markets and render taste not merely shallow but uniform. McWorld’s culture represents a kind of soft imperialism in which those who are colonized are said to “choose” their commercial indenture. But real choice demands real diversity and civic freedom (public choice—a point explored below). It also requires a willingness by the United States to work multilaterally and internationally to build global democratic infrastructures that rise next to McWorld and offset its trivial and bottom-up but all-too-pervasive hegemonies.
Yet in the last ten years the United States has intensified its commitment to a political culture of unilateralism and faux autonomy that reinforces rather than attenuates the effects of McWorld. There is hardly a multilateral treaty of significance to which the United States has willingly subscribed in recent times, whether it is the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the ban on land mines, or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Indeed, at the time of the terrorist attack the United States was threatening to unilaterally abrogate the ABM treaty in order to be able to develop and deploy its missile defense shield. There is hardly a single international institution that has not been questioned, undermined, or outright abandoned by the United States in the name of its need to protect its sovereign interests. Only the competing need to gather a coalition to underwrite its antiterrorist military strike compelled the American government finally to pay its UN dues and to commit to modest amounts of simple humanitarian aid that should have been a function of normalcy (the United States still devotes a smaller percentage