Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [8]
The Bretton Woods institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (heir to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) might have been of some succor in the effort to construct a more democratic globalism if they had been used for the kinds of developmental and democratic purposes for which they were designed in postwar Europe. Instead they have been cast by the democratic governments that control them as undemocratic instruments of private interest—seemingly the tools of banks, corporations, and investors that to an untoward degree also control the policies of the governments that nominally control them. Anarchism in the global sector is no accident: It has been assiduously cultivated.
Yet terrorism can be understood in part as a depraved version of this global anarchism—one that, for all its depravity, is as vigorous and self-justifying as the global markets. It too profits from the arrogant pretense of claims to national sovereignty that turn out to be indefensible. It too benefits by the absence of international executive police and juridical institutions. It too exploits global anarchy to ferment national anarchy and the further weakening of the capacity of nations to control their own destinies, either apart or together. In late-nineteenth-century America, when the federal government was markedly weaker than it is today, social relations looked rather like global relations do today. Lawlessness came easily, both to the robber barons of growing capitalist metropolises and to the robber desperadoes of the western prairies. Outlaws prospered in the suites as well as in the streets.
The global sector today seems driven by the same anarchy, in which burgeoning forces of what many American bankers have called wild capitalism spread both productivity, which we welcome, and injustice, which we try to ignore. But alongside wild capitalism rage the reactionary forces of wild terrorism. Against capitalism’s modern message, Jihadic fundamentalism spreads its antimodern message, sowing fear and nurturing chaos, hoping to bring both democracy and capitalism to their knees. The war between Jihad and McWorld takes no prisoners. It cannot serve democracy, however it turns out.
The democratic project is to globalize democracy as we have globalized the economy—to democratize the globalism that has been so efficiently marketized. The issue is no longer the utopian longing for global democracy against the siren call of consumerism or the passionate war cries of Jihad; it is the securing of safety. Following September 11, global governance has become a sober mandate of political realism.
Mandate or not, it will not be easy for America to overcome the reassuring myth of national independence and innocence with which it has lived so comfortably for two hundred years. Before it began to trade in the international currency of McWorld that made it the global merchandiser, America had invented a simpler story about itself. In the Puritan myth of the city on the hill, in the Enlightenment conceit of a tabula rasa on which a new people would inscribe a fresh history, Americans embraced Tom Paine’s quaint and revolutionary notion that on the new continent humankind could literally go back and start over again, as if at “the beginning of the world.” Europe’s cruel torments, its ancient prejudices and religious persecutions, would be left behind. Safeguarded by two immense oceans, at home on a bountiful and empty continent (the native inhabitants were part of the new world’s flora and fauna), Americans would devise a new and experimental science of government, establish a new constitution fortified by rights, and with the innocence of a newborn people write a new history. Slavery, a great civil war, two world conflagrations, and totalitarian regimes abroad could not dissuade America from its precious self-definition. Even as the oceans became mere streams that could be crossed in an instant by invisible adversaries, even as the pressures