Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [89]
The nations that have tried a modest dose of regulation in recent years are regarded as mercantilist bogeys, and find themselves under duress from free traders and market zealots to let go—in the ancient phrase, laisser-faire. There are few democratic governments around today, certainly not in America or England, that display much taste for regulation or control in the name of the public weal. Governments have become the targets of alienated and disaffected clients and are not likely to be regarded as the instruments by which citizens can tame wild capitalism for some time. Markets have emerged triumphant from a war against the nation-state and the public interests they represent that has been waged at least since Adam Smith. Kenichi Ohmae of Japan, Herbert Henzler of West Germany, and Fred Gluck of the United States—three competitors in search of consensus—agreed back in 1990 on a “Declaration of Interdependence Toward the World in 2005.” Its paramount innovation was a call for the role of central governments to “change, so as to: allow individuals access to the best and cheapest goods and services from anywhere in the world; help corporations provide stable and rewarding jobs anywhere in the world regardless of the corporation’s national identity; coordinate activities with other governments to minimize conflicts arising from narrow interest; avoid abrupt changes in economic and social fundamentals.”9 Abrupt changes like democratization? Narrow interest like national environmental or employment policies? The declaration calls on the nation-state to participate in its own liquidation. In many regions of the Western world, the state seems to be obliging, with the complicity of outraged women and men who clearly prefer their rights as clients and consumers to their responsibilities and freedoms as citizens.
Perhaps they are making a virtue of necessity. For where governments still try to regulate or censor or subsidize or intervene, their efforts are increasingly futile, because the market for entertainment and information has become so global, the technologies so impervious to local control, and the ideology of free trade so pervasive. In the United States, regulatory advocates like Vice President Gore have pushed for “universal service” on the new information superhighway, urging that the “schoolchild in Carthage, Tennessee” should “be able to plug into the Library of Congress and work at home at his own pace … regardless of [his] income.”10 Speaker Gingrich has even proposed ways of getting computers into the hands of the poor. Pretty thoughts, but about as unlikely as anything imaginable in the hostile climate of antigovernment sentiment and transnational markets that dominates our times.
And so the original question reappears: in a world where the nation-state and its democratic institutions are being fractured and weakened by the divisive forces of Jihad at the same moment they are being rendered antiquated and superfluous by the integrating forces of McWorld, how is democracy to survive? Where on the vaunted information highway are the roads that will lead to justice or the pipes that will convey the vox populi? Now that they have dismantled the empire of despots and statist political ideologies, including democracy, how can communities defend their common goods against the empire of profits and cultural monopoly? Which democratic ideology can contend with the pretense to “choice” of “free” markets so that we can regain the power to choose public goods in common and thereby free ourselves from the inadvertent public consequences of all the private market choices that masquerade