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By Root 1365 0

to premodern times: an attempt to recapture a world that existed prior to cosmopolitan capitalism and was defined by religious mysteries, hierarchical communities, spellbinding traditions, and historical torpor. As such, they may appear to be directly adversarial to the forces of McWorld. Yet Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response to modernity whose features both reflect and reinforce the modern world’s virtues and vices—Jihad via McWorld rather than Jihad versus McWorld. The forces of Jihad are not only remembered and retrieved by the enemies of McWorld but imagined and contrived by its friends and proponents.

Modernity precedes and thus sponsors and conditions its critics. And though those critics, on the way to combatting the modern, may try to resuscitate ancient usages and classical norms, such usages and norms—ethnicity, fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and culture for example—are themselves at least in part inventions of the agitated modern mind.3 Jihad is not only McWorld’s adversary, it is its child. The two are thus locked together in a kind of Freudian moment of the ongoing cultural struggle, neither willing to coexist with the other, neither complete without the other. Benedict Anderson gets it exactly right when he conceives of that driving engine of Jihad, the nation, as “an imagined political community.”4 Which brings us to the crucial question of nationalism, and its role in the struggle of Jihad versus McWorld.

The Meaning(s) of Nationalism

AMONG THE FORGES that animate modern Jihad, religion may be at once the most noble and the most toxic, but none is so prominent as nationalism, according to Walter Russell Mead and many others “the most powerful political force on earth today.”5 The trouble is, those who agree on nationalism’s potency do not agree on its meaning. There is old nationalism and new nationalism, good nationalism and bad nationalism, civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism, nationalism as the forge of great states and nationalism as their coffin, East European nationalism (arrayed against external empires [Turkish, Russian, Austrian]) and West European nationalism (arrayed against parochial forces inhibiting nation building), the nationalism of the liberal nation-state and the nationalism of ethnie: of parochial politics and tribalism.6

As a moment in the antimodern life of Jihad, nationalism suggests narrowness, antagonism, and divisiveness and seems to exist in a primarily negative form—ethnic and cultural particularism that aims at busting up the nation-state and flinging aside multicultural wholes in the name of monocultural fragments. Free traders and One McWorlders use nationalism as a scathing pejorative denoting a fractious and anticosmopolitan tribalism, reeking of bloody fraternalism and equally toxic doses of the parochial and the primitive.

Yet this is to distort what is in fact a far more dialectical conception of the nationalist idea in history. While it may seem to undermine integral states today, nationalism once helped fashion the states that forged the Enlightenment. As a consequence, it gained considerable momentum and a modernizing cachet of its own with the rationalistic (if often irrational) revolutions spawned by the Enlightenment in France, America, and Germany. The aspiration to a “liberal nationalism” that united the cosmopolitan ideals of liberty and equality with the communitarian ideals of fraternity and solidarity motivated the Jacobins and the American founders alike, and permitted peoples bound by culture and history nonetheless to fashion constitutions founded on rights and reason. The Greek revolt against Ottoman rule that drew Lord Byron to his epiphanic demise in 1824, for example, gained decisive support from English romantics and English liberals because national self-determination was perceived as the condition for the progress of liberty and liberty was understood to be nationalism’s noblest aspiration. No less a liberal than J. S. Mill had established what he