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By Root 1416 0

so the collapse of the Communist empire seems to have unleashed the new forces of Jihad we see at work in Eastern Europe and European Asia. Whether that is because Communist repression worsened things (repression leading ineluctably to explosion) or contained forces in a fashion that might ultimately have eliminated them is a contentious question we cannot settle. What is clear is that even communism’s version of empire deferred the issue for several generations, sparing parents and grandparents the bloodshed being visited today on their grandchildren (though communism certainly exacted its own price in blood).

Capitalist empire was less successful as a governor on the whirling dervishes of ethnic nationalism since its hold was less explicitly coercive and since, as we have seen here, commerce and markets can arouse as well as placate ethnicity and its countermaterialist zeal. That is precisely what Jihad is all about.

Yet times change quickly. Just a few years ago, astute commentators like Conor Cruise O’Brien pointed a warning finger at the Middle East, South Africa, and Ireland as the world’s leading flash points; who would want to make that claim now? Yesterday, Libya was Europe’s prime headache; today, Algeria causes more concern though just yesterday it was France’s most “successful” ex-colony. The devil may be in the details, but in world politics the devil is a chameleon and no theory that dwells on one or another particular case is likely to survive the next political surprise.29

Hence, I hope in what follows to sketch a typology of Jihad with at best what can only claim to be transient illustrative evidence. The data are too protean to be definitive and the events too vulnerable to distortion by the very probes that affect to explain them to be detachable from the normative frames by which we try to capture them. This is the general problem with pretending that social and political theory can be “scientific.” Although I can give neither the case studies I sketch nor the conundrums they raise anything like their full due, I focus then, without pretending to science, on four different versions of the reaction to modernity representing four distinct perspectives on Jihad.

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Jihad Within McWorld:

The “Democracies”

IN THE WELL-ESTABLISHED European democracies, the temptation to resist modernity is modernity’s nervous commentary on itself. Europe’s rather pallid version of Jihad takes two intersecting forms: provincialism, which sets the periphery against the center; and parochialism, which disdains the cosmopolitan. Both are hostile to the capital city and all it stands for. Both understand decentralized power as less threatening to liberty and more susceptible to control than central power. Provincialism shares the democratic spirit of Jefferson. It prizes the sanctity of town or ward government and, with Tocqueville, understands liberty to be an essentially local or municipal notion unlikely to thrive under the pressures of large-scale governance and wholly contractual social relations. By this logic, Barcelona and Lyons are more likely to be free than Madrid or Paris, and the villages at their doorstep will in turn feel even freer than Barcelona and Lyons.

Parochialism adds to provincialism a cultural critique, descrying in the cosmopolitanism and commercialism of capital cities forces deeply corrupting to human association: atomism, agnosticism, anarchy, and anomie—a series of terms whose “a” prefix stresses the deracination or “withoutness” of a modern society reduced to its slightest particles and thus without communal coherence because it is without God and without order, without law and without justice. Rousseau’s acerb portrait of eighteenth-century capital cities captures the visceral force of the parochial critique: “In a big city,” thunders Rousseau, “full of scheming, idle people without religion or principle, whose imagination, depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure, and great needs, engenders only monsters and inspires only crimes.”1

Occitan France

THE FRANCE THAT is