Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber[The Nation J21]
Janet M Eaton
Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld by BENJAMIN R. BARBER -
The only war worth winning is the struggle for democracy.
(from the January 21, 2002 issue)
He concludes his lengthy analysis:
"Nonetheless, in closing the door on the era of sovereign
independence and American security, anarchic terrorism has
opened a window for those who believe that social injustice,
unregulated wild capitalism and an aggressive secularism that
leaves no space for religion and civil society not only create
conditions on which terrorism feeds but invite violence in the name
of rectification. As a consequence, we are at a seminal moment in
our history--one in which trauma opens up the possibility of new
forms of action. Yesterday's utopia is today's realism; yesterday's
realism, a recipe for catastrophe tomorrow. If ever there was one,
this is democracy's moment. Whether our government seizes it will
depend not just on George Bush but on us. "
Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld
by BENJAMIN R. BARBER -
The terrorist attacks of September 11 did without a doubt change
the world forever, but they failed to change the ideological viewpoint
of either the left or the right in any significant way. The warriors and
unilateralists of the right still insist war conducted by an ever-
sovereign America is the only appropriate response to terrorism,
while the left continues to talk about the need for internationalism,
interdependency and an approach to global markets that redresses
economic imbalances and thereby reduces the appeal of
extremism-- if, in the climate of war patriotism, it talks a little more
quietly than heretofore. The internationalist lobby has a right to
grow more vociferous, however, for what has changed in the wake
of September 11 is the relationship between these arguments and
political realism (and its contrary, political idealism). Prior to
September 11, realpolitik (though it could speak with progressive
accents, as it did with Ronald Steel and E.H. Carr before him)
belonged primarily to the right-- which spurned talk of human rights
and democracy as hopelessly utopian, the blather of romantic left-
wing idealists who preferred to see the world as they wished it to
be rather than as it actually was.
Following September 11, however, the realist tiger changed its
stripes: "Idealistic" internationalism has become the new realism.
We face not a paradigm shift but the occupation of an old paradigm
by new tenants. Democratic globalists are quite abruptly the new
realists while the old realism--especially in its embrace of markets--
looks increasingly like a dangerous and utterly unrealistic dogma
opaque to our new realities as brutally inscribed on the national
consciousness by the demonic architects of September 11. The
issue is not whether to pursue a military or a civic strategy, for both
are clearly needed; the issue is how to pursue either one.
The historical realist doctrine was firmly grounded in an
international politics of sovereign states pursuing their interests in a
setting of shifting alliances where principles could only obstruct the
achievement of sovereign ends that interests alone defined and
served. Its mantras--the clichés of Lord Acton, Henry Morgenthau,
George Kennan or, for that matter, Henry Kissinger--had it that
nations have neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies but
only permanent interests; that the enemies of our enemies are
always our friends; that the pursuit of democratic ideals or human
rights can often obfuscate our true interests; that coalitions and
alliances in war or peace are tolerable only to the degree that we
retain our sovereign independence in all critical decisions and
policies; and that international institutions are to be embraced,
ignored or discarded exclusively on the basis of how well they
serve our sovereign national interests, which are entirely separable
from the objectives of such institutions.
However appealing these mantras may seem, and though upon
occasion they served to counter the hypocritical use of democratic
arguments to disguise interests (as when true democrats attacked
Woodrow Wilson's war to make the world "safe for democracy"),
they can no longer be said to represent even a plausible, let alone
a realistic, strategy in our current circumstances. To understand
why, we need to understand how September 11 put a period once
and for all at the end of the old story of American independence.
Many would say the two great world wars of the past century, even
as they proved American power and resilience, were already
distinct if unheeded harbingers of the passing of our sovereignty;
for, though fought on foreign soil, they represented conflicts from
which America could not be protected by its two oceans, struggles
whose outcomes would affect an America linked to the then-
nascent global system. Did anyone imagine that America could be
indifferent to the victory of fascism in Europe or Japanese
imperialism in Asia (or, later, of Soviet Communism in Eurasia) as
it might once have been indifferent to the triumph of the British or
Belgian or French empires in Africa? By the end of the twentieth
century, irresistible interdependence was a leitmotif of every
ecological, technological and economic event. It could hardly
escape even casual observers that global warming recognizes no
sovereign territory, that AIDS carries no passport, that technology
renders national boundaries increasingly meaningless, that the
Internet defies national regulation, that oil and cocaine addiction
circle the planet like twin plagues and that financial capital and
labor resources, like their anarchic cousins crime and terror, move
from country to country with "wilding" abandon without regard for
formal or legal arrangements-- acting informally and illegally
whenever traditional institutions stand in their way.
Most nations understood the significance of these changes well
enough, and well before the end of the past century Europe was
already on the way to forging transnational forms of integration that
rendered its member nations' sovereignty dubious. Not the United
States. Wrapped in its national myths of splendid isolation and
blessed innocence (chronicled insightfully by Herman Melville and
Henry James), it held out. How easy it was, encircled by two
oceans and reinforced lately in its belief in sovereign invincibility by
the novel utopia of a missile shield--technology construed as a
virtual ocean to protect us from the world's turmoil and dangers--to
persist in the illusion of sovereignty. The good times of the 1990s
facilitated an easy acquiescence in the founding myths, for in that
(suddenly remote) era of prideful narcissism, other people's
troubles and the depredations that were the collateral damage of
America's prosperous and productive global markets seemed little
more than diverting melodramas on CNN's evening "news" soap
operas.
Then came September 11. Marauders from the sky, from above
and abroad but also from within and below, sleepers in our midst
who somehow were leveraging our own powers of technology to
overcome our might, made a mockery of our sovereignty,
demonstrating that there was no longer any difference between
inside and outside, between domestic and international. We still
don't know authoritatively who precisely sponsored the acts of
September 11 or the bioterror that followed it: What alone has
become clear is that we can no longer assign culpability in the
neat nineteenth-century terms of domestic and foreign. And while
we may still seek sovereign sponsors for acts of terror that have
none, the myth of our independence can no longer be sustained.
Nonstate actors, whether they are multinational corporations or
loosely knit terrorist cells, are neither domestic nor foreign, neither
national nor international, neither sovereign entities nor international
organizations. Going on about states that harbor terrorists (our
"allies" Egypt and Saudi Arabia? Our good friend Germany? Or
how about Florida and New Jersey?) simply isn't helpful in catching
the bad guys. The Taliban are gone, and bin Laden will no doubt
follow, but terrorism's network exists in anonymous cells we can
neither identify nor capture. Declaring our independence in a world
of perverse and malevolent interdependence foisted on us by
people who despise us comes close to what political science
roughnecks once would have called pissing into the wind. Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia still foster schools that teach hate, and suicide
bombers are still lining up in Palestine for martyrdom missions in
numbers that suggest an open call for a Broadway show.
The American myth of independence is not the only casualty of
September 11. Traditional realist paradigms fail us today also
because our adversaries are no longer motivated by "interest" in
any relevant sense, and this makes the appeal to interest in the
fashion of realpolitik and rational-choice theory seem merely
foolish. Markets may be transnational instruments of interests, and
even bin Laden has a kind of "list of demands" (American troops
out of Saudi Arabia, Palestine liberated from Israeli "occupation,"
down with the infidel empire), but terrorists are not stubborn
negotiators pursuing rational agendas. Their souls yearn for other
days when certainty was unencumbered, for other worlds where
paradise offered other rewards. Their fanaticism has causes and
their zeal has its reasons, but market conceptions of interest will
not succeed in fathoming them. Bombing Hanoi never brought the
Vietcong to their knees, and they were only passionate
nationalists, not messianic fundamentalists; do we think we can
bomb into submission the millions who resent, fear and sometimes
detest what they think America means?
Or take the realist epigram about nations having neither permanent
friends nor permanent enemies. It actually turns out that America's
friends, defined not by interests but by principles, are its best allies
and most reliable coalition partners in the war on terrorism. Even
conservative realists have acknowledged that Israel--whatever one
thinks of Sharon's policies-- is a formidable ally in part because it
is the sole democracy in the Middle East. By the same token, we
have been consistently betrayed by an odd assortment of allies
born of shifting alliances that have been forged and broken in
pursuit of "friendship" with the enemies of our enemies: Iraq, Iran
and those onetime allies of convenience in the war against the
Soviets, the Taliban. Then there are the countless Islamic tyrannies
that are on our side only because their enemies have in turn been
the enemies of American economic interests or threats to the flow
of oil. I will leave it to others to determine how prudent our realist
logic is in embracing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen or Pakistan,
whose official media and state-sponsored schools often promulgate
the very propaganda and lies we have joined with them to combat.
On the other hand, the key principles at stake-- democracy and
pluralism, a space for religion safe from state and commercial
interference, and a space for government safe from sectarianism
and the ambitions of theocrats--actually turn out to be prudent and
useful benchmarks for collecting allies who will stand with us in the
war on terrorism. In the new post-September 11 realism, it is
apparent that the only true friends we have are the democracies,
and they are friends because they are democracies and share our
values even when they contest our interests and are made anxious
by our power. In the war against terror or the war for freedom, what
true realist would trade a cantankerous, preternaturally anti-
American France for a diplomatic and ostentatiously pro-American
Saudi Arabia?
Yet the pursuit of democracy has been a sideline in an American
realist foreign policy organized around oil and trade with despots
pretending to be on our side--not just in Republican but in
Democratic administrations as well, where democracy was
proclaimed but (remember Larry Summers) market democracy
construed as market fundamentalism was practiced. In the old
paradigm, democratic norms were very nice as emblems of
abstract belief and utopian aspiration, or as rationalizations of
conspicuous interests, but they were poor guides for a country
seeking status and safety in the world. Not anymore. The cute
cliché about democracies not making war on one another is
suddenly a hard realist foundational principle for national security
policy.
Except the truth today is not only that democracies do not make
war on one another, but that democracies alone are secure from
collective forms of violence and reactionary fundamentalism,
whether religious or ethnic. Those Islamic nations (or nations with
large Islamic populations) that have made progress toward
democracy-- Bangladesh, India or Turkey, for example--have been
relatively free of systematic terrorism and reactionary
fundamentalism as well as the export of terrorism. They may still
persecute minorities, harbor racists and reflect democratic
aspirations only partially, but they do not teach hate in their
schools or pipe propaganda through an official press or fund
terrorist training camps. Like India recently, they are the victims
rather than the perpetrators of international terrorism. Making allies
of the enemies of democracy because they share putative interests
with us is, in other words, not realism but foolish self-deception.
We have learned from the military campaign against the Taliban
and Al Qaeda how, when push comes to shove (push has come to
shove!), the Egyptians and the Saudis can be unreliable in sharing
intelligence, interdicting the funding of terrorism or standing firm
against the terrorists at their own door. Pakistan still allows
thousands of fundamentalist madrassahs to operate as holy-war
training schools. Yet how can these "allies" possibly be tough
when, in defense of their despotic regimes, they think that coddling
the terrorists outside their doors may be the price they have to pay
for keeping at bay the terrorists already in their front parlors? The
issue is not religion, not even fundamentalism; the issue is
democracy.
Unilateralism rooted in a keen sense of the integrity of sovereign
autonomy has been another keynote of realism's American
trajectory and is likely to become another casualty of September
11. From the Monroe Doctrine to our refusal to join the League of
Nations, from the isolationism that preceded World War II, and
from which we were jarred only by Pearl Harbor, to the isolationism
that followed the war and that yielded only partially to the cold war
and the arms race, and from our reluctance to pay our UN dues or
sign on to international treaties to our refusal to place American
troops under the command of friendly NATO foreigners, the United
States has persisted in reducing foreign policy to a singular formula
that preaches going it alone. Despite the humiliations of the 1970s,
when oil shortages, emerging ecological movements and the
Iranian hostage crisis should have warned us of the limitations of
unilateralism, we went on playing the Lone Ranger, the banner of
sovereign independence raised high.
We often seem nearly comatose when it comes to the many small
injuries and larger incursions to which American sovereignty is
subjected on a daily basis by those creeping forms of
interdependence that characterize modernity--technology, ecology,
trade, pop culture and consumer markets. Only the blunt assault of
the suicide bombers awoke the nation to the new realities and the
new demands on policy imposed by interdependence. Which is
why, since September 11, there has been at least a wan feint in
the direction of multilateralism and coalition-building. The long-
unpaid UN bills were finally closed out, the Security Council was
consulted and some Republican officials even whispered the
dreaded Clinton-tainted name of nation-building as a possible
requirement in a postwar strategy in Afghanistan.
Yet there is a long way to go. While the Colin Powell forces do
battle with the Dick Cheney forces for the heart of the President,
little is being done to open a civic and political front in the
campaign against terrorism. After what seemed a careful
multilateral dance with President Putin on missile defense,
President Bush has abruptly thrust his ballroom partner aside and
waltzed off into the sunset by himself, leaving the Russians and
Chinese (and our European allies) to sulk in the encroaching
gloom. Even in Afghanistan, Nicholas Kristof, in his first
contribution as the New York Times's new crisis-of-terrorism
columnist, complained that even as other nations' diplomats poured
into the capital after its fall, the United States posted not a single
representative to Kabul to begin nurturing a postwar political and
civil strategy--a reticence it has only just now begun to remedy.
Is there anything realistic about such reluctance? On the contrary,
realism here in its new democratic form suggests that America
must begin to engage in the slow and sovereignty-eroding business
of constructing a cooperative and benevolent interdependence in
which it joins the world rather than demanding that the world join it
or be consigned to the camp of the terrorists ("You are with us or
you are with the terrorists," intoned the President in those first
fearful days after September 11). This work recognizes that while
terrorism has no justification, it does have causes. The old realism
went by the old adage tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner and
eschewed deep explanations of the root causes of violence and
terror. The new realism insists that to understand collective malice
is not to pardon it but to assure that it can be addressed,
interdicted and perhaps even pre-empted. "Bad seed" notions of
original sin ("the evil ones") actually render perpetrators
invulnerable--subject only to a manichean struggle in which the
alternative to total victory is total defeat. Calling bin Laden and his
associates "the evil ones" is not necessarily inaccurate, but it
commits us to a dark world of jihad and counterjihad (what the
President first called his crusade), in which issues of democracy,
civil comity and social justice--let alone nuance, complexity and
interdependence--simply vanish. It is possible to hate jihad without
loving America. It is possible to condemn terror as absolutely
wrong without thinking that those who are terror's targets possess
absolute right.
This is the premise behind the thesis of interdependence. The
context of jihadic resistance and its pathology of terrorism is a
complex world in which there are causal interrelationships between
the jihadic reaction to modernity and the American role in shaping
it according to the peculiar logic of US technology, markets and
branded pop culture (what I call McWorld). Determining
connections and linkages is not the same thing as distributing
blame. Power confers responsibility. The power enjoyed by the
United States bestows on it obligations to address conditions it
may not have itself brought into being. Jihad in this view may grow
out of and reflect (among other things) a pathological metastasis of
valid grievances about the effects of an arrogant secularist
materialism that is the unfortunate concomitant of the spread of
consumerism across the world. It may reflect a desperate and
ultimately destructive concern for the integrity of indigenous cultural
traditions that are ill equipped to defend themselves against
aggressive markets in a free- trade world. It may reflect a struggle
for justice in which Western markets appear as obstacles rather
than facilitators of cultural identity.
Can Asian tea, with its religious and family "tea culture," survive
the onslaught of the global merchandising of cola beverages? Can
the family sit-down meal survive fast food, with its focus on
individualized consumers, fuel-pit-stop eating habits and
nourishment construed as snacking? Can national film cultures in
Mexico, France or India survive Hollywood's juggernaut movies
geared to universal teen tastes rooted in hard violence and easy
sentiment? Where is the space for prayer, for common religious
worship or for spiritual and cultural goods in a world in which the
24/7 merchandising of material commodities makes the global
economy go round? Are the millions of American Christian families
who home-school their children because they are so intimidated by
the violent commercial culture awaiting the kids as soon as they
leave home nothing but an American Taliban? Do even those
secular cosmopolitans in America's coastal cities want nothing
more than the screen diet fed them by the ubiquitous computers,
TVs and multiplexes?
Terror obviously is not an answer, but the truly desperate may
settle for terror as a response to our failure even to ask such
questions. The issue for jihad's warriors of annihilation is of course
far beyond such anxieties: It entails absolute devotion to absolute
values. Yet for many who are appalled by terrorism but
unimpressed by America, there may seem to be an absolutist
dimension to the materialist aspirations of our markets. Our global
market culture appears to us as both voluntary and wholesome; but
it can appear to others as both compelling (in the sense of
compulsory) and corrupt--not exactly coercive, but capable of
seducing children into a willed but corrosive secular materialism.
What's wrong with Disneyland or Nikes or the Whopper? We just
"give people what they want." But this merchandiser's dream is a
form of romanticism, the idealism of neoliberal markets, the
convenient idyll that material plenty can satisfy spiritual longing so
that fishing for profits can be thought of as synonymous with
trolling for liberty.
It is the new democratic realist who sees that if the only choice we
have is between the mullahs and the mall, between the hegemony
of religious absolutism and the hegemony of market determinism,
neither liberty nor the human spirit is likely to flourish. As we face
up to the costs both of fundamentalist terrorism and of fighting it,
must we not ask ourselves how it is that when we see religion
colonize every other realm of human life we call it theocracy and
turn up our noses at the odor of tyranny; and when we see politics
colonize every other realm of human life we call it absolutism and
tremble at the prospect of totalitarianism; but when we see market
relations and commercial consumerism try to colonize every other
realm of human life we call it liberty and celebrate its triumph?
There are too many John Walkers who begin by seeking a refuge
from the aggressive secularist materialism of their suburban lives
and end up slipping into someone else's dark conspiracy to rid the
earth of materialism's infidels. If such men are impoverished and
without hope as well, they become prime recruits for jihad.
The war on terrorism must be fought, but not as the war of
McWorld against jihad. The only war worth winning is the struggle
for democracy. What the new realism teaches is that only such a
struggle is likely to defeat the radical nihilists. That is good news
for progressives. For there are real options for democratic realists
in search of civic strategies that address the ills of globalization
and the insecurities of the millions of fundamentalist believers who
are neither willing consumers of Western commercial culture nor
willing advocates of jihadic terror. Well before the calamities of
September 11, a significant movement in the direction of
constructive and realistic interdependence was discernible,
beginning with the Green and human rights movements of the
1960s and '70s, and continuing into the NGO and
"antiglobalization" movements of the past few years. Jubilee 2000
managed to reduce Third World debt- service payments for some
nations by up to 30 percent, while the Community of Democracies
initiated by the State Department under Madeleine Albright has
been embraced by the Bush Administration and will continue to
sponsor meetings of democratic governments and democratic
NGOs. International economic reform lobbies like the Millennium
Summit's development goals project, established by the UN to
provide responses to global poverty, illiteracy and disease; Inter
Action, devoted to increasing foreign aid; Global Leadership, a start-
up alliance of corporations and grassroots organizations; and the
Zedillo Commission, which calls on the rich countries to devote 0.7
percent of their GNP to development assistance (as compared to
an average of 0.2 percent today and under 0.1 percent for the
United States), are making serious economic reform an issue for
governments. Moreover, and more important, they are insisting with
Amartya Sen and his new disciple Jeffrey Sachs that development
requires democratization first if it is to succeed.
George Soros's Open Society Institute and Civicus, the
transnational umbrella organization for NGOs, continue to serve the
global agenda of civil society. Even corporations are taking an
interest: Hundreds are collaborating in a Global Compact, under
the aegis of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, to seek a response
to issues of global governance, while the World Economic Forum
plans to include fifty religious leaders in a summit at its winter
meeting in New York in late January.
This is only a start, and without the explicit support of a more
multilateralist and civic-minded American government, such
institutions are unlikely to change the shape of global relations.
Nonetheless, in closing the door on the era of sovereign
independence and American security, anarchic terrorism has
opened a window for those who believe that social injustice,
unregulated wild capitalism and an aggressive secularism that
leaves no space for religion and civil society not only create
conditions on which terrorism feeds but invite violence in the name
of rectification. As a consequence, we are at a seminal moment in
our history--one in which trauma opens up the possibility of new
forms of action. Yesterday's utopia is today's realism; yesterday's
realism, a recipe for catastrophe tomorrow. If ever there was one,
this is democracy's moment. Whether our government seizes it will
depend not just on George Bush but on us.
*Benjamin R. Barber, distinguished university professor at the
University of Maryland, is the author of Jihad vs. McWorld
(Ballantine) and, most recently, The Truth of Power: Intellectual
Affairs in the Clinton White
House (Norton).
--
For MAI-not (un)subscription information, posting guidelines and
links to other MAI sites please see http://mai.flora.org/