Jihad vs. McWorld
Authors: Benjamin Barber
“McWorld is the universe of manufactured needs, mass consumption, and mass infotainment. It is motivated by profits and driven by the aggregate preferences of billions of consumers. Jihad is shorthand for the fierce politics of religious, tribal, and other zealots. In its most extreme manifestations—in the ultra nationalism of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Russia, for example, or the balkanization of the Balkans—it counters McWorld’s centrifugal pull and bloodless calculation.
Although some countries or parts of countries fit into one or the other category, Jihad and McWorld are not so much places as reactions to experience and attitudes of mind. As Mr. Barber provocatively puts it: ‘Belonging by default to McWorld, everyone is a consumer; seeking a repository for identity, everyone belongs to some tribe. But no one is a citizen.’”
—The Economist
“Jihad vs. McWorld
is that rare phenomenon—a book that is immensely readable, yet with a serious theme.”
—Government & Opposition
“Challenging and instructive.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Stimulating, tartly written.”
—Publishers Weekly
A BOOKLIST
EDITORS’ CHOICE
BOOKS BY BENJAMIN R. BARBER
The Truth of Power
(2001)
A Passion for Democracy
(1998)
A Place for Us
(1998)
Jihad vs. McWorld
(1995)
An Aristocracy of Everyone
(1992)
The Conquest of Politics
(1988)
Strong Democracy
(1984)
Marriage Voices
(A Novel) (1981)
Liberating Feminism
(1975)
The Death of Communal Liberty
(1974)
Superman and Common Men
(1971)
COLLABORATIONS
The Struggle for Democracy
with Patrick Watson (1989)
The Artist and Political Vision
edited with M. McGrath (1982)
Totalitarianism in Perspective
with C. J. Friedrich and M. Curtis (1969)
To the Memory of Judith N. Shklar
I was given extraordinary support by two research assistants. Carolyn Nestor did extensive work preparing the empirical materials for the chapters on McWorld, and also reviewed and corrected the notes and bibliographic materials on a crash schedule whose deadlines she met with remarkable aplomb. She acted as a sounding board for ideas and contributed far more than would be expected from a research assistant. I am very much in her debt. Mark Button helped develop research materials, theoretic and empirical, for the Jihad chapters, and was particularly astute in getting to the heart of alternative historical readings. Although the errors remain my own doing, the work of Nestor and Button saved me from what I know would have been many more.
Kathleen Quinn gave the finished manuscript several ruthless readings and readers owe her much for whatever fluency and continuity the text now has. Had she had her way, the book would have been even shorter and more readable, but someone had to take a stand for prolixity and I managed in the end to ignore rather too many of her sound editorial judgments.
Steve Wasserman at Times Books called me in Paris not long after my article on Jihad and McWorld appeared in
The Atlantic
and initiated a process of persuasion and discussion that led to this book. I am grateful to him for his enthusiasm and commitment, without which I would not have written the book. The same can be said of my old friend at
The Atlantic
, Jack Beatty, who encouraged me in developing a provocative idea into a sustainable argument.
Many friends, colleagues, associates, and anonymous commentators—both in the United States and abroad—have responded to the
original
Atlantic
article, scholarly and popular presentations of the argument as it developed, and sections of the manuscript as it was being written. I feel lucky to have had so many astute critics who were also friends, among them Michael Kustow, François D’Alancon, Bhikhu Parekh, Ivan Vitanyi, Jean Leca, Preston King, Michael Greven, Bruce Ackerman, Ghita Ionescu, Brian Barry, Chantal Mouffe, George Kateb, Nina Belyaeva, Harry Boyte, Richard Lehne, Seyla Benhabib, Alan Ryan, and the consummate scholar and dear friend to whom the book is dedicated, Judith N. Shklar—who feared Jihad, distrusted McWorld, and, ever so carefully, worked to clear a space for freedom and democracy.
Had I heeded these friendly critics more consistently, I would have certainly written a better book.
To my wife Leah and my daughter Nellie I owe an apology, though they have asked none of me. Without the labors of this project, I would have been better able to repay their indulgent tolerance. The guilt I feel arises not from complaint, but from how much too lovingly understanding they have been.
PART I. THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD
1. The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld
2. The Resource Imperative: The Passing of Autarky and the Fall of the West
3. The Industrial Sector and the Rise of the East
4. From Hard Goods to Soft Goods
6. Hollyworld: McWorld’s Videology
7. Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul
8. Teleliterature and the Theme Parking of McWorld
9. Who Owns McWorld? The Media Merger Frenzy
PART II. THE OLD WORLD OF JIHAD
10. Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld?
11. Jihad Within McWorld: The “Democracies”
12. China and the Not Necessarily Democratic Pacific Rim
13. Jihad Within McWorld: “Transitional Democracies”
14. Essential Jihad: Islam and Fundamentalism
15. Jihad and McWorld in the New World Disorder
16. Wild Capitalism vs. Democracy
17. Capitalism vs. Democracy in Russia
18. The Colonization of East Germany by McWorld
19. Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld
Appendix A. Justice-of-Energy-Distribution Index
Appendix B. Twenty-two Countries’ Top Ten Grossing Films,
1991
Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy
O
N SEPTEMBER 11
, Jihad’s long war against McWorld culminated in a fearsomely unprecedented and altogether astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise in New York City and the cathedral of American military might in Washington, D.C. In bringing down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and destroying a section of the Pentagon with diabolically contrived human bombs, Jihadic warriors reversed the momentum in the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, writing a new page in an ongoing story. Until that day, history’s seemingly ineluctable march into a complacent postmodernity had appeared to favor McWorld’s ultimate triumph—a historical victory for free-market institutions and McWorld’s assiduously commercialized and ambitiously secularist materialism. Today, the outcome of the confrontation between the future and the radical reaction to it seems far less certain. As the world enters a novel stage of shadowed warfare against an invisible enemy, the clash between Jihad and McWorld is again poignantly relevant in understanding why the modern response to terror cannot be exclusively military or tactical, but rather must entail a commitment to democracy and
justice even when they are in tension with the commitment to cultural expansionism and global markets. The war against terrorism also will have to be a war for justice if it is to succeed, and not just in the sense in which President George W. Bush used the term in his address to Congress.
A week after the trauma of the first large-scale assault on the American homeland, more successful than even its scheming perpetrators could possibly have hoped for, the president joined the abruptly renewed combat with Jihadic terrorists by deploying the rhetoric of retributive justice: “We will bring the terrorists to justice,” he said gravely to a joint session of Congress, “or we will bring justice to the terrorists.” The language of justice was surely the appropriate context for the American response, but it will remain appropriate only if the compass of its meaning is extended from retributive to distributive justice.
The collision between the forces of disintegral tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism I have called Jihad (Islam is not the issue) and the forces of integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural globalization I have called McWorld (for which America is not solely responsible) has been brutally exacerbated by the dialectical interdependence of these two seemingly oppositional sets of forces. In
Jihad vs. McWorld
, I warn that democracy is caught between a clash of movements, each of which for its own reasons seems indifferent to freedom’s fate, and might suffer grievously. It is now apparent, as we mount a new military offense against Jihad (understood not as Islam but as militant fundamentalism) that democracy rather than terrorism may become the principal victim of the battle currently being waged.
Only the globalization of civic and democratic institutions is likely to offer a way out of the global war between modernity and its aggrieved critics, for democracy responds both to Jihad and to McWorld. It responds directly to the resentments and spiritual unease of those for whom the trivialization and homogenization of values is an affront to cultural diversity and spiritual and moral seriousness. But it also answers the complaints of those mired in poverty and despair as a consequence of unregulated global markets and of a capitalism run wild because it has been uprooted from the humanizing constraints of the democratic nation-state. By extending the
compass of democracy to the global market sector, civic globalization can promise opportunities for accountability, participation, and governance to those wishing to join the modern world and take advantage of its economic blessings; by securing cultural diversity and a place for worship and faith insulated from the shallow orthodoxies of McWorld’s cultural monism, it can address the anxieties of those who fear secularist materialism and are fiercely committed to preserving their cultural and religious distinctiveness. The outcome of the cruel battle between Jihad and McWorld will depend on the capacity of moderns to make the world safe for women and men in search of both justice and faith, and can be won only if democracy is the victor.
If democracy is to be the instrument by which the world avoids the stark choice between a sterile cultural monism (McWorld) and a raging cultural fundamentalism (Jihad), neither of which services diversity or civic liberty, then America, Britain, and their allies will have to open a crucial second civic and democratic front aimed not against terrorism per se but against the anarchism and social chaos—the economic reductionism and its commercializing homogeneity—that have created the climate of despair and hopelessness that terrorism has so effectively exploited. A second democratic front will be advanced not only in the name of retributive justice and secularist interests, but in the name of distributive justice and religious pluralism.
The democratic front in the war on terrorism is not a battle to dissuade terrorists from their campaigns of annihilation. Their deeds are unspeakable, and their purposes can be neither rationalized nor negotiated. When they hijacked innocents and turned civilian air-crafts into lethal weapons, these self-proclaimed “martyrs of faith” in truth subjected others to a compulsory martyrdom indistinguishable from mass murder. The terrorists offer no terms and can be given none in exchange. When Jihad turns nihilistic, bringing it to justice can only take the form of extirpation—root, trunk, and branch. Eliminating terrorists will depend on professional military, intelligence, and diplomatic resources whose deployment will leave the greater number of citizens in America and throughout the world sitting on the sidelines, anxious spectators to a battle in which they cannot participate, a battle in which the nausea that accompanies fear
will dull the appetite for revenge. The second front, however, engages every citizen with a stake in democracy and social justice, both within nation-states and in the relations between them. It transforms anxious and passive spectators into resolute and engaged participants—the perfect antidote to fear.
