Jihad vs. McWorld (2 page)

The first military front must be prosecuted, both because an outraged and wounded American nation demands it and because terrorists bent on annihilation will not yield to blandishments or inducements. They are looking not for bargains but for oblivion. Yet it will be the successful prosecution of a second civic front in the war rather than the strictly military campaign that will determine the outcome. It too, in President Bush’s words, will be a war for justice, but a war defined by a new commitment to distributive justice: a readjudication of North-South responsibilities, a redefinition of the obligations of global capital to include global justice and comity, a repositioning of democratic institutions as they follow markets from the domestic to the international sector, a new recognition of the place and requirements of faith in an aggressively secular market society. The war against Jihad will not, in other words, succeed unless McWorld is also addressed.

To be sure, democratizing globalism and rendering McWorld less homogenizing and trivializing to religion and its accompanying ethical and spiritual values will not appease the terrorists, who are scarcely students of globalization’s contractual insufficiencies. Jihadic warriors offer no quarter, whether they are the children of Islam, Christianity, or some blood tribalism, and they should be given none. I describe these warriors in
Jihad vs. McWorld
as people who detest modernity—the secular, scientific, rational, and commercial civilization created by the Enlightenment as it is defined by both its virtues (freedom, democracy, tolerance, and diversity) and its vices (inequality, hegemony, cultural imperialism, and materialism). What can these enemies of the modern do but seek to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present?

Terrorists, then, cannot themselves be the object of democratic struggle. They swim in a sea of tacit popular support and resentful acquiescence, however, and these waters—roiling with anger and resentment—prove buoyant to ideologies of violence and mayhem. Americans were themselves first enraged and then deeply puzzled by
scenes from Islamic cities where ordinary men, women, and children who could hardly be counted as terrorists nonetheless manifested a kind of perverse jubilation in contemplating the wanton slaughter of American innocents. How could anyone cheer such acts? Yet an environment of despairing rage exists in too many places in the third world as well as in too many third-world neighborhoods of first-world cities, enabling terrorism by endowing it with a kind of quasilegitimacy it does not deserve. It is not terrorism itself but this facilitating environment against which the second-front battle is directed. Its constituents are not terrorists, for they are terrified by modernity and its costs and, consequently, vulnerable to ameliorative actions if those who embrace democracy find the will to take such actions. What they seek is justice, not vengeance. Their quarrel is not with modernity but with the aggressive neoliberal ideology that has been prosecuted in its name in pursuit of a global market society more conducive to profits for some than to justice for all. They are not even particularly anti-American; rather, they suspect that what Americans understand as prudent unilateralism is really a form of arrogant imperialism, that what Americans take to be a kind of cynical aloofness is really self-absorbed isolationism, and that what Americans think of as pragmatic alliances with tyrannical rulers in Islamic nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are really a betrayal of the democratic principles to which Americans claim to subscribe.

Hyperbolic commentators such as Samuel Huntington have described the current divide in the world as a global clash of civilizations, and warn of a cultural war between democracy and Islam, perhaps even between “the West and the rest.” But this is to ape the messianic rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, who has called for precisely such a war. The difference between bin Laden’s terrorists and the poverty-stricken third-world constituents he tries to call to arms, however, is the difference between radical Jihadic fundamentalists and ordinary men and women concerned to feed their children and nurture their religious communities. Fundamentalists can be found among every religious sect and represent a tiny, aggravated minority whose ideology contradicts the very religions in whose names they act. The remarkable comments of the American fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell interpreting the attacks on New York and
Washington as the wrath of God being vented on abortionists, homosexuals, and the American Civil Liberties Union no more defines Protestantism than the Taliban defines Islam.

The struggle of Jihad against McWorld is not a clash of civilizations but a dialectical expression of tensions built into a single global civilization as it emerges against a backdrop of traditional ethnic and religious divisions, many of which are actually created by McWorld and its infotainment industries and technological innovations. Imagine bin Laden without modern media: He would be an unknown desert rat. Imagine terrorism without its reliance on credit cards, global financial systems, modern technology, and the Internet: Terrorists would be reduced to throwing stones at local sheiks. It is the argument of this study that what we face is not a war between civilizations but a war within civilization, a struggle that expresses the ambivalence within each culture as it faces a global, networked, material future and wonders whether cultural and national autonomy can be retained, and the ambivalence within each individual juggling the obvious benefits of modernity with its equally obvious costs.

From Seattle and Prague to Stockholm and Genoa, street demonstrators have been protesting the costs of this globalization. Yet though President Chirac of France acknowledged after the dissident violence of Genoa months before the attacks in New York and Washington that a hundred thousand protesters do not take to the streets unless something is amiss, they have mostly been written off as anarchists or know-nothings. More media attention has been paid to their theatrics than to the deep problems those theatrics are intended to highlight. After September 11, some critics even tried to lump the antiglobalization protesters in with the terrorists, casting them as irresponsible destablizers of world order. But the protesters mostly are the children of McWorld, and their objections are not Jihadic but merely democratic. Their grievances concern not world order but world disorder, and if the young demonstrators are a little foolish in their politics, a little naive in their analyses, and a little short on viable solutions, they understand with a sophistication their leaders apparently lack that globalization’s current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence. They know too that those in the third world who seem to welcome American suffering are at
worst reluctant adversaries whose principal aim is to make clear that they too suffer from violence, even if it is less visible and destroys with greater stealth and over a longer period of time than the murderous schemes of the terrorists. They want not to belittle American suffering but to use its horrors to draw attention to their own. How many of these “enemies of McWorld,” given the chance, would prefer to enjoy modernity and its blessings if they were not so often the victims of modernity’s unevenly distributed costs? How many are really fanatic communists and how many are merely instinctive guardians of fairness who resent not capitalism’s productivity but only the claim that, in the absence of global regulation and the democratic rule of law, capitalism can serve them? It is finally hypocrisy rather than democracy that is the target of their rage.

Too often for those living in the second and third worlds to the south of the United States, Europe, and Japan, globalization looks like an imperious strategy of a predominantly American economic behemoth; too often what we understand as the market-driven opportunities to secure liberty and prosperity at home seems to them nothing but a rationalization for exploitation and oppression in the international sphere; too often what we call the international order is for them an international disorder. Our neoliberal antagonism to all political regulation in the global sector, to all institutions of legal and political oversight, to all attempts at democratizing globalization and institutionalizing economic justice looks to them like brute indifference to their welfare and their claims for justice. Western beneficiaries of McWorld celebrate market ideology with its commitment to the privatization of all things public and the commercialization of all things private, and consequently insist on total freedom from government interference in the global economic sector (laissez-faire). Yet total freedom from interference—the rule of private power over public goods—is another name for anarchy. And terror is merely one of the many contagious diseases that anarchy spawns.

What was evident to those who, before September 11, suffered the economic consequences of an undemocratic international anarchy beyond the reach of democratic sovereignty was that while many in the first world benefit from free markets in capital, labor, and goods, these same anarchic markets leave ordinary people in the third world largely unprotected. What has become apparent to the rest of us
after September 11 is that that same deregulated disorder from which financial and trade institutions imagine they benefit is the very disorder on which terrorism depends. Markets and globalized financial institutions, whether multinational corporations or individual currency speculators, are deeply averse to oversight by nation-states. McWorld seeks to overcome sovereignty and make its impact global. Jihad too makes war on sovereignty, using the interdependence of transportation, communication, and other modern technological systems to render borders porous and sovereign oversight irrelevant. Just as jobs defy borders, hemorrhaging from one country to another in a wage race to the bottom, and just as safety, health, and environmental standards lack an international benchmark against which states and regions might organize their employment, so too anarchistic terrorists loyal to no state and accountability to no people range freely across the world, knowing that no borders can detain them, no united global opinion can isolate them, no international police or juridical institutions can interdict them. The argument laid out in what follows proposes that both Jihad and McWorld undermine the sovereignty of nation-states, dismantling the democratic institutions that have been their finest achievement without discovering ways to extend democracy either downward to the subnational religious and ethnic entities that now lay claim to people’s loyalty or upward to the international sector in which McWorld’s pop culture and commercial markets operate without sovereign restraints.

Unlike America, which pretends to still enjoy sovereign independence, taking responsibility neither for the global reach of its popular culture (McWorld) nor for the secularizing and trivializing character of its adamant materialism, the terrorists acknowledge and exploit the actual interdependence that characterizes human relations in the twenty-first century. Theirs, however, is a perverse and malevolent interdependence, one in which they have learned to use McWorld’s weight jujitsu-style against its massive power. Ironically, even as the United States fosters an anarchic absence of sovereignty at the global level, it has resisted even the slightest compromise of its national sovereignty at home. America has complained bitterly in recent years about the prospect of surrendering a scintilla of its own sovereignty, whether to NATO commanders, to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal, or to international
treaties such as those banning land mines or regulating emissions. Even as I write, with the United States launching a military campaign against terrorism surrounded by a prudently constructed coalition, it has made clear that it prefers “coalitions” to “alliances” because it wants to be free to target objectives, develop strategy, and wage war exactly as it wishes.

Yet terrorism has already made a mockery of sovereignty. What were the hijacking of airliners, the calamitous attack on the World Trade Center, and the brash attack on the Pentagon if not a profound obliteration of American sovereignty? Terrorism is the negative and depraved form of that interdependence, which in its positive and beneficial form we too often refuse to acknowledge. As if still in the nineteenth century, America has persuaded itself that its options today are either to preserve an ancient and blissfully secure independence that puts us in charge of American destiny, or to yield to a perverted and compulsory interdependence that puts foreigners and alien international bodies such as the United Nations or the World Court in charge of American destiny. In truth, however, Americans have not enjoyed genuine independence since sometime before the great wars of the last century—certainly not since the advent of AIDS and West Nile virus, global warming and an ever more porous ozone layer, job “mobility” that has decimated America’s industrial economy, and restive speculators who have made capital flight more of a sovereign reality than any conceivable government oversight could be. Interdependence is not some foreign adversary against which citizens need to muster resistance. It is a domestic reality that already has compromised the efficacy of citizenship in scores of unacknowledged and uncharted ways.

It was the interdependence of America with the world and the interdependence of shared economic and technological systems everywhere on which the Jihadic warriors counted when they brought terror to the American homeland. They not only hijacked American airplanes, turning them into deadly missiles, but provoked the nation into closing down its air transportation system for nearly a week. They not only destroyed the temple of American capitalism at the World Trade Center but forced capitalism to shut down its markets and shocked the country into a recession, of which the stock market in free fall was only a leading indicator. How can any nation claim independence under these conditions?

In the world before McWorld, democratic sovereign nations could claim to be independent autonomous peoples exercising autonomous control over their lives. In Andrew Jackson’s premodern, largely rural America, where communities existed in isolation, where there was no national system of transportation or communication, systematic terror was simply not an option, as there
was
no system. There was no way to bring America to its knees because in a crucial sense America did not exist, at least not as an integral collectivity of interdependent regions with a single interest, until after the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution that followed it. Today there is so much systemic interactivity, so highly integrated a global network, so finely tuned an integral communications technology, that it has become as easy to paralyze as to use the multiple systems and networks. Hence, the decision would-be sovereign peoples face today is not the felicitous choice between secure independence and unwanted interdependence. It is only the sobering choice between, on the one hand, a relatively legitimate, democratic, and useful interdependence (which, however, is still to be constructed and which leaves sovereignty in tatters) and, on the other hand, a radically illegitimate and undemocratic interdependence on the terms of criminals, anarchists, and terrorists (an interdependence that is already here and which will triumph in the absence of a democratizing political will). In short, either we can allow McWorld and Jihad—Hollywood cowboys and international desperadoes—to set the terms of our interdependence, or we can leave those terms to new transnational treaties, new global democratic bodies, and a new creative common will. We can have our interactivity dictated to us by violence and anarchy, or we can construct it on the model of our own democratic aspirations. We can have a democratic and useful interdependence on whatever common ground we can persuade others to stand on, or we can stand on the brink of anarchy and try to prevent criminals and terrorists from pushing us into the abyss.