Jihad vs.McWorld Revisited: Opening a Democratic Front in the Fight Against Terrorism

THE BERLIN JOURNAL, Autumn 2001

A week after the first large-scale assault on the American homeland -an attack even more devastating than its perpetrators could have hoped for -President George W. Bush declared war on terrorism. The rhetoric he deployed was that 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 appropriate, but it will remain appropriate only if the compass of its meaning is extended from retributive to distributive justice.

In my book Jihad vs.McWorld ,I warned that democracy was caught between two clashing movements, each of which - for its own reasons -seem indifferent to freedom 's fate. Two seemingly oppositional sets of forces are in fact trapped in a brutal dialectical interdependence: disintegral tribalism and reactionary fundamentalism (which I call Jihad ) and integrative modernization and aggressive economic and cultural globalization (which I call McWorld ).As we mount a new military offense against Jihad (understood not as Islam but as militant fundamentalism),it is now apparent that democracy rather than terrorism may become the principal victim of the battle.

Only the globalization of civic and democratic institutions can offer a way out of the war between global capitalism and its aggrieved critics, between sterile cultural monism and raging cultural fundamentalism.Only democracy can address the resentment and spiritual unease of those whose cultural diversity and moral beliefs are affronted by McWorld 's trivialization and homogenization of values. Only democracy offers hope to those mired in poverty, tempted in their despair to turn to Jihad. Only global democracy can regulate global markets and a capitalism uprooted from the constraints of the democratic nation state.

Extending the compass of democracy to the global market sector will enable people to take advantage of its economic blessings and enjoy opportunities for accountability, participation, and governance. Democracy, by protecting cultural diversity and religious differences can address the anxieties of those who fear the shallow orthodoxies of secularist materialism.

America, Britain, and their allies must open a second, democratic front in the war against terrorism. The military campaign to eliminate terrorists makes anxious spectators of the majority of citizens in America and throughout the world, and as they watch on the sidelines, the nausea that accompanies fear will dull their appetite for revenge. The second front engages every citizen and transforms passive observers into resolute participants. It is more likely than the military front to deter- mine the war 's outcome.

Market for Democracy

This civic and democratic front is aimed not at terrorism per se but at anarchism and social chaos. It takes on both McWorld 's economic reductionism and commercializing homogeneity and the climate of hopeless- ness in which Jihad thrives. It entails readjudicating the responsibilities between North and South; redefining the obligations of global capital as it faces the claims of global justice and comity; repositioning democratic institutions as they follow markets from the domestic to the international sector; and, finally, recognizing the place and requirements of faith in an aggressively secular market society. This second front will advance not only in the name of retributive justice and secularist interests but in the name of distributive justice and religious pluralism.

This democratic front does not aim to dissuade terrorists from their campaigns of annihilation. Their deeds are unspeakable. Their purposes can neither be rationalized nor negotiated. They seek to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present. They offer no terms and can be given none in exchange. Justice here can only take the form of extirpation root , trunk, and branch. Fostering participatory democracy will not appease the terrorists, who are scarcely students of globalization's contractual insufficiencies. Yet terrorists swim in a sea of tacit popular support and acquiescence, and these waters roil with anger and resentment. Immediately after the attacks of September 11,we saw disturbing scenes of ordinary men, women and children apparently jubilating the deaths of American civilians. American viewers were first enraged, then deeply puzzled: how could anyone cheer such acts of wanton slaughter? But there is no doubt that despairing rage exists in too many parts of the third world - and in many third-world neighborhoods of first-world cities as well. Such despair endows terrorism with a false legitimacy.

Our second front in the war against terror- ism must target this facilitating environment. Its constituents are not terrorists; they are themselves terrified by globalization and its costs. They seek justice not vengeance. desperate few seemed to welcome the slaughter of six thousand Americans in a single morning, and a larger number want to use American suffering to draw attention to their own. They want to make clear that they too suffer from violence -a less visible violence that destroys with greater stealth and over a longer period of time. Given the opportunity, many of McWorld 's "enemies " would prefer to enjoy modernity and its blessings. More often, however, they are the victims of the modern world 's unevenly distributed costs.

What Price McWorld?

Hyperbolic commentators such as Samuel Huntington have de- scribed the current divide in the world as a global clash of civilizations and warn of a cultural war between democracy and Islam. But this apes 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 the 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 often contradicts the very religions in whose names they act.

From Seattle and Prague to Stockholm and Genoa, street demonstrators have protested the costs of globalization. They have for the most part been written off as anarchists and know-nothings, and the media has paid more attention to their theatrics than to the deep problems those theatrics are intended to highlight. As French president Jacques Chirac acknowledged after the dissident violence of Genoa, however, one hundred thousand protestors do not take to the streets unless something is amiss.

Some critics have, in the wake of September 11,tried to equate anti-globalization protestors with the terrorists: irresponsible destabilizers of world order. But the protestors are the children of McWorld. Their objections are democratic not Jihadic. They are aggrieved not by world order but by world disorder, and if their methods are occasionally foolish and their proposed solutions unrealistic, they grasp -with a sophistication that their leaders apparently lack -the fact that globalization 's current architecture breeds anarchy, nihilism, and violence. Hypocrisy not democracy is the target of their rage.

Too often those living in the second and third worlds to the south of the United States, Europe, and Japan perceive globalization as a form of first-world economic imperialism. Too often what we describe as opportunities to expand the sphere of liberty and prosperity seem to them to be so many empty promises - a rationalization for exploitation and oppression. Too often what we call the international order is for them an international disorder. America 's neo-liberal antagonism toward political regulation in the global sector; toward institutions of legal and political oversight; toward attempts to democratize globalization and institutionalize economic justice looks to them like brute indifference.

We celebrate our market ideology, with its commitment to the privatization of all things public and the commercialization of all things private. We insist on freedom from government interference in the global economic sector. Yet the laissez-faire rule of private power over public goods is another form of anarchy. And terror is merely one of the diseases that anarchy spawns.

America clings to its 19th -Century Destiny

Many suffer the economic and political con- sequences of such international anarchy. At the same time, many in the first world benefit from free markets in capital, labor, and goods -the same markets that leave ordinary people in the third world unprotected.

September 11 made clear that terrorism depends on the same deregulated disorder that allegedly benefits financial and trade institutions. Just as jobs hemorrhage from one country to another in a wage race to the bottom; just as safety, health, and environmental standards lack an international benchmark for states and regions to organize employment; so too terrorists -loyal to no state, accountable to no people - move freely across the world. No borders can detain them. No united global opinion can isolate them. No international police or juridical institutions can interdict them.

In recent years Americans have complained bitterly about deferring to NATO commanders, to supranational institutions, and to international treaties such as those banning landmines or regulating fossil fuels. By refusing to surrender one scintilla of its own national sovereignty, the U.S. has -ironically - chosen to foster an anarchic absence of sovereignty at the global level. Even as it launches a military campaign against terrorism surrounded by a prudently constructed coalition, the U.S. has made clear its preference for "coalitions "over "alliances."It wants to be free to target objectives, develop strategy, and wage war exactly as it wishes, free of the need to persuade allies of the wisdom of its intentions.

Yet international terrorism makes a mockery of national sovereignty, as the brash attacks of September 11 made all too clear. It is the negative and depraved form of that interdependence which, in its positive and beneficial Jihad vs. McWorld Revisited Continued from page 15 form, Americans stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. America clings to a nineteenth-century view of its own destiny. It seeks to preserve an ancient and blissfully secure independence. The perceived alternative is to yield to a perverted and compulsory interdependence that puts foreigners and alien international bodies like the United Nations or the World Court in charge.

In truth,however, Americans have not enjoyed a real independence since sometime before the great wars of the last century. It is certainly not independent of AIDS or West Nile Virus; of global warming and greenhouse gasses; of a job "mobility "that has decimated its industrial economy; or of restive speculators who have made the flight of capital a more "sovereign "reality than any conceivable government oversight. Interdependence is not some foreign adversary against which citizens need to muster resistance. It is a domestic reality, and it has already compromised the efficacy of citizenship in scores of unacknowledged and uncharted ways.

Jihadic warriors counted on the interdependence of America with the world and the interdependence of shared economic and technological systems everywhere when they terrorized America on September 11.They not only hijacked America 's air transportation system, turning its airplanes into deadly missiles; they provoked the nation into closing it down entirely for nearly a week. They not only destroyed the cathedral of American capital- ism at the World Trade Center, they forced capitalism to shut down its markets and they shocked the country into deep 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, there was genuine independence for democratic sovereign nations, and sovereignty represented a just claim by autonomous peoples to autonomous control over their lives.Ours is no longer the isolated, pre-industrial, rural America of n- drew Jackson 's era.Today there is so highly integrated a global network, so finely tuned an integral communications technology, so much systemic interactivity, that it has become as easy to paralyze the system as to use it. Terrorists, who freely acknowledge and exploit this inter- dependence, have learned to use McWorld 's weight jujitsu-style against its massive power.

Today, would-be sovereign peoples do not face the simple decision between secure independence and unwanted interdependence. They face a far more sobering choice between two forms of interdependence. Either they choose a relatively legitimate, democratic,and pragmatic interdependence (which, however is still to be constructed and which makes tat- ters of the old forms of national sovereignty); or a radically illegitimate and undemocratic interdependence will triumph, the terms of which have already been set by criminals, anarchists, and terrorists.

We can let the Hollywood cowboys and international desperadoes of McWorld and Jihad set the terms of our interdependence; or we can shape more equitable terms through 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 build a democratic interdependence on common ground,or we can stand on the brink of anarchy and try to prevent criminals and terrorists from pushing us into the abyss.