The two axial principles of our age--tribalism and globalism--clash at every
point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political
futures--both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of
large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of
national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against
people, tribe against tribe--a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly
conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of
artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in
on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration
and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers,
and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one
commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by
technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling
precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.
These two tendencies are sometimes visible in the same countries at the same
instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is
exploding into fragments; India is trying to live up to its reputation as the
world's largest integral democracy while powerful new fundamentalist parties
like the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, along with nationalist
assassins, are imperiling its hard-won unity. States are breaking up or joining
up: the Soviet Union has disappeared almost overnight, its parts forming new
unions with one another or with like-minded nationalities in neighboring
states. The old interwar national state based on territory and political
sovereignty looks to be a mere transitional development.
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of
McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by
parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating
ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national
borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much
hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves
democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind
against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be
democratic--or so I will argue.
McWorld, Or The Globalization of Politics
Four imperatives make up the dynamic of McWorld: a market imperative, a
resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological
imperative. By shrinking the world and diminishing the salience of national
borders, these imperatives have in combination achieved a considerable victory
over factiousness and particularism, and not least of all over their most
virulent traditional form--nationalism. It is the realists who are now
Europeans, the utopians who dream nostalgically of a resurgent England or
Germany, perhaps even a resurgent Wales or Saxony. Yesterday's wishful cry for
one world has yielded to the reality of McWorld.
The market imperative. Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism assumed
that the quest for ever-expanding markets would in time compel nation-based
capitalist economies to push against national boundaries in search of an
international economic imperium. Whatever else has happened to the scientistic
predictions of Marxism, in this domain they have proved farsighted. All
national economies are now vulnerable to the inroads of larger, transnational
markets within which trade is free, currencies are convertible, access to
banking is open, and contracts are enforceable under law. In Europe, Asia,
Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas such markets are eroding national
sovereignty and giving rise to entities--international banks, trade
associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC and Greenpeace, world news
services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations that increasingly
lack a meaningful national identity--that neither reflect nor respect
nationhood as an organizing or regulative principle.
The market imperative has also reinforced the quest for international peace and
stability, requisites of an efficient international economy. Markets are
enemies of parochialism, isolation, fractiousness, war. Market psychology
attenuates the psychology of ideological and religious cleavages and assumes a
concord among producers and consumers--categories that ill fit narrowly
conceived national or religious cultures. Shopping has little tolerance for
blue laws, whether dictated by pub-closing British paternalism,
Sabbath-observing Jewish Orthodox fundamentalism, or no-Sunday-liquor-sales
Massachusetts puritanism. In the context of common markets, international law
ceases to be a vision of justice and becomes a workaday framework for getting
things done--enforcing contracts, ensuring that governments abide by deals,
regulating trade and currency relations, and so forth.
Common markets demand a common language, as well as a common currency, and they
produce common behaviors of the kind bred by cosmopolitan city life everywhere.
Commercial pilots, computer programmers, international bankers, media
specialists, oil riggers, entertainment celebrities, ecology experts,
demographers, accountants, professors, athletes--these compose a new breed of
men and women for whom religion, culture, and nationality can seem only
marginal elements in a working identity. Although sociologists of everyday life
will no doubt continue to distinguish a Japanese from an American mode,
shopping has a common signature throughout the world. Cynics might even say
that some of the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe have had as their true
goal not liberty and the right to vote but well-paying jobs and the right to
shop (although the vote is proving easier to acquire than consumer goods). The
market imperative is, then, plenty powerful; but, notwithstanding some of the
claims made for "democratic capitalism," it is not identical with the
democratic imperative.
The resource imperative. Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political
autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized what
they called autarky, and tried for a while to create a way of life simple and
austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient. To be free meant to
be independent of any other community or polis. Not even the Athenians were
able to achieve autarky, however: human nature, it turns out, is dependency. By
the time of Pericles, Athenian politics was inextricably bound up with a
flowering empire held together by naval power and commerce--an empire that,
even as it appeared to enhance Athenian might, ate away at Athenian
independence and autarky. Master and slave, it turned out, were bound together
by mutual insufficiency.
The dream of autarky briefly engrossed nineteenth-century America as well, for
the underpopulated, endlessly bountiful land, the cornucopia of natural
resources, and the natural barriers of a continent walled in by two great seas
led many to believe that America could be a world unto itself. Given this past,
it has been harder for Americans than for most to accept the inevitability of
interdependence. But the rapid depletion of resources even in a country like
ours, where they once seemed inexhaustible, and the maldistribution of arable
soil and mineral resources on the planet, leave even the wealthiest societies
ever more resource-dependent and many other nations in permanently desperate
straits.
Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some nations
have almost nothing they need.
The information-technology imperatve. Enlightenment science and the
technologies derived from it are inherently universalizing. They entail a quest
for descriptive principles of general application, a search for universal
solutions to particular problems, and an unswerving embrace of objectivity and
impartiality.
Scientific progress embodies and depends on open communication, a common
discourse rooted in rationality, collaboration, and an easy and regular flow
and exchange of information. Such ideals can be hypocritical covers for
power-mongering by elites, and they may be shown to be wanting in many other
ways, but they are entailed by the very idea of science and they make science
and globalization practical allies.
Business, banking, and commerce all depend on information flow and are
facilitated by new communication technologies. The hardware of these
technologies tends to be systemic and integrated--computer, television, cable,
satellite, laser, fiber-optic, and microchip technologies combining to create a
vast interactive communications and information network that can potentially
give every person on earth access to every other person, and make every datum,
every byte, available to every set of eyes. If the automobile was, as George
Ball once said (when he gave his blessing to a Fiat factory in the Soviet Union
during the Cold War), "an ideology on four wheels," then electronic
telecommunication and information systems are an ideology at 186,000 miles per
second--which makes for a very small planet in a very big hurry. Individual
cultures speak particular languages; commerce and science increasingly speak
English; the whole world speaks logarithms and binary mathematics.
Moreover, the pursuit of science and technology asks for, even compels, open
societies. Satellite footprints do not respect national borders; telephone
wires penetrate the most closed societies. With photocopying and then fax
machines having infiltrated Soviet universities and samizdat literary circles
in the eighties, and computer modems having multiplied like rabbits in
communism's bureaucratic warrens thereafter, glasnost could not be far behind.
In their social requisites, secrecy and science are enemies.
The new technology's software is perhaps even more globalizing than its
hardware. The information arm of international commerce's sprawling body
reaches out and touches distinct nations and parochial cultures, and gives them
a common face chiseled in Hollywood, on Madison Avenue, and in Silicon Valley.
Throughout the 1980s one of the most-watched television programs in South
Africa was The Cosby Show. The demise of apartheid was already in production.
Exhibitors at the 1991 Cannes film festival expressed growing anxiety over the
"homogenization" and "Americanization" of the global film industry when, for
the third year running, American films dominated the awards ceremonies. America
has dominated the world's popular culture for much longer, and much more
decisively. In November of 1991 Switzerland's once insular culture boasted
best-seller lists featuring Terminator 2 as the No. 1 movie,Scarlett as the
No. 1 book, and Prince's Diamonds and Pearls as the No. 1 record album. No
wonder the Japanese are buying Hollywood film studios even faster than
Americans are buying Japanese television sets. This kind of software supremacy
may in the long term be far more important than hardware superiority, because
culture has become more potent than armaments. What is the power of the
Pentagon compared with Disneyland? Can the Sixth Fleet keep up with CNN?
McDonald's in Moscow and Coke in China will do more to create a global culture
than military colonization ever could. It is less the goods than the brand
names that do the work, for they convey life-style images that alter perception
and challenge behavior. They make up the seductive software of McWorld's common
(at times much too common) soul.
Yet in all this high-tech commercial world there is nothing that looks
particularly democratic. It lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty, to
new forms of manipulation and covert control as well as new kinds of
participation, to skewed, unjust market outcomes as well as greater
productivity. The consumer society and the open society are not quite
synonymous. Capitalism and democracy have a relationship, but it is something
less than a marriage. An efficient free market after all requires that
consumers be free to vote their dollars on competing goods, not that citizens
be free to vote their values and beliefs on competing political candidates and
programs. The free market flourished in junta-run Chile, in military-governed
Taiwan and Korea, and, earlier, in a variety of autocratic European empires as
well as their colonial possessions.
The ecological imperative. The impact of globalization on ecology is a cliche
even to world leaders who ignore it. We know well enough that the German
forests can be destroyed by Swiss and Italians driving gas-guzzlers fueled by
leaded gas. We also know that the planet can be asphyxiated by greenhouse gases
because Brazilian farmers want to be part of the twentieth century and are
burning down tropical rain forests to clear a little land to plough, and
because Indonesians make a living out of converting their lush jungle into
toothpicks for fastidious Japanese diners, upsetting the delicate oxygen
balance and in effect puncturing our global lungs. Yet this ecological
consciousness has meant not only greater awareness but also greater inequality,
as modernized nations try to slam the door behind them, saying to developing
nations, "The world cannot afford your modernization; ours has wrung it dry!"
Each of the four imperatives just cited is transnational, transideological, and
transcultural. Each applies impartially to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus,
and Buddhists; to democrats and totalitarians; to capitalists and socialists.
The Enlightenment dream of a universal rational society has to a remarkable
degree been realized--but in a form that is commercialized, homogenized,
depoliticized, bureaucratized, and, of course, radically incomplete, for the
movement toward McWorld is in competition with forces of global breakdown,
national dissolution, and centrifugal corruption. These forces, working in the
opposite direction, are the essence of what I call Jihad.
Jihad, Or The Lebanonization Of The World
OPEC, the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Red Cross, the
multinational corporation...there are scores of institutions that reflect
globalization. But they often appear as ineffective reactors to the world's
real actors: national states and, to an ever greater degree, subnational
factions in permanent rebellion against uniformity and integration--even the
kind represented by universal law and justice. The headlines feature these
players regularly: they are cultures, not countries; parts, not wholes; sects,
not religions; rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just
with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto
Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern
Ireland, Abkhasians, Kurile Islander Japanese, the Zulus of Inkatha,
Catalonians, Tamils, and, of course, Palestinians--people without countries,
inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that
will seal them off from modernity.
A powerful irony is at work here. Nationalism was once a force of integration
and unification, a movement aimed at bringing together disparate clans, tribes,
and cultural fragments under new, assimilationist flags. But as Ortega y Gasset
noted more than sixty years ago, having won its victories, nationalism changed
its strategy. In the 1920s, and again today, it is more often a reactionary and
divisive force, pulverizing the very nations it once helped cement together.
The force that creates nations is "inclusive," Ortega wrote in The Revolt of
the Masses. "In periods of consolidation, nationalism has a positive value, and
is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and
nationalism is nothing but a mania..."
This mania has left the post-Cold War world smoldering with hot wars; the
international scene is little more unified than it was at the end of the Great
War, in Ortega's own time. There were more than thirty wars in progress last
year, most of them ethnic, racial, tribal, or religious in character, and the
list of unsafe regions doesn't seem to be getting any shorter. Some new world
order!
The aim of many of these small-scale wars is to redraw boundaries, to implode
states and resecure parochial identities: to escape McWorld's dully insistent
imperatives. The mood is that of Jihad: war not as an instrument of policy but
as an emblem of identity, an expression of community, an end in itself. Even
where there is no shooting war, there is fractiousness, secession, and the
quest for ever smaller communities. Add to the list of dangerous countries
those at risk: In Switzerland and Spain, Jurassian and Basque separatists still
argue the virtues of ancient identities, sometimes in the language of bombs.
Hyperdisintegration in the former Soviet Union may well continue unabated--not
just a Ukraine independent from the Soviet Union but a Bessarabian Ukraine
independent from the Ukrainian republic; not just Russia severed from the
defunct union but Tatarstan severed from Russia. Yugoslavia makes even the
disunited, ex-Soviet, nonsocialist republics that were once the Soviet Union
look integrated, its sectarian fatherlands springing up within factional
motherlands like weeds within weeds within weeds. Kurdish independence would
threaten the territorial integrity of four Middle Eastern nations. Well before
the current cataclysm Soviet Georgia made a claim for autonomy from the Soviet
Union, only to be faced with its Ossetians (164,000 in a republic of 5.5
million) demanding their own self-determination within Georgia. The Abkhasian
minority in Georgia has followed suit. Even the good will established by
Canada's once promising Meech Lake protocols is in danger, with Francophone
Quebec again threatening the dissolution of the federation. In South Africa the
emergence from apartheid was hardly achieved when friction between Inkatha's
Zulus and the African National Congress's tribally identified members
threatened to replace Europeans' racism with an indigenous tribal war. After
thirty years of attempted integration using the colonial language (English) as
a unifier, Nigeria is now playing with the idea of linguistic
multiculturalism--which could mean the cultural breakup of the nation into
hundreds of tribal fragments. Even Saddam Hussein has benefited from the threat
of internal Jihad, having used renewed tribal and religious warfare to turn
last season's mortal enemies into reluctant allies of an Iraqi nationhood that
he nearly destroyed.
The passing of communism has torn away the thin veneer of internationalism
(workers of the world unite!) to reveal ethnic prejudices that are not only
ugly and deep-seated but increasingly murderous. Europe's old scourge,
anti-Semitism, is back with a vengeance, but it is only one of many
antagonisms. It appears all too easy to throw the historical gears into reverse
and pass from a Communist dictatorship back into a tribal state.
Among the tribes, religion is also a battlefield. ("Jihad" is a rich word whose
generic meaning is "struggle"--usually the struggle of the soul to avert evil.
Strictly applied to religious war, it is used only in reference to battles
where the faith is under assault, or battles against a government that denies
the practice of Islam. My use here is rhetorical, but does follow both
journalistic practice and history.) Remember the Thirty Years War? Whatever
forms of Enlightenment universalism might once have come to grace such
historically related forms of monotheism as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,
in many of their modern incarnations they are parochial rather than
cosmopolitan, angry rather than loving, proselytizing rather than ecumenical,
zealous rather than rationalist, sectarian rather than deistic, ethnocentric
rather than universalizing. As a result, like the new forms of
hypernationalism, the new expressions of religious fundamentalism are fractious
and pulverizing, never integrating. This is religion as the Crusaders knew it:
a battle to the death for souls that if not saved will be forever lost.
The atmospherics of Jihad have resulted in a breakdown of civility in the name
of identity, of comity in the name of community. International relations have
sometimes taken on the aspect of gang war--cultural turf battles featuring
tribal factions that were supposed to be sublimated as integral parts of large
national, economic, postcolonial, and constitutional entities.
The Darkening Future of Democracy
These rather melodramatic tableaux vivants do not tell the whole story,
however. For all their defects, Jihad and McWorld have their attractions. Yet,
to repeat and insist, the attractions are unrelated to democracy. Neither
McWorld nor Jihad is remotely democratic in impulse. Neither needs democracy;
neither promotes democracy.
McWorld does manage to look pretty seductive in a world obsessed with Jihad. It
delivers peace, prosperity, and relative unity--if at the cost of independence,
community, and identity (which is generally based on difference). The primary
political values required by the global market are order and tranquillity, and
freedom--as in the phrases "free trade," "free press," and "free love." Human
rights are needed to a degree, but not citizenship or participation--and no
more social justice and equality than are necessary to promote efficient
economic production and consumption. Multinational corporations sometimes seem
to prefer doing business with local oligarchs, inasmuch as they can take
confidence from dealing with the boss on all crucial matters. Despots who
slaughter their own populations are no problem, so long as they leave markets
in place and refrain from making war on their neighbors (Saddam Hussein's fatal
mistake). In trading partners, predictability is of more value than justice.
The Eastern European revolutions that seemed to arise out of concern for global
democratic values quickly deteriorated into a stampede in the general direction
of free markets and their ubiquitous, television-promoted shopping malls. East
Germany's Neues Forum, that courageous gathering of intellectuals, students,
and workers which overturned the Stalinist regime in Berlin in 1989, lasted
only six months in Germany's mini-version of McWorld. Then it gave way to money
and markets and monopolies from the West. By the time of the first all-German
elections, it could scarcely manage to secure three percent of the vote.
Elsewhere there is growing evidence that glasnost will go and
perestroika--defined as privatization and an opening of markets to Western
bidders--will stay. So understandably anxious are the new rulers of Eastern
Europe and whatever entities are forged from the residues of the Soviet Union
to gain access to credit and markets and technology--McWorld's flourishing new
currencies--that they have shown themselves willing to trade away democratic
prospects in pursuit of them: not just old totalitarian ideologies and
command-economy production models but some possible indigenous experiments with
a third way between capitalism and socialism, such as economic cooperatives and
employee stock-ownership plans, both of which have their ardent supporters in
the East.
Jihad delivers a different set of virtues: a vibrant local identity, a sense of
community, solidarity among kinsmen, neighbors, and countrymen, narrowly
conceived. But it also guarantees parochialism and is grounded in exclusion.
Solidarity is secured through war against outsiders. And solidarity often means
obedience to a hierarchy in governance, fanaticism in beliefs, and the
obliteration of individual selves in the name of the group. Deference to
leaders and intolerance toward outsiders (and toward "enemies within") are
hallmarks of tribalism--hardly the attitudes required for the cultivation of
new democratic women and men capable of governing themselves. Where new
democratic experiments have been conducted in retribalizing societies, in both
Europe and the Third World, the result has often been anarchy, repression,
persecution, and the coming of new, noncommunist forms of very old kinds of
despotism. During the past year, Havel's velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia
was imperiled by partisans of "Czechland" and of Slovakia as independent
entities. India seemed little less rent by Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, and Tamil
infighting than it was immediately after the British pulled out, more than
forty years ago.
To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a natural politics, it has
turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is the antipolitics
of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic, focused (as Marx
predicted it would be) on the administration of things--with people, however,
among the chief things to be administered. In its politico-economic imperatives
McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire market principles that privilege
efficiency, productivity, and beneficence at the expense of civic liberty and
self-government.
For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly
antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military junta,
theocratic fundamentalism--often associated with a version of the
Führerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule on behalf of a people.
Even the government of India, struggling for decades to model democracy for a
people who will soon number a billion, longs for great leaders; and for every
Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by zealous
assassins, the Indians appear to seek a replacement who will deliver them from
the lengthy travail of their freedom.
The Confederal Option
How can democracy be secured and spread in a world whose primary tendencies are
at best indifferent to it (McWorld) and at worst deeply antithetical to it
(Jihad)? My guess is that globalization will eventually vanquish
retribalization. The ethos of material "civilization" has not yet encountered
an obstacle it has been unable to thrust aside. Ortega may have grasped in the
1920s a clue to our own future in the coming millennium.
"Everyone sees the need of a new principle of life. But as always happens
in similar crises--some people attempt to save the situation by an artificial
intensification of the very principle which has led to decay. This is the
meaning of the 'nationalist' outburst of recent years....things have always
gone that way. The last flare, the longest; the last sigh, the deepest. On the
very eve of their disappearance there is an intensification of
frontiers--military and economic."
Jihad may be a last deep sigh before the eternal yawn of McWorld. On the other
hand, Ortega was not exactly prescient; his prophecy of peace and
internationalism came just before blitzkrieg, world war, and the Holocaust tore
the old order to bits. Yet democracy is how we remonstrate with reality, the
rebuke our aspirations offer to history. And if retribalization is inhospitable
to democracy, there is nonetheless a form of democratic government that can
accommodate parochialism and communitarianism, one that can even save them from
their defects and make them more tolerant and participatory: decentralized
participatory democracy. And if McWorld is indifferent to democracy, there is
nonetheless a form of democratic government that suits global markets passably
well--representative government in its federal or, better still, confederal
variation.
With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities, and the
universal rule of law, a confederalized representative system would serve the
political needs of McWorld as well as oligarchic bureaucratism or meritocratic
elitism is currently doing. As we are already beginning to see, many nations
may survive in the long term only as confederations that afford local regions
smaller than "nations" extensive jurisdiction. Recommended reading for
democrats of the twenty-first century is not the U.S. Constitution or the
French Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen but the Articles of
Confederation, that suddenly pertinent document that stitched together the
thirteen American colonies into what then seemed a too loose confederation of
independent states but now appears a new form of political realism, as veterans
of Yeltsin's new Russia and the new Europe created at Maastricht will attest.
By the same token, the participatory and direct form of democracy that engages
citizens in civic activity and civic judgment and goes well beyond just voting
and accountability--the system I have called "strong democracy"--suits the
political needs of decentralized communities as well as theocratic and
nationalist party dictatorships have done. Local neighborhoods need not be
democratic, but they can be. Real democracy has flourished in diminutive
settings: the spirit of liberty, Tocqueville said, is local. Participatory
democracy, if not naturally apposite to tribalism, has an undeniable
attractiveness under conditions of parochialism.
Democracy in any of these variations will, however, continue to be obstructed
by the undemocratic and antidemocratic trends toward uniformitarian globalism
and intolerant retribalization which I have portrayed here. For democracy to
persist in our brave new McWorld, we will have to commit acts of conscious
political will--a possibility, but hardly a probability, under these
conditions. Political will requires much more than the quick fix of the
transfer of institutions. Like technology transfer, institution transfer rests
on foolish assumptions about a uniform world of the kind that once fired the
imagination of colonial administrators. Spread English justice to the colonies
by exporting wigs. Let an East Indian trading company act as the vanguard to
Britain's free parliamentary institutions. Today's well-intentioned
quick-fixers in the National Endowment for Democracy and the Kennedy School of
Government, in the unions and foundations and universities zealously nurturing
contacts in Eastern Europe and the Third World, are hoping to democratize by
long distance. Post Bulgaria a parliament by first-class mail. Fed Ex the Bill
of Rights to Sri Lanka. Cable Cambodia some common law.
Yet Eastern Europe has already demonstrated that importing free political
parties, parliaments, and presses cannot establish a democratic civil society;
imposing a free market may even have the opposite effect. Democracy grows from
the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be
built from the inside out. The institutional superstructure comes last. Poland
may become democratic, but then again it may heed the Pope, and prefer to found
its politics on its Catholicism, with uncertain consequences for democracy.
Bulgaria may become democratic, but it may prefer tribal war. The former Soviet
Union may become a democratic confederation, or it may just grow into an
anarchic and weak conglomeration of markets for other nations' goods and
services.
Democrats need to seek out indigenous democratic impulses. There is always a
desire for self-government, always some expression of participation,
accountability, consent, and representation, even in traditional hierarchical
societies. These need to be identified, tapped, modified, and incorporated into
new democratic practices with an indigenous flavor. The tortoises among the
democratizers may ultimately outlive or outpace the hares, for they will have
the time and patience to explore conditions along the way, and to adapt their
gait to changing circumstances. Tragically, democracy in a hurry often looks
something like France in 1794 or China in 1989.
It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic ideal in the
face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull realities of McWorld will be
a confederal union of semi-autonomous communities smaller than nation-states,
tied together into regional economic associations and markets larger than
nation-states--participatory and self-determining in local matters at the
bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The nation-state would play
a diminished role, and sovereignty would lose some of its political potency.
The Green movement adage "Think globally, act locally" would actually come to
describe the conduct of politics.
This vision reflects only an ideal, however--one that is not terribly likely to
be realized. Freedom, Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, is a food easy to eat
but hard to digest. Still, democracy has always played itself out against the
odds. And democracy remains both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and
a secular faith potentially as inspiriting as Jihad.
Benjamin R. Barber is Whitman Professor of Political Science and director of
the Whitman Center at Rutgers University and the author of many books including
Strong Democracy (1984), An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992),
and Jihad Versus
McWorld (Times Books, 1995).
