Barber, Benjamin. 1995. "Jihad Vs McWorld" in Braving the New World: Readings in Contemporary Politics, pp. 17-27. © 1995 Nelson Canada. Jihad V s. McWorld Benjamin Barber Since World War II, up until the end of the 1980s, two military superpowers dominated tile world scene. In addition, multinational (or perhaps more descriptively "transnational") corporations became major international actors, some having larger annual sales than the entire gross domestic prod uct of many state economies. Now there is only one superpower left, and it exercises enormous influence not only because of its military strength but also because of the cultural and economic leverage it possesses. comitant decline of state power, even as states still struggle to emerge and be recognized. In this widely read article, Benjamin Barber sets out the two principal forces of the postCold War world: universalizing, globalizing State-to-state diplomacy now takes place within a changed context, in which the old rules of the game no longer apply, and in which a key development is the "globaliza- forces of technology, information, and trade; and parochial, tribalizing forces of nationalism, ethnicity, and religious identity. The two sets of forces combine to bring us together and drive us apart simUltaneously. Barber addresses a couple of themes worth noting at the outset. The first is the degree to which globalizing forces bear an American cultural imprint Is technology noncultural or does it inevitably carry with it American cultural lionn of national antecedents? The second theme is the anti- J economies and a con- ust beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures-botb bleak, neither democratic. The first is a rerribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a tbreat- democratic or anti political character of both forces. This is a powerful and provocative piece: it challenges the reader to think in global terms. The reader's main task is to first ask, as always, do I understand the relationships that Barber presents: the four imperatives of McWorld, the elements that make up the cimtrifugaJ forces of Jihad, and the antipoliticaJ nature of both? Second, Barber uses a vocabulary that will be familiar to political scientists, but not necessarily to the general reader. He uses terms such as comity and community, sectarianism, ethnocentrism and,confederalism, which will have to be discussed and thought abou~ not merely glossed over. ened Lebarionization 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 interdepen- III denee, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic muwality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and rhat mcsmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast \ food-with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing n;Hions into one commercially homogeneous global network: one Me-World tied wgether by tcchnology, ecology, communications, and commercc. The planet is tailing precipitanrly apart and coming reluctantly together at the vcry same moment. These two tendencies are sometimes visiblc in the same countries at the same instant: thus Yugoslavia, clamoring just recently to join the New Europe, is exploding inro 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 Parry, 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 likeminded 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 ha ve 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-r so I will argue. MCWORLD, OR THE GLOBALIZATION OF POLITICS ••• Four imperatives make !.lp the dynamic of McWodd: 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 viruleI1t 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 W:lles or Saxony. Yesterday's wishful cry for one world has yielded to the reality of McWorid. The market ;mperatiz1e. Marxist and Leninist theories of impc::ri'" ).·~.~s~~~;g~~::, , 1·.it~ii6~~f~~· •.• Pottl,1ihad·~n~{~~Pld.as~~~:II;~~~.·to:.democracy"' H6~ :'it· ,",do ih~yb{)t6·Jbreat7n:~emOcracy·a.ndhOWdO'th7 threatsditfer? .••. ~;~~~;~S~~bef~'~:fP?·a~.tidole/'arid ... ~··.;,;hch••i~iihdo.~fie·.· ·~ ..;·c~nth~f6fcesofJiha
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