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'"
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