Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld

[Dave Monroe]

>From Benjamin R. Barber, "Beyond Jihad vs. McWorld,"
The Nation, January 21, 2002 ...

"The terrorist attacks of September 11 did without a
doubt change the world forever, but they failed to
change the ideological viewpoint of either the left or
the right in any significant way. The warriors and
unilateralists of the right still insist war conducted
by an ever-sovereign America is the only appropriate
response to terrorism, while the left continues to
talk about the need for internationalism,
interdependency and an approach to global markets that
redresses economic imbalances and thereby reduces the
appeal of extremism--if, in the climate of war
patriotism, it talks a little more quietly than
heretofore. The internationalist lobby has a right to
grow more vociferous, however, for what has changed in
the wake of September 11 is the relationship between
these arguments and political realism (and its
contrary, political idealism). Prior to September 11,
realpolitik ... belonged primarily to the right--which
spurned talk of human rights and democracy as
hopelessly utopian, the blather of romantic left-wing
idealists who preferred to see the world as they
wished it to be rather than as it actually was. 

"Following September 11, however, the realist tiger
changed its stripes: 'Idealistic' internationalism has
become the new realism. We face not a paradigm shift
but the occupation of an old paradigm by new tenants.
Democratic globalists are quite abruptly the new
realists while the old realism--especially in its
embrace of markets--looks increasingly like a
dangerous and utterly unrealistic dogma opaque to our
new realities as brutally inscribed on the national
consciousness by the demonic architects of September
11. The issue is not whether to pursue a military or a
civic strategy, for both are clearly needed; the issue
is how to pursue either one. 

[...]

"The American myth of independence is not the only
casualty of September 11. Traditional realist
paradigms fail us today also because our adversaries
are no longer motivated by 'interest' in any relevant
sense, and this makes the appeal to interest in the
fashion of realpolitik and rational-choice theory seem
merely foolish. Markets may be transnational
instruments of interests, and even bin Laden has a
kind of 'list of demands' ... but terrorists are not
stubborn negotiators pursuing rational agendas. Their
souls yearn for other days when certainty was
unencumbered, for other worlds where paradise offered
other rewards. Their fanaticism has causes and their
zeal has its reasons, but market conceptions of
interest will not succeed in fathoming them....

"Or take the realist epigram about nations having
neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. It
actually turns out that America's friends, defined not
by interests but by principles, are its best allies
and most reliable coalition partners in the war on
terrorism.... By the same token, we have been
consistently betrayed by an odd assortment of allies
born of shifting alliances that have been forged and
broken in pursuit of 'friendship' with the enemies of
our enemies ....

"On the other hand, the key principles at
stake--democracy and pluralism, a space for religion
safe from state and commercial interference, and a
space for government safe from sectarianism and the
ambitions of theocrats--actually turn out to be
prudent and useful benchmarks for collecting allies
who will stand with us in the war on terrorism. In the
new post-September 11 realism, it is apparent that the
only true friends we have are the democracies, and
they are friends because they are democracies and
share our values even when they contest our interests
and are made anxious by our power....

"... realism here in its new democratic form suggests
that America must begin to engage in the slow and
sovereignty-eroding business of constructing a
cooperative and benevolent interdependence in which it
joins the world rather than demanding that the world
join it or be consigned to the camp of the terrorists
('You are with us or you are with the terrorists,'
intoned the President in those first fearful days
after September 11). This work recognizes that while
terrorism has no justification, it does have causes.
The old realism went by the old adage tout comprendre,
c'est tout pardonner and eschewed deep explanations of
the root causes of violence and terror. The new
realism insists that to understand collective malice
is not to pardon it but to assure that it can be
addressed, interdicted and perhaps even pre-empted.
'Bad seed' notions of original sin ('the evil ones')
actually render perpetrators invulnerable--subject
only to a manichean struggle in which the alternative
to total victory is total defeat....  It is possible
to hate jihad without loving America. It is possible
to condemn terror as absolutely wrong without thinking
that those who are terror's targets possess absolute
right.

"This is the premise behind the thesis of
interdependence.  The context of jihadic resistance
and its pathology of terrorism is a complex world in
which there are causal interrelationships between the
jihadic reaction to modernity and the American role in
shaping it according to the peculiar logic of US
technology, markets and branded pop culture (what I
call McWorld). Determining connections and linkages is
not the same thing as distributing blame. Power
confers responsibility. The power enjoyed by the
United States bestows on it obligations to address
conditions it may not have itself brought into being.
Jihad in this view may grow out of and reflect (among
other things) a pathological metastasis of valid
grievances about the effects of an arrogant secularist
materialism that is the unfortunate concomitant of the
spread of consumerism across the world. It may reflect
a desperate and ultimately destructive concern for the
integrity of indigenous cultural traditions that are
ill equipped to defend themselves against aggressive
markets in a free-trade world. It may reflect a
struggle for justice in which Western markets appear
as obstacles rather than facilitators of cultural
identity. 

[...]

"Terror obviously is not an answer, but the truly
desperate may settle for terror as a response to our
failure even to ask such questions. The issue for
jihad's warriors of annihilation is of course far
beyond such anxieties: It entails absolute devotion to
absolute values. Yet for many who are appalled by
terrorism but unimpressed by America, there may seem
to be an absolutist dimension to the materialist
aspirations of our markets....

"... As we face up to the costs both of fundamentalist
terrorism and of fighting it, must we not ask
ourselves how it is that when we see religion colonize
every other realm of human life we call it theocracy
and turn up our noses at the odor of tyranny; and when
we see politics colonize every other realm of human
life we call it absolutism and tremble at the prospect
of totalitarianism; but when we see market relations
and commercial consumerism try to colonize every other
realm of human life we call it liberty and celebrate
its triumph? ...

"The war on terrorism must be fought, but not as the
war of McWorld against jihad. The only war worth
winning is the struggle for democracy...."

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020121&s=barber

And see as well ...

Barber, Benjamin R.  Jihad vs. McWorld: How
   Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World.
   New York: Crown, 1995.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/barberf.htm

Okay ...


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail!
http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/