-Caveat Lector-
Here, in its well-worth-reading entirety, is the well-known and
seemingly quite prescient article published in the Atlantic Monthy in
1992, "Jihad vs. McWorld".
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/barberf.htm
M A R C H 1 9 9 2
The two axial principles of our age -- tribalism and globalism -- clash
at every point except one: they may both be threatening to democracy
by Benjamin R. Barber
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 IMPERATIVE. 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
Fuhrerprinzip 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.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/barberf.htm
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