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The Old Economy and the Birth of a New McWorld

GILLETTE'S CHAIRMAN Alfred M. Zeien has said "I do not fmd foreign countries foreign." i. Welcome to McWorld. There is no activity more intrinsically globalizing than trade, no ideology less interested in nations than capitalism, no challenge to frontiers more

.audacious than the market. By many measures, corporations are today more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as transnational or postnational or even antinational. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space. Their customers are not citizens of a particular nation or members of a parochial clan: they belong to the universal tribe of consumers defined by needs and wants that are ubiquitous, if not by nature then by the cunning of advertising. A consumer is a consumer is a consumer.

McDonald's serves 20 million customers around the world every day, drawing mQre customers daily than there are people in Greece, Ireland, and Switzerland together. 2 General Motors (still the world's largest company despite its uneven recent sales history) employs

THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD24

more people internationally than live in a number of the world's smaller nations. 3 With $2.4 billion worth of pizzas sold in 1991, the privately owned Domino's earned enough revenues to fund the col­ lective government expenditures of Senegal, Uganda, Bolivia, and Iceland.4- Toshiba, the General Electric of Japan, boasts in its 1992 annual report that "as good corporate citizens" they "do our part to ensure that progress continues within the world community," but its citizenship-whether Japanese or global-is hemmed in on every side by limits set by the demands of profitability, which in turn is driven by sales in 1992 of $25 billion, only slightly less than Argentina's recent government budget.s Globalism is mandated by profit not citizenship. Fast food goes upscale in the chic new chain Planet Hollywood. And "On planet Reebok," according to the suc­ cessful ad campaign of an only nominally '~erican" atWetic shoe company, "there are no boundaries."6 Ralph Lauren's perfume for men, Safari, also boasted of "Living Without Boundaries" in its launch campaign in 1992.

A popular protectionist sticker appearing across the nation on American automobile bumpers reads "Real Americans Buy Ameri­ can." The trouble is, it is hard to know which car is really more '~erican": the Chevy built in Mexico from primarily imported parts and then reimported into the United States, the Ford built in German plants employing Turkish workers and sold on the Hong Kong and Nigerian markets, or the Toyota Camry designed by American Peter J. Hill at Toyota's Newport Beach California Calty Design Research Center, assembled at the Georgetown, Kentucky, Toyota plant by American workers, primarily from American-made parts, and test-driven at Toyota's twelve-thousand-acre Arizona proving ground. 7 These international 'japanese" cars are puzzling: for to remain truly Japanese, the whole must somehow become more than its American parts. Thus, in a fit of schizophrenic self­ congratulation, Honda has been boasting about its "made-in­ America" roots (that is, parts) even as it revels in its status as Motor Trend's "Import of the Year."

So confusing has the question of automotive genealogy become that the United States government enacted an American Automo­ bile Labeling Act that since October I, 1994, has required that labels be afHxed to new autos specifying their "domestic content," from

The Old Economy and the New Mc World • 25

their engines to their windshield wipers. The labels are unlikely to clarifY the situation, however, since they reveal (to take just one example) that Chrysler Corporation's Dodge Stealth is built by Mit­ subishi in Nagoya, Japan, while Mitsubishi's Eclipse RS is built in Normal, Illinois, and features Chrysler engines. 8 Labels can be con­ fusing: the Nissan Altima assembled in America with mostly Ameri­ can parts does utilize radiator hoses manufactured in Paris ... Paris, Tennessee.9

The authors of the North American Free Trade Agreement found it particularly cumbersome to decide which products could qualifY for tariff-free status in the new zone since so many products "foreign" to North America were nonetheless assembled in the region with local parts. How about Japanese picture tubes installed in Mexican television chassis? Under traditional trade rules they were "domes­ tic"; under NAFTA rules, the picture tubes and electron guns will also have to be domestic to qualifY. But since Japanese companies own large shares of both of the '~erican" glass companies that manufacture tubes, '~erican" domestic television sets will still be substa!1tially Japanese, even if they qualifY as American under NAfTA rules. lO American-made cars will have to have 50 percent of their parts (by value) as well as 50 percent of their labor contributed domestically (rising to 62.5 percent in 2002) but does this really make the cars '~erican"? Putting identity labels on products turns out to be even more challenging than establishing ethnic identities for peo­ ple, for products have to be disassembled and labeled part by part by part, by origin of material, nationality of labor force, and cultural identity of designer to arrive at an ad absurdum conclusion about their ethnic identity.ll

Historically, there is something prototypically American about the automobile: Henry Ford's commitment to a mass-produced motorized vehicle that would set every American family free has come to be associated with many of the virtues of American lifestyle and not a few of its vices. The internationalization of auto­ mobile culture-what George Ball once called "an ideology on four wheels"-as well as of automobile manufacturing is thus actually a globalization of America, no matter who is making the cars. The Chinese have recently committed to automobile manufacture as a foundation for economic modernization: more than any other deci­

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THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD26

sion they have made, this one may commit them to the American­ ization they most fear. 12

Yet however American cars are in concept, they are hardly Amer­ ican in their manufacture whether measured by parts, design, or even labor. Indeed, increasingly, corporations refuse to defme them­ selves by reference to labor at all, let alone by reference to a particu­ lar parochial labor force with a local national character. Ignacio Ramonet argues that in the global economy neither capital nor work nor material is the determining factor, but rather the "optimal rela­ tionship between these three," which pushes us into the world of information, communication, and administration where traditional nation-states can exert little control and are bound to feel more and more uncomfortable. 13 Robert Kuttner reports that the state-of-the­ art handle for the postindustrial company-which clearly is also the post-nation-state company-is "the virtual corporation" where '~the company is no longer a physical entity with a stable mission or loca­ tion, but a shifting set of temporary relationships connected by com­ puter network, phone and fax."14

McWorld is a kind of virtual reality, created by invisible but omnipotent high-tech information networks and fluid transnational econo01ic markets, so the virtual corporation is not just a provocative turn of phrase. 15 Without even trying, reporter Julie Edelson Halpert gives it concrete meaning in the portrait she draws of Ford Motor Company's Mondeo project:

Seeking to shave months and millions of dollars from car design, Ford has consolidated management of its European, North Amer­ ican and Asian design operations into a single international net­ work using powerful work stations based on Silicon Graphics Inc. technology linked by Ethernet networking software.

... The Ford system ... was brought under a single "electronic roof" ... based in Dearborn, Michigan. The other main sites on the network are in Dunton, England; Cologne, Germany; Turin, Italy; Valencia, California; Hiroshima, Japan; and Melbourne, Australia. The circuits---satellite links, undersea cables and land lines-are purchased from telecommunications carriers. 16

The virtual corporation also exists in the labor market as an employer of "virtual" rather than actual laborers. The ideal virtual

The Old Economy and the New Me J#Jrld • 27

laborer is a robot: an interactive, "intelligent," fully programmed worker capable of working twenty-four hours a day with no suste­ nance and minimal upkeep. What a poignant marriage: in McWorld's chilly new cyberspace, yesterday's invisible hand reaches out to grasp the invisible body of tomorrow's newly born virtual cor­ poration to guide its spasmodic newborn movements toward an eter­ nity of profits, almost entirely without the intervention of a visible human hand.

Many modern nation-states have generated national industrial policies aimed at strategic coordination of economic policy and domination of international markets by their business corporations on the theory that the nation's citizens will somehow be benefited by supporting corporations even if corporations decline to return the favor. Yet although full employment is a public good, it is not a cor­ porate good. Business efficiency dictates downsizing, which means capital-intensive production, and capital-intensive production means labor-minimizing job policies. Translated into English this means fir­ ing as many permanent workers as possible and eliminating their costly benefit and pension packages. In their place appear machines, robots, and multiplying (so-called) "temporary" jobs, which are actu­ ally long-term jobs without long-term contracts, long-term security, or long-term benefits. Unemployment may eventually weaken the market by debilitating potential consumers (you can't buy unless you earn), but corporations taken one by one are necessarily rabid com­ petitors with (at most) a quarterly earnings horizon. They must be "lean and mean" to prevail. The "fat" here is workers and a corpo­ rate diet spells permanent "structural" unemployment for increasing numbers of workers.

American agriculture remains a dominant producer for world markets, but where once it took 80 percent of the workforce to grow crops, today it takes 2 percent. Manufacturing is following agricul­ ture. IBM sloughed off labor fat to the tune of sixty thousand work­ ers in 1993 to the general applause of market analysts, and it secured private advantages in the international computer market whose pub­ lic costs will not be seen for several years and whose consequences will in any case not be directly borne by IBM. 17 Nineteen ninety­ three was the year of "downsizing" (a euphemism for layoffs and fir­ ings) for many larger corporations, including a number that were in

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THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD28

the black and were acting "preemptively." The only thing labor­ intensive about modern manufacturing is the cost-cutting. Fearing inroads by generic brand companies, Procter & Gamble announced plans in 1994 to eliminate 13,000 jobs (and to close 30 of 147 plants) over a three-year period, while Eastman Kodak intends to cut 10,000 jobs through 1995 as part of its "restructuring." In the Common Market, unemployment is over II percent and in France, with a declining Gross Domestic Product (GDP) , it is higher. The global recession has eased but jobs are unlikely to reappear in prerecession plenitude, as the American recovery of the mid-nineties is already proving. Many of the new jobs are lower paying service positions, often without benefits or safety nets. Downsizing is after all a global market strategy responding to the new economics' of the automa­ tion/ electronic information age, and McWorld's labor market has little interest in employment per se and even less in protectionist gov­ ernments monkeying with labor supply and demand.

There are of course timorous and weak businesses (they hardly meet the criteria of capitalist ventures at all) that, like the ailing unions, welcome the attention of an interventionist government. But they belong more to a vanishing mercantilist ~conomy than to MeWorld. In recent decades we have witnessed some of· America's largest corporations seeking succor from the state-Chrysler or Amtrak or the savings and loan industry--demanding the socializa­ tion of their risk, so that public taxpayers can pay the costs of their business fiascos. In a world where socialism has disappeared, it can still be found lurking in the boardrooms of failing and bad-risk investment companies like those that misjudged the peso that yearn to spread their losses ~cross the backs of long-suffering taxpayers.

Unions too hide behind protectionist policies, trying to insulate their members from the often unfair discipline of international mar­ kets like NAFTA. But as Robert J. Samuelson has said, "the drive of big companies to win world markets and maximize sales overwhelms all but the most draconian protectionism."IB Social justice makes lit­ tle more headway against market ideology than national self-interest. Markets are by their nature unfair, and when confronted with state­ generated public interest issues like justice, full employment, and environmental protection they seek above all to be left alone. That is what a market is: an unobstructed set of exchange relationships

The Old Economy and the New Me J10rld • 29

among individual consumers and individual producers that is '. allowed to take its course; and McWorld is nothing if not a market.

Market proponents insist that, like a river kept from its natural flood plain by engineers bent on containing its occasional rampages, a market hemmed in by government levees and regulatory dams will in the end create far more havoc than o~e left to follow its own cycles.

Government has a perfect right, indeed it has a duty, to intervene in the economy in the name of justice, ecology, strategic interests, full employment, or other public goods in which the market has and can have no interest. But it cannot expect the denizens of McWorld to welcome such intervention or to demur from trying to obstruct gov­ ernment through their own political interventions. This is the major reason why trade sanctions and embargoes generally fail. Market­ driven profit has little tolerance for policy-driven punishment. With the rare exception of a country like Iraq with a leadership so obnox­ ious that it provokes unanimity among its adversaries and induces national governments to actually prosecute private companies that breach the cordon sanitaire, embargoes are little more than noisy nuisances. South Africa, Serbia, Iran, Israel, Chile, Argentina, and, until recently, even Cuba have at different times weathered embar­ goes with remarkable equanimity; many have sustained economic growth with the help of market exchanges that simply do not respond to coercive national policies or international law. Even Iraq managed to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity via secret trade well after it had become an outlaw country. 19

Modern transnational corporations in quest of global markets 'cannot really comprehend "foreign policy" because the wordfimrign has no meaning to the ambitious global businessperson. Like Gillette Chairman Zeien, they do not fmd foreign countries foreign: as far as production and consumption are concerned, there is only one world ;,md it is MeWorld. 20 How can the physical distinction between

.domestic and foreign have resonance in a virtual world defmed by electronic communications and intrinsically unbounded markets? World trade in 1950 stood at $308 billion. By 1968 it was over a tril­ lion and today it has passed $3'/2 trillion; meanwhile, tariffs-as potent a symbol of national boundaries as there is-have declined

om 40 percent of average product prices to about 5 percent. 21 If . orld trade is comprising an ever greater percentage of world GDp,

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THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD30

currency exchanges are in turn outstripping trade-some' say by as much as three to one.

During the 1980s, Japan scoffed at American companies that moved manufacturing facilities overseas to take advantage of cheaper labor, to get closer to markets, and to avoid dependency on an expen­ sive dollar. In the nineties, the Japanese are themselves moving man­ ufacturing outside of Japan. Seventy percent of 'Japanese-made" televisions and 30 percent of VCRs are now manufactured overseas. And while General Motors produces over 40 percent of its cars beyond American shores, Toyota's extranational production is up to 20 percent of its total. 22 Mabuchi Motors, which controls a remark­ able one-half of the world market in those tiny motors that power toothbrushes and zoom lenses and car windows, employs thirty-three thousand workers-but only one thousand of them work in Japan; the rest are offshore foreign laborers at plants in cheap labor markets like China. 23

Likewise, while it makes sense for nation-states to create incentives for exports and tariff disincentives for imports, corporate producers and individual consumers start from a very different vantage point: literally speaking, producers are universal "exporters" (they export everything they make in their factories "out") and consumers are universal "importers" (they import from "outside" their home every­ thing they consume); this universalism means in practice that the idea of imports and exports has little or no meaning for market play­ ers. The American textile company that moves its factory to Indone­ sia and, using cheaper labor, sends cheaper dresses back across the border incurs no trade deficit, only greater profitability. The Ameri­ can consumer who purchases that dress does not lose a job, she gains a bargain. Trade deficits belong to nation-states alone. Individual American workers may lose jobs and individual American citizens may have to deal with interest rate changes induced by their nation's trade deficit, but American consumers and American producers, qua consumers and prOducers, couldn't care less.

Of course nobody really intends to segment their being quite schizophrenically: Americans are job holders as well as consumer and even in the narrow terms of economic efficiency, their capaci to consume over the long haul depends on secure employment 0' the long term-and they know it. They are citizens no less than p~

The Old Economy and the New Mc UOr/d • 31

ducers and need to consider the public space consequences of their 'private sector acts. Market identity is only one fractious piece of a person's whole identity, which also contains ethnic and civic dimen­ sions that may rival or even be inimical to market identity. The con­

, 'sumer who welcomes lower prices may, as an employee of a textile firm, be hostile to the export of jobs that brought prices down. The producer who profits from the circumventing of environmental reg­ ulations may regret as a citizen the damage businesses like his cause to the environment and, as a citizen, support clean air legislation injurious to his business.

Yet full employment and environmental preservation are social goods rather than private-market goods; and the proponents of McWorld view markets and their impact strictly from the one­ dimensional perspective of capitalist efficiency. From this con­ :strained, short-term perspective, citizenship, ethnicity, and job status as well as other rival forms of identity are at best irrelevant, at worst, 'obstacles to be overcome. People and nations may shudder at corpo­ lIiate downsizing policies that result in massive job elimination, but the market will celebrate its players' new competitiveness.

Nations may have national economic policies but to the true capi­ ,talist, regulations, tariffs, bailouts, embargoes, wage restraints, employment quotas, environmentalist restrictions, and even puta­ pvely procapitalist incentives or price-fixing schemes are anath­ ema-all equally to be disdained as statist attempts to distort a tnatural" process that works properly only when left to itself. Thus

e ancient war cry of old and new capitalists alike: laisse;;,-faire! ,Leave us alone! Let us do what producers and consumers do: sell, ;buy, produce, consume.

These classical doctrines were conceived for a much simpler world d were pushed to the margins by Keynesianism and the welfare

state. The modern democratic state is legitimated by the priority of the public over the private, where public goods trump private inter­ ,~sts and the commonweal takes precedence over individual fortunes. B,ut under conditions of internationalism-the world trade policies , d global markets that constitute what I have called McWorld-old issez-faire notions reemerge with a new force. For there is no inter­ tional state and thus no guarantor or discoverer of an interna­ nal good. The international dis-order remains a kind of state of

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32 • THE NEW WORLD OF MCWORLD

nature among nations and it is marked by a "war of all against all"­ the "quest for power after power that ceaseth only in death" por­ trayed by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan more than three hundred years ago.

The invisible hand thus takes on new significance in the setting of invisible cyberspace, where virtual corporations defeat real nations.·. Now the space in which they operate is as invisible as the market's phantom hands. I underscore the importance of these new market hyperrealities here for two reasons: because the free market ideology they rehabilitate is a battering ram against the walls of the nation­ state, exposing McWorld's antagonism to nationalisms of every kind; and because they challenge and ultimately rewrite the traditional account of markets in terms of free trade in raw materials, manu­ factured goods, and services. For in the economics of McWorld, the traditional dominance of raw materials and goods yields to a novel and distinctive new realm of activity-what I call the infotainment telesector-that redefmes the economic realities of McWorld and reorders the relations of nation-states in ways that neither Francis Fukuyama nor Paul Kennedy could anticipate.

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Securing Global Democracy in the World of McWorld

T HE EVIDENCE FROM Russia and Germany higWights the short­ comings of markets as vessels of democratization, but markets

are only part of the story. McWorld has also brought with it techno­ logical innovations in the infotainment telesector that are less inimi­ cal to democracy. The old Baconian dictum that knowledge is power and that through science we can command the world, the belief thaq' the improvement of men's minds and the improvement of his lot are'i fmally the very same thing, was at the heart of the Enlightenment's) conviction that reason embodied in science and technology could~ liberate the human race from prejudice, ignorance, and injustice---;,pj,:11 could eventually liberate all women and men and democratize thetr~ social institutions. Walter B. Wriston is only the latest of a host o~~ Enlightenment-infused panglossian futurologists from Condorcet to~ Alvin Tomer who have composed odes to the emancipatory, demo:' cratic powers of the startling new technologies that drive McWorldl and have transformed capitalism from a system that serves needs intO: a system that creates and manipulates them. In The Twilight d,i

Securing Global Democracy • 269

Sovereignry, Wriston calls his fmal chapter "Power to the People." Apparently believing his own mythology, he goes on to argue that "the information age is rapidly igiving the power to the people ..." speeding us ,along on "our journey toward more human freedom."]

To be sure, technology's mandarins are correct in seeing improved information and communication as indispensable to improving democracy. From the time of the Greeks, who believed Prometheus's theft of fire from the Gods lit the way to human civilization (if also to tragedy), technical gadgets have been made to support democrati­ zation. In ancient Athens, small machines that randomized the selec­ tion of white and black balls were used for jury selection. During the Renaissance (as Bacon noticed), movable type, gunpowder, and the compass transformed society by democratizing literacy (when every­ one could read, neither priests nor princes could maintain their monopoly over the sovereign word); by equalizing combat (the aris­ tocratic knight's armor was no longer a guarantee of domination over the common man, now that everyman had his musket); and by opening up a new world of exploration to all (navigation offered everyman an exit visa from indentured servitude and political perse­ cution). In the fullness of time, long after Bacon was dead, radio and television and fmally mass-produced computers offered an ongoing technically enhanced democratization of the Word that spread liter­ acy and political knowledge and strengthened the competence and will of the well-established democratic electorates.

In the same tradition, the proposed information superhighway potentially offer to every woman and man on the globe access to

endless data banks and worldwide opinion exchange. Electronic bul­ ~letin boards can link like-minded individuals around their common rinterests and offer formats for community debates among those lack­ ying common values. Video teleconference capabilities allow local ~town meetings to interact with similar meetings across a region, a

~~ation, ?r the. world, bre~g ~own the p~rochialism o~ face-to:f~ce tmteractlOn WIthout sacrificmg Its personalIsm. InteractIVe televISIOn ~transforms a passive medium aimed at complacent consumers of !:entertainment and advertising into an active theater of social dis­ , ourse and political feedback, opening up the possibility of universal

ultichoice-vote-at-home referenda. Satellite dishes the size of a

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dinner plate put a global ear at the disposal of peoples imprisoned in the most despotic regimes, and have proved their worth in placeslike China and Iran where, despite an official government ban, they con­ tinue to spread-and as they do, to spread unfettered images to

information-starved consumers. 2

In combination, these technologies potentially enhance lateral communication among citizens, open access to information by all, and furnish citizens with communication links across distances that once precluded direct democracy or, indeed, interaction of any kind. If the scale of ancient democracy was bounded by the territory a man could crosS on foot in a day on his way to the assembly, telecom­ munications at the speed of light turn the entire globe into a wired town of potential neighbors-McLuhan's global village. Of course, if democracy is to be understood as deliberative and participatory activity on the part of responsible citizens, it must resist the innova­ tive forms of demagoguery that accompany innovative technology. Home voting via interactive television could further privatize politics and replace deliberative debate in public with the unconsidered instant expression of private prejudices. Democracy calls not only for votes but for good reasons, not only for an opinion but for a ratio­ nal argument on its behalf. Talk radio and scream television have already depreciated our political currency, and newer technologies are as likely to reinforce as to impede the trend if not subjected to the

test of deliberative competence. Futuristic idealism must then be treated with a certain skepticism.

The history of science and technology is at best a history of ambiva­ lence. In each of the instances explored here, we can speak only of potentiality, not of actuality. The double edge of technology's sword has been well known to us at least since Mary Shelley fIrst told the story of Dr. Frankenstein's monster, and our technologies today pos­

sess potentialities as monstrous as any she imagined. Telecommunications technology has the capability for strengthen­

ing civil society, but it also has a capacity for unprecedented surveil­ lance and can be used to impede and manipulate as well as to access information. Left to the market, which is where McWorld leaves tech­ nology, monsters may end up with a free and mightily profItable reign. As we have already noticed, the market has no particular inter-

Securing Global Democraqy • 271

est in the civic possibilities of technology-unless they can generate a respectable profIt (generally they cannot). When profItability is the primary object, technological innovation is likely to reinforce extant inequalities, making the resource-and-income-poor information-poor as well. Computer literacy has become as important as language lit­ eracy and numeracy in the job market, and is likely to be vital to civic literacy as well. The division of labor into symbolic analysis workers and more traditional durable goods and service sector workers has actually accelerated the growth of social inequality in America.

Robert Reich has drawn a disturbing American portrait in which privileged information/communication workers increasingly with­ draw public support from the larger society.. His grim analysis por­ trays them moving to insular suburbs and buying private recreational, schooling, security, and sanitation services for their own gated com­ munities, which the public at large cannot afford. They are then posi­ tioned to refuse to pay taxes for the declining public services they no longer need. Their withdrawal (Reich labels it the politics of seces­ sion) leaves the poor poorer, the public sector broke, and society ever more riven by economic disparities. 3 A similar pattern of "secession" by the new symbolic elites can be discerned on a global scale where elite nations secede from their global public responsibilities as fast as elite professionals secede from their public responsibilities within elite nations. The Third World becomes a series of urban ghettos within every First World society as well as a series of poor nation ghettos within international society. The "restructuring" of the global econ­ omy to meet the demands of the new age information/entertainment sector further reinforces the boundaries between the privileged and the rest.

Even when we set social and class issues aside, the market in tech­ nology can have untoward consequences. Technology can as easily become an instrument of repression as of liberation. Thoreau wor­ ried about how easily we become the "tools of our tools"; the new tools of the post-Gutenberg age of electronics confIrm his fear. Inter­ active television is a powerful surveillance instrument: as consumers tell shopping networks what they want to buy and tell banks how to dispense their cash and tell pollsters what they think about abortion, those receiving the information gain access to an extensive catalog of

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27 2 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

knowledge about the private habits, attitudes, and behaviors of con­ sumers. This information may in turn be used to reshape those habits and attitudes in ways that favor prod~cers and sellers massag­ ing the marketplace. The current antiregulatory fever means that the new information banks being compiled from interaction and surveil­ lance are subject neither to government scrutiny nor to limitation or control (such as a sunset provision that would periodically destroy all information). The Federal Communications Act of 1934 promised to "encourage the larger and more effective use of radio in the public interest," but the multiplication of broadcast channels across the electronic spectrum has led the government to withdraw its regula­

tory presence. Fred Friendly has been calling for an "electronic bill of rights" for

a number of years~ but government has been moving in the opposite direction, with the Clinton administration, despite its apparent belief in open access, committed to letting the market make the moves with a minimum of regulation. The "public airwaves" are still auctioned off to private vendors who sell them back at exorbitant rates to the public during election campaigns-increasing the costs of democ­ racy and the dependence of elections on money at the very moment when government has backed away from regulation. The 1984 Cable Act gives local franchisers (cities and towns) rather than the federal· or state government control over cable, in effect abandoning it to market forces that have shown scant regard for public needs.

4 In

1994, Senator Inouye introduced a bill into Congress directing the Federal Communications Commission to require the "reservation for public uses of capacity on telecommunications networks." His aim was to guarantee the public some voice in development of the Information Superhighway. His bill received little press attention and expired without action at the end of the I03rd Congress. Fear of government has incapacitated the public's only agent in diverting the new technologies into public channels. The model of Channel One, a classroom network (started by Whittle Communications and now controlled by K-III Corporation) that extorts classroom advertising time from needy schools in return for desperately wanted hardware, suggests that the public is likely to be served by the new technologies only in as far as someone can make serious money off it. 5

Securing Global Democracy • 273

It may be a cause of satisfaction, as Walter Wriston insists, that nowadays it is the citizen who is watching Big Brother and not the other way around. To be sure, in most post-Communist societies, as in our own market societies, Big Brother is no longer watching you; but neither is he watching those who are watching you, and even adversaries of regulation may find reason to be disturbed by that omission. If the classical liberal question used to be who will police the police, the pertinent liberal question in today's McWorld ought to be who will watch those who are watching us? Who will prevent the media from controlling their clients and consumers? Whowill act in lieu of a government that has demurred from representing the public's interests?

There would perhaps be less cause for concern if technology and telecommunication markets were truly diversified and competitive. But as we have seen, the conglomeration of companies focused on programming, information, communication, and entertainment suggests that government's erstwhile big brother has been dwarfed today by Ma Bell and her overgrown babies, who are currently buy­ ing up the cable market and trying to purchase entertainment and software production companies as fast as they can. Their aim is to stay competitive with infotainment companies like Time Warner. Thus US West bought a significant minority interest (along with

. Toshiba and C. Itoh) in Warner Brothers fIlm studio and Home Box Office only to have Time Warner acquire Cablevision ($2.2 billion) and Houston Industries ($2.3 billion) in 1995, and thereby regain control. The harder the American government tries to stay out of the development of a free market information highway, the harder corporate multinationals are trying to get in; and if they cannot effect a total takeover of the digital thoroughfare, they aspire at least to gain control of its gateways and tollbooths.

Democrats should not be the Luddites Jihad's anxious tribal war­ riors have become; they cannot afford to make technology and modernity enemies of self-determination and liberty. Technology is a neutral tool: allied to democracy it can enhance civic communica­ tion and expand citizen literacy. Left to markets, it is likely to aug­ ment McWorld's least worthy imperatives, including surveillance over and manipulation of opinion, and the cultivation of artificial

274 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

needs rooted in lifestyle "choices" unconnected to real economic, civic, or spiritual needs.

Not so long ago, the prescient historian J. G. A.. Pocock suggested that

[today we fmd] ourselves in a post-industrial and post-modern world in which more and more of us were consumers of informa­ tion and fewer and fewer of us producers or possessors of any­ thing, including our own identities. When a world of persons, actions, and things becomes a world of persons, actions, and lin­ guistic or electronic constructs that have no authors, it clearly becomes easier for the things~grown much more powerful because they are no longer real~to multiply and take charge, con­ trolling, and determining persons and actions that no longer con­ trol, determine or even produce them. 6

The world Pocock- describes is McWorld-what Neil Postman, another savvy critic of the tyranny of technology over its makers, calls technopoly. Technopoly suggests "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology."7 Post­ man is not a technological determinist and recognizes that technol­ ogy can be both friend and enemy. But liberated from our common democratic choices and left to the market, we are more likely to con­ front the enemy than the friend. Which is perhaps why John Pocock thinks the key to living in the postindustrial, postmodern world is finding "means of affirming that we are citizens ... that we are per­ sons and associating with other persons to have voice and action in the making of our worlds."a .

Many who are skeptical of McWorld have assailed in particular its pervasive materialism. These include traditionalist advocates of the moral Jihad against the West's consumer culture, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or his more militant Islamic brethren as well as some of Jihad's harshest critics like Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has blamed the temptations of tribalism on the West's "permissive cornucopia" that breeds materialist self-gratification and a "dominant cultural reality" defined by the "dynamic escalation of desire for sensual and material pleasure."g American kids from small towns in the farm belt with ears cocked to the siren song of urban shopping districts and subur-

Securing Global Democracy 275

ban malls hundreds of miles away are no different than Russian vet­ erans of communism succumbing to the insistent commercial jingles that come tumbling from their new Japanese TVs. "My dad won't even let us get MTV," complains a teen from Nebraska, whose friends "see the shopping mall as the great hangout of the rest of the nation, and they don't have one.,,10 So, the kid from Nebraska and the kid from Smolensk end up in L.A. or St. Petersburg where what­ ever distinct culture that may have attached to their youth is stripped away and replaced with the videology of a MeWorld utterly indiffer­ ent to diversity or democracy.

Such attitudes and behaviors are as much the product as the cause of McWorld's strategies, and make understandable the alliance against McWorld's global culture forged by Jihad's warriors-an alliance that leads premodern tribalists and postmodern Puritans to make common cause. Are these aroused and zealous camp followers of Jihad then really so nutty in their censuring of materialism and their call for modes of living more commensurate with the needs of the human spirit? How different is their rhetoric from the more aus­ tere and secular argument advanced so fervently by Vaclav Havel, who has not permitted his reputation as an ironist to obscure his unselfconscious commitment to forging a strong connection between politics and service to others? Havel calls for an awareness of "the secret order of the cosmos" that makes "genuine conscience and genuine respo~sibility . . . explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed 'from above.' ,,11

The complaint against McWorld represents impatience not just with its consumption-driven markets and its technocratic imperatives, but with its hollowness as a foundation for a meaningful moral exis­ tence. These absences translate into profound civic alienation that disconnects individuals from their communities and isolates them from nonmaterial sources of their being. Citizenship is not a cure for spiritual malaise but spiritual. malaise is a roadblock to citizenship because it impairs the capacity to create the community institutions on which a civil society and a democratic culture must rest.

As Robert Putnam has wisely suggested, "The norms and net­ works of civic engagement also powerfully affect the performance of representative government," so that when people start bowling alone instead of together in leagues, even so pedestrian an activity as this

01,':

276 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

may signal trouble for democracy. 12 That is why Harry C. Boyte and other supporters of renewed Citizenship have argued that we learn to, be citizens not fIrst in politics but in the "free spaces" of scho1:'ll, church, 4-H club, and YMCAY A culture of advertising, software, Hollywood movies, MTY, theme parks, and shopping malls hooped together by the virtual nexus of the information superhighway closes down free spaces. Such a culture is unquestionably in the process of, forging a global something: but whatever it is, that something is not democracy. For democracy rests on civil society and citizenship, and , while the new telecommunications technologies are not necessarily averse to either, they produce neither unless directed by citizens already living in and dedicated to a civil society.

A Global Civil Society?

As A FRAMEWORK for democracy, the nation-state is twice impaired: the challenges of global McWorld and regional Jihad are not sus­ ceptible to its interventions; and the ideology of laissez-faire that accompanies McWorld and has become the mantra of its propo­ nents within national government undermines whatever residual capacity it might have for action in the name of public good. Sovereignty is indeed in a twilight, condemned to a shadow world by government's myriad postmodern detractors-ex-Coplmunist and postindustrialist alike. In the post-Communist East, government is too closely associated with totalitarian despotism: to speak of citizens still evokes the language of comrades and faithful party hacks. In the democratic West, government remains too identified with bureau­ cracy, inefficiency, and a professional political class in whom peoples everywhere have lost confidence, if in part because they have lost confidence in themselves. Until we retrieve our public institutions and reclaim their powers as surrogates for our own,' government and its communication technologies will be part of the alien world we confront-part of "it"-rather than a tool with which we can con­ front "it." To make government our own is to recast our civic atti­ tudes, which is possible only in a vibrant civil society where responsibilities and rights are joined together in a seamless web of community self-government.

Securing Global Democracy • 277

At the same time, democracy demands new post-nation-state insti­ tutions and new attitudes more attentive to the direct responsibility people bear for their liberties. To be sure, global government, above all democratic global government, remains a distant dream; but the kinds of global citizenship necessary to its cultivation are less remote. Citizenship is nurtured first of all in democratic civil society. A global citizenship demands a domain parallel to McWorld's in which com­ munities of cooperation do consciously and for the public good what markets currendy do inadvertendy on behalf of aggregated private interests. This is no easy task. More than sixty years ago, John Dewey had already suggested that the problem was to identifY a democratic public. "Not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of social transactions," he wrote. "There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics, for conjoint actions which have indirect, serious and enduring conse­ quences are multitudinous beyond comparison."J4. How much more elusive than Dewey's national "public" is a global "public"-not just a network of NGOs, but a civic nexus across all boundaries; not just groups like "Doctors without Frontiers" (MCdecines sansfrontiires) but a world of citizens without frontiers?

The creation of a public is the task of civil society. Only there are attitudes likely to emerge that favor democracy and counter the siren song of McWorld. Only there are communities possible that answer the human need for parochial interaction in ways that remain open to inclusion and to cosmopolitan civic sentiments. But how can civil society be constructed in an international arena? Those wishing to try-not just in Russia and Germany where patience and civic cun­ ning are imperative, but in an America and Western Europe that have grown complacent about the civic domain-need both to recall the story of democracy's founding, and at the same time to invent new institutions appropriate to novel global conditions. Old democrats often suffer from their civic longevity. They forget the lessons of their own history, forget how violent and disruptive democratization can be, how long it takes to construct a foundational free society before a democratic constitution can ever be raised up upon it. Like the cautious senator who cannot remember the risk­ taking boy he once was, the modern democrat represses the memory

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278 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

of revolution and tumult in which he fIrst reached his own uncertain majority, pretending that he was forever a. prudent sage and that it did not take a prolonged and painful childhood to learn the arts of liberty (if they were learned at all).

Specialists seem persuaded that to construct a new democracy, whether for Russia, Somalia, or for the whole planet, requires noth­ ing more than the export of prefabricated constitutions and made­ to-order parliamentary systems. Joshua Muravchik is a perfect exemplar whose problems begin with the very title of his new book: Exporting Dwwcracy.15 Fed Ex the Federalist Papers to Belorussia; send a multiparty system to Nigeria by parcel post; E-mail the Chinese the Bill of Rights; ship the U.N. a civilian-controlled, all-volunteer, obe­ dient but conscience-sensitive peacekeeping force from a country with a high tolerance for casualties and no interests of its own ... and in the flash of a laser beam: democracy! For global government,

do exactly the same thing, globally. Not quite. Democracies are built slowly, culture by culture, each

with its oWn strengths and needs, over centuries, which is why the West Germans might have taken more care before expunging the novice civil institutions of the East German resistance movement like Neues Forum; and why the Russians might want to pay more attention to native institutions like the Russian mir (village com­ mune) or soviet (council) and a little less to import Western institu­ tions. For the lesson of Western democratic history is patience and self-reflection. Between Magna Carta's fIrst assertion of rights by the English Icing's vassals and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 that ushered in the era of parliamentary supremacy, stretched 450

long, war-filled years; and it would be ISO years more before Parlia­ ment became even nominally "democratic." Switzerland's proto­ democratic federal system took its fIrst steps in 1291 but acquired a fully democratic constitution only in 1848 (totally revised in 1874), more than fIve hundred years later. France initially experimented with aristocratic regional parliaments hundreds of years before its revolution in 1789, and it required still another century for some­ thing resembling a workable democratic republic to come into being.

In the 150 years between the foundings at Jamestown and Ply­ mouth Rock and the founding of the United States of America in 1789, colonial Americans had a half-dozen generations of experi-

Securing Global Democracy • 279

ence with royal charters, commonwealth government, town meet· ings, and a frontier wilderness society that sharpened their sense of autonomy and fashioned talents for self-government that would be indispensable to the working of the federal constitution. Moreover, it took the young democratic republic another seventy-five years and a bloody civil war to confront the issues of slavery and state sovereignty left unresolved by the 1789 constitution. 16

A people corrupted by tribalism and numbed by McWorld is no more ready to receive a prefabricated democratic constitution than a people emerging from a long history of despotism and tyranny. Nor can democracy be someone's gift to the powerless. It must be seized by them because they refuse to live without liberty and they insist on justice for all. To prepare the ground for democracy today either in transitional societies or on a global scale is fIrst to re-create citizens who will demand democracy: this means laying a foundation in civil society and civic culture. Democracy is not a universal prescription for some singularly remarkable form of government, it is an admo­ nition to people to live ina certain fashion: responsibly, auton­ omously yet on common ground, in self-determining communities somehow still open to others, with tolerance and mutual respect yet a fIrm sense of their own values. When John Dewey called democ­ racy a way of life-it is the idea of community life itself, he insisted-rather than a way of government, he called attention to its primacy as an associated mode of living in a civil society. A global democracy capable of countering the antidemocratic tendencies of Jihad and McWorld cannot be borrowed from some particular nation's warehouse or copied from an abstract constitutional tem­ plate. Citizenship, whether global or local, comes fIrst.

These lessons would not be so hard for the complacent denizens of McWorld and the angry brothers of Jihad if the idea of civil society had retained its currency among those who call themselves democrats today. But battered by history and squeezed between two equally elephantine state and private market sectors, civil society has fairly vanished both as theory and as democratic practice. Even in America, where the heritage of John Locke ought to have kept it supple, the idea of civil society has petrified and crumbled-its dry remains easily pushed aside in favor of a set of simple interlocking oppositions: the state versus the individual, government versus the

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280 • JIHAD vs. MCWORLD

private sector, public bureaucracy versus free markets, corrupt politi­ cians versus angry voters. Politically alienated and consumption­ weary people, equally uncomfortable with what they see as a rapacious and unsympathetic government and a fragmented and self-absorbed private sector, fmd themselves homeless. Neither the market nor the state bureaucracy seems to speak to them or serve them in their public identity. Although it is ultimately accountable to the people in their capacity as voters, the government is regarded by them as an almost foreign body: a threatening sphere of quasi­ legitimate coercion managed by unresponsive representatives, pro­ fessional politicians, and bureaucratic managers who have lost much of their authority as authentic voices for the public they supposedly represent. Voting, at best, is reduced to an act of spite or retribution

against outlaws disguised as candidates. On the other hand, the private sector, representing commercial

markets, and comprising private individuals and corporations, speaks for the public only inasmuch as it aggregates the desire of individuals and companies-private prejudices and special inter­ ests given a "public" status they do nothing to earn. The "public corporation" does nothing to deserve its legal sobriquet. It is pri­ vate in everything but its name. Not only is the actual public left voiceless and homeless, but those in government who still try in good faith to receive counsel from the now-phantom public do not really know where to turn, since so-called public opinion polls canvass private prejudice and since special interests represent themselves and only themselves. In America and most other democracies, politicians who were once citizens temporarily hold­ ing office are metamorphosed by power- into "professionals" out of touch with their constituencies, while citizens are reduced by their impotence to whining antagonists of the men and women they elect to office or to sulking clients of government services they con­ sume without being willing to pay for. For peoples so cynical about their own democratic institutions to recommend democracy to cousins in transitional states or to conceive of a global democracy in the world beyond sovereign borders is problematic at best. For today's half-baked citizens recommend democracy without trusting it: they abdicate their own majority powers in favor of term limits, constitutional amendments, and supermajorities. Likewise, they

Securing Global Democracy 281

recommend markets without believing in them: without being per­ suaded for an instant that markets can secure citizenship or civic liberty or much of anything beyond the material goods that no longer satisfy their yearning spirits.

To envision a democratic civic entity that empowers citizens to rule themselves is then necessarily to move beyond the two~celled model of government versus private sector we have come to rely on. Instead, invoking the traditional language of civil society, we need to begin to think about the domains people occupy as they go about their daily business as having at least three primary arenas, whether within tribal enclaves, nation-states, or a global society: the govern­ ment and the private sector to be sure, but also the civil domain, civic space or what Eastern Europeans and Russians regularly referred to as civil society before they became "democratic" and were per­ suaded by their Western handlers that local participatory institutions were unsuited to democracy's market ambitions.

Civil society, or civic space, occupies the middle ground between government and the private sector. It is not where we vote and it is not where we buy and sell; it is where we talk with neighbors about a crossing guard, plan a benefit for our community school, discuss how our church or synagogue can shelter the homeless, or organize a summer softball league for our children. In this domain, we are "pUblic" beings and share with government a sense of publicity and a regard for the general good and the commonweal; but unlike gov­ ernment, we make no claim to exercise a monopoly on legitimate coercion. Rather, we work here voluntarily and in this sense inhabit a "private" realm devoted to the cooperative (noncoercive) pursuit of public goods. This neighborly and cooperative domain of civil soci­ ety shares with the private sector the gift of liberty: it is voluntary and is constituted by freely associated individuals and groups; but unlike the private sector, it aims at common ground and consensual (that is, integrative and collaborative) modes of action. Civil society is thus public without being coercive, voluntary without being privatized. It is in this domain that our traditio'nal civic institutions such as foun­ dations, schools, churches, public interest and other voluntary civic associations properly belong. The media too, where they take their public responsibilities seriously and subordinate their commercial needs to their civic obligations, are part of civil society.

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282 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

Unhappily, civil society has been eclipsed by government/market bipolarities and its mediating strengths have been eliminated in favor of the simplistic opposition of state and individual: the command economy versus the free market. This opposition has forced those wishing to occupy noncoercive civic space-whether in traditional democracies, new democracies, or the global civic domain-back into the private sector where they reappear, quite improperly, as "special interest" advocates supposedly unmarked by common con­ cerns or public norms. We are compelled to be voters or consumers in all we do; if we wish to be citizens, if we want to participate in self­ governance rather than just elect those who govern us, there is no place to turn.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in Tocqueville's America and afterwards, American society felt like civil society. Without trying to romanticize the social conditions of that decentralized period, we can see how they allowed liberty a more local and civic aspect, while a modest governmental sphere and an unassuming private sector were overshadowed by an extensive civic network tied together by schools, granges, churches, town halls, village greens, country stores, and vol­ untary associations of every imaginable sort. It was these "municipal" institutions that fIred Tocqueville's imagination. Government, espe­ cially at the federal level, was a modest affair (probably too modest for some of the tasks it needed to accomplish) because the constitution had left all powers not specifIcally delegated to it to the states and peo­ ple. Markets were also modest affairs, regional in nature and domi­ nated by other associations and affections.

It was only when individuals who thought of themselves as citizens began to see themselves as consumers, and groups that were regarded as voluntary associations were supplanted by corporations legitimized as "legal persons," that market forces began to encroach on and crush civil society from the private sector side. Once markets began to expand radically, government responded with an aggressive cam­ paign on behalf of the public weal against the new monopolies, inad­ vertently crushing civil society from the state side. Squeezed between the warring realms of the two expanding monopolies, statist and cor­ porate, civil society lost its preeminent place in American life. By the time of the two Roosevelts it had nearly vanished and its civic denizens had been compelled to frnd sanctuary under the feudal tute-

Securing Global Democracy • 28 3

lage of either big government (their protectors and social servants) or the private sector, where schools, churches, unions, foundations, and other associations could assume the identity of corporations and aspire to be no more than special interest groups formed for the par­ ticularisticends of their members. Whether those ends were, say, market profitability or environmental preservation, was irrelevant since by defrnition all private associations necessarily had private ends. Schools became interest groups for people with children (par­ ents) rather than the forges of a free society; churches became confes­ sional special interest groups pursuing separate agendas rather than sources of moral fiber for the larger society (as Tocqueville had thought they would be); voluntary associations became a variation on private lobbies rather than the free spaces where women and men practiced an ~pprenticeshipof liberty.

Paradoxically, once civil society had been privatized and commer­ cialized, groups organized in desperate defense of the public interest found themselves cast as mere exemplars of plundering private inter­ est lobbies. Unions, for example, though concerned with fair com­ pensation, full employment, and the dignity of work for all became the private sector counterparts of the corporations, and in time learned all too well how to act the part. When they tried to break the stranglehold of corporations over labor, they were deemed another "special interest" group no better than those against whom they struck, and perhaps worse (since the companies struck were produc­ tive contributors to the wealth of America). Environmental groups have undergone the same transmogrifIcation more recently. Although pursuing what for all the world looks like a public agenda of clean air for all including the polluters, they are cast 'as the polluters' mirror­ image twin-another special interest group whose interests are to be arbitrated alongside those of toxic-waste dumpers. The media sur­ rendered their responsibility to inform democracy's proprietors and became sellers of gossip and wholly owned subsidiaries of private sec- . tor proprietors with no responsibilities at all other than to their profIt margins. Under such conditions, the "public good" could not and did not survive as a reasonable ideal. Its epitaph was written by David B. Truman, who in his influential 1951 primer The Governmental Process) a book that helped establish the dominant paradigm in social science throughout the 1960s and 1970s, wrote summarily that in dealing with +,

284 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

the pluralist pressure system of private interests that is America, "we do not need to account for a totally inclusive interest, because one does not exist."17 McWorld has only dropped an exclamation point into Truman's assertion.

We are left stranded by this melancholy history in an era where civil society is in eclipse and where citizens have neither home for their civic institutions nor voice with which to speak, even within nation-states nominally committed to democracy. Be passively ser­ viced (or passively persecuted) by the massive, busybody, bureau­ cratic state where the word citizen has no resonance; or sign onto the selfishness and radical individualism of the private sector where the word citizen has no resonance. Vote the public scoundrels out of public office and/or vote your private interests into office by voting your dollars for the scoundrels willing to work for you: those are the only remaining obligations of the much diminished office of citizen in what are supposed to be the best established democracies.

If these cheerless observations are at all well grounded, and democracy suffers from the polarizing effects of a vanished civil soci­ ety in America and other Western democracies, surely those looking to create new democracies under the conditions either of Jihad or of McWorld face formidable challenges. Their first priority surely must be the reconstruction of civil society as a framework for the reinven­ tion of democratic citizenship, a mediating third domain between the overgrown but increasingly ineffective state governmental and the metastasizing private market sectors. Our choices need not be limited by the zero-sum game between government and commer­ cial markets in which growth for the one spells encroachment for the other: a massive statist bureaucracy or a massive McWorld. Although that is precisely the choice that has been offered to peoples in Russia and East Germany, we need not opt either for some cari­ catured Big Brother government that enforces justice but in exchange plays the tyrant, or for some caricatured runaway free market that secures liberty but in exchange fosters inequality and social injustice and doggedly abjures the public weal. For this leaves us only with the choice between McWorld or tyranny. Indeed, as the nation-state loses its sovereignty, it is not so much the choice between tyranny and McWorld but the tyranny qf McWorld itself that

Securing Global Democracy • 285

becomes our destiny. Only some version of a global civil society can hope to counter its inadvertent despotism.

Civil society grounds democracy as a 'form of government in which not politicians and bureaucrats but an empowered people use legitimate force to put flesh on the bones of their liberties; and in which liberty carries with it the obligations of social responsibility

. and citizenship as well as the rights of legal persons. Civil society offers us a single civic identity that, belonging neither to state bureaucrats nor private consumers but to citizens alone, recouples rights and responsibilities and allows us to take control of our gov­ ernments and our markets. Civil society is the domain of citizens: a mediating domain between private markets and big government. Interposed between the state and the market, it can contain an obtrusive government without ceding public goods to the private sphere. At the same time it can dissipate the atmospherics of soli­ tariness and greed that surround markets without suffocating in an energetic big government's exhaust fumes. In the international domain, where states are weak and markets dominant, civil society can offer an alternative identity to people who otherwise are only clients or consumers-or passive spectators to global trends they can do nothing to challenge. It can make internationalism a form of cit­ izenship. Within national states, both government and the private sector can be humbled a little by a growing civil society that absorbs some of the public aspirations to self-government, without casting off its liberal character as a noncoercive association of equals. Because they tend to their own affairs and take more responsibility on themselves, citizens inhabiting a vibrant civil society worry less about elections and leaders and term limits and scandals; and they simultaneously free themselves from the "free" markets that other­ wise imprison them in a commercial mentality that leaves no room for community or for spirit.

To re-create civil society on this prescription does not entail a novel civic architecture; rather, it means reconceptualizing and repo­ sitioning institutions already in place, or finding ways to re-create them in an international setting. 18 In the United States, for example, this suggests turning again to schools, foundations, voluntary associ­ ations, churches and temples and mosques, community movements, and the media, as well as myriad other civil associations and remov­

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286 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

ing them from the private sector, repositioning them instead in civil , society. It suggests' helping citizens to reclaim their rightful public , voice and politicallegitiniacy against those who would write them off as representing only hypocritical special interests. In Russia and . other transitional societies it means supporting the new civic infra­ structure and worrying more about getting people involved in local civic associations than about the outcome of elections or the vicissi­ tudes of competing nationalist, socialist, capitalist, and reformist parties playing at parliamentary politics. For McWorld, it means seeking countervailing institutions not in international law and orga­ nization but in a new set of transnational civic associations that afford opportunities for nationally based civil societies to link up to one another and for individual citizens of different countries to cooperate across national boundaries in regional and global civil movements. Civil society needs a habitation; it must become a real place that offers the abstract idea of a public voice a palpable geog­ raphy somewhere other than in the twin adases of government and

markets. More than anything else, what has been lost in the clash of Jihad

and McWorld has been the idea of the public as something more than a random collection of consumers or an aggregation of special polit­ ical interests or a product of identity polititcs. The public voice turns out to be the voice of civil society, the voice of what we can call var­ iously an American civic forum, a Russian civ,ic forum, or a global civic forum--eivil society's own interactive representative assembly. We have noted that the democratic citizen must precede the democ­ ratization of government. It now becomes clear that civil society offers conditions for the creation of democratic citizens. A citizen is an individual who has acquired a public voice and understands him­ self to belong to a· wider community, who sees herself as sharing goods with others. Publicity is the key to citizenship. The character of the public voice is thus essential in defining the citizen. For a pub­ lic voice is not any old voice addressing the public. The divisive rant of talk radio or the staccato crossfire of pundit-TV are in fact perfect

models of everything that public talk is not. Much of what passes for journalism is in fact mere titillation or

dressed-up gossip or polite prejudice. The media have abandoned civil society for the greater profits of the private sector, where their

Securing Global Democrat) • 287

public responsibilities no longer hobble their taste for commercial success. How long a journey it can be for women and men nurtured in the private sector and used to identifYing with one another only via a cash contract on the one hand, or in terms of Jihad's blood fra­ ternity on the other, to fmd their way to civil society and speak in its measured public voice, particularly if that voice must also have a transnational or international resonance. "Public" inflects "voice" in a remarkable fashion that turns out to hold the key to civil society and citizenship. A genuinely public voice--the voice of civil sod­ ety--can empower those who speak far more effectively than either the officially univocal voice of government or the obsessively con­ trary talk of the private sector's jabbering Babel. The voice of civil society, of citizens in deliberative conversation, challenges the exclu­ sivity and irrationality of Jihad's clamor but is equally antithetical to the claun of McWorld's private markets to represent some aggrega­ tive public good. Neither Jihad nor McWorld grasps the meaning of "pUblic," and the idea of the public realized offers a powerful rem­ edy to the privatizing and· de-democratizing effects of aggressive tribes and aggressive markets.

If civil soCiety is one key to democracy, then global strong democ­ racy needs and depends on a methodical internationalization of civil society. Civil society in turn must again discover adequate incarna­ tions at the national level to become susceptible to globalization. For a historical model we might look back at the American Committees of Correspondence founded in the Revolutionary War era by citi­ zens without legitimate political oudets (the British controlled the formal institutions of government); these committees allowed them to gather together informally in bodies that were neither govern­ mental nor private but that together forged the civic materiel by which the new Republic was first fought for and won and then estab­ lished and constituted. Are virtual committees of correspondence possible on the Internet? Can citizens log on to a civic bulletin board across national boundaries? Here is a starting point for a genuinely civic telecommunications.

Not so long after the Committees of Correspondence inaugurated their successful revolution against English tyranny, Thomas Jeffer­ son had proposed local 'Civic assemblies as a continuation of direct and decentralized self-government: "Where every man is a sharer in

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288 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD .,

the direction of his ward-republic," he had written, "and feels that.~ he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at anJ election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a:

,v man in the State who will not be a member 'of some one of its coun~Ii,

~f ! cils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of him sooner ~~i than his power be wrested from him." 19 Only at-the local and regional levels where Jihad plays out its game can an alternative

t:

ii' I form of identity be won that can ultimately contain McWorld at the I:II" global level. Neither the tribal circle nor the traffic circle, neither the '~I:: clan nor the mall, offers adequate public space to the kind of demo­ I" cratic community that can provide citizens both identity and inclu­

sion. The affinities that spring from local association must not barricade the way to regional affections, national identification, and

( global alliances, as tribes and clans (whether historical or invented) too often do. Technology may permit us to reconstruct electronic wards and teleassemblies linking together distant neighbors. But this will happen only if markets are not left to determine how these tech­ nologies will be developed and deployed, and if global communica­ tion is disciplined by prudent deliberation and civility. How civil

'f society can be forged in an international environment is an extraor­

I dinary challenge. Recognizing that it needs to be forged is, however,

II the fIrst step toward salvaging a place for strong democracy in the world of McWorld.

There is a second, more institutional step as well. The parts may become more civil and participatory, their members more civic; yet they must be aligned by some form of global organization that per­ mits cooperation without destroying their autonomy. A global civil society is a foundation for but not yet the same thing as a global democratic government.

Democracy and Confederalism

How IS A world integrated by markets but otherwise utterly disinte­ gral to be held together if not by global government and unmediated international law-neither of which, I have suggested, hold out real­ istic promise? The primary form of reorganization in recent years,

, ,~j

Securing Global Democrary • 289

thanks to the politics of Jihad, has been partition. What is the alter­ native? Federalism is probably too aggressive and centralist a solu­ tion for countries as fractured as Croatia or Afghanistan and cannot even guarantee the integrity of, say, Switzerland, India, or Germany. Confederalism offers a more promising strategy, for it permits the nation-states already in existence to create, bottom-up, a global asso­ ciation. The alternative, a centralized, top-down governing frame, requires an international sovereign-some global legislator-to establish it; and the international sovereign is the very entity that is missing.

The Federalist Papers have been required reading for desperate gov­ ernments seeking to slow the pace of partition and civil disintegra­ tion. The Articles of CorifCderation make far more relevant reading. Article III of the Articles, in conjunction with a revitalization of civil society locally, provides a modest framework for holding rival national fragments together in a loose alliance rather like the one that "united" the three original cantons of Switzerland in 1291 at the Rtitli. Article III provides for the full autonomy of the member states and honors their independence (indispensable to those pursuing a politics of identity), but also declares that:

The said states hereby severally enter into a fIrm league of friend­ ship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding them­ selves to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade or any other pretense whatsoever.

This would seem to offer a starting place to defend against the depredations both of Jihad and McWorld. The Article assumes a certain root citizenship within each of the states, and probably would be effective only under conditions where civil society had set down such roots. Article IV provides that "the free inhabitants of each" state "shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of free cit­ izens in the several states, and the people of each state shall have ingress and regress to and from any other state, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce." Ethnic cleansing

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290 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

and involuntary refugees would be barred, equal citizenship and fre . movement e11ioined.

Similar provisions held together the He1vetic Confederation tha made the Swiss such an extraordinary example of democratic asso ciation (if not of inclusive citizenship) long before parliamentary institutions elsewhere had found their way to genuine representative; government. The splintered factions of many a ruptured nation;' could do worse than reconceive themselves in terms of a "fIrm league of friendship" around their common liberties (if they have

:;:

i Ij: any!). Quebec and the Anglophone provinces of Canada may well ;1:' be compelled to such a solution if they are to avoid a costly struggle.

Confederalism is no panacea but it may offer a viable alternative to more centralist, coercive, and thus futile solutions to national disinte­ gration. Modeled not on the American Federalist constitution but its confederalist predecessor, which gave the colonies sufficient time to live together to discover the need for more integrative remedies­ and to acquire the trust and tolerance on which such remedies depend-this solution offers a gradualist, voluntary, trust-building strategy of supranationality. Like democracy itself, such inclusive forms of confederal association are evolutionary in nature and depend on the success of ties that are initially much looser. The model is Switzerland prior to 1800 rather than the European Union, for Switzerland assured the civic vitality of the parts before crowding them into a larger whole; it took citizenship as a set of local attributes (to become a Swiss one must still acquire corrimunal citizenship fIrst, the national passport comes only afterwards) and by securing them in participatory institutions guaranteed that the confederal whole would be democratic.

The new Europe has in fact seemed most democratic not in its rigid representation of national states and their governments and certainly not in its technocratic dependence on market forces, but rather in its representation of the regions. We have seen how Ger­ man Laender and Spanish provinces have striven for a European membership that has a strongly confederal feel to it. Closer to their own peoples, their potential association with Europe (if it ever is per­ mitted by their own national governments) can effect ties that their member citizens may regard as relevant to them.

Securing Global Democracy • 291 ., 'I·ii~.·.

The problem of democracy under modern conditions is immensely ':i~:

complicated. In the context of the dialectical interplay of Jihad and :.:.I~,:i...!.,.i.,McWorld, reformist arguments tend to chase their own tails. Strong ~!,,~democracy needs citizens; citizens need civil society; civil sociyty ;:~

requires a form of association not bound by identity politics; that form of association is democracy. Or: global democracy needs con­ federalism, a noncompulsory form of association rooted in friend­ ship and mutual interests; confederalism depends on member states that are well rooted in civil society, and on citizens for whom the other is not synonymous with the enemy; civil society and citizenship are products of a democratic way of life. Yet the circle of democracy is unbroken, and perhaps the fIrst and last and only lesson this book can teach is that until democracy becomes the aim and end of those wrestling with the terrors of Jihad and the insufficiencies of McWorld, there is little chance that we can even embark on the long journey of imagination that takes women and men from elementary animal being (the thinness of economics) to cooperative human liv­ ing (the robustness of strong democracy). Thus, in Rwanda or in Bosnia or in East Timor or in Haiti, we perhaps misconceive the challenge when we ask how to partition or internationalize or pacifY a disintegrating country; perhaps the real challenge is how to make it democratic. Democracy is to be sure already the sought-after fInal outcome for those trying to rescue the planet: but it must also be the guiding principle going in.

If the democratic option sounds improbable as a response to Jihad (it is!), think of the "realist" solutions currently being debated-peace and stabilization through foreign invasion, expul­ sion, partition, resettlement, United Nations Trusteeship, military intervention, or simple dismemberment. Will they contain the spreading global fIres of Jihad? And if the democratic option sounds utopian as a response to the infotainment telesector with its infectious videology and its invisible electronic fIngers curling around human minds and hearts wherever satellite transmissions can be received, think of the alternative: surrender to the markets and thus to the least noble aspirations of human civilization they so efficiently serve; and the shrinking of our vaunted liberty to

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292 • JIHAD VS. MCWORLD

Regis Debray's wretched choice between "the local Ayatollah and Coca-Cola.,,20

In a nation at war, Abraham Lincoln saw in democracy a last and best hope. On our paradoxical planet today, with nations falling apart and coming together at the same moment for some bf the very same reasons, and with cowering ~ational governments and toothless international law hardly able to bark, let alone bite, democracy may now have become our first and only hope.