cover image Jihad Vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling: Apart and Coming Together-And What This Means for Democracy

Jihad Vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling: Apart and Coming Together-And What This Means for Democracy

Benjamin R. Barber. Crown Publishers, $25 (381pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-2350-6

Expanding on a 1993 article in the Atlantic, Rutgers University political scientist Barber offers a stimulating, tartly written survey of two paradoxical world trends: the looming balkanization of nation-states (Jihad) and the inexorable force of integration by technology (McWorld). The trends are in dialectic, not opposition. In McWorld, Barber notes, national boundaries become less significant in the face of multinational corporations and resource interdependence. World culture, he observes, is driven by the ``infotainment telesector,'' characterized by American advertising, film and MTV. Noting that McWorld can serve Jihad, Barber sketches the rise of nationalism in European democracies, in central Europe's emerging democracies, in Islam and, intriguingly, in the American Christian right. McWorld, he writes, threatens democracy by deadening debate and accepting inequalities, while Jihad threatens democracy by sacrificing tolerance and deliberation. ``[T]hey both make war on the sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation-state's democratic institutions.'' Barber believes each culture must build its own institutions of civil society. More wishfully, he suggests that a form of confederalism--not that of the European Union but of pre-1800 Switzerland--might serve to knit both regions and states. (Aug.)