Benjamin R. Barber is a professor of political science and director of the Whitman Center at Rutgers University. His popular books are Strong Democracy (1984), An aristocracy of Everyone (1992), and Jihad Vs. McWorld (Times Books, 1995). Jihad Vs. McWorld, his last book was published in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1992 (volume 269, No. 3, pages 53-65). The main purpose of this article it to highlight the two strong forces i.e. tribalism and globalism, or in other words Jihad and McWorld. They clash at every point except the fact that they both could be a serious threat to democracy.
[...] “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 goes from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down.” Conclusion seems possible” that this model may be the most attractive democratic ideal one to resist the two trends of Jihad and McWorld. More precisely, he defends confederal union of semi-autonomous communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into [...]
[...] In McWorld: bureaucratic, technocratic and meritocratic system guided by a laissez-faire principle of economic efficiency, McWorld is indifferent to democracy whereas Jihad is antidemocratic (one-party dictatorship, military juntas, theocratic fundamentalism, often a version of the Führerprinzip. III. A proposal: a confederal and participatory democracy 1. McWorld should eventually prevail over Jihad 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.” Why? Another quote from Ortega: “Everyone sees the need of a new principle of life. [...]
[...] It is incomplete because it is questioned and it makes the national borders “porous from without” when Jihad recreates them from within Jihad, or the Lebanonization of the world A “retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed”: a shock among cultures, people, and tribes but also a fierce opposition to interdependence, social cooperation and civic mutuality. The meaning of the word Jihad is struggle, usually a religious term: the struggle of the soul to avert evil, battles where the faith is under assault, against governments that deny the practice of Islam. [...]
[...] “Every nation, it turns out, needs something another nation has; some nations have almost nothing they need.” The information-technology imperative: - Technologies “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.” - In order to achieve some scientific progress, need for open communication and regular exchanges of information, for a rational and common discourse, = science and globalization are “practical allies.” - Business, banking, and commerce are based upon and facilitated by communication and new technologies. [...]
[...] [ ] 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.” examples of free markets in autocratic or despotic countries: Chile, Korea 2. The risk coming from Jihad and Lebanonization Values: local identity, sense of community, solidarity among people of the same group, and obedience to its hierarchy and beliefs. Jihad is clearly grounded on exclusion of others: war against outsiders - opposite to democracies' values: tolerance and not exclusion, no fanaticism, and no obliteration of individual selves in the name of the group, not the same deference to leaders Two antipolitic systems. [...]
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