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SMART BOMBS OR SMART CONCEPTS
Benjamin Barber
Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland; Author, Jihad vs. McWorld
I am not pleased that Jihad vs. McWorld had a prophetic eeriness on September 11. No one wants Osama bin Laden as their publicity agent. But to some degree, what I wrote about several years ago - a confrontation between the forces of global market modernization and commercialization, and a tribal, religious and ethnic reaction against them - has proven to be one of the key thematics played out in recent years. I'd like to talk about what 9/11 means for this confrontation between the forces of global society and those who seem so fearful of it - in some cases so fearful they have resorted to the most despicable forms of terroristic violence - and possible remedies that move beyond the military and intelligence strategies that have been the primary instruments of this administration.
For the first 200 years, this nation was wound up in a great, powerful and in many ways overweening myth: the myth of American independence, isolated by two great oceans, blessed with a continental bounty and a political system that in time opened membership to all and provided a model of democracy for the world. That myth inscribed in the Declaration of Independence has not only been a founding credo for this nation but a continuing presence that has made citizens and politicians alike believe that, when threats come to these shores, we deal with them by exporting our soldiers, defeating our enemies and raising the walls around America even higher.
Wrapped up in the myth was also a myth of American innocence, that this was a "new-found land," as Thomas Paine said, "as at the beginning of the world." America was where the human race was to have a second chance, outside religious turbulence, prejudices, wars and intolerance. The myth was laced with hypocrisy, because the nation was also founded on slavery and extermination of the indigenous population. But it brought forth a credo that allowed even those excluded from the initial contract - African Americans in slavery, women and many others - to gradually fight for inclusion.
This wonderful mythology has made us think we can solve our problems alone, and when evil comes our way, the Lone Ranger climbs on his horse, straps on his guns and fights the good fight. We've heard a lot of this rhetoric since September 11; it's powerful, and much of the country responds to it. On September 11, America was not just dealt the blow of a savage attack, but it was also treated to an unsolicited, yet powerful lesson in the new realities of the world - the ineluctability, the inevitability of interdependence; the fact that independent nations can no longer survive with their own destiny in their own hands.
It's frightening when our worst adversaries - men with hearts set on annihilation - understand the world better than we understand it, because that means we are in an uneven combat. Though we are far more powerful militarily, economically, culturally and even in values, it may be that we deploy solutions based on a misunderstanding of the world: a belief that we can solve our problems by ourselves, that unilateralism, though maybe unsentimental and not terribly moralistic, is useful and pragmatically efficient. September 11 taught us that the old realism has become a new kind of utopianism. The belief that America, by dint of its own military power, ignoring multilateral treaties, new legal conventions, international organizations, can overcome terrorism is now a new myth.
Before September 11, people who talked about global democracy, multilateralism, the need to create an interdependent foreign policy to try and deal with problems from AIDS to global warming to global markets, looked like a romantic utopia of soft-headed liberals. But now the multilateralists are the new realists, because they understand the lessons of September 11. Those lessons have been evident to the Europeans at least since World War II, when it was clear that no single European nation was in a position to protect itself by itself. The evolving economic, ecological and technological environment was one in which no nation could exercise sovereign independence and control outcomes without being deeply engaged with other nations. AIDS carries no passport. The West Nile virus does not stop for customs inspections. Global warming is no respecter of national boundaries. Terrorism doesn't check in before it moves into a country and register with the police.
Our world is a globalized, in Manuel Castells' phrase, "networked society," in which the networks and systems are in many ways more important than the individual players. President Bush has in a desk in the Oval Office a large sheet of paper with 22 photographs of Al Qaeda leaders on it. Each time one is captured or killed, he puts an X through it. That is a deeply insufficient way to take on terrorism, not because there is anything wrong with trying to get the leadership, but because terrorism is about people who operate in the interstices of national systems. To try to find a national state address for terrorism, as this administration has done and continues to do, is a deep categorical mistake. I am not soft about the need to take military action against terrorism, but to think that terrorism can be understood in terms of nation-states that protect or harbor it is to misunderstand the nature of terrorism. Terrorism is a denial of the nation-state system, a denial that territorial states are any longer the chief actors. If President Bush was serious when he said, "We will punish, destroy states that harbor terrorism," he would have first of all had to bomb New Jersey and Florida, which had been harboring the terrorists for at least two years prior to the act.
Afghanistan played a lead role in harboring terrorists, but destruction of the Taliban regime has done little to eliminate the Al Qaeda network that reappears now in Pakistan, Indonesia and in Yemen. Terrorism is like the human brain; it's about the synapses that connect the cells. Terrorists operated here effectively by manipulating and leveraging the American transportation system, the international financial and banking system and the credit card system. An approach that draws pictures of terrorists, puts Xs through them or writes down the addresses of the countries where some of them can be found and then makes war on those countries, makes no sense. Even if we took out Iraq, Iran and North Korea tomorrow, the centers of the "axis of evil," terrorism would continue. What's extraordinary is that we use today's smart bombs and smart weaponry to take on our enemies, but we link them with really dumb ideas taken from the 19th century.
What terrorism and the global market system share first of all is anarchism - a world without law, without archons. The so-called global order is a global disorder, which permits global markets to function in the absence of democratic regulation, legal oversight and democratic will. That may be useful in the short term, but in the long term it creates global anarchy which may sometimes benefit markets, but more often benefits criminals and terrorists.
On the whole we have globalized our vices, rather than our virtues - the weapons trade, crime, prostitution, pollution and diseases that now move around the world. We have globalized exploitation of women and particularly exploitation of children, who are laborers of many Third World economic systems. Children are the soldiers and victims in many of the tribal wars around the world. In Palestine, I don't want to call them martyrs or suicide bombers, but they are the victims of an adult system, a global system, which makes children the primary ones to pay the cost. On the streets of Brazil are homeless children whose choice is reduced to whether to become prostitutes or organ farms. In Thailand and in other parts of East Asia, children are used as the seductive objects of the global pornography tourist trade that you can sign up for on the Internet.
This is not a critique of capitalism; the great strength of capitalism in the West, with all of its contradictions and raw Darwinist tendencies, is that it works well when it's inside an envelope of democratic oversight and Tocquevillian civic institutions - church, family, philanthropies - which soften some of its worst side effects. They control some of its self-destructive tendencies because, left to its own devices, capitalism undermines and corrodes the very premise on which it operates. Capitalism's strength is that it works off competition, but its tendency is to destroy competition and create monopoly. It avoids that with the help of the rule of law, antitrust legislation and regulation. That doesn't just save capitalism from some of its harsher costs socially, it saves capitalism as a competitive economic system as well.
I'm not an opponent of globalization, I'm an opponent of asymmetrical globalization, in which you globalize the economics without the civics, politics and democracy. Most people I know in the "anti-globalization movement" - a term dubbed by the media - are not anti-global. Their question is, Globalization for whom, of what and in the name of which values and interests? Our project is not to stuff the genie of global markets back inside nation-state boxes - that's impossible. Our only hope is to extend the civic, political and regulatory features of nation-states to the global arena.
It's not so different from 19th-century America after the Civil War, when the great new behemoths of American capitalism - oil, steel, railways and eventually the automobile - operated largely without oversight. Government was still relatively miniscule and impotent compared to the new monopolies. But by the end of the 19th century, it became apparent to all Americans that these new robber barons would not just destroy American democracy but American capitalism if the state didn't intervene. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was first to understand the need to regulate capitalism so its productive and entrepreneurial energies could be used for the good of all America but its contradictions and excesses contained.
We need a Rooseveltian solution at the global level. But that's hardly on the agenda. Protesters too often talk as if you are somehow going to stop these large global conglomerates. That's not going to happen. Capitalism as a business proposition has acknowledged and recognized interdependence and gone global. Democracy has stayed locked within the nation-state. That discrepancy creates the tensions that we see today between powerful and yet impotent nation-states that can neither control global capitalism nor global terrorism, much for the same reasons.
We see the irony of the U.S. looking for ways to bring global criminals under control and at the same time refusing to ratify and sign on to the new International Criminal Tribunal; of the U.S. looking for a coalition to overcome the "axis of evil" yet refusing to sign on to multilateral treaties which manifest the new spirit of interdependence and cooperation.
The conference in South Africa last year on racism turned out to be an anti-Israeli, anti-American operation, but every time we don't win we can't say, "I'm going home, I'm not playing anymore." As a powerful, mature nation, we have to stay and fight. It's not others we damage when we come home, but ourselves. The global warming protocols developed at Kyoto might put extra pressures on the U.S., but we put extra pressures on the world because we are 4-5 percent of the population that uses 25-30 percent of the world's fossil energy reserves, so maybe that suggests special responsibilities. If we have special claims to make, we have to be there making the arguments. That's democracy - we do it very well internally.
The reality is if others around the world are impoverished, America will not be permitted to stay wealthy. If others around the world are at risk and generations of their children seem to have no future, then our children may also have no future. There are no walls high enough, no oceans wide enough to separate America's fate from the fate of the world, which means we have to be engaged in shaping that world.
The anarchic world of global markets has to be made governable if the world of terrorism and criminality is to be made governable. You can't have the rule of law for some and not for others. While military campaigns against individuals and regimes will help a little to slow things down, in the long term terrorism has to be attacked systemically through extension of rule of law, multilateral cooperation through development of institutions of social and economic justice, as well as criminal prosecution. We have to create a world in which there are not 14 year-olds who think to be a martyr is a better fate than to be educated, get a job and have a family.
The problem with Sharon's war in Palestine is that it won't work. The problem with America's war in Afghanistan is that by itself it won't work. This isn't an argument against the use of military force, but against the use of force unaccompanied by the other things that have to be done to give children hope. There is an evil out there, and there is an axis of evil, but mirroring them is an axis of injustice, despair, resentment and rage. That doesn't justify terrorism, but it helps explain it. It helps explain what the U.S. has to do in order to overcome it.
Terrorism is almost always a symbol of disempowerment. On the whole, you and I pay our taxes, obey the laws even though we might not agree, because we have pretty good lives. If we don't agree we know how to change them. If terrorism is the last resort for men and women without power, the only ultimate remedy is empowerment. Democracy is about empowering people to control their own destiny. The Palestinians are without a homeland largely out of their own mistakes and the mistakes of the Arab world. But Sharon will never end terrorism by capturing the man in the act of terror today because there are generations of children coming up. Sharon has dismantled and destroyed what little civic, health and educational infrastructures had been created. Without schools, hope, jobs, dignity - why not terrorism? If we want to combat the illusions and dangerous myths of the powerless, we have to find ways to empower them - not the terrorists themselves, but the wider sea of people from whom they come and who feel sympathy for them.
Americans have been saying since 9/11, Why do they hate us? It's not that they hate us, but they fear the future - they see the globalization that we represent as an encroachment on their futures. To the degree they feel that way, they become our enemies, hate our regime, and they will engage in a violence far more destructive to them than to us, but that in an interdependent world will bring us all down. Democratic empowerment, the extension of civil society, the globalization of our democratic and governing institutions to encompass and overcome the anarchy of global markets, crime and terrorism is the only realistic strategy open to us. I don't see administrations in Jerusalem or Washington even contemplating this part of the campaign. America has to take its own democracy seriously and think about creating a democratic global society, in which neither rogue corporations nor rogue terrorists are permitted to govern the future.
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