Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber

Author:Benjamin R. Barber
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, Sociology, Religion, Politics, History
ISBN: 9780307874443
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1995-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

13

Jihad Within McWorld:

“Transitional Democracies”

THE PARADOXICAL INTERFACE of Jihad and McWorld is nowhere more in evidence than behind the crumpled iron curtain in the “transitional” or “emerging democracies”—which though they most certainly are emerging from communism and in transition to somewhere, are for the most part neither democratic nor very likely to become so any time soon. If anything, they are regressing rather than progressing. Dragoslav Bokan, an editor and film director who became a leader of the Serbian private militia known as the White Eagles, confesses: “I don’t believe in democracy because I don’t believe any group at any time can change the course and goals of their ancestors by their own free will.”1 Another spent local academic concludes: “… too much history in too little room. There are no liberals here, there are only nationalists. We are victims of a long-lasting nationalist idea, impossible to get rid of.”2 The nationalist idea so many Eastern Europeans manage at once both to fear and to cherish is not the nineteenth-century ideal of integration and nation building. Yugoslavia, insists Zarko Domljan, Croatia’s Assembly president elected in 1991, “is not a nation—it is a mixture of ancient tribes,” and newspaper headlines regularly feature the region in terms of a “whirlwind of hatreds.”3

Within the developed world, to which these jagged middle European shards of the ex-Soviet empire affect to belong, there is no region in which Jihad has an uglier or more disintegral presence. Both as a struggle against multicultural nation-states, states that once managed to sublimate ethnicity such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union once were, and as a battle to contain the cultural inroads of McWorld’s implacable markets, Jihad has found its natural home in Central Europe and Western Asia. Its compass is described by that great arc of warring tribes that rises off the Adriatic through Albania and Yugoslavia, and—flanked by Bulgaria to the south and Hungary to the north—pushes northeast through Romania and Transylvania to Moldavia and Bessarabia and into the Ukraine and the Crimea, wrapping itself around the Black Sea and finally dropping down again into Transcaucasia, where Azerbaijanis and Armenians do battle right up to the edge of the Caspian Sea as Europe gives way to Asia. This bloody crescent has always been the heartland of Europe’s zone of tumult. Above it there is a secondary arc, scarcely less bloody, whose trajectory runs from Czechoslovakia and Poland up through the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in the north, and then plunges down into Belarus, Great Russia proper, and the Ukraine, which features its own multicultural nightmares.

Under the great empires of the Ottomans, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Russians, these tribally supersaturated regions were neatly segmented into pluralistic zones of tolerance where local culture flourished under the watchful eye of monarchies that would brook no bloodshed other than the bloodshed that emanated from their own policies. The neo-imperial Communists also enforced a nationalities doctrine that was repressive and intolerant of parochialism. Today this imperial handiwork has come

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