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Benjamin R. Barber is a leading thinker regarding the subject of democracy. For Barber, as he argues in several of his works, democracy should be both participatory, far beyond the act of voting, and inclusive. In Jihad vs. McWorld, Barber worries that the very existence of democracy and the nation-state, on which it has primarily depended, are threatened. This threat results from what he describes as the two core tenets of our age: globalism and retribalization. These are the forces of "McWorld" and "Jihad" that he describes as "operating with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one recreating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without" (Barber 1996, 252). His title refers to what he sees as the two premier global trends of our day, movements that are, respectively, reducing the world to intractable fragments and giving it an unprecedented unity. The book's first part concerns McWorld, the ever-expanding service sector of the international economy, especially as it manifests itself in what Barber calls the "infotainment telesector," American in substance if not always in ownership. He sums it up in a litany of brand names and pop icons: Disney and Paramount, Nike and Reebok, Madonna and MTV, Coke and Pepsi, Homer Simpson and Batman, Kentucky Fried Chicken and, needless to say, McDonald's. Relentlessly promoting its "ideology of fun" at the expense of local institutions and folkways, this "virtual economy" of images and lifestyles promises to become nothing less than a world "monoculture." For civic life, this is especially bad news, Barber contends. Manipulated by "promotion, spin, packaging, and advertising," citizens lose all interest in public matters, falling prey to "passive consumption" and devoting themselves exclusively to the satisfaction of their multiplying wants. In the second part of the book, Barber takes up "Jihad." Moving beyond its strictly Islamic meaning, he understands it as any effort by a parochial community to protect itself from the cosmopolitan, universal standards of the West. It is a metaphor for "opposition to modernity." Accordingly, Jihad encompasses not only religious extremists like Hamas and Hezbollah but also a range of this-worldly chauvinisms, from Russia's Zhirinovsky and the Bosnian Serbs to the promoters of language rights and separatism in places like Quebec, Catalonia, and Occitan France. In its more virulent forms, this too is no help for democracy. Inward-looking and narrow, the rivals of McWorld tend to favor violence, to disdain basic civil liberties, and to have serious reservations about political equality. In the book's third and final section, Barber suggests how we might yet salvage a democratic future from the "tribalism" of Jihad and the "consumerism" of McWorld, invoking the much-discussed concept of civil society. In seeming agreement with many other observers, he argues that community groups and voluntary associations provide the "attitudinal resources" that make "democratic citizenship possible" and let "democratic institutions function effectively." It is this fragile social infrastructure that must be bolstered, he insists, but his proposal for doing so - the creation of a "global civil society" whose precise character he leaves to the reader's imagination - is a disappointing afterthought to the rest of the book. More on that later…. Barber's main concern is with something that he refers to as "participatory democracy" or "civil society", a kind of political system in which each individual takes an active role in nearly every decision of government.
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