Harvard Journal of Law & Technology Volume 9, Number 2 Summer 1996
JIHAD VS. MCWORLD
By Benjamin Barber. New York, N.y.: Times Books. 1995. Pp. 381. $25.00 (hard). During President Clinton's historic 1994 visit to Eastern Europe and Russia, he often repeated his praise for the emerging "democratic markets" of the former Soviet Bloc (p. 14). The coupling of these two concepts, democratic governance and market economy, however, may not be as inevitable as the President's comments suggested. Democracy is essentially a political system that, at its best, seeks to include populations living under its authority in the process of making decisions that guide their lives. A market economy, on the other hand, is a system of open competition among producers of goods and providers of services. While both are systems of competition - - of products in a market economy, and of interestS in a democracy - - neither can fully incorporate the model of the other. If democracy is the rule of the people, who are the constituents of a "corporate democracy?" Does domination by a cabal of controlling shareholders manifest a democratic system, even if this renders minority shareholders powerless or if the corporation's workers or dependent customers are not represented? How broadly democratic can a corporation become before its driving profit motive is subsumed by its societal perceptions of the common good? On the other side of the spectrum, how corporate can democracy be before it no longer deserves the democratic label? If ownership and control become the basis of democracy, how will the voices of less advantaged members of a society be heard, and what will happen to the participatory model of democracy? Benjamin Barber suggests in his new book, dihad vs. McWorld, that the unfe~ered spread of capitalism not only does not promote democracy, but often undermines it. Barber examines the integrationist pressures of international capitalism, global communications systems, and mass advertising campaigns - - all forces which, he argues, do to inter-group diversity what McDonald's does across the globe to twenty million customers a day (p. 23): it "mesmerize[s]" people with uniformity, speed, and efficiency, "pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce" (p. 4). Concurrent with the international pressures I. Benjamin Barber is the Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. He has written several books and is a regular contributor to Harper's, TheNew
Republic, and The Atlantic Monthly.