Jihad v. McWorld.

• Author: Cook, Gareth
• Position: Review

Jihad v. McWorld

Benjamin Barber Times Books, $25

Last year, I went to Middleboro, a small town in southeastern Massachusetts, to write a piece about Rwanda. It had all the makings of your classic "shrinking planet" story. Here was Manzi Kanobana, a Tutsi teen from the heart of Africa, now an exchange student at a small New England high school. To these kids, Manzi seemed strange at first, but he played a mean game of soccer and quickly made friends. His home country's quirky customs caught on--like the midnight candy Christmas tradition--and, before long, he had plenty of friends with whom to watch TV--usually CNN's "International Hour." Middleboro, meet Kigali.

But that spring, amidst CNN's reports of Coca Cola's move to Prague and the most recent opening of a McDonald's franchise in Budapest, came chaotic stories of Rwanda's self-destruction. The president's plane had been shot down, and the nation's two tribes--the Hutus and the minority Tutsis--fell upon each other with an apocalyptic fury. One afternoon, I sat in a sparsely-furnished apartment, with Manzi's aunt sitting at the table next to me, crying softly as her young nephew explained, bewildered, how men came with machetes and executed most of his family.

Is the world coming together, or is it ripping apart at the seams?

This is the driving question behind Jihad vs. McWorld, an important new book by Rutgers political scientist Ben Barber. This book, like Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers or Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, is an attempt to make sense of what is still awkwardly known as "the post-Cold War world." Barber concerns himself with what he sees as the two dominant international trends of our time: "McWorld integration," based on a rapidly growing world consumer culture, and "Jihad retribalization," splintering once-settled nations. He pointedly argues that although "McWorld" and "Jihad" are in seeming opposition, the two forces are in fact partners, attacking democracies at their roots. Yet, this is not a book solely for foreign-policy mavens. Barber asks provocative questions about the direction Americans are taking--as a country and as a culture.

For a while, it was fashionable to point out that the United States didn't win the Cold War--Japan did. Indeed, Japan did emerge from the superpower struggle as a real economic power unfettered by punishing levels of defense spending. But Barber argues that the real prize should go to...