[In the following review, Sigmund examines Barber's definitions of “Jihad” and “McWorld,” Barber's proposals for strengthening participatory democracy, and his suggestion for creating an “international confederalism.”]

The jarring title notwithstanding, … [Jihad vs. McWorld] is a significant book. It juxtaposes two countervailing tendencies in the contemporary world, the universalizing tendencies of global capitalism and the particularizing drives of religious, tribal, and ethnic fanaticism, and argues that both are undermining the fragile structures of democracy.

The first part on the emergence of “McWorld” documents the expansion of a homogenizing, American-dominated worldwide consumer culture. A media mogul like Australian-born Rupert Murdoch, besides owning TV Guide, Twentieth Century Fox Films, HarperCollins Publishers, and the New York Post, controls television chains in the U.S., Britain, and Hong Kong that broadcast to two-thirds of the world's population. U.S. films comprise all or nearly all the ten top-grossing films in every major country except Mexico (six out of ten), Italy, and Japan (five out of ten). In Germany, American-made films have moved from 53 percent of the market in 1981 to 83 percent today. Eighty percent of the films shown in Europe are American, while only 2 percent of those shown in the U.S. come from Europe. Satellite dishes proliferate in China, despite government opposition, and they receive CNN, MTV, and the BBC news, the last pulled by Murdoch at the request of the Chinese government. Imitations of American trash TV appear in Britain, the Russians do a rip-off of “Wheel of Fortune” and a dubbed version of the real thing reaches 70 percent of Poland's viewers. Honda boasts both of being the import car of the year, and having 80 percent American components, while the Dodge Stealth is built in Nagoya, Japan.

Spokesmen for several U.S. administrations have seen the expansion of global capitalism as linked positively to democracy. However, Barber argues that “Market Leninism” in China and successful capitalist tyrannies in Chile, South Korea, and Singapore disprove the link, and that “capitalists may be democrats but capitalism does not need or entail democracy.”

Consumer choice, often manipulated by the media, is not the same thing, says Barber, as the autonomous decision making of the democratic citizen. (Barber does not mention the role of mass communications such as the fax machine and CNN in the ending of authoritarianism in Chile and Eastern Europe, and in the events of Tiananmen Square in China in 1989.)

The second part of the book examines “dogmatic and violent particularism”—Barber's definition of Jihad—around the world. Besides Israeli and Islamic extremists and the warring ethnicities of the former Yugoslavia, there are the Irish, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, and the many ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union. Less extreme but still divisive are the German Swiss, the East Germans, and the French Canadians. Each is reviewed for its explosive divisiveness. Not included, because in most cases they have been defeated or have lost their revolutionary faith, are the Marxist-inspired guerrillas who were active in nearly every country of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Barber admits that religion can be compatible with democracy and alludes to Tocqueville's claim that it was a prerequisite for its effective functioning. Yet he is dubious about the possibility of a reconciliation between Islam and democracy similar to that which had taken place in Christianity. He seems to believe that there is little difference between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms in terms of their opposition to democratic practices. “Both want to be born again so as to be born yesterday,” that is, before the advent of modernity with its acquisitiveness, individualism, and secularization, for which the spiritual poverty of the market is partly to blame. And Waco and Oklahoma City show that the weapons of holy war are not exclusively Islamic.

In the long run, Barber seems to believe, the forces of McWorld will triumph. But this will only mean that the democratic nation-state will be subordinated to the forces of the international market, a development in postmodern politics that Barber sees as “bad. No, not bad, disastrous.”

What can be done to strengthen the forces of democracy? Like many contemporary social critics, Barber calls for the strengthening of civil society, locally, nationally, and internationally. He sees the schools, churches, foundations, public-interest groups, and the media “when they subordinate their commercial needs to their civic obligations,” as constituting a middle ground between government and the private sector. They provide the basis for alternative nonmarket institutions to regulate the market's anarchy or adverse consequences.

However, the examples Barber give of the results of the actions of such institutions all seem to require legislation—outlawing leaded gas, subsidizing public transportation, mandating hospital insurance for bus drivers, and limiting highway construction in scenic areas. But the extension of state regulation depends on and is legitimated by its democratic auspices, providing an alternative to the choice between radical collectivism and radical individualism.

Beyond the state, he sees an international “confederalism” as the next step in civic empowerment and cooperation. Presumably he means the extension of the activity of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but just how this is to be done is not explained. There are references to the Articles of Confederation as providing a model, but aside from stressing the noncompulsory nature of his proposed strong global democracy there are no details on how we build an alternative to Jihad and McWorld. Once again, enforcement seems to require some kind of international authority, but there is no discussion of relevant international cooperation that has been effective—the international human-rights movement, for example—or that which has failed—for example, various international codes of conduct for multinational corporations.

Barber's best-known book is Strong Democracy (1984), a critique of representative institutions and a call for more direct democracy, such as that he observed in the cantons of Switzerland. In its prescriptions for resolving problems Jihad vs. McWorld continues and extends Barber's concern with genuinely participatory democracy. Not everyone will be persuaded by his proposed solutions, but this vivid and well-written diagnosis of the conflicting tendencies in the contemporary world makes lively and persuasive reading.