Globalism and tribalism: The Barber polemic

By Uditha Devapriya

Samir Amin, who passed away in 2017, wrote frequently on the dangers of fundamentalist nationalism in the Global South. As with Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, his focus and interest remained in the periphery: The weakest links and the ‘storm centres’ of the world. Yet he did not see the growth of fundamentalism in these regions as a self-regulating trend: Rather, he viewed it as a consequence of their forced integration into the world economy by neoliberal globalisation. Far from considering them as separate processes, he considered nationalism and neoliberalism as one and the same, feeding into each other. For him, integration didn’t so much unite the periphery as promote its very antithesis, fragmentation.

The experience of Third World societies in the post-1975 conjuncture confirms this link. The radicalisation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the revival of Hindutva in India, and the resurgence of ethnic separatism in the former Soviet Union followed the neoliberalisation of these societies via the IMF prescription of tax reductions, welfare cuts, currency devaluation, and privatisation. Yet the course of history has not resolved the debate: Polemics continue to appear, even today, on the relationship between globalisation and development on the one hand, and globalisation and nationalism on the other. One such polemic, which appeared 30 years ago, continues to be of particular interest.

In 1992 Benjamin Barber authored an essay in The Atlantic that went on to animate scholarly discussions on the difference between globalisation, neoliberalism, and nationalism. Titled ‘Jihad vs McWorldism’, the article contended that while these two titular forces coexisted across nations and borders, and while both of them promoted fragmentation, even if not in equal measure, they pulled in different directions: “the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalising markets.” Barber cheered neither of these forces (“both bleak, neither democratic”), yet he observed within the conflict between them a choice, a fundamental one, for humanity, between “the brutal realities” of Jihad and “the dull realities” of McWorld. This Manichean view continues to be promoted by mainstream scholarship today.

In its most essential sense, the essay delves into two forms of nationalism. In its first form, to be found in the metropolitan centre, it traces its origins to the French Revolution and speaks the voice of a unified civic consciousness; in its second form, more prevalent in the tropics, it speaks the voice of a hundred fragmented ethnicities.

The solutions policymakers tend to prescribe for the periphery, in which nationalism operates as a supposedly disuniting force, are always the same: Globalise, liberalise, open up markets, let in multinational capital, and conduct economic shock therapy. Mike Davis in ‘Planet of Slums’ calls this “adjustment from below”, whereby the markets of the Global South, through IMF reform packages, are forcibly freed with no consideration for its impact on the poorest of these societies. Fidelis Balogun’s summing up of the process hits the target: “privatising in full steam and getting hungrier by the day.”

We know privatising in full steam has exacerbated disparities, within the third world, and made hungrier. But how has its impact been on nationalism? Less than half a century since the first structural adjustment was forced on Mexico, it would seem that globalisation and liberalisation have failed to vanquish tribalism from the periphery: far from obliterating it, these “reforms” and processes have instead sharpened its contrasts, fuelling centripetalism and centrifugalism while perpetuating inequalities. “The market,” observed Andre Gunder Frank, “unifies but does not homogenise and instead simultaneously polarises and thereby fragmentises.” To put that pithily, the unifying-polarising tendencies of McWorldism have managed to feed into the unifying-polarising tendencies of Jihadism.

One should, of course, desist from viewing these issues along the lines of Cowboys versus Indians. Reducing them to a simple binary between neoliberalism/bad and nationalism/good, or vice-versa, gets us nowhere. Even Barber’s essay stops short of endorsing McWorldism as an objective necessity, or for that matter a necessary evil; it instead calls for a compromise between these two extremities, concurrently encouraging “indigenous democratic impulses” while envisioning a globalist social contract: What Barber calls a “confederal union of semi-autonomous communities smaller than nation-states.” One notices in this an approximation, albeit ever so slight, to a United States of the world: A political model which facilitates both regional autonomy and international cooperation.

Reading between the lines, it’s evident that Barber shares a concern, a liberal one, about the potential of free markets and ethnic fault-lines to rend entire societies asunder. His point isn’t so much choosing between these two, as coming up with a third option: What I see as a global federal government, divided along ethnic lines rather than into geographic entities. Barber not unfittingly quotes Tocqueville here: “The spirit of liberty is local.” Any deviation from this model is to be critiqued: Hence he considers it futile and untenable to try parcelling democracy over long distances, to “Fed Ex the Bill of Rights to Sri Lanka.” Penned a decade or so before George Bush the Second parcelled his version of American democracy to West Asia, these words sound extraordinarily prophetic.

Regardless of what one may think of it today, it’s easy to understand why confederalism felt relevant and timely back then: Coming right before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the horrors of Sarajevo, the solution the essay proposed seemed apt for a post-Cold War order and conjuncture in which superpower tussles no longer shaped the trajectory or resolution of national/regional conflicts. However, one must not be hasty in endorsing Barber’s model and polemic. Instead one must ask two crucial questions: To what extent was Barber’s optimism about “strong democracy” buttressed by a world-government, as he saw it, justified, and to what extent was it, as it eventually turned out to be, misplaced? To restate this, to the extent that his critique of globalisation and tribalisation enabled him to come up with an alternative, how justified was he in his belief that devolution and integration along confederal lines could deliver to the periphery what neither globalisation nor tribalisation had?

Barber’s confederation-integration-devolution model can be criticised from three vantage points. The first is its assumption that globalisation, in modified form, can vanquish tribalism, and that it can deter the reassertion of ethno-nationalist fundamentalism. What the confederal model seeks to achieve is a framework within which globalisation can achieve this end more quickly and efficiently: With the world divided on federal lines, yet integrated into a wider body politic, it promotes representation at the local level, tackling ultra-nationalism and anti-nationalism. As Barber notes, there is “always a desire for self-government, always some expression of participation, accountability, consent, and representation, even in traditional hierarchical societies.” These “need to be identified, tapped, modified, and incorporated into new democratic practices with an indigenous flavour.”

Globalisation with an indigenous democratic impulse, however, is still globalisation, and as such suffers from globalisation’s fundamental malaise: The halving, if not quartering, of the world into enriched haves and dispossessed have-nots, a division which fits in neatly with the bifurcation into metropolitan centre and global periphery. Any model which seeks to remould and restructure globalisation without addressing the systemic divide between well off and worse off communities that it entrenches, within regions and between continents, runs the risk of exacerbating ethnic and religious polarities, thus fuelling the very forces of tribalism it set out to eradicate. At best then, such a model can only prolong, not resolve, the rift between world-affirming and world-denying impulses within the Third World.

The second critique has to do with Barber’s conceptualisation of nationalism. Viewing it through a Eurocentric/West-centric prism, his essay frames it, specifically its ethno-tribalist manifestations, as a backward Third World phenomenon. A corollary of this is the belief that Europe is too civilised, too mired in a civic consciousness, to tolerate such primitive/barbaric sentiments. According to this view of things, the West stands for global cooperation because it has liberated itself from the confines of such ideologies; the East, on the other hand, needs to be incorporated into a globalist order by the West because it has not.

Even when confronted with the fact that peripheral Third World nationalism considerably borrowed from 18th century European nationalism, critics brush aside the past: Hence Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian Prime Minister, extols the virtues of a more perfect union in the EU while excoriating “the chronic condition of nationalism” and its founder, the 18th century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder.

Historical reality does not bear out such jaundiced views of nationalism. As anyone who has read R.A.L.H. Gunawardana’s essay ‘The People of the Lion’ will know, many terms from the nationalist dictionary, such as race, have distinctly European origins. More insightful in this regard is James Petras’s 2008 Foreign Affairs essay ‘Us and Them’, which refutes the thesis that nationalism is backward, and Third Worldist, by showing that the First World has had its own share of tribalist ideologies: propelled not by a twist of history alien to the West, but, as Muller points out, “by some of the deepest currents of modernity.”

The third critique is essentially a rehash of the first and second. Barber’s solution suffers from the myopic worldview of reformists the world over: It assumes that systemic rifts can be eradicated through structural reforms. As the Third World experience will attest, though, no systemic rift was ever resolved through political structures.

Samir Amin classified the Global South into two distinct geographic entities: The Third World, or countries linked to the industrial West, as in East Asia, and the Fourth World, or the rest of humanity, which exports primary commodities for cheap and imports industrial goods from the West and East Asia for dear. To the extent that neoliberal globalisation has sped up the enrichment of Amin’s Third World at the expense of the Fourth – particularly in South Asia, whose share of the world’s poor rose from 27.3 percent in 1990 to 33.4 percent in 2013, and in Africa, whose share rose from under 20 percent to more than 25 percent – it goes without saying that cosmetic political reforms will not question, let alone modify, centre-peripheral relations in existence since the 15th century, “when Columbus globalised us all.” To modify them, not just a new model of globalisation, but a new conception of democracy (participatory rather than liberal), needs to be in place – and not just in the periphery.

Today, no one seriously advocates Barber’s model of confederalism. This has as much to do with the experience of the West as it does with that of the non-West: Deindustrialisation in the ex-factories of the West, plus capital flight into the non-industrialised East – from Detroit to Delhi – has generated a popular, populist backlash against further global integration. This in turn has legitimised nationalist tribalism, even in the First World: A deplorable state of affairs which has entrenched disparities and thwarted systemic reforms.

The assumptions on which Barber’s model rests appear to have facilitated a coming together of neoliberalism and nationalism. Twelve years after his essay appeared, it behoves us to ask how we can resolve the dialectic between these two forces. The world today seems to be falling apart and coming together: A unity of disunity, paraphrasing Perry Anderson, sucking us into a maelstrom of perpetual fragmentation and integration. We badly need a way out.

(The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)