Ethnic Discourse and the New World Dysorder
In this chapter, Majid Tehranian notes that global communication and international relations has been analyzed primarily through the framework of political-economy by Liberalists and Marxists and contends that this framework alone is not sufficient for understanding the world dysorder (as in dysfunctional) deeply rooted in ethnic conflicts that characterize the post-Cold War era. Like many of the authors in this volume, such as Shuter (Chapter 3), Asante (Chapter 7), Miike (Chapter 8), Karenga (Chapter 13), Mowlana (Chapter 15), and Tu (Chapter 32), Tehranian pinpoints one of the most important, yet often ignored, dimensions in international relations—the cultural. He presents a brilliant analysis of the double-edged nature of five current global trends: (1) globalism, (2) regionalism, (3) nationalism, (4) localism, and (5) spiritualism. Rather than simply rejecting these trends, Tehranian submits that each trend can be constructive or destructive depending on our collective choices and actions. He stresses that we ought to forge unity in diversity through communitarian globalism, inclusionary regionalism, democratic-benign nationalism, liberal localism, and ecumenical spiritualism.
When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.
Rudolf Bahro
The rise of ethnicity as a central problem of our time has a dual origin. The most immediate cause is, of course, the end of the Cold War. From Yalta in 1945 to Malta in 1989, the world was dominated by the tidal rivalries between the East and West with a rising undercurrent of north-south conflicts and contentions.1. The universalist ideological pretensions of communism and liberalism left little room for the claims of ethnic and national loyalties except in the third world where national liberation movements attempted to chart a third way under the rubrics of national self-determination and nonalignment. While these attempts succeeded in gaining national independence for many Asian and African countries, they failed to give adequate recognition to the enormous racial, ethnic, and tribal diversity of the newly independent nations themselves. Ethnicity and ethnic discourse thus remained repressed under the weight of a world order characterized by bipolarity and nation-state rivalries.
The end of the Cold War, however, has unleashed the centrifugal, ethnic, and tribal forces within nation-states. (For a sample of ethnic conflict on American campuses, see Tehranian, 1991c.) It has led to the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the world’s last multinational empire, the breakdown of multiethnic patchworks such as Yugoslavia and Iraq, has threatened the breakup of other nation-states such as Canada and India and unleashed racial and ethnic violence in the United States, Israel, South Africa, and other multiracial and multiethnic societies. If we pair these events with other developments such as the rise of religious fundamentalism, we may argue that the rise of primordial identities as opposed to civic and status identities has profound historical roots in the processes of modernization itself. Modernization as a process of universal leveling of societies into relatively homogeneous entities has encountered four great reactions in modern history, which may be labeled as countermodernization, hypermodernization, demodernization, and postmodernization.
The universalist, rationalist, scientific, and technological discourse of modernity, so well articulated in the ideologies of liberalism and Marxism, had for long camouflaged a hegemonic project by a new modern, technocratic, internationalist elite. This elite has largely imposed its will on the rest of a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious, and traditionalist world. With the demise of the Cold War, the fraternal bonds of capitalist and socialist-technocratic elites have been further strengthened. The world centers of wealth and power now speak the language of a new internationalism, a new world order. The world peripheries are left with no universalist ideologies except the universalism of human suffering and religious hopes. National and parochial cultures as opposed to universalist and cosmopolitan cultures have thus gained a new lease on life in the peripheries. Countermodernization in the name of neotraditionalist religious ideologies (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism) is challenging the authority of the modern, secular state in many parts of the world. In the past, hypermodernization as the ideology of rapid transition to an industrial society has historically worked through nationalism, fascism, and communism to mobilize natural and human resources in the cause of state power; it will continue to be the reaction of some of the late-comers to industrialization such as China. Demodernization in the name of environmentalist, feminist, and spiritualist ideologies is taking issue with the modernist ideas of progress as exploitation of nature and engineering of society. Postmodernization is going even further in its critique of modernity by calling into question the absolutist claims of positivist science (scientism) and by simultaneously proposing its own absolutisms of nihilism and relativism. In the face of these challenges, the continuing projects of modernization have no other option but to co-opt elements of the emerging ideologies.
The world is clearly in a state of transition from an old to a new, yet undefined order torn between contradictory potentials. Hoffmann (1990) captured the essential feature of this uncertainly by using the metaphor of a bus to characterize the world situation: “The world is like a bus whose driver—the global economy—is not in full control of the engine and is himself out of control, in which children—the people—are tempted to step on either the brake or the gas pedal, and the adults—the states—are worried passengers. A league of passengers may not be enough to keep the bus on the road, but there is no better solution yet” (p. 122). Although Hoffmann’s characterization of states as adults and people as children reveals an unabashed elitist bias, his implicit point about the need for cooperation is well taken. The futile wars of the past few decades (from Korea to Vietnam and the Middle East) brought no conclusive victories except untold death and destruction on all sides. The Cold War was won by no side except, perhaps, Germany and Japan. The presumed victor, the United States, is in a state of economic disarray while the presumed vanquished, the ex-Soviet Union, presents the world’s communist imperial system in a state of dissolution and reorganization. As Kennedy (1987) argued, both superpowers extended their military grasp beyond their economic reach and are now facing the dire consequences.
In the midst of these contradictions, however, five global megatrends seem to stand out, each characterized by inner tensions between two distinctly different tendencies and discourses. These trends may be defined as globalism, regionalism, nationalism, localism, and spiritualism. Accelerating processes of world communication through travel and tourism, the print media, global broadcasting, telephone and satellite networks, transborder data flows, as well as the global dissemination of the miniaturized media such as telephones, modems, copying and fax machines, personal computers, audiocassette and videocassette recorders, and connectivity among them— have all immensely contributed to what might be called an acceleration of history. While it took two world wars in this century to dissolve the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, and Portuguese empires, the Soviet empire dissolved within a few years through glasnost and the rapid exposure of the Soviet society to the world media, videocassette recorders, fax machines, and computer networks. This is not to claim for technology an exclusive or even decisive role in revolutionary changes but to suggest that technology always augments the social forces already present and pressing for social change. How does world communication contribute to the contradictory potentials and choices in the five global trends suggested above? In what way does the international public discourse reflect these trends and frame the policy choices?
Globalism: Hegemonic Versus Communitarian
Globalism is perhaps the most apparent of all five trends. It is particularly visible to the eyes of international travelers at world airports, hotel chains, fast-food restaurants, and those ubiquitous signs of modern civilization—the Big Mac, Coca-Cola, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. The Big Mac has conquered the Old World (London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing) for the new. The Coca-Colonization of the world has reached the remotest villages around the globe. Striking a Pose2. and breakdancing may be edging out proletarian solidarity, national fervor, and religious devotion.
The engine of globalism is modern capitalism, dating back to the 16th century, tearing down the traditional barriers of feudal, tribal, racial, ethnic, and even national loyalties in favor of the internationalism of the world marketplace of ideas and commodities. Its carriers are the global corporations typically operating in more than 100 countries, locating wherever government interference is the least and profit opportunities the most. Its chief technologies are energy, transportation, and telecommunication, the three successive technological breakthroughs leading to three successive long waves of global economic growth. The latest wave, the third industrial revolution, is characterized by the application of computing technologies to all facets of life in manufacturing (Computer Assisted Design-Computer Assisted Manufacturing; CAD-CAM), administration, education, travel, and entertainment. Without telecommunication, transborder data flows, and electronic fund transfers, the global economy and corporation would have been inconceivable. Globalism’s strategies of conquest are horizontal, vertical, and spatial integration3. of the key world industries from oil to transportation and telecommunication. Its lubricants are the transfers of capital from the centers to the peripheries orchestrated by the World Bank and International Monetary fund, mobilizing world capital, allocating it globally, and reducing the risk for private investors.
Globalism, however, has produced both majestic successes and grand failures. It has brought modern industrial civilization to the remotest regions of the world, but it has also created growing gaps and antagonisms between the rich and poor, humans and nature, and centers and peripheries. Capitalism and communism as the twin faces of globalism, both originating in the Enlightenment project, have also imposed on the world a secular, scientific, and technological worldview that considers human progress in primarily material terms. This ideology of developmentalism is now worldwide. In the peripheries, where the processes of development have taken place piecemeal and unevenly, the social system is often torn between a modernizing elite and a traditional mass. Frequently, the two sectors of the population live in separate quarters, sometimes as if in separate countries and centuries. As bits and watts (indicators of information and energy consumption) increase in mass production and consumption, life is diminished under a system of modernized poverty. Whereas poverty in traditional societies is made tolerable by relative equality, the ethics of self-denial and mutual obligation, and the bonds of community, modernized poverty is driven to despair in a prevailing environment of relentless acquisition, conspicuous consumption, and unabashed greed in the larger society. Modernized poverty thus breeds atomistic mobility, status anxiety, social envy, rising expectations, frustrations, regression, and aggression. The negative internalities of dualistic modernity (such as time-consuming acceleration, sick-making health care, stupefying education, countercommunicative mass communication, and information-void news) thus outpace the positive externalities of growth and development. This process used to be primarily characteristic of third world societies, but increasingly the inner cities of the first and second worlds of development also are plagued by class, racial, and ethnic dualisms. Witness the race riots of the United States in 1965 and 1992.
Globalism as a megatrend is, however, torn between two hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses. There are those who argue for the worldwide triumph of liberal capitalism, the “end of history” as Fukuyama (1989) called it, suggesting that only the boring details are left yet to be worked out, that the great Hegelian battle of ideas in history has come to a conclusive end, that there is little need for a public discourse on the fundamental goals of development. This view is also resonating in American academic circles in a debate between the declinists, led by Kennedy’s (1987) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and the revivalists, led by Nye’s (1990) Bound to Lead. While Kennedy argues that all modern great powers, including the United States, have gone through a cycle of economic expansion, military overreach, and a consequent economic and political decline, Nye suggests that a unique combination of resource endowments, democratic power, and cultural appeal bounds4. the United States to continue as the lone superpower and world leader. The Pentagon has joined this debate by the preparation of leaked documents setting out the blueprint of a proposed strategy for continued U.S. world hegemony (New York Times, May 26, 1992). That hegemony, the Pentagon argues, can be guaranteed only through continued U.S. military preparedness while limiting the autonomy of other potential centers of military power such as Japan, Germany, Russia, and others. In the U.S. presidential elections of 1992 a related debate also took place: The globalists, led by President Bush, saw America’s future in its continued active role in making the world safe for the global corporations, whereas their Democratic and independent critics proposed to refocus on America’s domestic problems.
In contrast to the hegemonic, globalist perspectives, there are others who also claim a globalist perspective but with an accent on the local. Think Globally, Act Locally is their motto (Feather, 1980). The notions of Spaceship Earth (Fuller, 1978), Gaia hypothesis (Lockwood, 1988), common security, sustainable development, soft and appropriate technology, Think Globally, Dial Locally all suggest a commonality of human destiny and a need for greater equality that requires devolution of power and communication. In a follow-up to their seminal study of Limits to Growth (Meadows & Meadows, 1972), conducted twenty years later, Meadows, Meadows, & Randers (1991) recapitulated their earlier conclusions as follows:
- Human use of many essential resources and generation of many kinds of pollutants have already surpassed rates that are physically sustainable. Without significant reductions in material and energy flows, there will be in the coming decades an uncontrolled decline in per capita food output, energy use, and industrial production.
- This decline is not inevitable. To avoid it two changes are necessary. The first is comprehensive revision of policies and practices that perpetuate growth in material consumption and in population. The second is a rapid, drastic increase in the efficiency with which materials and energy are used.
- A sustainable society is still technically and economically possible. It could be much more desirable than a society that tries to solve its problems by constant expansion. The transition to a sustainable society requires a careful balance between long-term and short-term goals and an emphasis on sufficiency, equity, and quality of life rather than on quantity of output. It requires more than productivity and more than technology; it also requires maturity, compassion, and wisdom. (pp. xv–xvi)
The publication of the earlier version of Limits to Growth was followed by a heightened public discourse on the ecological problems. The new edition is coming out at a time in which the memories of the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Exxon-Valdez, Bhopal, and the Persian Gulf War ecological disasters are still fresh in people’s minds. There is also a worldwide movement for sustainable development as pronounced in the Rio Declaration of the Earth Summit of June 1992. The green movement and parties have found in the color green a symbol for their central concern with the preservation of the environment in the face of the onslaught of relentless growth. But destruction of nature is not the only problem. Destroying the delicate bonds of community is the other equally significant cost of rapid and despotic modernization. The traditions of civility and mutual obligation have eroded under the onslaught of acquisitive individualism and its fetishes of commodity and identity. There is a need, therefore, for a new balance between liberty, equality, and community, the three axial principles of modern democracies. Since this balance has been undermined in capitalist societies by a relentless pursuit of individual greed and in communist societies by a bureaucratic devotion to state goals, a revival of civil society and its epistemic communities through devolutions of power is called for.5. I have called this approach to social change communitarian (Tehranian, 1990a, 1990b, 1991b). Under the leadership of Etzioni, a new movement bearing the same name has recently emerged in the United States with its own programs and publications (including a new periodical, The Responsive Community).
A communitarian perspective on the new world order differs sharply from coercive or hegemonic perspectives. It would call for nonviolence, ecologically sensitive and socially responsible sustainable development, protection of human rights, the upholding of human responsibility toward all layers of human community from local to global, and a celebration of cultural diversity. Three elements seem essential to the construction of an effective world community: common interests, norms, and laws. Two factors have strengthened global common interests: threats to human survival through ecological disasters and mass violence, and opportunities in a global economy based on peaceful trade and cooperation. An emerging consensus on international norms recognizes the global political, economic, and ecological interdependence. These norms emphasize the need for the global protection of the environment, use of technology, trade, and development policies to overcome the gaps between the rich and the poor, a universal application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and a collective denunciation of the use of violence in national and international conflicts. The world community ultimately depends on a fragile moral community. Without solidifying these norms, it will be torn apart. But norms without laws and laws without sanctions will have little effect. The world community must be, therefore, a community of interests, norms, laws, and sanctions.
Regionalism: Exclusionary Versus Inclusionary
Given the enormous heterogeneity of the world, however, a global community is best achieved through an interlocking system of smaller and more homogeneous communities. Regionalism is one such trend. This may be called an Age of Regions. Regional formations such as the European Economic Community (EEC), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), and others represent efforts by groups of relatively close countries to establish effective communities of interests, norms, laws, and sanctions. There is a risk, of course, that these budding regional blocs could turn into intense economic competition and possible political confrontation rather than cooperation. Fortress Europe versus Fortress America versus Fortress East Asia is not an unlikely scenario. Regionalism can be, therefore, exclusionary or inclusionary. It can foster a new type of regional chauvinism or it can provide a protective shield for its members against the global hegemonic projects while opening up to the rest of the world for mutual cooperation and benefit.
Regional formations, however, reflect the present dualistic structures of the world system divided between centers and peripheries. First, at the apex of this hierarchy stands North America with its peripheries in South and Central America. NAFTA is the regional expression of this center. Second, catching up and occasionally surpassing North America in per capita income is Western Europe with its old colonial peripheries in Asia and Africa and its new potential peripheries in Central and Eastern Europe. The EEC and the European Union thus represent a broadening regional organization, including Western and Eastern European countries. Third, aspiring to the top position is Japan together with its peripheries in East Asia, some of which are out-Japanizing the Japanese by remarkable rates of economic growth driven by export development strategies. These include South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore trailed by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Although the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conferences (PECC) and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) are broader in membership, the East Asian countries play a critical role in these regional formations. Fourth, Russia in the new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) presents a new periphery for Western, Japanese, and North American investment while acting as a center in relation to its own Asian peripheries. Fifth, China plays a similar role for Japanese transfers of technology and capital while acting as a center in relation to its less developed regions such as Mongolia, Tibet, and Sinkiang. Sixth, itself similarly vulnerable to Western penetration, India is acting as a center for its multilingual empire as well as the smaller nations of South Asia. This regional formation is represented by the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Seventh, the ASEAN region stands out as a unique combination of countries united in common efforts to attain economic growth and avoid periphery status through regional cooperation. In addition to Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Brunei, the ASEAN countries may soon admit Cambodia, Burma, and Vietnam to their ranks. Eighth, despite a unity of language and culture, the Arab world presents a less successful regionalist project. A strategic military location, the possession of oil resources by some and not others, and traditional national and tribal rivalries have divided and weakened the Arabs in their efforts toward such unity. The beleaguered Arab League is the main regional expression of Arab unity. Ninth, Latin America with its wealth of population and resources presents yet another periphery united by a common Hispanic-Portuguese culture, divided by different types of political regimes, promising of regional collaboration for development. The Organization of American States (OAS) is its main expression with some subregional organizations. Tenth, a new regional formation under the name of Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), consisting of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and the former Muslim Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakistan, Turkemenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrghyzstan was formed in February 1992. The new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan might join ECO later. Eleventh, and finally, stands the vast continent of black Africa south of the Sahara with its dark history of white exploitation, famines, tribal conflicts, sluggish growth, and current awakening to a new need for regional cooperation.
Regionalism is driven by a complex of forces to detour past hostilities; to achieve regional security; to obtain economies of scale, scope, and status; to strengthen common cultural ties; and to protect against global or regional hegemonic projects. Culture and communication thus play a central role in regional formations. A common cultural heritage as in Europe and Latin America, a common language as in the Arab world, common economic and security problems as in the ASEAN region, and close cultural backgrounds and aspirations as in the newly formed ECO, each have played a role. But regional integration is easier said than done. It requires economic complementarity, political trust, and cultural affinity. Even Europe, which has been in the fore-front of regional integration, is now having second thoughts on the pace of its movement toward monetary and political unification. Little and cosmopolitan Denmark, for instance, in mid-1992 showed signs of doubt on trading the luxury of a unique identity for a European grand design. While smallness might be a handicap, big is not necessarily beautiful.
Nationalism: Totalitarian-Aggressive Versus Democratic-Benign
It is easier to achieve national rather than regional integration. The entire history of nationalism is an effort to mold a state in the image of a single nation with a common language, culture, economy, and political system. Nationalism has proved a relatively successful method of political organization in the modern world precisely because it is a step closer to the realities of human diversity than imperial systems. States that are multinational, with the possible exception of Switzerland, face problems of internal security. Witness the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, India, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Canada, and the United States.
During the Cold War, the death of nationalism was slightly exaggerated. The end of the Cold War has witnessed a new surge of ethnic consciousness and nationalism around the world. With the decline of the universalist ideological pretensions of liberalism and communism, primordial identities have resurfaced as the most potent force in domestic and international politics. We now have about 178 countries in the United Nations, increasing as the new states in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia become members. There are, however, more than 5,000 nations spread around these countries, many of them restive and clamoring for independence and statehood. Witness the Kurds, the Palestinians, the Québécois. Of the 120 violent conflicts currently waged around the world, 72% are ethnic wars. There are currently some 15 million refugees in the world and over 150 million displaced people. Most of these dislocations are the result of protracted ethnic conflicts erupting into violence. There are some 4,522 living languages in the world, of which 138 languages have more than 1 million speakers. Many languages have, unfortunately, died out. The number of languages in the United States before the coming of Columbus in 1492 was over 1,000. Today it is only 200 (Shah, 1992). Every language represents human creativity at its noblest, the voice of gods breathing life into a dead world. “In the beginning was the Word.” We must preserve those languages that live and resurrect those that have died.
A kind of alternative United Nations, called the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), was formed on February 11, 1991, to assist the world’s disenfranchised minorities toward national self-determination. A total of 14 nations and peoples made up UNPO’s original roll. The organization had nearly doubled its membership to 26 by 1992, representing nearly 350 million people. Along with its 26 full members, UNPO also welcomes “observer” nations such as the native American groups. In August 1991, 10 observer nations participated in the UNPO General Assembly. The largest member nation is Kurdistan with a population of 25 million in the Middle East; the smallest is probably Belau, a tiny U.S. island trusteeship territory in the Pacific with a population of 14,000. What unites these peoples is a common sense of frustration over the denial of their elementary individual and collective human rights. In Turkey, for instance, the Kurds have not even been acknowledged as Kurds; they are referred to as “mountain Turks.” The people of Belau have voted repeatedly in the past few years to refuse nuclear weapons on their shores, but they are being pressured by the U.S. government to accept nuclear warships to achieve an independent status. Tibet has been occupied by China since 1950 and the Uyghur people of Sinkiang have been subdued by the central authorities in Beijing. A condition for membership in UNPO is, however, the renunciation of violence as a means of achieving self-determination (see Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1992, pp. E1–6, and the UNPO Covenant published at the UNPO headquarters in The Hague).
To defend and celebrate the cultural diversity that the emergence of such forgotten peoples represents, is a great challenge. The forces of globalism and regionalism often tend to homogenize and destroy cultural diversity, much to the impoverishment of the world. However, nationalism also has often been used as the hegemonic project of a dominant ethnic group to repress the weaker ethnic groups. Nationalism can be, therefore, democratic and benign or totalitarian and malignant, externally aggressive and internally repressive. Swiss nationalism, for instance, is an example of the former. Nazi German and Fascist Italian nationalisms provide examples of the latter. More recently, the nationalism of the colonized peoples has demonstrated how this ideology can be a liberating force in history, whereas the nationalism of the colonizers shows how exploitation and repression of the subjected peoples can be justified under the noblest of moral claims such as the white man’s burden or Manifest Destiny. Nationalism has achieved much in art and culture, economic progress, and political unity. But it has also produced untold misery and genocides such as the near extermination of the native Americans and native Hawai‘ians in the United States (Stannard, 1989), the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, and the repression of the Palestinians in Israel.
The trouble with cultural and national identity is that it is often presented as nonnegotiable. Much of the violence of the modern world can be traced back to religious, national, or racial ideologies camouflaging material, economic and political conflicts of interests. The Gulf War, for instance, was fought in the name of superior Western standards of moral conduct. What if Kuwait’s main product were broccoli? Would President Bush have sent nearly 1 million U.S. troops to the Gulf War? Contrast Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait with Serbia’s invasion of Bosnia, which has been largely left to its own devices. The moral standards invoked in the Gulf War were similarly circumvented in Los Angeles when trial by a jury of peers in the African-American Rodney King case threatened to bring a guilty verdict on the white policemen who had beaten him nearly to death. The trial was transferred to a white suburb of Los Angeles where the jury was expected to and did, in fact, deliver a not-guilty verdict. These examples of moral obtuseness may seem worlds apart, but they point to a single problem in the modern world. Class, ethnicity, race, and nationality are so intimately intertwined in a hierarchy of wealth, income, and status that it is often easy to pour conflicting economic interests into racial, ethnic, or national passions and violence. While economic conflicts are negotiable, however, ethnic, racial and national conflicts tend to be treated as nonnegotiable. That is why racism so often provides a convenient ideological vehicle for class interests.
Through interactive public discourse rather than hegemonic one-way communication, the media can contribute to peace and mutual understanding in domestic as well as international affairs. However, much of the world media is controlled either by government or commercial interests motivated primarily by propaganda or profit motives. In social and political conflicts, therefore, the tendency is toward a threefold process of simplification of issues, that is, dichotomizing, personalizing, and trivializing public issues toward a construction of media reality considerably at odds with the existential realities of social life. Broadcasting particularly lends itself to these excesses. The visual impact of television is especially suited to an appeal to the right brain, to one-dimensional, singular constructions of reality rather than plurality of meanings. Witness the Gulf War and its portrayal of that conflict as a sanitized, high-tech, visual game with a minimum of human casualties and suffering. No one has yet carefully assessed the real casualties of that war. But the postwar reports indicate over 150,000 dead; 100,000 maimed; and the creation of 1 million Kurdish, Shi’ite, and Palestinian refugees followed by epidemics, vendettas, and high infant mortality rates that resulted from breakdown of basic utilities in Iraq and Kuwait. Approximately 80% of the American public receives its news through television, and 80% of the same public was reported to have supported the war. Is there any correlation between these two statistics?
The global village has been historically dominated by broadcasting networks in the service of subtle and not-so-subtle nationalist propaganda. Although between 1965 and 1990, world radio and television sets have dramatically increased in numbers and distribution in favor of the less developed countries (LDCs), the major transmitting networks continue to be dominated by Western media organizations. World radio sets increased from 530 million in 1965 to 2.1 billion sets in 1990.6. The share of LDCs increased from 21% to 44% of the total. World television sets increased from 180 million in 1965 to 1 billion in 1990. The share of LDCs increased from 17% to 45%. World radio broadcasting is clearly dominated by the United States, the UK, Germany, France, China; a declining Russia; and an ascending Taiwan, South Korea, Egypt, India, and Iran—and most of it in pursuit of each country’s own partisan politics. World television broadcasting is currently dominated by CNN and Visnews as well as Worldnet (distributing television programs that “enhance U.S. diplomacy abroad”), the BBC commercial World Television News, Deutschland TV, and Canal France International, most of which have entered the arena with generous government subsidies. However, the pioneer in the field is purely commercial. Turner’s Cable News Network was established in 1980 and is now available on satellite or cable in 137 countries. Its rival is BBC World Service Television, set up in 1991 as a commercial venture after the BBC tried and failed to win government support.
Localism: Parochial Versus Liberal
While nationalism has clearly been a prevailing historical force for the past two centuries, localism is a relatively novel trend pointing to a deepening of the democratic forces. The processes of decolonization and democratization that started with the American Revolution in 1776 have now penetrated everywhere. The continuing world democratic revolution has gone through four long waves. From 1776 to 1848, this revolution was primarily aimed at the overthrow of monarchies and independence for the colonies in Europe and the Americas. World War I (1914–1918) led to the breakdown of the Russian, Austrio-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires and the weakening of European control over their colonies in the Middle East and North Africa. World War II (1940–1945) led to the final breakdown of the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish empires in Africa and Asia. The end of the Cold War in 1989 and the breakdown of the Soviet Union may be considered as the fourth wave in a continuing revolution.
The new democratic revolution, however, is focused on local empowerment. Localism is the ideological expression of this trend, emphasizing local knowledge, local initiative, local technologies, and local organization. The torch of leadership has similarly passed from the ideologues of the great revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries to the technologues of 20th-century technocracies in government and business and to the communologues of the grass-root, localist movements that speak in the vernacular of local knowledge and epistemic communities. As the slogan Think Globally, Dial Locally also suggests, the global communication network has brought to the local communities the power to link with communities of affinity throughout the world. The local initiatives for nuclear-weapons-free zones (NWFZs) has increased from 250 in 1982 to 5,000 in 1991 (Boulding, 1991). There are already 24 countries that have unilaterally declared themselves as NWFZs. There are also five formal NWFZ treaties signed among governments. A global idea thus depends for its implementation on local movements and organizations (Boulding, 1991; Tehranian, 1991a). The formation of municipal foreign policy organizations in many cities in the United States is another manifestation of how local communities are no longer willing to allow the U.S. Department of State to be their sole representative in matters of grave international concern.
However, localism also is caught in a tension—between parochialism and liberalism. Parochial localism tends to be narrow minded, bigoted, and persecutionary. The phenomenon of David Duke in Louisiana politics may be considered as an archetype of such trends. Unabashed racism coupled with local prejudices and organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan has proved a powerful tonic at times of dwindling resources and diminishing expectations. The Rodney King case in Los Angeles also demonstrates the parochial power of localism. In 1992, the jurors in Simi Valley were acting in perfect harmony with their own local views of white policemen as protectors of law and order when they handed down a verdict of not guilty, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When localism combines with a national trend toward racism as demonstrated by the Republican party’s willingness to use race as an issue in elections (witness the Willie Horton television ads in the 1988 presidential elections), the outcome can be tragic as demonstrated in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The Rodney King case also demonstrated both the power and impotence of television in the face of local prejudices. Powerful visual portrayals of a helpless black man beaten to the ground by a group of four white policemen brought about a national outcry for racial justice, but it could not bring a guilty verdict from a jury of 12 who were deeply entrapped by their own localist worldview. Powerful images of looting and beating of the whites in Los Angeles by black rioters has created a backlash for what Vice President Dan Quayle has called “law and order” against the “poverty of values.”
The hierarchies of inequality within nations in which women, minorities, and immigrants are often trapped at the bottom of the social structures of injustice and violence, ultimately cannot be corrected except through grass-root initiatives and actions. No matter how powerful the global, regional, and national forces, it is local conditions and power configurations that shape the routinized structures of violence, as seen in the inner-city ghettos. The communities in the U.S. South did not change the scourge of segregation for more than 100 years; when the South was industrialized, the institutional structures were changed at the local level. The same can be said of the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. The new segregation in urban America relegates 20% of the population to the conditions of an underclass whose chances for upward mobility are nearly nil. The postindustrial information society of high technology and fully automated factories (e.g., CAD-CAM) has created conditions of structural unemployment and unemployability for this population. The male unemployment rate among the black population of U.S. inner cities is about 50%. Such conditions cannot change until remedies take into account not only state and national forces but also the local level.
The United States presents only one of the most advanced and violent cases of what is unfolding in a post-urban world. Only 12% of Americans now live in big cities. More than 50% of Americans now live in small towns and suburbs. But cities are defined in a peculiar way. As The Economist (May 9, 1992) points out, Beverly Hills is a city completely surrounded by Los Angeles with its own mayor, government, police force, and tax structure. Compton, too, has complete autonomy. But the two cities could not be further apart in their respective mis/fortune. One is the home of Hollywood glitter; the other is a black slum close to south central Los Angeles. Beverly Hills has lavish municipal services; Compton has almost none. If the maps could be redrawn to mix rich and poor neighborhoods, the two sides of the track could share burdens with greater peace and security for both.
Transportation and telecommunication are making it increasingly possible, in part via telework, to live and work in small towns or what continues to be inappropriately called suburbs. These “edge cities,” as Garreau (1991) calls them, are where the new high-tech industries, commercial services, and shopping malls locate. The city of Los Angeles is a patchwork of such autonomous suburbs, connected with the world’s most sophisticated freeway system, enabling their residente to bypass the undesirable neighborhoods while having easy access to urban beaches, theaters, museums, and other desirable facilities. While the business districts in the big city and the small edge cities experience revival and expansion, the inner cities decline. Philadelphia, America’s 5th largest city, encapsulates this paradox. In the past decade, Philadelphia’s skyline in the business districts has been transformed by architecturally exciting new skyscrapers while the ghetto areas have gone into a downward spin. The city’s population is down to around 1.5 million, compared with 2 million in 1970—but its suburbs are ever more populous. Average suburbanites do not see much benefit to burden sharing. Many of them have escaped the cities to avoid high taxes and soaring crime. It would be difficult if not impossible to convince them that it is in their own interest to give some of their local taxes to the cities from which they have escaped. In the meantime, the inner cities in the United States and many other parts of the world burn both actually and metaphorically.
Spiritualism: Fundamentalist Versus Ecumenical
The world is thus desperately in need of a new ethics of social responsibility. The acquisitive society of the modern world has unleashed boundless human energies and dazzling technologies for production but it has failed to provide fairness or a sense of community. As gaps grow among and within nations, modernity also will increasingly fail to provide security not only for the poor but also for the rich and the middle class. The response to this moral and political crisis has been the rise of a new spiritualist movement in many parts of the world. The movement has, however, assumed two contradictory faces—fundamentalist and ecumenical.
During the past decade, countries as wide apart in geography, history, social structure, and culture as the United States, India, Iran, Israel, and Guatemala have come under the political impact of fundamentalist religious movements.7. The presidential elections of the late 1970s and 1980s in the United States were profoundly influenced by the rise of the new fundamentalist Christian movement, particularly in the Bible Belt. Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush each in their own unique style campaigned on a political platform pleasing to the fundamentalists on such social issues as prayer at schools, restrictions on abortion, and ban on pornography as well as a general bemoaning of the decadence of a liberal and permissive society. India’s last election in 1991 was marked by the spectacular successes of a fundamentalist Hindu party in a country constitutionally dedicated to a secular regime. Similarly, in the 1980s, the Jewish fundamentalist parties in Israel profoundly affected the balance between the Labor and Likud parties in favor of the latter. And in Guatemala, where only 30% of the population is Protestant, a fundamentalist was elected to the presidency in 1990.
Fundamentalism appears primarily as a reactive phenomenon—to the unsettling effects of rapid social change (hypermodernization in developing countries, postmodernization in the developed), to marginalization (of the ethnic majorities as in the cases of the Malay in Malaysia and the Hindus in India), to relative material or psychological deprivation (among the urban ghetto or yuppie fundamentalists), and to commodity fetishism as an antithesis to its own identity fetishism. It may or may not be a passing social phenomenon as it seizes power (as in Iran) or is frustrated by the superior power of the state (as in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, or Algeria), as it is gradually integrated into the mainstream of cultural life (as in the case of the Moral Majority in the United States), or as it is allied with the ruling elites in preserving the status quo (as in the United States, Guatemala, and Saudi Arabia). Its alternative strategies thus consist of revolutionary militancy (for total power), withdrawal (from mainstream society), accommodation (with the rest of society), or a relentless conservation of traditional religious values and norms. One of its unintended consequences might be to pave the way for greater epistemological tolerance between religious and secular worldviews as each one softens its monopolistic truth claims. Alternatively, it may take over and rule with an iron fist until it too is chastened by the human facts of diversity and need for tolerance.
But the rise of fundamentalism signals a deeper yearning for a spiritual home in a cold and callous modern world characterized by ceaseless wants and anxieties. In this world, individuals are torn away from the ties of community and atomized by those routinized and anonymous technocracies of modernity that reward them with commodities while robbing them of their souls. The secular ideologies of progress, nationalism, liberalism, and communism, were thought for a while to provide a new, effective sense of community and social responsibility. However, the secular ideologies never addressed, let alone resolved, the human conditions of finitude, fragility, and morality. Primordial identities (religion, race, ethnicity, and gender)—which were thought by such great social pundits as Marx, Freud, and Weber to be withering away in the modern world—have come back to the political arena with vengeance. Culture as the last repository of collective defense against the onslaught of modernity and its alien and alienating consequences has assumed a new force and vitality.
Accelerating physical, social, and psychic mobility, facilitated by the technologies of transportation and telecommunication, is producing multiple and syncretic identities and cultures for most peoples of the world. What appeared to be nonnegotiable, one’s body (race, gender, age), time (historical home), and space (geographic home) is becoming increasingly negotiable. Veiled Muslim women can watch Death of a Princess (the BBC-WGBH-produced saga of a Saudi princess stoned to death in Saudi Arabia with her lover for adultery) via smuggled videotapes and draw their own conclusions about how they wish to redefine themselves. Michael Jackson’s break dancing has penetrated the hardest bastions of cultural protectionism in third world societies. Wherever press and broadcasting are muzzled, audiocassettes and videocassettes have provided an alternative channel for alternative news and views (Iyer, 1988). In 1979, a cassette revolution helped to overthrow the shah of Iran. In 1988, at the beginnings of glasnost in the former Soviet Union, the video production and sale of alternative newscasts in videocassette rentals became a growth industry. In 1989, the use of fax machines in China undermined the efforts of the government to control the news of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1990–1991, in a relatively liberal and media-saturated country such as the United States, the managed media’s portrayal of the Gulf War was so powerfully challenged by events and alternative channels of communication (computer networking, video documentaries of the aftermath of the war) that the war “victory” lost much of its legitimacy a year later.8. Political and cultural pluralism is thus not only desirable but also possible and perhaps inevitable. We must not only tolerate and respect differences but also celebrate them through multiculturalism and a revitalization of the public sphere of discourse (Habermas, 1983).
However, we need to forge a unity out of this human plurality, to orchestrate a harmony out of the dissonance of voices. This unity cannot come but out of the oneness of the human spirit. The world is discovering a new sense of oneness. The continuing possibility of a nuclear holocaust, augmented by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the risks of a deteriorating environmental crisis, the rise of state and anomic terrorism against innocent bystanders—all seem to bring the more socially sensitive and responsible world citizens closer together into a new solidarity, a new tribe, a new spirit. The new spiritualism has no name, no rituals, no pope, no ayatollah, and no creed. But it is certainly in the air. It finds its inspiration in the totality of the spiritual heritage of humankind—in all religions great and small, in all philosophies secular or religious. It may be termed philosophia perennia in that the message has been perennially preached, in Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the Koran, and in the Sufi songs. It calls for the unity of all races, nationalities, ethnic and religious groups in the struggle to navigate the blue Spaceship Earth safely through these turbulent times.
Author’s Note
Ethnic discourse is employed here in its most general sense, suggesting an increasing prevalence of ethnic conflict since the end of the Cold War and the rise of ethnic issues in the public discourse of politicians, the media, and other representations of world events. Note also that it is dysorder as in dysfunctional. I wish to thank Christine Kris for her suggestions of dysorder and Colleen Roach for her helpful comments and suggestions on the original draft of this chapter.
Notes
1.Yalta was the site of the Allied Conference that attempted but failed to shape the post-World War II world around U.S.–Soviet cooperation, starting a Cold War between the two countries. Malta was the site of a conference between presidents Bush and Gorbachev that put an effective end to the Cold War.
2.This is the title of a Madonna video.
3.Horizontal integration is control of a single industry over a large territory. Vertical integration is control of different stages of production in a complex of interrelated industries such as production of crude oil, refining, transport, and distribution in the petroleum industry or publishing, broadcasting, cable, computing, and musical and video retailing in the media industries. Spatial integration is control of a conglomerate of industries over a vast expanse of territory. In all cases, control of one segment reinforces control of others.
4.Nye is using bound in a double sense, predicting a future and suggesting a constraining duty—notes from a lecture entitled Bound to lead: The changing nature of American power at Harvard by Joseph Nye, Jr. (July 24, 1990).
5.An epistemic community may be defined as a community of meaning, rooted in a common cosmology, language, art, culture, and education.
6.The figures in this paragraph are drawn from The Economist. May 2, 1992, pp. 21–22.
7.Like most other overused terms, fundamentalism may be a word beyond salvation. It may have become a term to cover up our ignorance about a very complex phenomenon. Although there is a general tendency toward an inordinate attachment to religious dogmas, fundamentalism as a term may not be an appropriate label for all of these movements. Moreover, the term has now become so pejorative that it might have lost much of its analytical value. The term is more appropriate, of course, with respect to the Protestant movements that wore it as a badge of honor by claiming to return to the fundamentals of the Bible. Of late, some former Protestant fundamentalist leaders prefer the terms Pentecostal and Evangelical. In the case of Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu fundamentalism, it might be even more accurate to call them religious nationalism. On these points, see Juergensmeyer (1992a, 1992b) and Tehranian (1993a, 1993b).
8.The foregoing examples were observed by the author.
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