Memo to the President

by Benjamin R. Barber

ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE, October 25, 2001

Dear Mr. President:

You spoke last night to America and to the world with a forceful conviction, warning that we will either bring the terrorists to justice or bring justice to the terrorists. For a day, until people protested that it offended religious sensibilities, you even dubbed the military campaign Operation Infinite Justice. You honor us and our belief in democracy and the rule of law by couching the American response to despicable acts of terror in the language of justice, and by reminding us that justice will not tolerate a weakening of our liberties.

Yet the commitment to justice requires not only a military campaign, but also an international order marked by justice. For while terrorists can be rightly condemned as nihilistic evildoers with no agenda other than destruction, the climate of marginalization and hopelessness that breeds terrorism is another matter. And here we run frontally into a perverse asymmetry in the global system for which we bear some responsibility. In our pursuit of global trade and a laissez-faire global-market society friendly to corporations and banks, we have globalized capitalism and the trade in labor, capital and currency without globalizing the democratic and civic institutions that - here in America - temper capitalism's contradictions and make it not only productive but just.

Too often, we have turned our backs on global treaties (such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming), institutions (the new International Criminal Court) and conferences (the Durban meeting on racism) - for the best of reasons (they are hostile to our interests) but with the worst of consequences (we lose our capacity to influence their shaping and development and appear arrogant and isolationist even to our friends). In this regard, though I understand that the language of "you are with us or you are with the terrorists" is a necessary rhetoric of war in a troubled nation that must be called to action, it can appear to our friends abroad as the rhetoric of imperial hubris. There may be some who are against terrorism who nonetheless will want to dissent from our strategy. The world cannot be divided into those who are uncritically with America and those who dwell with Satan, not without actually helping Satan build his constituency. It is not just the world that must join America, but America that must join the world.

Now to be sure, the terrorists themselves are not engaged in a negotiation over the terms of globalization, and you have told them with a bluntness they cannot fail to understand that we will not negotiate with them or those who harbor them. They are jihadic warriors opposed to modernity, to Enlightenment, to civilization itself in its modern incarnation, its virtues and vices alike. They must be annihilated. But terrorists swim in a sea of tacit popular support, of resentful acquiescence tinged by anger. This environment of rage and despair is a natural soil in which new terrorists can take root and grow as quickly as old ones are hunted down and eliminated.

The warriors of jihad may aim at the destruction of globalization in both its economic and cultural manifestations, but the much wider community of the angry and the marginalized hope not to smash modern democratic institutions but to join and benefit from them. Unlike the terrorists, those hurt by global markets celebrate destruction only to the degree that they cannot participate in construction. They are reluctant adversaries who, if given the chance, would prefer to enjoy modernity and its blessings.

American economic interests have benefited from global laissez faire, and both you and President Clinton have subjected laissez faire to benign neglect. Both you and Bill Clinton have tolerated the absence of democratic institutions in international affairs that might regulate markets and represent the interests of ordinary citizens. Yet this neoliberal economic order is for many people in the world beyond our shores a world of disorder whose anarchism nurtures poverty and oppression. Its antagonism toward all state regulation, all institutions of legal and political oversight, and all attempts at globalizing democracy and justice looks to them like a brute indifference to their welfare and makes our commitment to justice seem hypocritical. We speak the language of markets, and markets demand total freedom from interference; but total freedom from interference - the rule of private power over public power - is another name for anarchy. And terror is one of the terrible diseases that anarchy spawns.

With good reason, you worry about American sovereignty. Members of both political parties have complained bitterly about the prospect of surrendering a scintilla of our sovereignty, whether to NATO commanders in military campaigns, to U.N. political bodies trying to broker global agreements, or to international treaties and the supranational institutions that might enforce them. Yet terrorism has made a mockery of sovereignty, compromising it in fatal ways. What was the hijacking of airliners, the calamitous razing of the World Trade Center, the brash attack on the Pentagon, but a profound obliteration of American sovereignty?

Every American must understand that the choice we face is not the one between a happy and secure independence that puts us in charge of American destiny or a perverted interdependence that puts "foreigners" and "alien" international bodies like the United Nations or the International Court of Justice in charge of American destiny. For though we still yearn for it, we have not enjoyed real independence since the great wars of the last century, certainly not since the advent of AIDS and the West Nile virus, of global warming and the hemorrhaging of jobs from a wounded American economy. Interdependence is not a foreign threat against which we can mount a military defense; it is a domestic reality already dominant in our lives. It was the interdependence of our economic and technological systems on which the terrorists counted when they paralyzed the nation. They turned our interdependence against us, and now we must turn that same interdependence into a weapon against them.

Terrorism is a depraved version of globalization no less vigorous than global markets. It too profits from the clamorous pretense of the claim to national sovereignty; it too benefits from the absence of international executive, police and juridical institutions; it too exploits global anarchy to foment national anarchy and the further weakening of the ability of nations to control their own destinies.

You have opened a first front in our war to overcome terrorism, and you have assembled a coalition of partners around the world to help fight it. Can we not at this same moment open a second, civic front in that noble war and undertake the project of extending the sovereign oversight of democratic peoples to global affairs, whether they are economic affairs that damage the public interests and social welfare of whole peoples or the conspiratorial affairs of jihadic warriors bent on destroying both the global system and the nations that benefit from it? For, Mr. President, democracy is not just the route to justice, it is the road to safety and national security as well.