Jihad Vs. McWorlddited

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Jihad vs. McWorld
McWorld and Jihad are two struggling competitive forces that differ in methods and goals. Specifically, McWorld is a concept established by Benjamin Barber to describe the new globalized world where countries have little power and citizenship has lost meaning as a cornerstone of democracy. According to Barber, McWorld is ruled by antinational corporations which view everyone simply as consumers (53). As such, in the new McWorld, citizens are unable to use democracy to protect or enhance their social values because this would interfere with the marketplace. The primary assumption is that countless consumers around the world will only act to satisfy the social aspirations of McWorld communities.
On the other hand, Jihad, as described by Barber, involves retribalization of a group of people by war and bloodshed (53). It is a threatened Lebanonization of countries in which people are pitted against people, culture against culture and tribe against tribe. Many Islamic fundamentalists tend to believe so strongly in Jihad that they are ready to sacrifice human life to achieve their purpose. Therefore a primary difference between the two concepts is that Islamic fundamentalists value religious ideals, whereas McWorld values cold, hard cash at the expense of democracy and human life.
The U.S. represents the McWorld. Specifically, American culture is callously being sold everywhere around the world with little or no efforts to respect the culture of the native inhabitants (Barber 60).

For instance, European McDonalds has continued to demonstrate an ambition to dominate the world by creating many international branches. It is also a usual policy of American global corporations to fill low and middle-level positions of employment with natives of the specific operational area. Still, executives and high-level employees who make real decisions are usually based back in the U.S. Consequently this leaves all American-based corporations very homogenized with a distinctly American feel.
McWorld has four imperatives– resource, market, information-technology, and ecological. Each of these imperatives is incompatible with Jihad forces because, they are geared toward promoting economic dominance, whereas Jihad forces are exerted to impose religious dominance. Ideally, these imperatives aim to create a universal rational society in the form that is commercialized, depoliticized, homogenized, and bureaucratized and radically incomplete (Barber 61). The movement toward McWorld competes with the forces of national dissolution, globalization breakdown, and centrifugal corruption.

Work Cited
Barber, B. “Jihad Vs. McWorld.” The Atlantic Monthly. (1992): 53-65.