How do countries like India integrate seamlessly into the global economy on the one hand? On the other hand, how does India manage fundamentalist forces gnawing at every muscle in her body -- whether it is militant Hindu, rabid Islam or prostelyzing Christianity? What a dichotomy! What makes it scarier still, there are precedents that haven't exactly turned in good news. Yugoslavia trying its damndest best to join the New Europe even as it exploded into fragments. The Soviet Union experimenting with Glasnost before it disappeared overnight.

Argues Benjamin R Barber in a seminal 1992 essay first published in The Atlantic Online -- "The forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically. If the global future is to pit Jihad's centrifugal whirlwind against McWorld's centripetal black hole, the outcome is unlikely to be democratic."

Powerful argument. Read on