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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 February 2000 Issue No. 469
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters "Arabs need globalisation and democracy"
By Dina Ezzat
Arabs fail to establish the right ties with the world because they still insist on seeing world politics in black and white only. And they fail to establish good relations among themselves because of the legacy of Pan-Arabism. This was the main argument offered by the Foreign Policy section of the 1999 Arab Strategic Report issued by the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
The report argues that for this state of affairs to change the Arab countries need to espouse globalisation; the alternative would be inevitable marginalisation.
The Arabs' fear of globalisation and their failure to deal with its political and economic aspects dominate the first chapter of the report: "Arabs and International Interactions."
"At the official level there was only limited attention paid by the Arabs to the Kosovo tragedy and the NATO intervention to put an end to this tragedy. However, this issue got much attention in the public Arab political discourse," the report notes.
The Kosovo tragedy is used by the writers of the report as a case in point to illustrate the failure of the Arab world to deal with the increasing political globalisation. According to the report, the Arabs embrace a school of thought that "knows only of absolute virtue or absolute evil" and, therefore, they could not discriminate between the US policy on the Balkans crisis and its other policies that they disagree with.
It is to this "simplistic" view that the report attributes its claim that the Arabs would not have minded to see the massacres continue in Kosovo rather than to approve of the US-led NATO intervention, given that this intervention allowed the US to further underline its hegemony. For the Arabs, the report theorises, it would have been better to even sacrifice the lives of Kosovars as part of the "struggle against imperialism, hegemony or globalisation".
The report criticises Egypt for being one of the countries which play by the black-and-white rule, albeit in a fashion that takes into consideration its interests with the White House.
As part of their call for globalisation, the writers of this report chose to make a precedent by supporting the proposition of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to widen the concept of state sovereignty so as to allow for international intervention in internal state affairs to save people from oppressive governmental practices when the need arises. The report explicitly states that the UN Charter should be amended to fit with this new vision of sovereignty.
Globalisation, the report argues, should be pursued even at the expense of nationalism since it is impossible for the Arab countries to separate themselves from the world economic set-up.
"The WTO agreements should not be looked at only from the perspective of the commitments they entail but also from the point of view of the many advantages that come with these agreements and that could enable the developing countries to promote their economies and be winners in the final analysis."
Accordingly, the Arab countries are called upon to abandon the "slogan of national production" since it could be easily proven, according to the criteria cited by the writers of the report, that a foreign commodity produced in Egypt, for example, could be of a much higher value to the Egyptian economy than a locally produced commodity.
A comparison between the Arabs as enemies of, or at best strangers to, globalisation and Israel, a believer in globalisation, is drawn at several points in the 1999 Arab Strategic Report. The writers of the report find Israel to be well ahead of its Arab neighbours in terms of development, technology research, and standards of education. The Arabs have lagged behind on all these fronts, the report says.
The report blames Pan-Arabism for the disappointing state of relations among Arab countries which cannot bring themselves to hold an Arab summit even on a limited scale or to seriously act to establish an Arab Free Trade Area.
The result is an acute case of "Arab mistrust... that takes the Arab world into the 21st century without any clear vision of the future of their regional order or their joint efforts".
The plea of the report against Arab nationalism is based on an argument that accuses the founders and followers of this movement of a disinterest in democracy and a preoccupation, if not an obsession, with Israel's increasing power.
The prescription offered by the report is more democracy, more integration in the global economy, bigger budgets for education and scientific research and fewer worries about the attempts of the US and Israel to marginalise the Arabs. Those attempts, the report likes to suggest, are only phobias that Arabs have become too used to.
