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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 Feb. - 1 March 2000 Issue No. 470
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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 Heritage Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Imaging tomorrow:
(1) Rethinking the global village
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
As we stand on the threshold of a new millennium, we can no longer focus our attempts to predict the shape of things to come on specific issues only, but must develop a more comprehensive overview of the future we want to build. In other words, we must extend our field of vision to take in the whole forest rather than focus on individual trees.
There has been a tendency in recent years to see the world as a global village, with neither boundaries nor frontiers. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is seen as symbolic of the fall of barriers in general. But what really developed this perception is the revolution in communications and information, which has eliminated distances and allowed any citizen in any part of the world to live events as and when they occur anywhere in the world. The disappearance of distances in terms of time has brought about their disappearance in terms of space.
But how valid really is this perception? It is based on the proposition that all the mechanisms governing the contemporary world are operating in the direction of making it one homogeneous whole and of virtually eliminating distances within it. This might be true in terms of physical distance, but it is also true that globalisation has spawned phenomena that operate in the opposite direction, increasing rather than decreasing the distances between various sectors of the global community. With a rich minority becoming richer and a poor majority becoming poorer, the growing social discrepancies between the different communities making up the global village are becoming more divisive than the highest barrier.
Capitalism still deepens social differences and, generally speaking, it cannot be said that the disappearance of boundaries has contributed to bringing people closer together; it has also highlighted the contrasts and disparities between them. We are thus living in an Einsteinian world where greater distances are developing in smaller rooms, where dualities proliferate rather than disappear and, at the heart of these dualities, bipolarity.
The fall of the Berlin Wall has been touted as marking a cut-off point between one historical moment and another, as heralding in a new world in total discontinuity with the one we knew before the fall. Much has been written about the end of bipolarity and the emergence of what, with the disappearance of barriers between peoples, was described as a unipolar world. While the emphasis has been on the differences between the two worlds, on their antipodal nature, we should not lose sight of the fact that they still display many of the same traits. One of those traits is bipolarity, although it has now acquired a new, original character that is neither essentially geographical nor ideological, as when it denoted a western bloc versus an eastern bloc, capitalism versus communism.
The new version of polarisation is more insidious than the old, which was based on a clear-cut contradiction between two hostile superpowers. Following the collapse of one of the superpowers, a world no longer polarised by the power play at the summit of the global community believed that a bipolar world order was a thing of the past. But the supposedly unipolar world order that replaced it did not appeal to the whole of humankind. It has become a pole of attraction for some, of repulsion for others. The new bipolarity is thus between those who identify with the new world order and those who oppose it, not because of ideological affiliation to an alternative world order but because they are alienated by what they see as the failure of the new order to respond to their aspirations.
In the last couple of years, attempts have been made to come up with a viable alternative to the now prevailing world order. Known as the Third Way, that is, neither capitalism, nor communism, it seeks to find a middle ground between the unbridled capitalism that characterises the new world order and those who are bent on destroying it, those who constitute what has come to be known as the counter-pole of terrorism. But the Third Way has yet to materialise. So far, it has not proved to be more appealing than the present world order or its terrorist antipode.
We have thus moved from a bipolar world order based on a confrontation between two antagonistic blocs each enjoying its own legitimacy, to a world order based on globalisation that admits of one legitimacy only. The previous bipolar legitimacy became possible because both the western democracies and the Soviet Union fought together against fascism. Both believed, during World War II, that fascism was a threat that surpassed all others. But after fascism was vanquished, the coexistence of the two legitimacies degenerated into a Cold War eventually, into the implosion of one of the two poles. However, the disappearance of the communist pole did not bring an end to bipolarity, only to a given form of bipolarity.
And so, despite the various theories that have come up to celebrate the end of bipolarity, it remains an important component of the global structure. The most prominent of these theories was Francis Fukoyama's 'end-of-history' theory, which attempted to prove not that history as a whole had come to an end but that the engine of history would no longer be driven by acute polarisation and that history based on conflict would be replaced by history based on cohesion. When it became apparent that conflict situations had actually increased after the collapse of the bipolar world order, Fukoyama's 'end of history' theory lost much of its initial credibility. It was replaced by Samuel P Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' theory, which proceeded from a racist premise. In his view, civilisations, like races, are doomed to collide because they cannot meet. To deprive the theory of its racist connotations, the notion of 'clash of civilisations' should be replaced by the theory of 'dialogue of civilisations', of diversity in unity, not of diversity that cannot be unified and which makes clashes unavoidable.
With the resurgence of racism, does this mean that the disappearance of the communist pole has paved the way for a fascist pole? What is now happening in Austria could be a forerunner of this trend. The new Austrian government is not opposed to the globalisation of capital, only to the globalisation of labour as represented in the inflow of immigrants to Austria. The xenophobic noises coming out of Vienna are a concrete expression of the 'clash of civilisations' theory.
Where does war stand in this new context? Warfare will probably not be conducted with conventional armies and weaponry but, as the continuation of politics by other means, war will continue. Terrorism is a form of low intensity warfare that could become very high intensity if terrorist groups succeed in hijacking nuclear bombs or even simply purchasing them on the black market, where there is now a huge supply of weapons, nuclear and otherwise, smuggled out of Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union. Such a situation can very easily spiral out of control, especially now that nuclear military technology is no longer a secret shared only by a limited number of great powers and that technological progress in this field is forging ahead at an accelerated pace.
