28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001
Issue No.514
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001 Issue No.514 |
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Struggling for alternatives
The Euro-Mediterranean partenariat process, initiated in Barcelona in 1995, has proven bankrupt -- first, because there is no true Euro-Arab dialogue associating all the Arab countries with all their European counterparts and, second, because since its birth, its other goal has been to impose Israel's integration on the region, although this country, due to its apartheid policies, should be isolated from the international community. It is Europe's responsibility to distance itself from the US, on the political as on the economic levels, and to lend substance to its references to human rights. The struggle for democracy (in Tunisia, Turkey...) is first and foremost the people's concern. The construction of alternatives must be the response to neoliberal expansion, the social consequences of which are objectively ruinous; and it must rest upon converging modes of struggle and resistance to the dominant model.
A FAILURE AND ITS REASONS: First, I would like to address directly the future of relations between the European states -- and their collective organisation, the European Union -- on one hand, and, on the other, the Arab states. I believe that the process referred to as the Euro-Mediterranean partenariat, begun in Barcelona in 1995, is not simply stalled but in fact bankrupt. This outcome could have been foreseen. The plane never really took off; and it is crashing to the ground at this moment. Such a failure could have been predicted, for the project itself was conceptualised on the basis of an unacceptable principle, which was neither credible nor, in consequence, feasible (even if some of its advocates may have been acting in good faith). This process brought about the intervention of two groups of participants: on one hand, the Europeans -- not only Mediterranean Europeans, from countries abutting on the Mediterranean, but all the European countries, and specifically the European Union. Far be it from me to question the Europeans' right to think of themselves as having common interests and as necessarily imagining a common future. This is their right, even if it is also the right of Europeans in each of the concerned countries to criticise, as some do, the European project as it stands today.
The other partenariat, including coastal countries from the southern and eastern parts of the Mediterranean, is quite odd. Yet these are for the most part Arab countries, which also belong to a distinct entity: the Arab world. Whether or not one is an Arab nationalist, and through passionate conviction considers that entity to be unified, it does exist, and it is necessary to recognise that it may have a certain sensitivity shared by the people that constitute it: a certain sense of common interests and a shared vision of its insertion in the contemporary world. To separate Mediterranean from non-Mediterranean Arab countries is truly disastrous, and unacceptable. What is needed, rather, is a Euro-Arab agreement or a dialogue -- involving all the European and all the Arab countries, whether or not they are Mediterranean. The concept of the Mediterranean means nothing unless it implies gathering all the coastal countries around technical problems linked to the sea they share, in the field of pollution for instance. But this is a very limited domain, and not a foundation on which one can conjure up the future of relations between Europe and that piece of the South called the Arab world.
BARCELONA AND THE PEACE PROCESS: We must remember, after all, that the time at which the Barcelona conference convened -- 1995 -- was also the time of Madrid and Oslo, in other words a time during which a certain type of peace between the Arabs and Israel was being drawn up with America. The Europeans thus put in place a strategy to complement that of Israel and the US, aimed at dictating the content of peace. This peace was imagined on a basis that, as it should have been possible to foretell, was unacceptable, because it meant the creation of Bantustans -- there is no better term -- in the occupied territories of Palestine. Its result was the strengthening of the apartheid model, which, very fortunately, in its South African version, was condemned universally and in due course disappeared. Still, it was kept in place for a very long time, not only by reactionaries within South Africa, who ran the system to suit themselves, but also by global capital, the great powers, the US and the European states, which buttressed it almost until its final hour. They turned coat only when the project began to stagger under the grave blows dealt it by the people of South Africa.
Former President Nelson Mandela, indeed, reminded Clinton of this when he visited South Africa: "Where were you during apartheid?" he asked. "No one heard about you at the time. On the other hand, those whom you believed should be banished from society, like Gaddhafi for example, were against apartheid, and gave us financial and material support, including weapons."
But to return to the time of the Barcelona conference and the peace process in Israel: it is during this time that the Euro-Med project was thought up. It was hardly subtle: the idea was to impose, especially on the Arabs, Israel's integration into the region, and to set as a condition to cooperation between Europe and the Arab countries a similar kind of cooperation between those same Arab countries and Israel... It is just as if, during apartheid (to cite the same example), Europe had imposed upon the African states the normalisation of diplomatic and other relations with South Africa as a condition of European support. It is shameful. I feel that things must be said, called by their proper names; it must be said that, as long as Israel refuses to recognise a Palestinian state, it will be necessary to treat it as we treated South Africa, in other words by banishing it from international society.
EUROPEAN POLICY ON PALESTINE AND KURDISTAN: Israel is an apartheid country, and is implementing an apartheid project. It is unacceptable to tolerate it, let alone back it. Boycotting Israel is the duty of the world's civilised nations. It is not only a right -- the Arabs' right, for instance; it is the duty of all the civilised countries of the world today. I would say the same with respect to the other non-Arab partner of the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey is engaged in a civil war against a large proportion of its own population, the Kurds. The problem is not whether Turkey wants to consider itself or does indeed consider itself European, or whether the Europeans agree or refuse to consider it as such. The question is whether Turkey has any particular right to massacre part of its population, and to do so in the absence of any condemnation.
All this must be said, because Europe today -- its peoples, its governments and perhaps the European Union -- needs to inscribe itself within an alternative perspective to that of current globalisation, that is within a perspective freed from what I call the dual alignment that reigns today: liberal globalisation and US hegemony. The two are linked. If one accepts the exclusive logic of liberal globalisation, one must agree to give priority or even exclusive rights to the interests of dominant capital. And the interests of dominant European capital are not that different from those of dominant North American capital. There are conflicts, of course, but these are vulgar mercantile conflicts, similar to the conflicts that can take place between two transnational corporations affiliated to the same country. This is of course not the basis on which to conceive of Europe's possible autonomy from the US. All the speeches about this autonomy are simply wishful thinking at this point in time...
Returning to the Middle East, at the present time, with the double tragedy unfolding in Palestine and Kurdistan, European intervention seems to impose itself -- not necessarily armed intervention, but a strong political intervention, accompanied by effective boycott measures against Turkey and Israel, until the latter recognises the state of Palestine. Europe raised a hue and cry in Kosovo for far less. It flexed its muscles, but aligned itself with a decision Washington had already taken. It so happens that, to take an independent stand on Palestine and Kurdistan, Europe would have to distance itself from the US, and clearly that is very difficult. If it is easier to cite good reasons for intervention when following in the US's wake, that is because a political -- and not simply a verbal -- Europe does not exist.
STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY AND REFERENCES TO HUMAN RIGHTS: Can European references to human rights, respect for which theoretically constitutes a condition to partnership agreements, serve as a lever to civil society? I fear that this too is only wishful thinking, even if it is, I am sure, motivated by the very best intentions. A charter, even one signed by governments that have no intention of implementing it, but one that recognises a certain number of rights, can become an instrument, a lever, that political forces and peoples that are the victims of a given system can use. But this will remain marginal, because I do not believe that in the understanding governments and the EU have of Europe, this tool will be anything other than a means to be manipulated when facing an adversary one seeks to weaken, but that is not mobilised when dealing with an ally. Duality prevails: double standards are the rule.
Ben Ali's dictatorship, for instance, one of the most despicable south of the Mediterranean, is not the target of very violent protests by the European governments. In Turkey, the permanent war being waged against the Kurds is not condemned in stronger terms. I know that the Europeans have imposed upon the Turks, in return for their adhesion to the European Council, a common declaration of rights, but it is quite obvious that, although Turkey did indeed sign, it violates that agreement every day. Worse still: it ignores it utterly and no one says anything. This is why I think one cannot separate the struggle for democracy: it is fundamental.
The struggle for democracy is above all the people's business; each people fights in its own country. Internationalism is very useful in this domain, but change will be built essentially on the basis of internal struggles and the mobilisation of democratic forces within each society. What the outside can do is, precisely, to support these forces, not to fight them, even if the latter is done in the name of democracy as witnessed in a number of cases.
The concept that dominates today, on the global and not just the European level, is that of "good governance," to use the fashionable jargon -- in other words, the concept of acceptable government. Unfortunately, this is a very poor concept that reduces democracy -- still, better than nothing, you will say -- to the tolerance of party pluralism, formal elections, and respect for a certain number of elementary individual rights, with no recognition of social rights, individual and collective: the right to work, to an education, to health, freedom of movement both inside and outside one's own country -- in short, of people's right to self-determination, to cite the well-known formula.
Things cannot be separated. There is no such thing as political rights in the narrow sense. If other rights do not accompany them, they become instruments that can be and are manipulated, and therefore that hinder the cause of democracy because they cancel, they destroy its credibility before the people. If Israel is presented as an example of democracy to the Palestinian people, what idea can they have of democracy? What is a democracy based on the massacre of children, who are shot while doing nothing more than showing their legitimate anger at the apartheid to which they are subjected? So rights cannot be separated from each other, and the democratic charters I aspire to must recognise all human rights. Yet this is not at all what Europe is proposing or even setting as conditions, without implementing them, to said cooperation.
CREDIBLE ALTERNATIVES TO GLOBALISATION: We should not be satisfied with a simple critique of neoliberal practice. In this part of the world as elsewhere, the results are clear for most people: growing inequalities in income distribution, an increase in the diverse forms of poverty, marginalisation, unemployment, etc. These results are inherent to the logic of the globalised neoliberal model. But we must not stop at a statement of fact. Rentier economies, corruption, etc. are not exotic local cultural artefacts, specific to this or that country or region of the world; they are phenomena that are objectively amplified, supported and encouraged by current neoliberal expansion. The effect of this expansion is to dismantle the possible constructive potential of an alternative model of economic development, one worthy of the name, which benefits the popular strata and guarantees a margin of autonomy and negotiation to countries and societies in the global system.
It is really necessary to put forth one or several credible alternatives to globalisation. Theoretically, it is not that difficult to imagine what must be done: multipolar globalisation, giving nations, countries, regional groupings some room to manoeuvre, a margin of freedom, autonomy, negotiation; imposing historic compromises on the international level, similar to market regulation mechanisms on the national level, and corresponding to social interests beyond the sole interest of the maximum profitability of capital. These alternatives are not difficult to imagine, but the fact that a research centre can express them coherently does not mean that they will be implemented. Alternatives in history are produced by struggle, the legitimate refusal to submit to the victor's logic and the ability to impose compromise on the dominant partner -- in this case, on capital, since we are in a capitalist system. What is the welfare state of the post-World War II period, in the European countries and elsewhere, if not an historic compromise between capital and labour, produced by the defeat of fascism, or in other words the victory of the democratic forces that gave the working classes a political legitimacy they had never enjoyed in the capitalist systems of the countries in question?
Change will come from these struggles. They are complex and numerous; fortunately, they are not fading -- on the contrary, they are increasing, insofar as the adversary is being forced to make concessions, and change its language to some extent. Witness the World Bank's passage from a very harsh neoliberal discourse on poverty to a wishy-washy, diluted babbling. These developments would be inconceivable if we detached them from the economic processes that engender them. So we must think on the basis of social struggles. We need forums of this type (the Alternative Euro-Med Summit in Marseilles), as many forums as possible. Such forums, where experience of struggle gives rise to the exchange of analyses in a way that will gradually ensure maximum convergence among the various struggles, are indeed increasing in number. The alternative will be born of this convergence -- not otherwise.
Translated from French by Pascale Ghazaleh
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