8 - 14 February 2001
Issue No.520
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 February 2001 Issue No.520 |
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The coming violent millennium
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
During his visit to Egypt last week, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh was the guest speaker at a gathering organised by the Egyptian Council on Foreign Affairs at Cairo's Diplomatic Club. His address was remarkable both for its broad and penetrating analysis of various aspects of contemporary political life and for the philosophical context in which he placed them. However, his assessment of the global situation raised a number of disquieting questions, and left me for one with the distinct impression that things can only get worse as violence asserts itself ever more strongly as an idiom of expression on the international scene.
If it is true that the 20th century is the century where there has been most talk about peace, it is also the century that has been the most violent in history. And, today, as we move into the third millennium, the signs are that it will not be a millennium of peace and stability but one that will be marked by violence, even if it will not necessarily assume the form of war as we have traditionally experienced it.
The 20th century witnessed two world wars which unleashed unprecedented waves of destruction on the world. A thermo-nuclear World War III was narrowly averted thanks to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of a world order based on a confrontational relationship between two antagonistic blocs of states, each armed with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction capable of annihilating our planet, not once, but many times over. The disappearance of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole remaining global superpower, even if its economic growth is now suffering from a slowdown after many years of unprecedented prosperity. Does this mean that unipolarity has replaced bipolarity? The globalisation process is said to symbolise this transmutation.
But here are also good reasons to believe that globalisation is no substitute for bipolarity. Although it has succeeded in lifting many barriers in the way of relations between peoples, globalisation has not reduced the discrepancies in peoples' standards of living. On the contrary, discrepancies have never been as sharp. In that sense, bipolarity is still very much a feature of the present world order, no longer as an expression of the contradictions between two blocs of states with antagonistic ideologies, but as an expression of contradictions within each society taken separately and in global society taken as a whole.
Proof that the new world order is marked by both globalisation and bipolarity at one and the same time can be found in the simultaneous convening of the Davos and counter-Davos meetings last week. As usual, the World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in the Swiss resort town of Davos, bringing together the world's top elites in the fields of ideological and theoretical thinking, politics and economics. On the other side of the world, both literally and figuratively, NGOs and civil society groups organised a counter-meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to lay the groundwork for an alternative globalisation capable of fulfilling the aspirations of the bulk of humanity who feel that the benefits of the present process of globalisation are passing them by and who feel increasingly marginalised in the existing world order.
In Porto Alegre, 15,000 participants demanded that the debts of developing countries be written off and called for the creation of an organ for global arbitration not only to fix the responsibilities of the debtors but also of the creditors for allowing the Third World debt burden to reach its present astronomical proportions. They proposed that a cartel of debtors be formed to negotiate with the creditors on an equal footing. In 1980, the total debt of the poor countries stood at $500 billion but saw a fourfold increase over the next two decades. Debt service charges raised the sum to $3,350 billion, more than six times the original sum. The Porto Alegre gathering declared that the time had come for civil society to participate directly in the ongoing multilateral trade negotiations, to bring the talks to a satisfactory end for all concerned.
The Porto Alegre gathering did not issue a final statement because the participants were too numerous to reach consensus on the complex problems discussed in the short time available. But follow-up meetings have been scheduled to coincide with the G-8 summit in Genoa in July, the meetings of the World Bank and the IMF in autumn in Washington and the WTO summit to be held in Qatar in November.
Many who took part in the Porto Alegre demonstrations were neither communists nor sympathisers of the Soviet Union, but they were aware that the existence of another superpower had served as a safety net against the danger of a breakdown of world order and the spread of chaos. The Soviet Union provided some kind of balance at the summit of the global community, even if this took the form of a global equation of nuclear terror. Because humans can die only once, the two superpowers were equal in power even if unequal in terms of overkill capability.
In the absence of the confrontation that once polarised the world, there has emerged a new bipolarity between a pole that represents the new world order and which enjoys international legitimacy in the context of globalisation, and another pole that represents the forces which do not play by the rules of the new world order, recognising neither the rules of democracy nor the rule of international law, and which are described by the former as the pole of violence and terrorism.
Actually, global terrorism has become an undeniable feature of contemporary political reality. A prominent example is the Osama bin Laden phenomenon. But for this and similar phenomena to disappear, social justice must be given precedence over so-called "economic efficiency," based, according to the advocates of unbridled capitalism, on maximising profits in the context of a liberal market system.
The Porto Alegre gathering respected the rules of democracy, serving as a forum in which freedom of expression was given full rein. In a way, it replaced the safety net that disappeared with the demise of the Soviet Union. That is why the Davos meeting could not ignore the anti-Davos demonstration in Brazil. It is significant in this respect that France's socialist government, which was represented by two ministers in Davos, decided to send another two ministers to Porto Alegre, thereby tacitly admitting the objective need to bring the Brazil meeting into the fold of international legitimacy exactly like its counterpart in Davos.
It is clear that, whether we like it or not, violence has become an integral component of contemporary political life and that it will continue to plague modern societies as long as the requirements of economic efficiency are placed before the imperative need to meet the legitimate aspirations of every human being for a decent life at a time of unprecedented plenty. But it is also worth asking whether the economic system alone is to blame for the ongoing violence. Would violence be overcome if the present economic system were to be replaced by a better one?
There are good reasons to believe that the human species is threatened by calamities in future irrespective of the economic system by which it is governed, or even, more generally, of the type of relations between man and his fellow man, determined also by the relations between man and nature. Growing tensions due to man's abuse of his environment could end up with the human species exposing itself to total annihilation.
Science and technology have reached a critical stage. Man is now able to probe the infinitely small (the world of atoms and beyond) and also the infinitely large (the world of galaxies and black holes). We have come to realise that we are not the centre of the cosmos, but only a product of a small planet belonging to one of billions of solar systems in one of billions of galaxies. Like all celestial bodies, Earth is doomed to disappear one day. The most optimistic estimates place that day a few billion years in the future, barring possible collisions with other cosmic bodies, which could occur at any time.
The new element introduced to this equation is that, thanks to the remarkable achievements in the field of science and technology, we now face the threat of self-extinction. Man uses advanced technology to improve his lot. But unknown side effects of scientific discoveries can be more potent in determining humankind's future than the pre-planned effects of these discoveries. Because negative side effects cannot, statistically speaking, be cancelled altogether, man is condemned to annihilate himself some way down the road in future. In the best of cases, we could try to delay this eventuality; we will never be able to totally eliminate it.
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