26 April - 2 May 2001
Issue No.531
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 April - 2 May 2001 Issue No.531 |
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New world, old problems
The expression "national security economics" has replaced the term "war economics" -- deemed no longer viable -- in international political discourse, and rightly so. Indeed, the international political arena increasingly favours peaceful resolution over armed conflict. This, as the reader may well have guessed, is part of the broader tendency to conceive of the world as a unified entity, a tendency made possible by advances in communication and transport technology.
The intellectual discourse that accompanies the phenomenon of globalisation offers a complete and workable ideology of contemporary capitalism even if many parties deny the existence of such an ideology. Yet many increasingly indispensable concepts testify to the contrary: transparency, freedom of trade, human rights, democratic rights, inter-dependency, privatisation, competitiveness -- all of these derive from free-market economics. A critical discussion of the operation of such principles in Third World countries, whose societies and economies are not sufficiently developed to accommodate the concepts in question, should never imply a wholehearted rejection of the new world order -- which, in its essential outline, is not necessarily an evil to complain about, as many local commentators do.
Rather, a heightened awareness of the effects on Third World economies of such new-age economic wars as those now besetting us is all that is necessary: brutal, expansionist, almost imperialist multinationals that damage national economies, the increasing centrality of the World Trade Organisation to the lives of the poor and the possible erosion of national sovereignty -- these are but some of the more palpable dangers.
Such dangers undermine and impede development, without which the Third World will never catch up sufficiently to be part of the global village -- in which case the economic edicts of the new world order would be very welcome.
* This week's Soapbox speaker is professor of political science at Helwan University.
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