9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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0On globalisation, security and self-sacrifice
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed was invited to Algiers this week to take part in a conference on "Globalisation and Security." Here is a shortened version of his paper
With the apparent shrinking of our world due to economic, media and technological factors, authority is being restructured at the global level. The nation-state no longer monopolises power. Its sovereignty is no longer absolute. A level has emerged above state power (the multinational corporations, for instance); another below it (NGO's, crime cartels, terrorist networks, etc).
The restructuring of authority has been accompanied by the restructuring of political norms. Before, these norms had only one frame of reference: the state. Now, with the emergence of a variety of levels above and below state power, the prevailing norms are not necessarily those of the state. What is negative in the eyes of the state is not necessarily so in the eyes of this or that layer of society. New normative systems are emerging, generating new types of frictions and conflicts.
This is bound to engender a security problem. How to guarantee security in a society with multiple and, eventually, contradictory, sets of values? True, democratic societies to which we aspire are based on pluralism and the free interchange of a variety of opinions, but these remain within the legitimacy of the regime. Globalisation has come forward with new frames of reference that are not necessarily those of the state.
Before globalisation, security was basically state security, within the framework of the state's absolute sovereign prerogatives. With globalisation, the state's prerogatives are no longer absolute, for technical and material reasons, if not (yet) for legal reasons. Constitutions have not been amended in line with our changing world, where states are helpless in the face of such blatant infringements of their sovereignty as the unrestricted monitoring of their skies by technologically advanced countries.
Actually, the notion that state sovereignty enjoys absolute prerogatives has always been more theoretical than real. Even before the global village syndrome of the Information Age, states have never been isolated from their surroundings and, consequently, their sovereignty has always been "relative." Moreover, their conduct was informed to a great extent by their ideological outlooks, and thus affected by social and class conflicts in society. This brought about a sort of global polarisation between a pole made up of capitalist countries led by the United States, in opposition to a pole made up of various socialist countries led by the Soviet Union.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, its successor, Russia, did not inherit its status as a world pole and globalisation came under the leadership of one state alone, the USA. But unipolarity was unable to suppress all manifestations of bipolarity, especially with state sovereignty losing its previous "absolute" character and the dispersion of power between a number of levels. A new bipolarity replaced the previous one in which the protagonists were no longer capitalism versus socialism, but the only remaining superpower versus the so-called "rogue" states accused of harbouring terrorist networks.
Globalisation and the assumption that the world had become fundamentally unipolar and that, therefore, one pole could play a key role in determining the course of conflict in the world, lent credence to the belief that conflicts should -- and could -- be resolved by political, peaceful means, and that wars could be avoided.
This development introduced a new notion of security. Instead of being conceived as an issue whose parameters are determined by each state separately, security is now seen as a collective enterprise that has to assume some form of interdependence. President Bush has defined the main conflict today as the one which pits the civilised world against international terrorism, and warned that whoever does not stand with the United States in this conflict stands with terrorism. Does this mean that all violence is necessarily terroristic in nature and that, with the exception of violence practised by the unique superpower, no violence is legitimate?
The American understanding of security has been exploited to the full by Sharon, who has gone all out to depict Arafat as a terrorist in the mould of Bin Laden and the PLO as an organisation comparable to Al-Qa'eda. In transposing Bush's global vision to the regional level, Sharon has earned high praise from his American mentor, who described him as "a man of peace" even as his tanks were slaughtering the Palestinians and destroying their homes and infrastructure in full view of the world.
Equating the violence used to fight foreign occupation with the random violence used by terrorists for purposes not recognised under international law is a relatively recent phenomenon. The idea that violence is a legitimate mode of resisting occupation has a long history in contemporary politics. It reached a climax at the end of World War II, with the UN Charter stipulating that resisting occupation is legitimate by all means, including armed struggle. When the Charter was formulated, the Allied victory over the Axis had brought an end to Nazi Germany's occupation of most of Europe, and the Charter consecrated that victory.
But if Europe had succeeded in throwing off the shackles of occupation, the same was not true of large chunks of Africa and Asia, which were still under the yoke of colonialism. The years following the war saw the rise of national liberation movements which launched wars of independence against the colonial powers, mainly Britain and France. But where violent resistance to German occupation was not only condoned but actively encouraged, a different standard applied to the colonised peoples. To discredit national liberation movements, the occupying powers denounced them as terrorist. Algeria's war of independence suffered particularly from such accusations.
As globalisation moved forward, and with the disappearance of the communist pole, it was the West's definition of violence which got the upper hand. It took advantage of the newly emerging human rights movements and humanitarian law to underline that violence against innocent civilians should in all cases be condemned. This is an issue which has been shrouded in ambiguity for some time, actually for as long as some forms of violence continue to be regarded as legitimate. Can this ambiguity be overcome?
This has become a crucial issue at the present time. Must we relinquish violence, even legitimate violence, on the grounds that it exposes innocent civilians to deadly threats? That is the argument Sharon uses to accuse the PLO of terrorism.
There is no denying that the killing of civilians must be condemned, but what about suicide operations whose victims can include civilians, even unintentionally? Should they be similarly condemned? Does the sacrifice of self justify the sacrifice of others?
Israelis assert that the Palestinians are to blame for the violence wracking the occupied territories. They ignore the fact that occupation is in itself violent, and concentrate on the reaction to occupation to conclude that counter-violence is the only violence. According to them, occupation is not an act of violence. It is the Palestinians who are required to relinquish violence, while Israeli violence has become "legitimate self-defence" justified by security concerns.
The Intifada is the clearest expression of Palestinian resistance. It is evidence that the Palestinians have not been defeated and that they are still fighting for their objectives. As such, it is a beacon of light that cannot and must not be extinguished. But this puts forward a dilemma, because the suicide operations can be seen as a repeat performance of the September 11 scenario, but undertaken as separate individual operations rather than as a collective endeavour. Such a scenario was condemned by the civilised world, including the PLO. How to overcome the dilemma?
Here the line of demarcation between legitimate resistance and terrorism must be made absolutely clear. Military action is only justified against military targets. There can be no exceptions to this rule, even if it means that a Palestinian freedom fighter will have to hold back from striking a given military target for fear of causing civilian casualties.
Of course, Israel is breaking this rule on a daily basis. The dilatory tactics it used to scuttle the UN fact-finding team's visit to Jenin proves its awareness of the atrocities committed against civilian targets by its military, in an eerie replay of the Sabra and Shatila massacres masterminded by Sharon. Israel is using the fedayin actions against its civilians as an excuse to retaliate with devastating violence against Palestinian civilians by the thousands, in the aim of propagating terror that will lead to a mass migration from the occupied territories, a process euphemistically described as the "transfer" of the Palestinian population out of Palestine. Every time a small chink appears in the window of opportunity, the window is slammed shut by a suicide attack on Israeli civilians. Which raises the question of whether these attacks, so convenient for Israel, might not sometimes be the work of agents provocateurs who are actually implementing Sharon's grand design.
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