Arabs and Muslims and the global order
Galal Amin* focuses on the economic dimension as he sorts out what is old and what is new in the current world order
Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the socialist order in one state after another during the late 1980s it was natural to expect the emergence of a new world order and a redrawing of the pattern of international relations and spheres of influence. And, in fact, during the past 13 years events have confirmed the expectation. The outbreaks of war and emergence of new areas of tension, the settling of old accounts and the rise of new rivalries, the spread of new ideas and slogans from the halls of academia to official circles and then the media were all signs of a new order in the process of coalescence.
Nevertheless, the old does not disappear so abruptly and the new is not all that new. The ancient Greek maxim, "You can only go into the same river once," is an affirmation that change never stops, but it is also a reminder of continuity. It is, after all, the same river. In the new world order that is in the making we must therefore expect the continued existence of certain elements from the old.
Among the most important of these persisting elements is the prevalence of economic factors in determining national policies and the configuration of international relations. The history of contemporary international relations affirms the critical instrumentality of such factors and there is no reason to anticipate that this situation will change in the foreseeable future. In practice, mankind has not yet distinguished himself from the rest of the animal kingdom in that purely material motives remain the ultimate determinant of his actions. In spite of the immense progress he has achieved over the past three centuries in satisfying his fundamental needs for subsistence and in improving his standards of living, mankind appears no less greedy and covetous than before.
Another trait carried over from the old order is the readiness of the stronger party to perpetrate the most horrendous acts if it finds them conducive to the realisation of its aims. History from ancient times onwards confirms that mankind has made little progress in terms of humanity towards fellow man. Several centuries of modern civilisation are replete with major protracted wars, at the cost of millions of lives, aimed at redistributing the sources of wealth, securing cheap sources of primary materials or opening new markets. Again, there is little cause to hope for change in this domain as well.
If such primary instincts and means to realise them still govern international relations, we must further expect the persistence of another characteristic, so frequently manifested across history, in the new world order. This is the tendency of powers to camouflage their aims and their means of accomplishing them. When the objectives are purely materialistic and defy the most fundamental principles of justice, and when the means to realise these objectives fly in the face of universally accepted morals and humanitarian values, deception becomes an inevitable and intrinsic mode of behaviour. Economic motives must be cloaked in mantles of lofty slogans projecting principle, rather than material gain, as the impetus for action. Disseminating Christianity, civilising backward peoples, protecting minorities, advancing the cause of freedom, liberty and the supremacy of law have, in the past, been used to disguise the basest motives. Defending human rights, eliminating terrorism, eradicating weapons of mass destruction, such are the currency of the new world order.
There is a corollary to the tendency to create an idealistic façade for material motives and illegitimate means of fulfilling them: the tendency to brand attempts to expose such artifice as "conspiracy theories". The accusation itself, is part of the process of deception, the purpose of which is to intimate that those who express scepticism over the declared intentions of an international power and call into question its depiction of events, or the events it precipitated in order to realise its aims, must be prey to a form of mental disorder. Crying "conspiracy theory" thus becomes a means to intimidate people against using their faculty to reason in processing the information at their disposal so as to make them doubt, perhaps, their own common sense in their attempts to resolve the discrepancies between what they are told and what they perceive with their own eyes.
If the foregoing are among the characteristics of the old order that have been destined to remain with us following the collapse of the socialist camp, those very characteristics have, naturally, assumed different forms in various phases of history and will manifest themselves differently under the new world order.
Marx famously wrote that social relations are intimately bound to the forces of production. "When people obtain new forces of production they change their mode of production and with the change in the mode of production, which is to say the change in their livelihood, they alter all their social relations. The windmill gives you feudal society and the steam-powered mill gives you capitalist society." Marx's observation is still valid more than a century and a half after he wrote it.
However, capitalist society, as Marx knew it in the mid-19th century, was radically different from capitalist society at the beginning of the 20th century, which was not the same society that existed in the middle of that century, which, again, was different from the capitalist society we are experiencing at the beginning of the 21st century, if, indeed, the term "capitalist society" is still applicable. In Marx's time, Britain and France had undergone the industrial revolution; however, they did not yet need to dispose of a significant proportion of their industrial product outside the European markets or to make a significant capital investment abroad. When these needs did emerge and when their factories required larger quantities of raw materials, they unleashed a massive offensive against the non- industrialised nations of the South. Military occupation was deemed the means offering the fastest route to opening new markets and to guaranteeing the flow of primary materials. Had Marx written the above passage at the end of the 19th century, he would have added, "Modern textile factories, whose capacity for production, generating production and capitalist accumulation exceed the absorptive capacities of European markets for new products and investments, give you colonialism in the form of military occupation."
In the mid-20th century, World War II brought to the fore two new economic powers: the US and the USSR, which began to divide between them the legacy of British and French colonialism. However, the goods these powers had to dispose of no longer consisted of a few simple products such as textiles. Production had now become much more diversified and complex. Now, outlets had to be found for hundreds of consumer goods from cars to Coca-Cola, various types of goods used in production, ranging from machinery to construction equipment, as well as goods of little value to consumers, but ones that are extremely costly, namely weapons.
Simultaneously, the machinery of production required larger quantities and a greater diversity of primary materials (both agricultural and mineral), the most important of which was oil. Yet, technological advances in communications, transportation and weaponry made it possible, indeed desirable, to abandon the old colonialist method of direct occupation. Instead, it became more cost-effective to exert hegemony through local rulers, and the two superpowers frequently found that engineering coups d'état in the countries they sought to dominate would be more than adequate for accomplishing their aims. Thus, had Marx lived to experience the quarter of a century following World War II he might have written: "Arms manufactures and the need to dispose of surplus production and surplus American agricultural yields give you Third World military regimes, the rubric of economic development and foreign aid, and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund."
This same post-war period, however, also engendered certain favourable conditions for Third World countries, permitting them a margin of manoeuvrability which they had been denied during the previous century. The Cold War, the preoccupation of Europe and Japan with reconstruction and the focus in Europe on economic unification combined to alleviate pressures on Third World countries, as did the fact that the US and USSR had considerable scope for investment in the re-emerging European economies.
Such circumstances enabled many Third World countries to realise an economic and social resurgence that should not be underestimated. With the greater freedom of movement they enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s some formed revolutionary nationalist governments that were able, in turn, to exercise a high degree of protectionism for their emerging industries and implement effective measures towards redistributing income among social classes. Moreover, they also began to create economic blocs with other nations with which they shared many cultural and historical characteristics.
These experiments augured success were it not that the world had begun, in the late 1960s, a transition to another world order. The great advances in the methods of production, in communications and transportation, and in the methods of data storage and processing gave rise to a global division of labour in tandem with the spread of single manufacturing processes over several different nations in different parts of the globe. Under the new circumstances, the company whose major base of activities did not transcend the national entity to which it belonged no longer had the most effective structure for meeting its needs for primary materials, labour, marketing and reinvestment. Rather, the optimum system for production became the transnational, and under this new system Third World countries could no longer be permitted to enjoy that manoeuvrability and relative autonomy they enjoyed for a brief period during the post-World War II era. Thus, the customs barriers these countries had established had to fall before the onslaught of GATT accords (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the creation of the WTO (World Trade Organisation). State- controlled economic planning and policies of income redistribution gave way to the intervention of transnationals and to the pressures of the countries where they had their headquarters and international monetary organisations that served the companies. Consequently, the emerging Third World economic blocs collapsed under these pressures while the Soviet Union and the entire socialist bloc crumbled under the encroachment of these interests.
Were Marx around at the end of the 20th century to comment on these developments, he likely would have observed, "The emergence and spread of transnationals gives you a new world order founded upon the principles of free trade and economic deregulation, the decline of the nation state and the re-emergence of sharp class discrepancies."
The change in the economic and political world order necessarily had to be accompanied by a commensurate change in the rhetoric serving to mask gross avarice behind lofty principles. In the colonial era, military occupation used as a smokescreen the "white man's burden", with its simultaneous implication that the indigenous peoples Europe sought to "civilise" were encumbered by immutable ethnic, racial or cultural traits inimical to its mission. In the era of colonialism via economic aid, the catchphrases were the imperatives of economic development and industrial progress. The onset of the transnationals gave birth to a new rhetoric: "globalisation", "a global village", "the end of history", and "the end of the age of ideologies".
One of the most successful tactics for promulgating such ideas is to create an enemy as the focus of the hatred of the people a nation seeks to mobilise behind its goals. Hatred is the other side of fear, which is best instilled by creating an enemy possessing preternatural capacities to do evil. A common enemy not only helps to unite otherwise disparate segments of a particular society, it also deflects criticism and scepticism while ensuring loyalty and facilitating submission to orders that would encounter resistance under ordinary circumstances.
In the age of blatant colonial occupation and global rivalries over sources of raw materials, the enemy was readily available. For the British, French and Americans in two world wars the Germans and later the Japanese were fiendish monsters imperilling the good and civilised world. Naturally, it is much easier to justify killing other human beings and to get people to sacrifice their own lives in the process if the enemy is portrayed as a dragon. During the Cold War the Russians filled in as foe in place of the Germans and Japanese, and communism replaced Nazism and fascism as the world's most diabolical peril. So successful was US anti- communist propaganda that Khrushchev once protested loudly during a UN session that Russians did not eat children. The anti-communist rhetoric persists today, and is still used to taint individuals and groups within Western societies and other peoples and nations abroad that are deemed hostile to capitalist aims, in spite of the collapse of the Soviet system and the fact that the fiends of yesterday have become the West's best friends today.
Although the rhetoric of the "Red Peril" remains alive, the new world order, dominated by transnationals, had to cast a new enemy. Accordingly, it chose the Arabs and Muslim peoples for this role. Nations and areas of the globe that had been closed to these companies now had to be opened. Customs barriers and political and cultural barriers needed to be eliminated or weakened. The proliferation of centres of rapid growth throughout the world increased the need for new and secure sources of primary materials. However, the Arab world is not merely a huge potential market for transnationals' products and a prospective area for investing their surplus capital. The Arab world is unique among other parts of the globe for two basic reasons. First, it is home to the world's largest oil reserves. Second, it is the area where the Zionist enterprise is realising its ambitions. Israel has attained such a level of military and technical prowess that it can expand territorially and economically, and, if needed, transfer a large portion of the Palestinian population outside of the territories it currently occupies. Economic expansion requires new markets, sources of energy and water, and cheap labour, all of which are not in sufficient supply within its current boundaries.
Oil and Israel require the re-organisation of the Arab world, which entails modern forms of occupation and the partition of some Arab nations or the annexation of portions of some Arab nations to others. Israel and the Zionist movement, as always, have been prepared to offer their services to the dominant powers in the world order in exchange for appropriate rewards. And, in fact, it has used its powers of intimidation in combination with its manipulation of the Palestinian cause to contribute to opening up the economies of some Arab countries, such as Egypt, while the persistence of the Israeli threat has helped the arms manufacturers dispose of their wares in neighbouring countries. In addition, it has served as a pretext for certain pro- American regimes to perpetuate themselves. In return for such noble services, Israel has been paid in the form of silence over its treatment of the Palestinians and assistance in redrawing the region in a manner conducive to its interests, as is becoming more and more apparent with every passing day.
What could better serve the interests of the new world order and Israel but the invention of an enemy called "terrorism"; specifically, "Islamic and Arab terrorism"? Not surprisingly, one perceives many similarities between the usage of the new rhetoric and the former anti- communist rhetoric. "Red" had served as an all-purpose brand to be used for leftists, whether they espoused socialism, democracy, totalitarianism, revolution or peace. It was used to stigmatise national liberation movements, anyone who questioned the status quo and, frequently, innovations in the arts and literature that did not please that powers that be. Today, "terrorist", is being used in a similarly indiscriminate manner.
But there are also differences. Communists were identifiable; they could be associated with specific countries, they had famous theorists and ideologues, and they had a recorded history. The "terrorist" is the elusive enemy. He has no face, no country of origin. He could be anywhere -- in the US, Indonesia, Australia -- and everywhere at once (which is most appropriate to this age of globalisation). Terrorists are identified following a crime that can be conveniently attributed to terrorism, but never beforehand, and it could take anywhere from two days to two years to apprehend them, while each day brings a new sighting in a different place than the day before. From time to time, government news agencies issue bulletins about the whereabouts of these terrorists, who we learn are citizens of a country that is the best of friends with that nation that regards terrorism as its lethal enemy, but the culprits still elude capture. Ultimately, the most we do learn about the terrorist is that he is the "other", the "enemy"; he is "dangerous" and "evil"; he has diabolical designs but we are left in the dark about the nature of these designs, as though his sole purpose is simply to terrorise for the sake of terrorising. But, at least he provides the powers of the new world order the pretext of "eliminating terrorism" for any number of actions they might wish to take.
Simultaneously, it is to be understood that the Arabs and Muslims are somehow more inherently inclined to commit terrorist acts than other peoples. Yet, the Arabs are numerous and the Muslims more so. It is impossible that all these people, or even a significant proportion of them be terrorists, especially given that they are dispersed across many different countries, some of which are on friendly terms with those nations leading the fight against terrorism. No attempt has been made to explain this inconsistency.
In addition, the Arabs were not always regarded as terrorists or hostile to peace and stability. Nor has Islam always been so maligned, even by those nations that are now the champions of anti-terrorism. At the turn of the 20th century, Arab nationalism and rebellion against the Turks were enthusiastically encouraged by the West when it needed to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. Arab nationalism received another boost in the 1950s when the West was rallying support against Soviet expansion and Islam was similarly exploited against the heresy of communist atheism. But now that these instruments have accomplished their objectives and the Soviet threat is no more, Arab nationalism is depicted as a great fiction because the Arabs are constitutionally incapable of agreeing on anything and Islam is a religion that intrinsically breeds violence, extremism and terrorism.
In today's world of globalisation and Israeli expansionism, the Arabs and Muslims are the object of a campaign of vilification unparalleled in history. The sheer geographical extent of the assault, spanning from the US in the west to China in the east, is astounding, as is the volume and diversity of media and official statements dedicated to propagating the assault. Perhaps the scale and suddenness of the onslaught is not so surprising in light of what I have mentioned above. However, what is surprising is the reaction of a significant segment of Arab intellectuals, their numerous seminars and conferences on how to improve the image of Islam in the West, and their delegations to Western capitals to explain the truth about Islam. Do these Arab intellectuals truly believe that the West is acting on the basis of a "misunderstanding" that simply needs to be cleared up? Do they really think that Western decision-makers lack sufficient information about us, our culture and religion even after more than a hundred years of colonial occupation and incessant research and intelligence gathering?
One might suggest that the attitudes of Arab intellectuals are not surprising either. After all, it is the habit of the weak to view himself through the perspective of his opponent and to regard his own strengths as failings and the faults of others as virtues. Intellectuals, in fact, may even be more disposed to this habit than others, especially if they think they can meet a demand in the West that offers generous remuneration.
There is no limit to what an Arab intellectual might say once he has decided to act as a foreign mouthpiece. "Terrorism is an incontrovertible fact," he will tell us, "and terrorism does have an Arab and Muslim face," to which he will add, "the Arabs are not only poor, they are backward". We might also hear them say, "The highest form of freedom is to be found in the democratic systems practiced in the West", even in the face of evidence that democracy brings only nominal freedoms and that those who possess them are ever ready to abuse the liberties and freedoms of others.
We are, therefore, forced to admit that the image of the Arab intellectual under the new global order is not altogether a glowing one. However, we must also recognise that our intellectuals have an important responsibility in freeing ourselves from the stranglehold of the new world order. We are living in a time when forms of psychological and mental oppression are growing more common than material oppression, when brainwashing is proving more effective than outright coercion. True, both forms of manipulation have always co-existed throughout history. However, such are the needs for skilled labour and for a certain level of consumer affluence in order to keep the capitalist machinery of the new order of production in motion that the more subtle forms of control are in increasing demand. Under this new and insidious climate, intellectuals are best poised to expose the forms of deception that keep people in thrall to the system.
A second reason why intellectuals today have a greater responsibility than ever before is that the gap between appearance and reality is wider than ever before. It is now possible to make millions through an advertisement that reaches all corners of the globe at once. Simultaneously, the art of altering ideas, creating tastes and changing lifestyles in order to generate consumer demand are growing ever more powerful and pervasive. Intellectuals are needed in order to expose the subtle processes that are controlling people's behaviour and the motives behind them. This task, in conjunction with the current campaign of anti- Arab and anti-Muslim vilification that is furthering the ends of the dominant forces in the new world order, places a doubly formidable onus on Arab intellectuals.
* The writer is professor of economics at the American University in Cairo.
