For most major development actors, the emphasis is squarely on individual learning. Achieving universal primary education, for instance, is the second Millennium Development Goal, coming just after ending poverty and hunger. Organizations such as the World Bank believe that education is “universally recognized as one of the most fundamental building blocks for human development and poverty reduction,” and that, as DFID puts it, it is “fundamental to everything we do.”

Yet, societies and states must also learn if they are to develop the new institutions, new knowledge, and new capacities that are essential to creating wealth, improving governance, and enhancing resilience. And this larger, macro level learning requires very different types of investments from those individuals need—investments that rarely get prioritized in the development field.
How Societal and State Learning Differs From Individual Learning

State or societal learning differs from individual learning in a number of ways. First, it involves a different type of knowledge. Know-how that enhances how a society operates may be very different than that which helps individuals get ahead. For instance, states need lots of people with strong organizational management skills. Companies, government ministries, and NGOs are not effective without a large group of experienced administrators who know how to run the systems that make their organizations work well. Second, they need knowledge that is group or organization based. Maintaining property rights, adjudicating disputes, and running education systems all depend on institutional knowledge built up over a long time period and which is maintained in a way that is not dependent on individuals. Third, states need to learn from experience to develop new institutions (such as hybrid legal systems) that help them solve collective action problems. This requires learning and cooperation on a society scale that goes well beyond anything done in a classroom. Fourth, states need to find ways to attract and retain knowledge within their borders, something individuals do not have to worry about. This may mean creating incentives for diaspora to return or ensuring that key information is embedded in organizations that are not vulnerable to brain drain. Fifth, states need feedback loops that improve how systems work. Improving policies requires understanding where existing policies do not live up to expectations and what can be done about it.

While enhancing the wellbeing of individuals obviously matters, countries only progress as fast as they can learn on a societal level. The more a society can accumulate knowledge and experience about what works and does not work, the better its institutions will be, and the more able it will be able to enhance governance, productivity, and economic diversification. These, in turn, will enhance resilience and ensure growth is both sustainable and broad-based.

Countries in which individuals see widespread education gains but which fail to progress are likely to end up with frustrated populations, jobless growth, and political instability, as has happened in many Arab countries in recent years. Indeed, one of the main causes of the Arab Spring was that the countries were producing far more university graduates than their economies could employ.

How Do States Learn?

States and societies learn by trying out new ideas and methods, choosing those that work, discarding those that don’t, and spreading the best methods as widely as possible. Success depends on the quality of the encompassing institutions (most importantly the government), organizations actually doing the experimenting (companies, NGOs, and state entities), infrastructure, and feedback loops judging performance.

The best description of this process that I have seen appeared in last year’s China-DAC Study Group report “Economic Transformation and Poverty Reduction: How It Happened in China, Helping It Happen in Africa”:

What makes rapid transformation processes possible? Development as a learning process.

The common features of the transformation process are deeply connected to the fundamental sources of economic growth – ideas, innovation and organisation. This is what is replicable with development-oriented leadership. And these sources of growth are becoming more powerful than ever as knowledge accumulates and disseminates faster than ever before in history, as China’s record shows.

A dynamic learning process takes hold in a country via interactions with new ideas, products and organisational models that are increasingly abundant in the multipolar, connected, global economy of the 21st century. Business models that are found to work locally, become widely replicated and then progressively improved, in an endogenous process of continual upgrading, across the economy – agriculture, industry, infrastructure and services. . . .

The state plays an active role in supplying “hard” and “soft” infrastructure at each stage, generating large externalities which are essential to the growth process. Rising employment and incomes stimulate the local economy and create new jobs. Poverty rates begin to fall dramatically. Intensive feedback mechanisms between the state and the enterprise sector identify what is working and what needs corrective action. Performance, rather than established interests, becomes the reference point for policymaking.

What China’s Experience Teaches

Among the many elements mentioned in the report as “fundamental elements in China’s success in massively reducing poverty and creating a middle-income country” are:

Puts a high priority on policymaking capacity and investment in research and extension capacities in universities and institutes and linking them to ministries and the decision and implementation processes . . .

Attracts talented people to return home to work for their countries . . .

Self-reliance has been a fundamental principle of Chinese strategy. This principle is imbedded deeply in China’s strong ownership of its own development path while absorbing knowledge from a wide range of external actors, including investors and experts, and engaging with bilateral and multilateral policy processes….

Policy development and technical capacities have always been central policy concerns, providing a basis for monitoring and accountability systems at both the central and local government levels….

Significant decentralisation generated bottom-up initiatives that were widely replicated….

The transformation process is intensive in on-going policy testing and adaptation based on evidence. China has created an extensive set of institutional capacities in the hard and soft sciences to enable the analysis of performance, problems and solutions. The experiment-evaluate-scale up success principle is widely applied and rapidly implemented. This has demanded the expansion of higher education and the development of research institutions linked to policy decision making and implementation. World expertise has been sought and attracted through incentive schemes, international partnerships and often via aid programmes.

China’s policy review and adjustment processes, informed by feedback mechanisms and global change, are more important than ever, both domestically and internationally.

Helping Countries Learn

Helping countries learn requires strengthening the institutions that underpin the societal learning process by how their own learning and dissemination of information affects all other institutions within the country. This means a much stronger emphasis on building the knowledge institutions—including business, public administration, and law schools; rule of law institutes (to study/document legal multiplicity and find creative homegrown solutions); universities; teacher training colleges/teacher evaluation institutes; policy think tanks; good governance institutes; technological research centers; independent monitoring organizations, etc.—that promise to have multiplier effects across a whole country.

Building up human capital is essential, but building up the institutions that enable states themselves to analyze their own problems, experiment with possible solutions, formulate responses, and upgrade people wherever necessary is even more valuable. Although government has a large role to play, both as an absorber and disseminator of information, it is really only one part of a much larger network of entities that work together and compete against each other in ways that enhance overall learning.

Thinking of society as an entity in itself—a system or a network or a set of interacting components that must work together effectively to maintain its vibrancy and resilience—makes the development process clearer. This entity must, just like individuals, constantly upgrade itself through learning, adaptation, and incremental enhancement. Nurturing this process is as important—if not more important—as helping individuals improve their wellbeing if countries are to progress.

AUTHOR: Seth Kaplan
URL: http://www.fragilestates.org
E-MAIL: seth [at] sethkaplan.org

Between 2 July – 18 July, NL-Aid is enjoying a summer recess. From 19th July, you can read articles of our authors again. Untill that time, we have selected Youtube videos in which development thinkers are centered. In this episode: Che Guevara.

AUTHOR: Hans Sluijter
URL: www.NL-Aid.org
E-MAIL: info [at] www.NL-Aid.org

For example, there are literary thousands of books on the French Revolution written from very different perspectives. The student focused on historiography would find it difficult to believe that all the authors looked at the exact same events but drew such different interpretations and conclusions. How much common ground can we find in the interpretations of Jules Michelet, George Lefebvre and Francois Furet on the French Revolution. The same holds true of the Russian Revolution, as Boris Kolonitskii argues in “Russian Historiography of the 1917 Revolution”.

And the same would hold true of the American Civil War, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, etc. If I am interested in the role of the workers in Paris in 1789, and in workers’ soviets in Petrograd in 1917, but I have no interest in the role of nobles that I assume all along are ‘the enemy’, my interpretation and entire outlook of the revolutions will be very different than the scholar who focuses on the positive contributions of the nobility to French and Russian society under absolutism. Anything that distracts from my thesis will be left out or disputed.

In a pluralistic society, everyone has a right to their ideological, political, and religious perspectives, and such considered interpretations can only be afforded weight on the merits – empirical data, reasoned arguments, and sound scholarly presentation. Having said that, the varieties of views actually enrich the interested reader’s understanding of the topic and it is far better to have different interpretations than to suffer the monolithic dogma of a single Truth! For this reason, I am in complete agreement with with Bertrand Russell regarding absolutes, namely, there are none including this statement. The idea of writing is not to inculcate dogma nor to indoctrinate, but to educate and that entails exchange of many views from whcih some type of time-bound synthesis emerges.

This ideal of plurality of perspectives was dealt a major blow during the Cold War that helped shaped public opinion on a world scale and it molded educational institutions in East, West and non-aligned areas. Dichotomous thinking became a way of interpreting everything from social sciences to humanities and arts, and even the hard sciences, and all because governments helped to mold institutions in such a mode. “Better Red than dead” was not just a slogan, but a way of conceptualizing the world, and it afforded meaning to otherwise meaningless existence of the individual who identified with a universal issue.

Just as it was impossible for most people in the West to see anything positive in the Soviet bloc countries under Stalin and successive Soviet regimes until Gorbachev, it was very difficult for mainstream die-hard Soviet scholars to see anything positive about the decadent West. The Soviet-American confrontation shaped the conceptual dichotomy to the degree that people could appreciate the Bolshoi on its merits, but could still castigate it as a ‘ Soviet propaganda tool’. Similarly, the Soviets could appreciate advancements in American science and technology on their merits, but dismiss them as ‘tools of imperialism’.

Because political dogma necessitated dismissing or at least distorting any positive development of ‘the enemy’, ordinary people, including many scholars, let alone opportunistic journalists and politicians, felt compelled to do their patriotic duty and castigate everything about ‘the enemy’; as though diminishing ‘the enemy’s’ achievements would automatically translate into ‘achievement’ for ‘our side’. The strange irrational line of thinking is that if nothing is ‘good’ about the ‘other side’ (the enemy), then everything is great about our side.

Combined with poisonous nationalism, such dichotomous thinking is so deeply inculcated into the minds of people even today that they are hardly capable of thinking otherwise. Instead of a Cold War based on the Soviet-American confrontation, we have the absurd ‘war on terror’ and instead of large enemies we have smaller ones like Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela.

The political tone sets the pace for society at large, including intellectuals who would find it difficult to say anything positive about Iran if they have accepted the ‘Axis of evil’ dogma. Similarly, Iranians who have accepted the dogma of the Islamic Revolution, such as it has evolved to this day, would find it difficult to see anything positive about the West; and this includes everything from decadent hedonistic lifestyles to an imperialist foreign policy. But is this all there is of the West, that simplistic and nothing else? The same argument goes for Western critics of Iran, of course, who see nothing positive about it because they oppose the regime.

Iran has made incalculable contributions to civilization from ancient times to the present. Iran has made enormous progress in the last 30 years, despite overwhelming pressures from the US, and this is to its credit. The area of nuclear energy, an area that I have spoken out in favor of Iran’s right to pursue a nuclear energy program, is so controversial that many in the West use it to castigate everything about Iran. However, as much as I find it appalling for the IAEA to have unjustly targeted Iran for political reasons alone, I cannot be blind to Iran’s human rights record, especially with regard to women. It may very well be true that Iran is Shangri La for women under the Islamic revolutionary regime, and none of the human rights violations that I have stated are true; in fact, I accept that they may be propaganda to undermine the regime and that I am merely repeating propaganda.

If that is indeed the case, why is it that when one “Google’s” the heading “Women and Human Rights in Iran” more than 60 million postings/hits appear and it is so difficult to find material that praises the regime for its treatment of women? The web is free for all to express their views, so why do we have an avalanche of criticism on this topic, whereas there are favorable essays on other topics, ranging from foreign affairs to economic development? Let us confront the real issue here which is not the regime, for those come and go, but the enduring human cost of women under a patriarchal society maintained in order to keep a social and political order in place for as long as possible.

There are scholarly books and articles on the subject, taking into account religion, traditions, nationalism, and material civilization imposed on the country through economic modernization. How one reads and interprets works on women in Iran depends not necessarily on what the authori is trying to convey, but on the reader’s preconceived notions about Iran and about women. Therefore, if one is hostile to anything “Iranian” or hostile to ‘women’ seeking gender equality, then the conclusions will be shaped by those preconceived notions.

By contrast, if one is religiously devoted to Iran, any criticism about anything Iranian is similarly colored by such patriotic devotion. How does the dichotomous mode of thinking help the reader understand the human condition? Unless one is a devotee of Soren Kierkegaard’s EITHER OR, a philosophical work that sets out to strictly separate life’s hedonistic road from the ethical one, it really serves no purpose to embrace the dichotomous interpretative road on social science and humanities issues.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com

Carl Gustav Jung in 1910

Has globalization molded the ‘collective unconsciousness’ and subsumed individual free will (at least the illusion of it)? If so, is that a negative development because globalization is not rooted in predatory profit motive based on a hierarchical social model instead of humane-compassion-rooted conscience? If everything is for sale, why not thought and creativity, why not free will, or at least what is left of it for the individual to exercise? People sell human organs as they once sold members of their family to slavery and as they still sell women in the Afro-Asian business of human trafficking. On occasion people even sell their ‘hardly used soul’ on EBAY for those interested in purchasing it for a few dollars so they can imitate Goethe’s Faust. People sell their bodies and minds, their services that invariably entails surrendering their ‘free will’.

Even worse, when the will of the other is subjugated by institutions a human being feels reduced to the level of a lower species, wrongly in my view, for a bird flies freely and fish swim the oceans and lakes without others of their own species imposing constrictive conditions.In a materialistic society people trade all traces of their humane and compassionate aspects, their dignity and independence for success as defined by a bourgeois value system – wealth, status, power and prestige.

Globalized collective unconscious in the early 21st century and selling of free will is a harsh reality shaped by material culture. “Selling ice to Eskimos” as a marketing strategy may sound absurd, but is it not the case that bottled water is now a global trend owing to marketing and not need? A person may be standing next to a water cooler, but will purchase a plastic bottle of water from the vending machine or cafeteria because his brain has been conditioned to do. Is this a case of surrendering free will to the marketing of bottled water or simply surrendering free thought to ‘prevailing trends’, and to what degree is there a difference? The age of mass politics and mass culture entails that markets and the state have co-opted and commercialized the individual and local and national culture – free will and collective unconsciousness.

Carl Jung correctly observed that from the dawn of civilization until the 20th century people believed the human soul is a substance with eternal life. In the last half century or so, contemporary science and the materialistic society’s institutions and value system have obviated the soul and left humans in an existential void. Perhaps this was an inevitable result that started with the rationalism of the Enlightenment as we see in Critique of Pure Reason by I. Kant, a philosopher whose works influenced Jung.

If there is no soul because modern society has obviated it, is there a free will, and if it exists, is it merely a another commodity no different than a bag of onions? Do humans have the ability to choose in an autonomous manner their thoughts, imagination, and actions any more than they can choose their dreams? In that respect how are we different than other animal species? Jung’s most famous concept of ‘collective unconscious’ developed in the 1920s, largely as a departure from Freudian psychology, has great relevance in today’s globalization culture that not only subordinates the individual into the cultural abyss of commercialism and its ideology, but local and national cultures and what Jung described as the ‘collective unconscious’ that today lacks any sense of humane-rooted conscience.

More than natural science, material conditions account for the collective unconscious that globalization shapes and subsumes as an integral part of the predatory market economy of which the individual is an extension. Subsumed in the globalized collective unconsciousness, the individual feels less significant and less confident of how free will shapes identity and destiny, thus less confident about life’s purpose and meaning that comes already defined by the natural sciences as conformed to serve the globalized materialistic culture.

Is free will an illusion, as teleology linked to free will has waned, or is free will a reality, otherwise, how else could human beings make countless choices in their lives – everything from choosing what to eat to choosing to commit a sin as their religion defines it? But do humans ‘choose’ what to eat from a predetermined set of foods, based on how they have been culturally conditioned what foods to eat, and based on cost, time of the day, and a host of other predetermined conditions of thought patterns rooted in human biology and psychology? Similarly, do people choose their sins – let us say homosexuality that Catholics define as sin, although bio-genetics points to the direction of genetic determinism?

Although the neuroscience of free will as almost as controversial as philosophical and religious discussions of the subject, it is a legitimate question to ask if it is possible to ascertain the nature of free will if emotions and thoughts are determined by electrochemical reactions within and between nerve cells. The technology exists today to predict that the brain has already committed to a decision before it is even aware of its action. Perhaps free will is an illusion and that it is so could be supported by hard science one day. But if the choice of illusions an illusion? Is the issue of free will as much a political issue as it is a matter for neurobiology and philosophy?

In ‘Psychology and Literature’ Carl Jung writes:

“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.” If it is the case that the collective unconscious guides if not determines human behavior, is our species not closer to animals than it is to anything divine?

From the ancient times when religion convinced people that their lives were left to the gods until the present when politicians and psychologists try to convince people that they do exercise free will in daily decisions about their own lives, their family, friends, associates, neighborhood, community, town, state, country, the world. The absence of belief in free will easily absolves the individual of any sense of personal responsibility. At the same time, it is demoralizing, in fact enslaving, for the individual to believe that there is nothing but chance, luck, and predetermined fate at work regardless of the individual’s endeavors. Herein rests the overwhelming feeling that globalization has obviated free will, local culture and national identity by fostering a collective unconsciousness whose only goal is conformity to the value system and institutions promoting capitalism.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com

Samuel P. Huntington

One reason I always enjoyed Sam Huntington’s work ever since I was an undergraduate reading Soldier and the State is because he was a master at trying to capture the long-view of global historical trends and doing it with a great deal of thought after examining various sides of the issue and providing thought-provoking analysis in the process. Labeling ‘third wave’ the transition from authoritarianism to ‘democracy’  from the mid-1970s to the 1990s in countries from southern Europe (Portugal, Spain and Greece, to Latin America and Africa was a way to make sense of global trends.

I will not add much to the ‘third wave’ pros and cons arguments, except to point out that  those familiar with the literature and/or the countries that are included in the ‘third wave’ know very well that what was described as transition to democracy was in essence a transition from corrupt authoritarian regimes to corrupt semi-democratic ones for most, and in all cases without exception countries that became even more thoroughly dependent economically on the regional economic blocs dominated by the US, northwest Europe, and Japan.

It is true that at the cultural and to a degree social levels there has been greater ‘pluralism’ in societies that transitioned during the ‘third wave’. However, while women have more rights, the judicial system is more just, and there are greater opportunities for mobility based on a more meritorious system, it is also true that these countries compromised their sovereignty by surrendering to the globalized market economy to a much greater degree than they had under authoritarian regimes that tended to support ‘national capitalism’ more than international capitalism.

For example, the people of Portugal and Chile that are part of the ‘third wave’ elect their national leaders who only follow and execute policies in accordance with the rules of the market economy and under considerable pressure from the US and EU directly or indirectly through the IMF, World Bank, OECD, European Central Bank. To what degree do Portugal and Chile enjoy national sovereignty when the IMF and European Central Bank basically dictate to them monetary and fiscal policy that impact living standards and result in social engineering? In short, the ballot box affords the illusion of freedom of political choice, but the national economy and public finances have been surrendered to global finance capitalism that operates with comprador bourgeoisie at the national level.

If the ‘third wave’ did not result in the type of social justice politically, socially, and economically that one would associate with a Norwegian model of democracy, let us just say as an example that many admire, why would the imaginary ‘fourth wave’ be any different taking place now in the Middle East? Second, the suggestion that modernization can come solely or primarily as a result of ‘ideas’ is in some respect reactionary, initially suggested by none other than the master propagandist of counter-revolution Edmund Burke. Adamantly opposed to the French Revolution, Burke faulted the ‘radical’ ideas of the Enlightenment for poisoning the minds and hearts of people who blindly followed the leaders to the streets of Paris in 1789.

Let us establish that all uprisings that evolve into revolutions must necessarily be based on a coherent set of ideas, otherwise they are what in scholarship we call ‘Robin Hood’ movements. But the suggestion that the ideas per se or their interpretation (secular or religious) cause uprisings that may or may not evolve into revolution is not supported by any empirical evidence for any uprising in human history from the German Peasants’ War that Luther’s doctrines inspired to the Cuban Revolution. Even assuming the irrational takes over sound judgment in people acting as groups, people people in masses do not hit the streets risking injury or death for the sake of ideas alone, otherwise, those who read and think for themselves should be in the streets all the time protesting against the status quo.

The more essential question is what are the dynamics of the Arab uprisings and what are the possible scenarios under which future regimes can operate. The suggestion that the Arab uprisings are not rooted in Islam is difficult for me to comprehend. I firmly maintain that legitimacy for the establishment and the opposition seeking reform throughout the Arab world is rooted in Islam and not in any secular ideology that may be in the periphery. Muslims did not arrive here from Mars but were born into Islamic culture, thus societal legitimacy emanates from the faith. Nevertheless, I would be interested to see public opinion polls at some point after the dust settles across the Arab world about what motivated people to rebel.

Without empirical evidence, I will assume that Islam is an integral part of all other issues intertwined with the faith, especially in Egypt where the Islamic Brotherhood played a key role, but also in Yemen and Tunisia. In the absence of a secular political ideology, religious doctrine is what the masses rally around. This was indeed the case in the German Peasants’ War when there was no political ideology, thus Lutheranism served the purpose. Whereas the identity of a Muslim emanates from the faith as well as the nation-state, social status and lesser factors, the identity of a Christian in France or US is rooted in multiple institutions mostly secular, that may or may not include nation-state and faith.

While I briefly read some of Rachid Benzine’s ideas on Islam and looked at French video interviews, I am not sure what he is saying that is not already thoroughly explained in most Middle East textbooks on history, culture, social structure, and economy. However, it is important for each generation to produce its own spokespeople and Rachid Benzine serves such a purpose in France and Europe today. In essence, he is following a long-standing tradition started by Bernard Lewis, Fazlur Rahman and others, as well as Edward Said who was a critic of conventional scholarship. But is the failure of the Arab world, and more widely the Islamic world, to undergo an intellectual revolution (Renaissance and Enlightenment like Europe), invariably linked to social development, owed to a ‘misreading’ of the Koran and in failing to recognize and respond to specific historical situations?

As a traditional society that has not undergone a Renaissance, a Scientific Revolution, an Age of Reason, an Industrial Revolution, and in addition has been subject to foreign conquest that imposed monocultural economic structures (export-oriented economies) on it, the Arab world finds itself confronting the contradictions of wanting to preserve its cultural identity on the one hand, keeping up with the western world on the other in order to lessen exploitation of its resources and labor, and strengthen national sovereignty, and finding it impossible to avoid integration into the world-system of the market economy, which entails dependency at some level.

Embracing ‘modernization theory’ which is in essence suggests trying to fit Islamic institutions and society into a secularized Western-dominated world is not exactly revolutionary as some would argue. In the first half of the 19th century, Albanian-born Egyptian reformer Mehmet Ali tried to strengthen Egypt by modernizing it through a strong state structure while maintaining its Muslim institutions. Egypt’s attempts at reform under Mehmet Ali worked to a limited degree while he was in power to strengthen the country and prevent colonization, but the fact that Egypt fell deep into debt by heavily borrowing, and eventually became a British colony.

The second round of reform came with Gamal Abdel Nasser who like Ali was a nationalist rooted in Muslim faith but determined to modernize the nation to prevent its exploitation and manipulation by foreign powers. Influenced by socialist ideas, Nasser moved from the West to the Soviets to the non-aligned bloc, but in the end the hegemonic Western capitalist system with its mighty military machine behind it was too much to withstand for Egypt that failed to convince the Arab states to form a regional bloc. Ali and Nasser gave Egyptians a sense of national pride, a sense of dignity that at least they were living in a country that enjoyed national sovereignty, but he too failed as his successors Sadat and Mubarak reduced Egypt to a semi-colony. 

Given that reforms under Ali and Nasser had limitations in improving living standards and in strengthening the nation to the degree that it could resist external dependence, where is Egypt headed in the 21st century? Egypt is in a very strategic position geographically, having just gone through an uprising against authoritarianism as part of similar regional uprisings in a world dominated by regional economic blocs, a world where there is no Soviet Union or non-aligned to use as leverage, a world where finance capital is stronger than ever in the history of capitalism and the state relatively weak even after the recent global recession that temporarily revived the state’s power.

Is Egypt part of a ‘fourth wave’ toward democracy, or is that another phantom mental construct designed for the convenience of those who want to make sense of events and be optimistic that the modernization theory works – equating modernization  with Western concepts of bourgeois capitalism. In my view, ‘transformation policy’ that the US began implementing after WWII as a means to integrate the rest of the world into the global system of capitalist institutions is inevitable not just for Egypt, but for the entire Arab world, no matter what regime emerges after the uprisings of 2011. Alain de Benoist is right on target that now that the popular uprising has ended in Egypt, the divisions among the various opposition groups will emerge more clearly; not that such divisions will make much difference in so far as what has taken place in Egypt as well as Tunisia is a political revolt and not a social revolution.

In the absence of a regional (Middle Eastern-North African) economic bloc, in the absence of some revival of Nasser’s dream for Arab solidarity, Egypt will be even more thoroughly integrated into the capitalist system than it was under Mubarak who had set up his own fiefdom. The only question is what leverage does Egypt have at its disposal in order to enjoy greater national sovereignty, no matter what regime emerges, anything from an Islamic fundamentalist to the most liberal westernized model one can imagine. If the new regime goes running to the Chinese, they will demand that Egypt conform to the rules of the marketplace, to the IMF and World Bank, to the World Trade Organization, to observing all of its foreign treaty and other obligations; exactly as the US demanded from the Egyptian army so that the foreign aid can continue pouring in.

Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Bahrain, and the entire Arab world, will remain Western dependencies because they do not have better options that would serve the entrenched elites. After all, Libya under Muammar al-Gaddafi, now challenged by a segment of the discontent population reintegrated his country fully with the West after trying Soviet, Arab League and non-aligned paths.

Western dependency entails few changes in the status quo of the Arab world, merely enough to satisfy those that have fought to end authoritarianism. While it would be a great development to have more respect for women and broader observance of human rights in general,  the trend for Egypt and the rest of the Middle East is westernization through commercialism – consumer products and services, pop cultural influences, telecommunications, media and technology – which entails influencing the value system based on Islam and becoming more like Turkey that seeks full membership in the European Union.

This subtle form of infringement on Muslim sovereignty to which Arabs object comes slowly, and it contributes and is a reaction to popular uprisings, along with the broader recognition that the Muslim world is made up mostly of poor people, while the Christian West is prosperous, immersed in materialistic, hedonistic values and lifestyles. The closely integrated globalized economy entails withering cultural identities and that is the case in the Muslim world as well.

The only hope to strengthen national sovereignty and lessen external dependence for the Arabs is to revisit some 21st version of Nasser’s dream of an integrated Arab world, regional solidarity at all levels possible as a means of increasing leverage around the world. Given that Arab princes and millionaires are putting their money in global financial markets, expensive real estate in the West, and other businesses around the world, given that the Arabs are pitifully divided, regional economic integration is unlikely.

AUTHOR: Jon Kofas
URL: http://jonkofas.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: jonkofas [at] yahoo.com