ANALYSIS: "And Now, Islamism Trumps Arabism," by Michael Slackman, New York Times, 20 August 2006, p. WK1.
Tried to explain this one last night, but dealt it only a glancing blow, I fear.
Hell, been trying to explain it here for months.
Last night I ran into the usual lumping of my analysis on globalization with Friedman, which always pisses me off a bit because it betrays that American requirement to choose in that oh so binary way: globalization is either all about integration (Friedman) or it's all about disintegration (Huntington)--"you make the call!"
I catch the same binary approach on Iran: if I support rapprochement I must think Iran is a good regime, but if I realized just how evil Iran was, I'd want at least containment and probably invasion.
You know, globalization is a lot like detente, because detente was, in the end, change through connectivity rather than waiting on change to start connectivity (that was the brilliant point of our academic from Oxford last night on Lydon's show).
Globalization coming to the Middle East creates change, pure and simple. Arabism had long been used by the region's dictators as a pseudo-unifying principle (none of them really wanted any unity per se (though occasionally one of them wanted to use Arabism to extend his power beyond his borders), it was just another means of controlling the masses). By the 1960-70s, when the modernizers started connecting the region to some larger reality (the embryonic globalization of that age), a natural yang emerged to that yin in the form of radical Islam, with the big scary explosion being the Iranian revolution of 1979, which deposes that most cruel of modernizers, the Shah of Iran.
Since then, so much of the rest of the world has moved on to embrace globalization: not just the old West, but the rising East and key pillars of the South. But the Middle East remained relatively disconnected, letting in just enough content connectivity to scare the powers that be and to turn on the cultural police of Islam.
And so you got two combinations: rulers that appeased that rising religious sentiment (like the House of Saud) and those that clamped it down (Mubarek). Meanwhile, Arabism retreated into the history books.
Speed ahead to the post-9/11 world, where 3 billion new capitalists have added such an uncontrollable impetus to globalization's rapid rise, and the Middle East is being encroached upon from all angles at the same time the nations there are desperately trying to process a youth bulge.
So the combinations of the past aren't working so well: if you try to appease the Islamic radicals, it can backfire on you, as with Saudi Arabia and its 9/11 crop; and if you clamp down even harder, you're Mubarek facing the Muslim Brotherhood's rising popularity.
This is the fragile powder keg Bush accessed with his Big Bang strategy, and he got what he wanted: there is change across the dial: some good, some bad, but everything moving in one way or another.
And what's moving most right now is a politicized, radicalized Islam.
Is it necessarily fundamentalist, as in, desiring a disconnect from the outside world?
No, but that will be it's first instincts--especially in situations of power.
Proximately, though, the focus will be on the little devil (Israel) and the big devil (U.S.), in the mistaken belief that driving both out will somehow make the Middle East work better in some way, when of course it won't. It'd just be the same pathetic mess absent the unifying hatred of outsiders, so we'd just see a lot of civil strife as Sunni turns on Shiia turns on whomever's left and those who desire true disconnectedness from the outside world (fundamentalists) turn on anyone with a hint of modernizing/connecting desire.
In short, it'd look a lot like Iraq right now.
So what do we get by forcing Iraq down that path now as opposed to a mythical later?
We get a preview. We get a start. We get what logically comes next.
Will we eventually be forced to talk to Iran? Of course.
Same with Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood--all of them.
They are what comes next. They were always what was going to come next.
Beyond them we will eventually meet what the neocons had hoped would be awaiting them on the streets of Baghdad back in April 2003, but that's a difficult journey that many on our side will wish to avoid.
It can't be avoided, of course, because globalization won't be denied.
So, in concluding last night's discussion, there are plenty of historical analogies to go around.
For the Core, the challenge evokes 1948 and the sense of the Long War that's going to be won more non-kinetically than kinetically.
For the Middle East, we need to be thinking more like 1972. Not in terms of ditching Vietnam, but in terms of embracing nations we need to integrate rather than contain.
And in the larger strategic sense, we need to remember the integration of the American West in the latter half of the 19th century, recognizing that such integration will change us in addition to changing those integrated, and understanding that this historical process will be bloody around the margins.
I realize that whenever I evoke the settling of the American West, some knees automatically jerk with the assumption that genocide is somehow the argument. Reducing that complex historical process to just that angle is certainly self-righteous, but it's ultimately diverting.
First, why do so many on our side assume that the Islamic world as a whole plays "Native Americans" to this integration process? I look around the Middle East and the rest of the Gap and see the vast majority as settlers already in place. The "unintegratables" here can be thought of as akin to the Native Americans, but that's just the hardline fundamentalists and jihadists who will brook no serious cultural change to the point of killing and dying to prevent it. Very few experts on Islam see that sort of resistance as being anything but a small percentage of the population.
No, I see plenty of settlers already in place, with tons of unaccredited wealth (Hernando de Soto's argument), and the main problem being sufficient legal rule sets to attract foreign capital (often, because the government stands in the way).
You know, the more I encounter that genocidal assumption the more I realize how profoundly pessimistic and typically dismissive so many of us are regarding the Middle East's potential--as in, these people are all slated for extinction--instead of recognizing the "settler" possibility. The region's rigid all right, but it presents nowhere the disparity in either civilizational or economic/social development as to approximate the far wider gap between American settlers and the Native Americans (and yes, I know that statement exposes me to similar charges regarding the Native Americans, as in they were more advanced, etc., than I give them credit for, but frankly, that argument just doesn't stand up to scrutiny).
Second, America's westward expansion was, much like globalization, an integrating and disintegrating process. It reformatted the land from one civilization into another, and because of the strong disjuncture between those civilizations, it resulted in genocidal conflicts, but likewise intense infrastructural networking, state building, and the extension of political rule. It was imposed out of a sense of destiny that was as much justified as it was unjust. It was simply unstoppable, bloody, nasty and ultimately settling.
Now, some in the West assume that the disjunctures between Islam and what I call the Functioning Core of globalization are equally as great as those presented by America's westward expansion--thus genocidal wars are inevitable.
I think that's a bad misreading of the region and Islam in general. As Olivier Roy argues so eloquently in Globalised Islam, the globalized response of radicalized Islam is--in itself--a very positive sign, signaling that Islam hopes to change us as much as we will inevitably change Islam through globalization's march. In that convergence of civilizations, there will be great and continuing clashes, but genocide? The system just doesn't allow it anymore--except in the truly off-grid locations like Africa. When we get involved militarily, we self-police in profound ways. Doesn't mean we don't make mistakes, because we do. It means we self-correct. So Abu Ghraib isn't exactly the Holocaust, now is it? And that's a very good thing, despite the hyperbolic comparisons that are constantly thrown in our face whenever we screw up.
But screwing up is never the issue. How fast you self-correct is the issue. And there America shines more the longer we continue this grand experiment called the United States. At the beginning, we sucked at this process (witness the century it took to finally deal with slavery), but with each iteration of self-correction and change and improvement and rule-set resets, we get better.
Globalization today presents many of the same unstoppable desires and ambition. You add the 3 billion and they want more. That "more" means the Middle East and the Gap in general is "doomed" or "slated" or "presented with the great opportunity" for integration.
Is it fair or just, this amount of civilization reformatting and change that this process will entail? Depends on whether you think the violence and social disruption caused in these regions is justified by the hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty by globalization's spread, and whether you think the opportunities presented on the far side of this tumultuous integration process justify these means.
I have no doubt that there will be injustices and difficult costs on both sides, but mostly on the side of the integrated. I also have no doubt that the social change imposed by globalization (i.e., its tendency to empower women relative to men) is better that leaving the social injustices of traditional societies in place (tradition mostly being defined in history by male control over females). Likewise, I believe more wealth is created by markets than by states, and that the Gap's great disparities of wealth (a fraction controls the bulk) will be altered by this process to allow for greater accumulation of wealth by a far greater percentage of the population, as it has occurred in Asia this past generation. That doesn't mean inequalities go away, for indeed they tend to be heightened between the top and bottom. It means there begins to be a middle finally, something that is basically missing throughout the Gap. And if there is no middle, there is little to no chance for political pluralism, which the Middle East is sorely lacking.
In using historical analogies (the point of last night's show), one tends to reach for form more than content, as in an attempt to capture dynamics. Obviously, a rote rerun is neither possible nor desired: you want to do better each time you're faced with similar circumstances, recognizing how differing circumstances allow for better approaches.
But recognizing the paradigm's dynamics is crucial. This is not a "world war" type process of land conquest, but an integration process where weak/bad states will be processed into better ones, not because we demand it but because globalization will force it--or it will force that society's continued disconnectedness.
In each instance, I believe that integration beats disintegration as a choice, and that connectivity trumps disconnectedness. I believe in evangelical functions of religion rather than fundamentalist expressions.
And yes, forcing us all to live together in connectedness (known today by the moniker of globalization) will force a tremendous amount of change on both those who welcome it (by all indications, the bulk of the populations throughout the Gap) and those who revile it (a small minority who will fight these changes to the very end, and yes, for them, the conflict will be "genocidal" in that they will not survive it).
In that conflict process, which I believe is both inevitable and good, it will be harder before it gets easier, but putting off the hard part only ensures greater conflict and death totals down the line, because if integration isn't achieved, colonial mercantilist-style economic transaction patterns will predominate, as will local authoritarianism and failed states, and the death totals associated with those pathways will (as they do today) dwarf the death totals of integrating conflicts (and if you don't believe that, then you are woefully ignorant of what's happening every day in Africa right now).
The challenge before us is not one of deciding "yes" or "no" to this historical process. That train left the station a generation ago when the East decided to join the global economy.
The only question that remains is how we rise to this challenge, how we get smarter about how we wage both war and peace.
To pretend that the choice lies between war and peace is self-delusional, just like pretending we must choose between globalization-the-integration-process and globalization-the-disintegrating/reformatting-process. Life is simply not that binary.
The Gap will be both settled and liberated. It will be both disintegrated and integrated. Civilizations will both clash and come together.
Our only choice is how we shepherd that process, and in that discussion we need to remember both what we did well and what we did poorly in previous iterations.
