EXCERPTS:"`Arabs need globalisation and democracy'", A.A.W. 17-23 Feb. 2000

SUBJECT:Arab phobias.

" `Arabs need globalisation and democracy' " By Dina Ezzat, Al-Ahram
Weekly 17-23 Feb.'00

QUOTE FROM TEXT::"The prescription offered by the report is more
democracy, more integration in the global economy, bigger budgets for
education
and scientific reasearch and fewer worries about the attempts of the US and
Israel to
marginalise the Arabs.

Thore attempts ... are only phobias that Arabs have become too used
to."

EXCERPTS:
Arabs fail to establish the right ties with the world because they still
insist on seeing world politics in black and white only. And they fail to
establish good relations among themselves because of the legacy of
Pan-Arabism. This was the main argument
offered by the Foreign Policy section of the 1999 Arab Strategic Report
issued by the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
. . .
The Arabs' fear of globalisation and their failure to deal with its
political and economic aspects dominate the first chapter of the report:
"Arabs and International Interactions."
. . .
The Kosovo tragedy is ...a case in point to illustrate the failure of
the Arab world to deal with the increasing political globalisation.
According to the report, the Arabs embrace a school of thought that "knows
only of absolute virtue or absolute evil" and, therefore, they could not
discriminate between the US policy on the Balkans crisis and its other
policies that they disagree with.

It is to this "simplistic" view that the report attributes its claim
that the Arabs would not have minded to see the massacres continue in Kosovo
rather than to approve of the US-led NATO intervention, given that this
intervention allowed the US to further underline its hegemony. For the
Arabs, the report theorises, it would have been better to even sacrifice the
lives of Kosovars as part of the "struggle against imperialism, hegemony or
globalisation".

The report criticises Egypt for being one of the countries which play by
the black-and-white rule, albeit in a fashion
that takes into consideration its interests with the White House.

As part of their call for globalisation, the writers of this report
chose to make a precedent by supporting the proposition of UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan to widen the concept of state sovereignty so as to allow
for international intervention in internal state affairs to save people from
oppressive governmental practices when the need arises...

Globalisation, the report argues, should be pursued even at the expense
of nationalism since it is impossible for the Arab countries to separate
themselves from the world economic set-up.
. . .
... the Arab countries are called upon to abandon the "slogan of
national production" since it could be easily proven, according to the
criteria cited by the writers of the report, that a foreign commodity
produced in Egypt, for example, could be of a much higher value to the
Egyptian economy than a locally produced commodity.

A comparison between the Arabs as enemies of, or at best strangers to,
globalisation and Israel, a believer in globalisation, is drawn at
several points... be well ahead of its Arab neighbours in terms of
development, technology research, and standards of education. The Arabs
have lagged behind on all these fronts, the report says.

The report blames Pan-Arabism for the disappointing state of relations
among Arab countries which cannot bring themselves to hold an Arab summit
even on a limited scale or to seriously act to establish an Arab Free Trade
Area.

The result is an acute case of "Arab mistrust... that takes the Arab
world into the 21st century without any clear vision of the future of their
regional order or their joint efforts".

The plea of the report against Arab nationalism is based on an argument
that accuses the founders and followers of this movement of a disinterest in
democracy and a preoccupation, if not an obsession, with Israel's increasing
power.

The prescription offered by the report is more democracy, more
integration in the global economy, bigger budgets for education and
scientific research and fewer worries about the attempts of the US and
Israel to marginalise the Arabs. Those attempts, the report likes to
suggest, are only phobias that Arabs have become too used to.

Dr, Joseph Lerner, Co-Director IMRA
www.imra.org.il