SPEAKING
FREELY Waiting for the next
tsunami By Arno Tausch
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Both Europe
and the Muslim world are facing the same tendency of a
basic and underlying shift in global economic activity
away from the west of the Euro/Asian/African landmass
toward the countries of the Pacific. The present US
government's main interest is in preserving and
intensifying US global hegemony after the end of the
Cold War, and maximizing access to global wealth and
energy resources in a world that looks more and more
like the late 19th century. The conditions of this
political economy of the 21st century were spelled out
by the world system theory school of thought in the
social sciences pioneered by Karl Polanyi. Non-Muslim
Europeans and non-European Muslims sit, so to speak, in
the same global economic boat. In several European
countries, but also in Japan and even in the United
States, inequality and globalization have been on the
increase since 1980. Saudi Arabia from 1975-98 lost 18
of a possible 23 valuable years of development, while
most capitalist Western democracies lost no year in that
period. About a third of the world's entire land surface
suffered from such a dramatic development turnaround
since 1975.
There is no justification for
looking scornfully at the Muslim world. In the end, it
is their basic welfare net that gave the countries of
the region certain social pro-poor structures in times
of economic relative or absolute impoverishment. Both
sides along what still might look like a cultural
dividing line should begin to learn again from the very
positive co-existence that existed in Spain before the
Reconquista 1492. The peaceful co-existence and economic
convergence between Europe and Islam could even become
the basis of future European well-being in world
society. Zakat and Sadaqah - the two basic
Muslim institutions of social welfare - would serve well
the poor in Latin America, Southern Africa and Eastern
Europe, and proposals for a global "Tobin tax" could be
interpreted as a kind of contemporary, global
zakat. Human development increases in the Muslim
countries were among the most rapid in the entire world.
In the long run, the European Union would only have to
gain from a more bold and forward-looking policy of
applying the famous future-membership Copenhagen
criteria about democracy and competitive market
economies to the Arab mezzogiorno of Europe in a
world economy that definitely is reorienting itself
again toward China and the Orient.
During the
1990s, penetration by transnational capital dramatically
increased in many parts of Europe (especially in what
was described by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
recently as "the new Europe"), as well as in eastern
Latin America, in Southern Africa, in Central Asia and
in South and Southeast Asia. However, there was a
dramatic decrease of MNC (multinational corporation)
penetration in most countries of the Muslim world during
the second half of the 1990s. The multinationals
withdrew from the region at an unprecedented scale, long
before the attacks of September 11, 2001. World capital
thus withdrew from the Muslim Middle East and went into
Eastern Europe, Central Asia, East and Southeast Asia,
eastern Latin America and Southern Africa instead.
So is sociologist Giovanni Arrighi right when he
maintains that the ascent of one region conditions the
decline of another one? Most probably, yes. Empirical
findings over the past years are all the more striking
since we also have to consider that on a world level -
contrary to popular assumptions - membership in the
Islamic Conference is not an impediment against
political democracy and human development, while
"Washington Consensus" policies more often than not
indeed are. The empirical record speaks a clear language
in favor of Islamic democracy and against those in the
West who attempt to treat a Muslim cultural heritage as
a general development burden. It should be also clear
that a reliance on the "Washington Consensus" will not
"fix" the performance of countries. Cross-national
data also clearly contradict many of the expectations
inherent in the writings of Professor Samuel Huntington.
Four development indicators under review for our
purposes here - two for the environment, one on human
development, and one on democracy - are even positively
and significantly determined by membership in the
Islamic Conference, once you properly control for the
effects of the other influencing variables. However,
gender justice and redistribution remain indeed the
Achilles' heel of today's members of the Islamic
Conference, strengthening the cause of those Muslims who
advocate more social inclusion and more gender justice,
and thus a more adequate contemporary reading of the
Holy Scriptures.
The various Christian
liberation theologies and liberation theologies from
other denominations, which Polanyi's though in many ways
preceded, are working in the same direction. Non-Muslim
"Europeans" should remember that the keys of the "common
European house" do not belong to one cultural tradition
only. The world of Islam was pivotal to the European
path to the Renaissance and to the rediscovery of
classic Greek philosophy. Islamic tolerance and
knowledge enabled us Europeans to develop. The Muslim
world, on the other hand, can gain a lot from a thorough
reading of the works of the great social scientist
Polanyi, who always thought that morality and the social
sphere are above the market principle.
America's
long-term agenda under President George W Bush is not
just interested in establishing its vision in the Near
East, but in the end is interested in blocking peaceful
European ascent to global leadership - as envisaged by
the European Union's Lisbon agenda until 2000 - at the
same time. As is well known, at the Lisbon European
Council (March 2000), the EU set itself a new strategic
goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive
and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world,
capable of sustainable economic growth with more and
better jobs and greater social cohesion. The rift
between Europe and the United States - especially
between France, Germany and Russia on the one hand and
the US on the other - has a very basic political
economic background: the growing hegemonic rivalry
between the world's leading capitalist blocs that have
characterized world capitalism since 1450. An EU
comprising up to 40 nations of the third and fourth
enlargement wave indeed would be a major change in the
structure of the international system and could be
driven by America's power play, but also by its own
internal deficient dynamics, characterized by low
innovation, into such a position.
A large, wider
Europe, driven into hegemonic rivalry by the present
hyperpower play by the United States, is a somber
scenario. It enjoys high probability, and it has dire
world political consequences. It was shown in recent
quantitative research that there is a recurrent and
shortening cycle of conflict in the international
system, linked to the long cycles of economics and
politics. According to Arrighi, the usual recurrent
slumps in the 50-year economic (Kondratieff) cycles
(1756, 1832, 1885, 1932 and 1975-82 as the beginnings of
new Kondratieff cycles, while 1756, 1774, 1793, 1812,
1832, 1862, 1885, 1908, 1932, 1958, 1975, and 1992 are
the turning points of Kuznets cycles) are called signal
crises; while the interaction between the end of world
hegemonies (1340, 1560, 1750 and 1930) and the regular
Kondratieff slumps are called terminal crises or tsunami
waves, because they have catastrophic and devastating
effects on the world system and have a high probability
of leading, in a shortening time period, to major-power
wars.
The joint dramatic decline of European
growth rates and Arab/MENA (Middle East and North
Africa) country growth rates over time since the 1960s
can be shown from the "Global Development Network Growth
Database" of the World Bank. Only the Irish Republic had
real accelerating economic growth, while 12 of the 15
present European Union members were confronted with
decreasing economic growth from 1962-98 (the
acceleration of economic growth in Luxembourg is
negligible, and there is no complete data series for
Germany within the new borders after the fall of the
Berlin Wall).
An imperial path for a United
Europe, entering into major power conflict with the US
over raw materials in Central and Western Asia, would be
the last thing the world needs, although there are lots
of indicators that would warn us that the leading powers
in the center could follow precisely this path. A look
into history shows how dangerous imperial confrontation,
as driven by the present "power play" by the United
States of America, is. Two hundred eighteen repressive
regimes (141 state regimes and 77 quasi-state and group
regimes) killed from 1900-87 nearly 170 million of their
own citizens and foreigners - about four times the
number of people killed in domestic and international
wars during that same period. Most of these deaths
occurred during the "earthquake" of the "tsunami" wave
of confrontation in world politics and economics that
hit the globe from 1914-45, so aptly described by
Polanyi in 1944.
Very sharp and bitter
confrontations might arise between the United States and
Europe over access to the Caspian Sea and its 150
billion barrels of oil reserves, and over foreign policy
vis-a-vis the Balkans, and the Middle East, with Europe
favoring a rapprochement with Serbia after its October
2000 transition, a rapprochement with the Palestinians
and the Kurds, while the US staunchly favors its own
privileged access to the oilfields in the Caspian Sea
and in Iraq.
Dr Arno Tausch is
associate visiting professor of political science at
Innsbruck University. His personal academic website is
MyLITsearch.org, University of
Alberta.
(Copyright 2004 Dr Arno Tausch.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Pleaseclick hereif you are
interested in contributing.
