Globalization technology and mulit-culture if this isn't post-modern i don't know what is.
Empty Pockets, Angry Minds
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
MUMBAI, India
I have no doubt that the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad have caused real offense to many Muslims. I'm glad my newspaper didn't publish them. But there is something in the worldwide Muslim reaction to these cartoons that is excessive, and suggests that something else is at work in this story. It's time we talked about it.
To understand this Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity — and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced.
Today's world has become so wired together, so flattened, that you can't avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet — just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. In this flat world you get your humiliation fiber-optically, at 56K or via broadband, whether you're in the Muslim suburbs of Paris or Kabul. Today, Muslim youth are enraged by cartoons in Denmark. Earlier, it was a Newsweek story about a desecrated Koran. Why? When you're already feeling left behind, even the tiniest insult from afar goes to the very core of your being — because your skin is so thin.
India is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, but the cartoon protests here, unlike those in Pakistan, have been largely peaceful. One reason for the difference is surely that Indian Muslims are empowered and live in a flourishing democracy. India's richest man is a Muslim software entrepreneur. But so many young Arabs and Muslims live in nations that have deprived them of any chance to realize their full potential.
The Middle East Media Research Institute, called Memri, just published an analysis of the latest employment figures issued by the U.N.'s International Labor Office. The I.L.O. study, Memri reported, found that "the Middle East and North Africa stand out as the region with the highest rate of unemployment in the world": 13.2 percent. That is worse than in sub-Saharan Africa.
While G.D.P. in the Middle East-North Africa region registered an annual increase of 5.5 percent from 1993 to 2003, productivity, the measure of how efficiently these resources were used, increased by only about 0.1 percent annually — better than only one region, sub-Saharan Africa.
The Arab world is the only area in the world where productivity did not increase with G.D.P. growth. That's because so much of the G.D.P. growth in this region was driven by oil revenues, not by educating workers to do new things with new technologies.Nearly 60 percent of the Arab world is under the age of 25. With limited job growth to absorb them, the I.L.O. estimates, the region is spinning out about 500,000 more unemployed people each year. At a time when India and China are focused on getting their children to be more scientific, innovative thinkers, educational standards in much of the Muslim world — particularly when it comes to science and critical inquiry — are not keeping pace.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, bluntly wrote the following in Global Agenda 2006, the journal of the recent Davos World Economic Forum:"Pakistan's public (and all but a handful of private) universities are intellectual rubble, their degrees of little consequence. ... According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Pakistanis have succeeded in registering only eight patents internationally in 57 years. ..."[Today] you seldom encounter a Muslim name in scientific journals. Muslim contributions to pure and applied science — measured in terms of discoveries, publications, patents and processes — are marginal. ... The harsh truth is that science and Islam parted ways many centuries ago. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age of science from the ninth to the 14th centuries, subsequent collapse, modest rebirth in the 19th century, and a profound reversal from science and modernity, beginning in the last decades of the 20th century. This reversal appears, if anything, to be gaining speed."No wonder so many young people in this part of the world are unprepared, and therefore easily enraged, as they encounter modernity. And no wonder backward religious leaders and dictators in places like Syria and Iran — who have miserably failed their youth — are so quick to turn their young people's anger against an insulting cartoon and away from themselves and the rot they have wrought.
2 comments:
Jim Wilson's comment:
Thomas Friedman is interesting; I read all of the Op/Ed pieces in the NY Times, including his which usually run twice a week. Friedman's schtick is what foreign policy theorists call "structural institutionalism," which is a fancy way of saying he belives that economic factors are what drive the world. While I find his columns always very interesting, my personal feelings regarding international relations are more in the "offensive realist" camp. We live in a world where people like Friedman often fall too in love with factors of globalization, using it as a model to explain and predict vast changes to the geo-political landscape. There are a few problems with this idea however. First, Robert Keohane called this notion "globaloney," meaning that while the ever increasing system of global economic interdependence is very real, it is typically a secondary consideration to underlying balance of power political models. Take China for example. The west is encouraging their foray into the globalized economy, the "seamless web of complex interdependence." However, there is a dangerous correlary with China. As their economy grows at a blistering 25% annual rate, they may become more capitalistic, but that does not necessarily bode well for America or Europe in terms of balance of power, because there is also a comensurate rise in Chinese Nationalism with the increased wealth. This is not surprising, as the main reason socialism failed was because people like Marx & Engels grossly underestimated the strength of national identity. Friedman mentions the Middle East, and his opinion, which is typical among westerners is that the region is backwards because it is economically backwards, and that if we could economically reform the middle east they would take care of themselves. This may or may not be true; as western liberal reform in various states has had mixed results. For starters, most of the Middle East is not made up of genuine 'nation states,' meaning a lot of the states are mixed ethnically. secondly, when you take underdeveloped regions and quickly alter their policies or infuse foreign capital tied up with conditional restrictions, you often experience pretty strong blowback; whether that be Chinese style nationalistic resurgance, where empowering the people may only empower them to hate us more. As far as the cartooon issue goes, I think it is primarily the result of conniving Mulahs and Clerics who recognize the changing winds and the western pressure for democratic reform coming from the west, and are utilizing whatever scare tactics they can to whip the people into a frenzy. And unfortunately, when enough of your population has low education and is more aligned with their religious community than with the state, they are suseptible to fundamentalist swings within that religion. So, it's a catch 22. You can't reform the middle east and get the people educated and engaged in good jobs until you can bring in FDI, Foreign Direct Investment of capital by private companies. But, you can't bring in the FDI until you can stop the day to day violence and terrorism. In other words, no Dutch or British business would dare build a new office in Tehran or Baghdad, for fear that some angry mob would now burn it down. But at the same time, people in those states will continue burning down buildings until they have something better to do, like getting an education and then getting jobs at European companies setting up shop in town. And it is only with more education and economic reform that people's alliance with radical Islamic wings be curbed. I guess that means a fine balance between tanks and foreign economic aid... who knows what the right balance is though.
Jim, thank you for your comment. A globalized (is that a word?) world dose seem like a utopia in Tom's mind. He dose admit problems with these changing winds. You might want to read his book to get his full position. His view is so simple to understand. It makes me worry that he is being too simplistic. But, I think he is calling for the same balance that you conclude would make the Middle East a better place. He was for the war in Iraq because it could be a step towards modernity. He is also very critical of how the war is being mis-handled. In short, the tanks could help, but they have not helped. They have hert.
Post a Comment