Europe and the Arab World: Patterns and Prospects for the New Relationship - Hardcover

El Kenz, Ali; Amin, Samir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1842774360 ISBN 13: 9781842774366

Verlag: ZED BOOKS LTD, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

<p><i>Europe and the Arab World</i> is a wide-ranging assessment of the prospects for a new relationship between Europe and the Arab world in the coming years. Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz take as their starting point the significantly shifting balance of political forces within the various Arab countries, including the rise of both political Islam and civil society. They argue that the strategic global hegemony of the United States constitutes a major element affecting the Euro-Arab relationship. They then focus on the European Union initiative, originally launched in Barcelona, to put its relations with the Arab countries of the Mediterranean and Gulf regions on a new footing of equality and mutually beneficial cooperation. The authors provide a detailed empirical account of the initiative as well as an historically contextualized, intellectually critical and politically perceptive analysis of the various realities impacting on it.<br><br>Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz conclude that, while considerable dialogue and even institution-building have taken place in order to give substance to this attempt to go beyond the colonial legacy of inequality and dependence, little of a concrete kind has been achieved in transforming the underlying economic and political relationships between the Arab Islamic and European Christian worlds of the Mediterranean. Among the many obstacles identified are the overriding and economically deleterious impact of globalized capitalism, and the determination of the United States to impose its own political objectives on the Middle East.<br><br>The timeliness of this book's argument is highlighted by the new tensions that have accompanied the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and the Bush administration's political pretensions to 'bring democracy' to the whole region.</p>

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<p>Samir Amin has a worldwide reputation as one of the foremost radical thinkers of our generation. Among his many institutional roles, he has been director of IDEP (the United Nations African Institute for Planning) from 1970 to 1980; the Director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal; and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives. His most famous works are Accumulation on a World Scale and Unequal Development. Among his recent books in English are Re-reading the Post-War World: An Intellectual Itinerary (1994) and Empire of Chaos (1993).<br><br>Ali El Kenz is Professor in Sociology in Nantes University, France. His work is focused on Arab research in the social sciences and he has published books, chapters and articles in both French and Arabic.<br>Samir Amin has a worldwide reputation as one of the foremost radical thinkers of our generation. Among his many institutional roles, he has been director of IDEP (the United Nations African Institute for Planning) from 1970 to 1980; the Director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal; and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives. His most famous works are Accumulation on a World Scale and Unequal Development. Among his recent books in English are Re-reading the Post-War World: An Intellectual Itinerary (1994) and Empire of Chaos (1993).<br><br>Ali El Kenz is Professor in Sociology in Nantes University, France. His work is focused on Arab research in the social sciences and he has published books, chapters and articles in both French and Arabic.</p>

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Europe and the Arab World

Patterns and Prospects for the New Relationship

By Samir Amin, Ali El Kenz

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2005 Samir Amin and Ali El Kenz
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84277-436-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
1 The Arab world: a balance sheet of the present situation and struggles, 1, 
2 The Mediterranean-Gulf region: some international policy problems, 50, 
3 Euro-Mediterranean relationships: globalization and regionalization, 74, 
4 On the Euro-Mediterranean partnership, 131, 
Appendix: Basic data on the Arab world, 139, 
Sources and bibliography, 152, 
Index, 158, 

CHAPTER 1

The Arab world: a balance sheet of the present situation and struggles

What follows is an attempt to identify the questions posed by movements and struggles within the Arab world, analysing and assessing their ambiguities and limitations. It takes the inherent contradictions of the system as a starting point, identifying the conditions for popular and democratic progress that might be facilitated by these struggles.

The autocratic state faced with the challenge of modernity

There is no democratic state in the Arab world. There are only autocratic states. Although autocratic, Arab political regimes have not always been – and still are not – without legitimacy in the eyes of their own societies. According to Hashem Sharaby, state power has always been synonymous with personal power, as opposed to the power of the law defining the modern state. This Weber-like descriptive analysis is worth qualifying since the personal (or personalized) powers in question are legitimate only in so far as they are proclaimed as being respectful of the tradition (and especially of the religious shariah) and are perceived as such. From a more in-depth perspective, Sharaby establishes a relationship between autocracy and the 'patriarchal' nature of the system of social values. The term 'patriarchy' is understood here to be more than what is ascribed to the popularized commonplace term of 'male chauvinism' (asserting and practising the marginalization of women in society). The patriarchy in question is a system that upholds the duty of obedience at all levels: school and family education nip in the bud the slightest hint of criticism and hierarchies are sacrosanct in the family system (subordinating women and children), in the business sector (subordinating the employee to the employer), in public service (demanding absolute submission to superiors), in the absolute prohibition of unorthodox religious interpretation, etc. This observation links up with the conclusions that I have drawn from the definition of modernity and from the challenge it constitutes.

Modernity is based on the principle that human beings create their history individually and collectively and that, to that extent, they have the right to innovate and to disregard tradition. Proclaiming this principle meant breaking with the fundamental principle that governed all pre-modern societies, including of course those of feudal and Christian Europe. Modernity was born with this proclamation. It had nothing to do with rebirth; it was simply a question of birth. The tag 'Renaissance' that Europeans themselves gave to history in this era is therefore misleading. It is the result of an ideological construction purporting that Graeco-Roman antiquity was acquainted with the principle of modernity, which was veiled in the 'Middle Ages' (between the old modernity and the new modernity) by religious obscurantism. It was the mythical perception of antiquity that in turn paved the way for Eurocentrism, whereby Europe claims to go back to its past, 'to return to its sources' (hence, the Renaissance), whereas in fact, it is engineering a break with its own history. The European Renaissance was the product of an internal social process, the solution found to contradictions peculiar to the then Europe through the invention of capitalism. On the other hand, what the Arabs by imitation referred to as their Renaissance – the nahda of the nineteenth century – was not one either. It was the reaction to an external shock. The Europe that modernity had rendered powerful and triumphant had an ambiguous effect on the Arab world through attraction (admiration) and repulsion (through the arrogance of its conquest). The Arab Renaissance takes its qualifying term literally. It is assumed that, if the Arabs 'returned' to their sources, as the Europeans claim to have done, they would regain their greatness, even if debased for some time. The nahda does not know the nature of the modernity that enhances Europe's power.

This is not the place to refer to different aspects and moments marking nahda's deployment. I will just state briefly that nahda does not forge the necessary break with tradition that defines modernity. Nahda does not recognize the meaning of secularism, in other words, separation between religion and politics, the condition that ensures that politics serves as the field for free innovation, and for that matter, for democracy in the modern sense. Nahda thinks it can substitute for secularism an interpretation of religion purged of its obscurantist drifts. At any rate, to date, Arab societies are not adequately equipped to understand that secularism is not a 'specific' characteristic of the Western world but rather a requirement for modernity. Nahda does not realize the meaning of democracy, which should be understood as the right to break with tradition. It therefore remains captive to the concepts of the autocratic state; it hopes and prays for a 'just' despot (al moustabid al adel) – even if not 'enlightened', and the nuance is significant. Nahda does not understand that modernity also promotes women's aspirations to freedom, thereby exercising their right to innovate and break with tradition. Eventually, nahda reduces modernity to the immediate aspect of what it produces: technical progress. This voluntarily over-simplified presentation does not mean that I am not aware of the contradictions expressed in nahda, nor that certain avant-garde thinkers were aware of the real challenges posed by modernity, such as Kassem Amin and the importance of women's emancipation, Ali Abdel Razek and secularism, and Kawakibi and the challenge posed by democracy. However, none of these breakthroughs had any effect; on the contrary, Arab society reacted by refusing to follow the paths indicated. Nahda is therefore not the time marking the birth of modernity in the Arab world but rather the period of its abortion.

Since the Arab states have not yet embraced modernity, Arabs still accept to a large extent these principles of autocratic power, which maintains its legitimacy or loses it in fields other than its non-recognition of the principle of democracy. If it is able to resist imperialist aggression – or to give that impression – if it is able to promote a visible improvement of the material living conditions of many, if not all, autocratic power enjoys guaranteed popularity. Beyond this non-modernity principle, autocratic power therefore owes its legitimacy to tradition. In some cases, this could refer to a tradition of national and religious monarchy such as that of Morocco or of a tribal monarchy in the Arabian peninsula. But there is another form of tradition – the one inherited from the Ottoman Empire, dominant in the territory between Algeria and Iraq, and therefore influencing the largest segment of the Arab...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ZED BOOKS LTD
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1842774360
• ISBN 13: 9781842774366
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar