Globalization And The Muslim World

Globalization and the Muslim world

Hasan Yahya, Professor of Sociology

Economists see The globalization of the world economy issue as one of the most powerful silent features of our age. Trade, investment, capital, services, ideas, and people, are all increasing in movement on a global scale. Rapid advances in transportation and communication technology have reduced the barriers posed by geography and distance.

Governments around the world have also facilitated economic globalization by embracing policies of openness and liberalization . The result is not only increasing interdependence between countries and regions, but the emergence of a complex and highly integrated system of trade, production, and finance.

Globalization is embedded in a wider and deeper political order-a liberal order created by the United States and its capitalist-democratic partners after WWII. This order was built on a set of practices, bargains and institutions that bind the great powers together and interlocking and binding security institutions that prevent the return to balance and strategic competition among these states. Globalization is only possible because it is embedded in this order. But more than this, binding security relations create a sort of  "reverse mercantilism" that creates positive incentives for the democratic-capitalist security partners to trade and invest between them. Relative gains considerations are dampened and strategic incentives are added to more economic incentives as leading states attempt to compose their differences and concert their politics.

Globalization is a more powerful force shaping world political economy than regionalism. Rationalism is driven more by agendas of economic openness and integration than by exclusion and insularity. The impacts of globalization on inter-state relations are real and do make it more difficult or less attractive for states to pose relative gains or narrowly nationalistic policies. The character of trade interdependence and the working of global production networks confuse nationalist calculations which was not understood by the OIC. Furthermore, the rapid shifting character of contemporary technology-based economic change creates more rotation and segmentation of winners and losers in world politics. Where hinder losers to withdraw from the open world economy.

Finally, The major states today do not seem to understand the multiple elements that create and sustain global economic openness. The interconnection between global security order and economic globalization has not been appreciated. The United States has tended to emphasize the virtues of openness and deregulation-including capital markets-without paying enough attention to the domestic social institutions and international governance arrangements that are necessary to make openness work. The new debate should include domestic social institutions for the benefits of citizens which is getting worse and reflected in inter-state and regional violence  The need is serious for a new international mechanisms is to be advised. The economic forces of change always run ahead of the ability of politics to manage or control those forces.  This has never be true than today.

In terms of political foundations of globalization, it is rooted in two  political orders after WWII,  the "containment order" as a result of the Cold War.  Built around superpower competition. Extended deterrence to contain ideological competition. The other order after 1990,  took the shape to focus on building a new set of  relations among the western democracies. This order was not directed at countering Soviet power and fear of communism , instead it was aimed at solving the problems of economic breakdown.

Before WWII, Germany  and Japan each had built their states around the military domination of their respective geographical regions. Russia was also a territorial imperial power unto itself. And Great Britain had the imperial preference system which was a threat to an open world economy. During the 1930s in the United States the debate among scholars and policy thinkers was about the implications for the United States of a world regional blocs  .After WWII, a capitalist order took shape, capitalism would be organized internationally and not along national, regional , or imperial lines. As the United States found that it would not be a great power and survive only in western hemisphere. Therefore it looked at trade and resources of the vast euro-Asian regions. {Including the Middle East]. They pushed the idea of capitalism to be organized on a global basis. Behind this world capitalist order  was the idea of NATO, where a set of binding institutions that keep then exercise of power predictable and restrained. NATO, the US-Japan alliance, and a series of other bilateral security ties are at the center of this complex set of institutions that cut across the regions of the world to provide restraint and reassurances. The NATO alliance members security created insecurities in states of unequal power,  this logic of "reverse Mercantilism" securities of the NATO alliance members tried to provide national security rationales for open market.

Taliban, Saudi Arabia and several Arab nations (Qater, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, and Syria, provide services and support for NATO forces in the Gulf, and Pakistan provided services to NATO to occupy Afghanistan. None of the Muslim world leaders was smart enough to understand the implications of the defeat of the two Muslim countries. Or may be they understand, but play the blind game for quick gain. They did not think that the  only side to benefit was Israel.

The SCO shanghai five and later six, including Russia and China,  will add some countries to total ten nations in few years, But the Muslim nations  willremain in between , sometimes leaning to the East, but most times leaning toward the West.

All these organizations carry the doubts about their innocence. In terms of their latent and manifest objectives they are different from their functions for many reasons including political, moral and ideological .

I am still optimistic and have the hope that Muslims will come to understand the real conditions of their decay and weaknesses. The future still ahead and we all are heading to it. If we remain static, future will hit us and make wake up to work before the future became yesterday. History remains our professor to understand past present and the future. (1002 words)