In February 1993, the Arab Maghrib Union (AMU) marked its fourth anniversary. Despite the great hopes that were vested in this regional economic organization, it has not thrived. [1] There have been five summit meetings since the Treaty of Marrakesh was signed to great fanfare, but the heads of state have been sorely distracted by issues other than building an economic union in North Africa: the unresolved matter of Western Sahara, the Islamist movement in Algeria, the international sanctions against Libya, the pressure for democratization in Mauritania and Tunisia, even the Persian Gulf war.
To the outside world, the unification of the two Yemens in 1990 resembled the German experience in miniature. North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic, YAR) was considered a laissez faire market economy, whereas the South (the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, PDRY) was “the communist one.” When, weeks ahead of Bonn and Berlin, Sanaa and Aden announced their union, Western commentary assumed that in Yemen, as in Germany, capitalist (Northern) firms would buy out the moribund (Southern) state sector and provide the basis for future economic growth.
Conventional definitions imagine world trade as taking places among nations — international trade, it is called. Convention also holds that everyone is best off when such trade is carried on as freely as possible. Neither the definition nor the polemic of free traders has changed much, except for a pseudo-scientific overlay of mathematics, since David Ricardo laid it out in 1817. But the world has changed some in the last 176 years.
Chips and satellites are part of that change, of course, but so is the spread of a social institution, the multinational corporation. Some figures from a 1992 World Bank report make this point well. After noting that multinationals had shifted “labor-intensive stages of production” to Third World states, the report continued:
There was a short period, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the shape of the emerging post-Cold war system seemed quite clear. The disintegration of the Eastern Bloc would be complemented by further economic and political integration of Western Europe according to the Maastricht Treaty timetable. Other new blocs, like the North American Free Trade Area, were in the making. The whole system was to be regulated by a US-dominated order based on such international institutions as the UN Security Council, the World Bank and a revised General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
In this issue we consider “new orders” in several senses — orders of hierarchy, orders of magnitude and marching orders. Ray Hinnebusch succinctly notes the underlying theme: the struggle of capital to dominate labor, internationally via the IMF’s “liberalization” leverage and locally (in this case, the Egyptian countryside) via the regime’s deference to the interests of Egypt’s propertied classes.
Driss Basri, Michel Rousset and Georges Vedel, eds., Revision de la constitution marocaine 1992: analyses et commentaires (Imprimerie Royale, 1992).
Louise L’Estrange Fawcett, Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijani Crisis of 1946 (Cambridge, 1992).
David A. Korn, Stalemate: The War of Attrition and Great Power Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1967-1970 (Westview, 1992).
In a world conditioned to perceive the rhythm of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the vantage point of downtown Tel Aviv, the Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition of 1969-1970 along the Suez Canal has rarely merited serious attention. It was, after all, Egyptian society, politics and military organization that underwent important and costly changes during this period; in Israel the effects of the conflict were barely visible beyond the immediate vicinity of the front. Yet this war of attrition was the most intense and prolonged military encounter the Arab-Israeli conflict has yet produced.
Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam (Addison-Wesley, 1991).
Hisham Sharabi, ed., Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical Responses (Routledge, 1990).
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana, 1991).
The scandal has not yet received the national media attention it deserves, but West Coast activists are up in arms about revelations that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith secretly employed a self-styled art dealer named Roy Bullock to collect information on a wide range of individuals and organizations deemed anti-Jewish or hostile to Israel, including Rep. Ron Dellums, the ACLU, New Jewish Agenda, MERIP and many Arab-American, Palestine solidarity and anti-apartheid activists and groups. Bullock, who was employed by the CIA in El Salvador in the 1980s and also served as an FBI informant, worked for the ADL for more than three decades, amassing a database that included files on some 12,000 individuals and 950 organizations.
“The sheikh of al-Azhar should thank God profusely that the shari‘a is not in force in Egypt, for it it were he would certainly be in for a good flogging in punishment for smearing virtuous people,” wrote Farag Fawda in March 1988 — thus contributing to a debate that had been raging since the beginning of that year.
In saluting author Salman Rushdie and expressing solidarity with his plight, I would like to put on the table the question of whether the notorious “fatwa” issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against Rushdie is really a fatwa in the first place. This is neither an academic exercise nor a purely theoretical investigation, but a matter of great practical relevance to any strategy (and tactics) for helping Rushdie the prisoner, writer and human being transcend the debilitating impasse in which he finds himself.
Suad Joseph, an editor of this magazine, teaches anthropology at the University of California-Davis and is a founder of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies and the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology. She has published extensively on sectarianism, gender and the family, and constructions of the self and state in Lebanon. Joe Stork spoke with her in early May.
What questions does the idea of civil society raise concerning gender?
The “collapse of communism” in 1989 and the victory over Iraq in 1991 sparked a wave of triumphal declarations by Western pundits and analysts who believed that all “viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism” had now been exhausted and discredited. Some then tried to sketch a foreign policy appropriate to the “new world order.” [1] A consistent theme of this “new thinking” was that the peoples of the developing countries must now acknowledge that liberal democracy is the only plausible form of governance in the modern world. Accordingly, support for democratization should henceforth be a central objective of US diplomacy and foreign assistance. [2]
Iyad Barghouti, professor of sociology at al-Najah University in Nablus, is the author of The Palestinian Islamic Movement and the New World Order (1992) and Islamization and Politics in the Palestinian Territories (1990). He spoke with Lisa Hajjar on May 5, 1993.
How would you describe the appeal of Hamas and other Islamist groups?
Hamas now is the main competitor of the PLO. This is not because the Palestinian people are more willing to turn to religion per se, but because the current situation in the Occupied Territories has led more and more people to see Hamas as a “nationalist” alternative.
Are the situations different in the West Bank and Gaza?
Most observers, in attempting to explain why the movement toward pluralism, liberalism and democracy has been relatively weak in the Arab world, have concluded that it must have something to do with culture, and more particularly with Islam. Growing interest and research in the subject have not shaken the widespread notion that there is one single political doctrine of Islam, more or less identical with the historical caliphate and incompatible with pluralist democracy as it first developed in the West. Islam, it is said, has not in the past been democratic and is unable to become so in the future.
The board and editorial committee of MERIP met over the first weekend of June. The main item on our agenda was structural adjustment — not a detached analysis of Egypt and the World Bank, but a wrenching confrontation with our need to bring the costs of this organization and magazine in line with the income we generate.
For MERIP, as for any political publication project, sales of our magazine, pamphlets and other information services do not cover the costs of operation. As an independent project, we have no support from a university or other institution. To make up the shortfall, we solicit support from foundations, churches and other organizations interested in seeing our work continue. And we depend on you, our readers, to send us contributions each year.
