"That's
Not The Democracy We Want"
By Tariq Ali
& Tareq Al-Arab
04 June, 2004
Qantara.de
Dr Josef Joffe,
publisher and editor-in-chief of Germany's leading intellectual weekly
'Die Zeit' argues, that the Arab world "fell backwards" and
has become impoverished mainly because it was unwilling to participate
in globalisation. Do you share this point of view?
Tariq Ali: Let's
just go through these countries in turn: Saudi Arabia - the Saudi monarchy
which was handed the country first by the British empire and then by
the American empire, backed with support initially by Britain, subsequently
by the United States, military support.how can the people of the Peninsula
be blamed for the Saudi family running it which was handed it by the
United States like a mafia family? "This is your country, run it
for us.
Keep the oil safe
for us." These little sheikhdoms in the Arab world - imperial petrol
stations - would be removed if it was not for western support. Or Egypt:
how many billions of dollars has the United States given Mubarak to
keep a reactionary government in power for one reason alone, that it
made a deal with Israel? How can the Egyptians be blamed for it?
If you talk to people
in Egypt, they will say to you, we want free elections. It's a puppet
regime, why don't the United States push it to have free elections?
Because they would lose. It's what Samuel Huntington is now calling
the democratic paradox, that if you had democratic elections in the
Arab world, a majority of these would produce governments that are hostile
to the United States and their oil being siphoned off in the way it
is. Then what would your ideologues say? You would have democracy, you
would have governments which want control of their own oil. Then they'd
have to be overthrown because it's not the democracy we wanted. This
is the reality.
Of course in the
Arab world you still have repressive regimes, and most of the mistakes
the Arab leaders made themselves, but it's also a question of different
imperialisms, first the British and then the American.
Do you see a
new form of xenophobia rising in Europe?
Ali: Yes, I think
this exists and I think this is an outcome of neo-liberal economic policies
which have weakened collective solidarity in Western European society.
Trade unions are much weaker than they were ever before, collective
thinking, collective ways of operating are permanently under fire. Britain
is the worst in this respect and so people are encouraged to be consumers.
They are called customers. This is what is replacing citizenship, a
form of consumerism. We are customers rather than citizens. And this
leads people increasingly to the whole way in which modern capitalism
is structuring itself to lead incredibly atomised existences. You think
about yourself, full stop.
In this atmosphere
there is a hostility to anything you feel might challenge your daily
consumerist existence. Outsiders threaten it because you feel they are
competitors. The west imposes legal and military sanctions against countries
which do not accept the free market; and the movement of capital is
sacred, but the movement of labour which should also be free is constantly
stopped.
So capital movement
has no restrictions but labour movement has restrictions: that's the
way the west controls the world: "We will exploit you as much as
we can but you can't come and be workers here because that affects the
social fabric of our society", to which we say: "What you
are doing globally affects the social fabric of Latin America, Africa,
large parts of Asia."
Is the fear of
Islamist terror in this context just a pretext? Would prejudices or
even racism against the Arab world exist even without Islamist terror?
Ali: Since the end
of the cold war the United States in particular has been looking for
an enemy because unless you have an enemy it's impossible to justify
the level of military spending or the priorities of the military industrial
complex, which now dominates American economics and politics to a very
large extent. In this situation it's not surprising that they used 9/11
to construct a new enemy.
And after 9/11 the
whole world, the whole western world in particular, completely became
uncritical of the United States for a while, then the Iraq war started
that process again. But there is this xenophobia, the portrayal of Islam
and Islamic people who are a potential threat, which is very foolish,
but it exists. There is no doubt about it.
Current events
may have weakened the reformist movements in the Islamic world, but
are there still groups working for civil society in the Islamic world?
Ali: Yes, of course!
You had elections in Pakistan many times. You had elections in Indonesia.
You have a tradition of literature and poetry, especially in the Arab
world, which is far more advanced than anything in the West. In some
ways the repression forces people to go underground and they think in
different ways, it also makes them more alert.
If you would tape
record a conversation in a café in Damascus or Cairo or Baghdad
today and tape record or film exactly at the same time cafés
in the United States and then put them out then you would see what is
being discussed in different parts of the world is very different. The
Arab population is far more engaged, far more critical than its counterparts
certainly in the United States and also in some states in Western Europe.
You read the poetry
of Nizar Qabbani, of Saadi Youssef, of Mudhaffar al-Nawab, you find
me their equivalents in the western world. I don't want to go too far,
but what has Enzensberger written in Germany over the last 25 years?
Nothing. Nothing which means anything. Instead the big trend of intellectuals
in the west is to become people who are in the service in one way or
the other of their respective governments.
The independence
the intelligentsia used to have in Western Europe in the Sixties and
Seventies is gone. France used to have Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoire,
who is its leading intellectual today? Bernard-Henry Lévy, someone
who does what is in the interest of French foreign policy. Let's get
some sort of balance on this question of civil society and how it functions.
Who are the reformers
in the Arab world?
Ali: The only reformers
the west recognises are people who are complete stooges of the west,
who are prepared to push through free market reforms. Those are the
reformers, I don't accept that. I don't think these people do the Arab
world a service. In Syria and in Iraq there were many, many problems
under the Baathist dictatorship, we know that. But there are some things
they have done which are not bad: the education of women, the integration
of women in society, the health services that they have provided especially
in Iraq - before the sanctions the country had one of the best health
services in the Arab world. So they can't have it both ways.
Women in Syria and
in Iraq were treated extremely well, educated, became doctors, teachers.
You can walk in the streets of Damascus today and see large numbers
of women wearing clothes of all sorts without their heads being covered.
So what is this? I don't like these stereotypes of the Muslim world,
each country has its different traditions.
What prospects
have reform movements to succeed?
Ali: When I go to
Arab countries, Egypt for instance, many good people have been so demoralised
by what's been going on for the last twenty years that in this neo-liberal
world, apart from individualism and consumerism, the global way this
functions is by creating little non-governmental organisations which
are given money by the West. These are groups of people who would otherwise
be engaged doing something more useful, but they are paid big salaries
to do research on gender relation on a cotton plant outside Cairo. Well,
that's very interesting, but I'm sorry, academics in the universities
should be doing this, not NGOs! It's a way of buying off people, this
is not how civil society works.
Civil society would
operate better if these people who are all in NGOs would form political
organisations and offered alternatives to the religious groups and the
corrupt regimes. That's the big problem in the Arab world today.
We have a set of
corrupt venal regimes, most of them backed by the west, and poised against
them in the field are the Islamists. But in the middle there is nothing.
And that's the space which needs to be occupied by secular forces. I
have always argued that secular intellectuals have to insist that they
have just as much a right as the religious scholars to analyse and interpret
the texts which are the common cultural property of everyone who lives
in that region and break the monopoly of the clerics.
Interview: Tariq
al-Arab, © Qantara.de 2004