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[PHOTO] Crystal trees, shopAGO
Feb. 23rd, 2011 02:12 amBeribboned and glittering, these shopAGO displays were something.
Feb. 23rd, 2011
More from Olivier Roy via the Global Sociology Blog, this time in a New Statesmen article.
Go, read.
Look at those involved in the uprisings, and it is clear that we are dealing with a post-Islamist generation. For them, the great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history, their parents' affair. The members of this young generation aren't interested in ideology: their slogans are pragmatic and concrete - "Erhal!" or "Go now!". Unlike their predecessors in Algeria in the 1980s, they make no appeal to Islam; rather, they are rejecting corrupt dictatorships and calling for democracy. This is not to say that the demonstrators are secular; but they are operating in a secular political space, and they do not see in Islam an ideology capable of creating a better world.
The same goes for other ideologies: they are nationalist (look at all the flag-waving) without advocating nationalism. Particularly striking is the abandonment of conspiracy theories. The United States and Israel - or France, in the case of Tunisia - are no longer identified as the cause of all the misery in the Arab world. The slogans of pan-Arabism have been largely absent, too, even if the copycat effect that brought Egyptians and Yemenis into the streets following the events in Tunis shows that the "Arab world" is a political reality.
This generation is pluralist, undoubtedly because it is also individualist. Sociological studies show that it is better educated than previous generations, better informed, often with access to modern means of communication that allow individuals to connect with one another without the mediation of political parties - which in any case are banned. These young people know that Islamist regimes have become dictatorships; neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia holds any fascination for them. Indeed, those who have been demonstrating in Egypt are the same kinds of people as those who poured on to the streets to oppose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. (For propaganda reasons, the regime in Tehran has declared its support for the opposition movement in Egypt, though this is little more than a settling of scores with Hosni Mubarak.) Many of them are religious believers, but they keep their faith separate from their political demands. In this sense, the movement is "secular". Religious observance has been individualised.
Above all, people have been demonstrating for dignity and "respect", a watchword that emerged in Algeria in the late 1990s. And the values to which they are laying claim are universal. But the "democracy" that is being called for is not foreign, and therein lies the difference from the Bush administration's attempt to promote democracy in Iraq in 2003. That did not work, because it lacked political legitimacy and was associated with a military intervention. Today, paradoxically, it is the waning of US influence in the Middle East, together with the pragmatism of the Obama administration, that has allowed a native and fully legitimate demand for democracy to be expressed.
That said, a revolt is not a revolution. The new popular movement has no leaders, no structure and no political parties, which will make the task of anchoring democracy in these former dictatorships difficult. It is unlikely that the collapse of the old regimes will automatically lead to the establishment in their place of liberal democracies, as Washington once hoped would happen in Iraq.
What of the Islamists, those who see in Islam a political ideology capable of solving all of society's problems? They have not disappeared, but they have changed. The most radical of them have left to wage international jihad; they are in the desert with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in Pakistan or the suburbs of London. They have no social or political base. Indeed, global jihad is completely detached from social movements and national struggles. Al-Qaeda tries to present itself as the vanguard of the global Muslim "umma" in its battle against western oppression, but without success. Al-Qaeda recruits deracinated young jihadists who have cut themselves off entirely from their families and communities. It remains stuck in the logic of the "propaganda of the deed" and has never bothered to try to build political structures inside Muslim societies.
Go, read.
Bloomberg's Flavia Krause-Jackson isn't kind to Berlusconi. Nor should she be: although the United Kingdom came close crony capitalist Berlusconi seems to have gotten along famously with his Libyan homologue.
Italy, as the chart shows, is exposed to Libya's economic issues."Italy bought 49 percent of Libya’s exports to the 27-nation EU in 2009 and was responsible for 39 percent of the bloc’s sales to the North African country, according to Eurostat, the EU’s Luxembourg-based statistics office. Germany bought 14 percent of Libyan exports." Monday's slide in Italian stocks--especially stocks in those businesses invested in Libya--did not lead to the technical faults which closed down the Italian Stock Exchange yesterday, apparently.
In his pursuit of business with North Africa’s longest-serving dictator, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi let Muammar Qaddafi pitch his tent in the heart of Rome.
Berlusconi shut down the city’s biggest park in June 2009 to allow the visiting Libyan leader and his entourage of all- female bodyguards to set up camp by the 16th-century Villa Doria Pamphili. A year earlier, Italy agreed to pay $5 billion over 25 years to its former colony in reparations.
“With hindsight, the more slavish manifestations of deference could have been avoided,” Franco Pavoncello, a politics professor at John Cabot University in Rome, said in a telephone interview. “He went out of his way, more than others, to be best friends with Qaddafi. He can’t exactly take it all back now.”
Libya has invested in Italian companies including Fiat SpA, UniCredit SpA and the Juventus soccer team, while Eni SpA has been present in the North African country for half a century, leaving Italy reliant on Libya for a quarter of its crude oil. As his ties with Qaddafi developed, Berlusconi built on that economic legacy, which is now unraveling and underscores the cost of doing business with autocratic regimes.
[. . .]
“For years he boasted about his special relationship with Qaddafi,” Dario Franceschini, a leader of the Democratic Party, the main opposition to Berlusconi, told reporters in Rome Feb. 1. “We’d love for him to tap that now and stop the bloodshed.”
[. . .]
As the first reports of civil unrest began to filter through from Libya this month, Berlusconi was reluctant to criticize his ally.
The premier said Feb. 19, four days after anti-government protests began, that he did not want to “disturb” Qaddafi and had not called him.
He eventually put out a late-night statement on Feb. 21, in which he condemned the “unacceptable” use of force by the military regime to suppress protests and called for a common effort “to prevent the Libyan crisis from degenerating into a civil war that will have consequences difficult to predict.”
Italy, as the chart shows, is exposed to Libya's economic issues."Italy bought 49 percent of Libya’s exports to the 27-nation EU in 2009 and was responsible for 39 percent of the bloc’s sales to the North African country, according to Eurostat, the EU’s Luxembourg-based statistics office. Germany bought 14 percent of Libyan exports." Monday's slide in Italian stocks--especially stocks in those businesses invested in Libya--did not lead to the technical faults which closed down the Italian Stock Exchange yesterday, apparently.
[F]issures and catalysts created by the state's own processes of modernization that create the impetus towards revolution, according to Pincus. But what is modernization? Here is Pincus's brief account:By state modernization I mean a self-conscious effort by the regime to transform itself in fundamental ways. State modernization will usually include an effort to centralize and bureaucratize political authority, an initiative to transform the military using the most up-to-date techniques, a program to accelerate economic growth and shape the contours of society using the tools of the state, and the deployment of techniques allowing the state to gather information about and potentially supporess social and political activities taking place in a wide range of social levels and geographical locales within the polity. (kindle loc 613)
But not all modernizing states result in revolution; so what factors make revolution more likely? Pincus mentions Sweden, Denmark, and Meiji Japan as historical examples of societies with modernizing states and no revolution. Pincus thinks the answer lies in the degree to which the modernizing state is able to keep credible control of the apparatus of social order.
Revolutions are more likely in situations in which the modernizing regime is not clearly perceived to have a monopoly of the forces of violence.... When the modernizing state quickly demonstrates its control of resources and disarms the opposition, as in seventeenth-century Denmark and Sweden or late-nineteenth-century Japan, revolutions do not occur.
So the causal narrative the Pincus offers goes along something like these lines:
* The state initiates a process of reform and modernization.
* There are multiple visions of what "modernization" ought to look like for the polity, both within the state and outside the state.
* These multiple visions have the capacity to create advocates and processes of collective mobilization outside the state within civil society.
* One or more parties in civil society gain the intention and the resources to challenge the state.
* The state marshalls its forces to repress opposition.
* If it lacks sufficient capacity to intimidate or repress opposition, revolution occurs.
Little thinks Pincus ultimately neglects causes to revolutions other that state programs of modernization ("under-class revolt, state breakdown, demographic change, ideological conflict, the disruptive social effects of war, and fiscal crisis" etc). Still, the paradigm has uses.
The question has come to haunt every article and broadcast from Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the region whose people have revolted: what constitutes a revolution? In the 1970s, we used to chase that question in courses on comparative revolutions; and looking back on my ancient lecture notes, I can’t help but imagine a trajectory: England, 1640; France, 1789; Russia, 1917 … and Egypt, 2011?
I would not presume to pronounce on the course of events in Egypt over the past three weeks, but I think it’s fair to ask whether the information that now arrives every second by every means of communication from Twitter to television bears any relation to the classic models of revolution. Or should Egypt teach us to abandon those models altogether and to consider a kind of upheaval undreamt of in our old varieties of political science?
[W]hy should they fit [that pattern]? Perhaps as some historians used to argue, the pattern expresses a deeper dialectic, which can be detected in every great upheaval. Yet others argued back by citing elements that were unique to particular situations, such as bungled leadership, unforeseen consequences, and sheer contingency. The element of contingency certainly weighed heavily in 1789. If Louis XVI had either compromised in time with the revolutionaries or repressed them decisively, events could have taken a different course. Mubarak—Louis XVI?
What of the other political-science principles we once evoked? The “J curve,” which described a collective reaction to short-term improvement in the economy after a period of stagnation? The “revolution of rising expectations,” in which piecemeal reforms stimulated unrealizable hopes? The over-centralized character of the state administration, leading to the atrophy of civic life outside the center and vulnerability in the capital city? The status frustrations of the bourgeoisie, the “alienated intellectuals,” the divided elite, the misconceived reforms, and, yes, the price of bread?
Go, read.
I've a post up at Demography Matters that makes the point that, while Malta now might be imagined as islands pressured by illegal migrants, this time last century large numbers of Maltese were actively settling French-colonized North Africa. History has reversed itself, no?
Go, read.
Go, read.
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I've a post up at History and Futility that riffs on Malta's different locations in different imagined worlds--southern bulwark of Europe against a menacing Africa, or a bastion of Western expansion into the Maghreb--to make points about how meaning in maps is derived from interpretations of different relationships at least as much as simple geographic coordinates.
Go, read.
Go, read.