By Taha Abdel-Alim Conspiracy theories aside, it was mostly Egypt's domestic scene and foreign policy that prevented the country from achieving its full potential for development and industrialisation. Egypt needs to take advantage of the opportunities that globalisation affords, yet should strive to minimise its harmful consequences. To do so, the country needs to see its options clearly -- not an easy task when ideologues continue to suppress any attempt to offer realistic analysis. Essentially, two things are needed: full comprehension of the objectives, choices, priorities, and policies of globalisation as well as a clear vision of Egypt's interests, goals, and options. We need a fair assessment of globalisation and its course, for only such an assessment will provide us with a historical and theoretical outlook. Once we have defined globalisation, we may proceed to consider the intricacies of managing and assessing it. Unlike the case with early colonial conquests, globalisation did not come to this country through military invasion. The processes and policies associated with globalisation have been in evidence since the early 1990s, and have affected every single aspect of the international scene. Although globalisation is an ongoing process, we can identify at least three of its main characteristics: the shift from industrial to information society, the opening up and merger of various economies, and the propensity to standardise all aspects of human life, economic as well as non-economic. Globalisation is not a mere continuation of the course taken by the world economy since the mid-19th century. Back then, the Egyptian economy was made a subsidiary of industrial economies, with Egypt providing raw materials -- cotton mostly -- as well as a market for European industry. Since the 1990s, a quantum leap has been made in the opening up and integration of the local economy into the global. The domestic market is now more open to foreign goods, services, and investment. And as a result of the information revolution, this is happening at a lower cost and higher speed than ever. The main features of this process are freedom and growth of international trade, increased foreign direct investment, liberalisation of stock and money markets, and freedom of capital movement in what one may describe as a global financial village. The market economy, in short, has eclipsed the command economy in matters of productivity and modernisation. Globalisation has provided better jobs and higher productivity, and made the world a more prosperous place. But the resulting wealth has not been evenly distributed. Most countries, including Egypt, have failed to benefit from globalisation or affect its course. As a result, uneven development has continued unabated and only a handful of countries can claim to be in control of the global economic scene. * The writer is an expert at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
