Anouar Abdel-Malek* charts the way to reversing the tide of Western hegemony When few years ago the Egyptian TV drama Liyali al-Helmiya (Helmiya Nights) was being aired, a great many spectators used to heave a sigh while listening to the opening song wondering "where did all this melancholy come from?" The answer, perhaps, lies in the changing times. Melancholy in Egypt in this day and age is made of breadlines, traffic jams, youth struggling to find jobs and scrape together enough money to marry, people deprived of a respectable amount of freedom to participate in and derive enjoyment out of political and cultural life, and other such concerns that touch upon the human rights as they are understood in the context of independent nation- states in which people have obtained such rights. But things grow a little foggier as we shift the focus outward. What about the impact of climatic change and global warming on Egypt's north coast and the Delta? What's the truth regarding the end of the era of inexpensive food? Now that the myth of peace and prosperity that was constructed along the road from Camp David to Annapolis has crumbled, what do we have to say about the collapse of a segment of our northern border and the flood of Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai, fleeing from the criminal Israeli starvation siege? By what logic has the Sinai been left to the whims of nature instead of having been turned into a verdant delta capable of supporting a strong and robust society that would safeguard our eastern gateway, which since the earliest days of the kingdom of the pharaohs was our safety net against foreign penetration and out of which surged the armies of the sun, under Egypt's commanders from Ramsis II and Tuthmosis III to Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali? How can we keep looking forward, day after day, to a new multi-polar, multi-centre, multi-cultural world? Which leads us to the global economic forum at Davos, which the Zionist leadership at the summit of the economy of the West has made the barometre of the global economy and the beacon for the new generation of leaders of globalisation. That beacon is casting a cold gleam from the ice-clad peaks of Switzerland. On the climate surrounding the recent Davos meeting that was held in the third week of January, the prominent American journalist H. D. S. Greenway wrote: "When the World Economic Forum ends its annual meeting here, the high test clientele drains away from this mountain town surprisingly quickly. This year they left an impression that the power and influence of Europe and North America were draining away too, inexorably shifting from the West eastward toward Asia. The structures that the United States had established after WWII were questioned as never before. The old trans-Atlantic order of the last 60 years seemed less relevant to many influential men and women who gathered here." Greenway gave his surprising article, which appeared in The Herald Tribune of 30 January 2008, a title meant to leave us hanging: "An Asian Century?" The rates of global change have escalated noticeably in the past few years, and with these changes questions have shifted, as has the approach to structuring the new in all fields, from political and economic systems to modes of production and consumption, from venues of political action to the status of the nation-state in the face of the penetration of globalisation, from military strategy and technology to the natural and social sciences. And all these shifts are taking place at a time when religions and civilisations are assuming greater importance. The question thus becomes: how are we supposed to deal with this inundation of the new into a land in the grips of seismic tremors? But to every new there must be a beginning. Perhaps we can find our starting point in the nature of the present era in which we live, which we might regard as having come into being as follows: Until a few decades ago the global order was one that revolved around the West (Europe since the 16th century then the US since the 20th). The West began to establish its centrality in the Age of Discoveries and consolidated it through its expanding colonization drive into Central and South America, Africa and Asia. In the wake of World War II, western hegemony took the form of the bipolar order, headed by the US and the former Soviet Union, which lasted throughout the Cold War period until 1991. In the face of Western dominance over the world's natural resources and economic activity, and, hence, over the life, liberty and standards of living of the peoples of Latin America, Africa and Asia, it was only natural that these three continents enter the throes of resistance, which took the forms of national liberation movements, national revolutions, wars of liberation and even radical social revolutions. These upheavals gained increasing momentum throughout the era of colonialist encroachment from the early 19th to the mid 20th centuries, especially in China, the Islamic world, Latin America and some other spheres of Africa and Asia. The wave of popular, national and cultural awakening in the three continents reached its zenith between 1949 and 1973. The liberation of China, representing a fifth of the world's population, and the foundation of the Chinese People's Republic in October 1949, marked the end of the era of western centrality and imperial hegemony from the broader historical perspective. The ensuing period of national uprisings and wars of liberation led to the liberation of Vietnam, Cuba, Egypt, the countries of North Africa, India, the Southeast Asian countries and the remaining countries of Latin America. Perhaps 1973, marked by the victory of the Vietnamese war of liberation and Egypt's crossing of the Suez Canal in the Arab- Israeli war in October could be regarded as the seal of the end of that era of "Changing the world," as I entitled my 1985 book on this subject. The era of "Changing the world" brought the projection onto us of some rather scholastically imprecise terms such as the "Third World" (conveying the understanding that the "First World" is home to the western capitalist countries and the "Second World" the stomping grounds of (also) western socialist ones) and "The South," which suggests some curious geography whereby by the European-American Atlantic sphere is "up" in the north and everyone else is "down" in the south (although how that "south" can comprise all of China, Korea, today's Russia, Iran, Egypt and Turkey is anyone's guess). Wouldn't it have been more logical simply to call the continents and the geo-cultural areas and regions by their names? Would it not have been more appropriate, when referring to the antithesis of the regions of western hegemony to refer to Africa, Latin America and Asia as the "Three Continents," instead of just changing the descriptions of the countries in these continents from "undeveloped" to "underdeveloped" or "developing," as though the sole gauge of progress were economic production and consumption? Then came the break-up of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, a process that took place from 1989-1991 and that sounded the end of the dismantlement of the bipolar order established by the Yalta Treaty (1945). From 1991 onwards the US assumed its place at the peak of the now uni-polar order and began to put into effect a strategy to prevent the rise of any new rival global pole, and the power that came in for the bulk of its attention was not the combined force of political centres aspiring to have a share in the current world order, but that of a rising global force in the East. China, according to that American National Security Department document Global Trends 2015, had to be stopped before it was too late. Accordingly, the US set into motion its war against the tide of the future, beginning, in 2003, in Iraq, with the purpose of securing control over the countries and resources of the Arab oil producing sphere, thereby fixing its grip on that major fuel artery that feeds the Chinese economic boom. That China is at the vanguard of a procession of emerging economic blocs (such as ASEAN and the common market in Latin America MERCOSOR) and is moving towards a historical strategic partnership with Japan, on the one hand, and India, on the other, makes -- from the American perspective -- the mission of aborting the rise of a Chinese pole particularly urgent. A new world is taking shape, made up of a group of super and great powers, and a vast network of medium powers, extending over about two thirds of the inhabited globe. Meanwhile, the moral influence and global leadership of the US have fallen into decline, now that it has become palpably clear that its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed and that it is unable to strike at North Korea and Iran (which together with Iraq formed what the American fundamentalist Zionist administration called the "Axis of Evil"). Against this backdrop of a new world in the process of coalescing, there arose a feeling from deep within the Egyptian consciousness that now is the time to reconstitute Egypt's national security instruments, as defined by the constitution, and as elaborated by a number of research centres and experts specialising in the study of Egypt's role and potentials, with the purpose of identifying its priorities and, accordingly, ordering its alliances. In other words, now more than ever, there is an urgency for a national front, based on the principle of unity between Egypt's people and its armed forces, and made up of all political forces bound by supreme allegiance to the homeland. * The writer is a social scientist with numerous published books, including the seminal works Social Dialectics: Civilizations and Social Theory (State University of New York Press) and Egypt: Military Society; the Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change Under Nasser (Random House, New York).
