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Fri Aug 12 10:50:31 PDT 2005

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OURS TO REASON WHY
Aug 11th 2005  

THIS could have been a very good book: a searing attack on the glib
endorsements of globalisation and facile analyses of history and
culture offered, in Mark LeVine's un-humble opinion, by Thomas
Friedman, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington--three bestselling
luminaries who together form an "axis of arrogance and ignorance".
Instead, the book is over-long, over-ambitious and, given the expertise
of Mr LeVine, an Arabic-speaking professor on the Irvine campus of the
University of California, strangely naive. 

But have patience (and forget the misleading title with its allusion to
George Bush's suggestion that Islamist terrorists "hate us for our
freedoms"): much of what Mr LeVine writes is worth reading. His
underlying thesis is that globalisation is a form of corporate
imperialism that, far from benefiting developing countries with extra
wealth through extra trade, perversely widens their social and economic
disparities. So when Mr Friedman and others bemoan the failure of the
Middle East and North Africa to increase economic growth by jumping on
the globalisation bandwagon, they miss the point, says Mr LeVine: "Lack
of growth in the region has been an important, if not primary reason
for the relative lack of poverty."

Whether the unemployed of Algiers, dreaming of illegal entry into
France, see it that way is doubtful, but Mr LeVine supports his thesis
with such a wealth of statistical detail that even the most gung-ho
advocate of IMF and World Bank programmes must pause for thought. When
the region's painful history of colonialism is added, along with the
plight of the Palestinians and the chaos of Iraq, the Arab world's
mistrust of the West becomes much more reasonable.

The trouble is that Mr LeVine gets carried away by his own enthusiasms.
Conventional analysis is bad, and so he castigates the Arab authors of
the UN's Arab Human Development Report for noting that as many books
are translated into Spanish each year as have been translated into
Arabic in recorded history--but he does so on the basis that educated
Arabs often read books in their original English, French or Spanish. So
what? The point he glosses over is that there are far too many
uneducated, indeed illiterate, Arabs. 

Mr LeVine's pet enthusiasm is the notion that all can be resolved by
what he calls "culture jamming" between scholars, activists and
artists. That may work for music (the professor is an accomplished
guitarist who has "jammed" with fellow musicians throughout the region)
but does he really believe that this might hold back the forces of
globalisation?

 It would be wrong to say that the anti-globalisation movement (witness
the Seattle demonstrations and the "anti-Davos" World Social Forum) has
had no impact, but the effect has been not nearly as great as Mr LeVine
imagines. The wise reader will forget the jamming and skip over the
history of "the global peace and justice movement". Instead,
concentrate on what Mr LeVine says about the region's culture--and read
the informative footnotes.
 By Mark LeVine. Oneworld Publications; 456 pages; $27.50 and GBP16.99 

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