Khaldoun Al-Sham’a
The term “decline,” borrowed from biology and reflecting the meaning of a pandemic, may aptly indicate the final breaths of globalization. I use this title to demonstrate, on one hand, that it is self-evident that globalization became, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a reference model— the paradigm— or the focal point of the global village that organizes international relations. On the other hand, this paradigm did not reach us all at once; rather, it arrived inscribed in memory through the myth of the Marshall Plan directed specifically at war-torn Europe. Additionally, I aim to examine some characteristics of globalization and how its decline later influenced the exacerbation of a series of negative phenomena that moved towards a regressive response to the linear progression of development, compensating for it with Ibn Khaldun’s circular dynamic of rise and fall, followed by resurgence, and so on. This idea relates to Vico, Spengler, and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return.
I speak from an Arab perspective, specifically a Syrian one. Therefore, it is evident that I view the decline of globalization from a position related to the expected political system in a country where half of the Syrian population has been killed or displaced.
What is globalization? It is a problematic question that can be answered by saying it is a process related to the change in how we live.
It is also connected to the economic situation, which relies more than ever on what is called interdependence— the mutual economic reliance among states. However, this relationship cannot be considered a single system. Most commercial activity occurs through regional clusters such as the European Union, the Asia-Pacific region, and Northern Europe, rather than within a singular global framework.
Moreover, one can also refute the claim that globalization has negatively impacted the role of the state. Governments still play a crucial role. They organize and coordinate economic activities, trade agreements, and liberal economic policies. National governments have retained considerable authority and influence despite the growing phenomenon of mutual economic reliance among states. However, the nation-state in its retrogressive nationalist form adopts a more active perspective and is characterized by greater effectiveness with the steady advance of globalization.
Thus, globalization is not a singular linear process towards achieving a greater degree of integration among states; rather, it is a dual process of the flow of information and influence that leads to different outcomes.
Based on the above, one can say that the status quo remains decisive. What is rational, in Hegel’s terms, is real, and what is real is rational. If what is happening in Syria is not rational, then the real (the actual) is rational. As the poet Tawfiq Sayigh put it, “the last word is always for the beast.” The Syrian experience, before and after the health pandemic, establishes the right of might rather than the might of right. It does not establish a new cognitive approach but rather reinforces an old cognitive method, perhaps encapsulated by Ibn Khaldun’s introduction:
“If the king is oppressive, harsh with punishments, and probing into the disasters of people and enumerating their sins, fear encompasses them, and they resort to lying, cunning, and deception, they become accustomed to it, and their perceptions and morals deteriorate. They may even betray him in battles, leading to the corruption of protection due to the corruption of intentions. This may result in a collective agreement to kill him; thus, the state deteriorates, and the fence is ruined. Even if his rule remains over them and his oppression continues, the solidarity weakens as stated above, and the fence itself becomes corrupt due to the inability to provide protection.”
Perhaps what precedes indicates a potential reason for the decline of globalization under the umbrella of dominating powers and its failure to position an ethical goal or even approach one of the most prominent elements of the suspended Syrian massacre, namely what is called “cosmopolitan democracy.” This democracy is opposed in its positioning by prominent thinkers such as Chomsky and Samir Amin, to name a few.
Indeed, the criticized cosmopolitan democracy serves as a reference model for a political system that calls for the implementation of fundamental human rights that transcend borders. Rights that David Held, a theorist of globalization, places within a context of foundations that permeate a time period in which the global system is established through multiple networks of power, including intermingled human categories, close cultures, and international links of mutual dependence, thereby making cosmopolitan democracy a human right that balances the dominating powers and states.
Discussing the utopia of globalization theorists leads us back to reality, which in turn redirects us to the retreat of globalization to its opposite. In his book “Capitalism in the Age of Globalization,” Samir Amin argues that globalization is in a state of undesirable polarization that can be avoided. He dismantles the IMF and the World Bank, considering them administrative mechanisms dedicated to protecting the profitability of capital. He also critiques the equation of the concept of development with market expansion, asserting instead that each society individually needs to negotiate the terms of its mutual dependence with the global economy. Furthermore, Samir Amin explores the role of the United States, arguing that the roots of the American project for global dominance through military force lie in European liberalism, which the United States has developed to serve only the interests of capital, and that it is now exporting this economic model worldwide.
The forgotten Syrian massacre in its global conflict with the prevailing regime reveals that the conflict is not with the capital that the country needs, but with the humanitarian pandemic preceding the health pandemic. This destructive pandemic for humanity and the environment represents the greatest humanitarian and political crisis of the twenty-first century, raising considerable astonishment.
Why, then, do some anti-globalization advocates with a democratic intellectual framework ignore the massacre that claimed millions of Syrian lives?
There is no doubt that there are points of overlap and intersection, sometimes evident and sometimes hidden, between the utopia of globalization and the utopia of its opponents. It can even be said that the spontaneous intersection between them suggests the emergence of three dynamics:
The first is related to the reinforcement of nationalist tendencies. The Russian Federation, as the heir to the Soviet Union, has become a quintessential expansionist imperialism. A state that builds upon a past rooted in czarism, emulating the West while constantly seeking to appease it. Its chronic president openly boasts of experimenting with tons of Russian-made weapons on Syrians. The dreaded partner manifests in the form of Persian imperialism, which invokes religion, a theocracy that exploits its sectarian system to declare its colonial control over Arab capitals. Two empires establish an Eastern despotism amidst the rubble.
I conclude my reading by saying that dialogue only occurs between self and other. The other, as expressed by poet Samih Al-Qasim, is the antithesis:
“I do not love you, O death, but I do not fear you,
And I realize that your bed is my body and your blanket is my soul,
And I know that your shores constrict upon me.”
The Decline of Globalization Amid Two Pandemics
Khaldoun Al-Sham’a
The term “decline,” borrowed from biology and reflecting the meaning of a pandemic, may aptly indicate the final breaths of globalization. I use this title to demonstrate, on one hand, that it is self-evident that globalization became, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a reference model— the paradigm— or the focal point of the global village that organizes international relations. On the other hand, this paradigm did not reach us all at once; rather, it arrived inscribed in memory through the myth of the Marshall Plan directed specifically at war-torn Europe. Additionally, I aim to examine some characteristics of globalization and how its decline later influenced the exacerbation of a series of negative phenomena that moved towards a regressive response to the linear progression of development, compensating for it with Ibn Khaldun’s circular dynamic of rise and fall, followed by resurgence, and so on. This idea relates to Vico, Spengler, and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return.
I speak from an Arab perspective, specifically a Syrian one. Therefore, it is evident that I view the decline of globalization from a position related to the expected political system in a country where half of the Syrian population has been killed or displaced.
What is globalization? It is a problematic question that can be answered by saying it is a process related to the change in how we live.
It is also connected to the economic situation, which relies more than ever on what is called interdependence— the mutual economic reliance among states. However, this relationship cannot be considered a single system. Most commercial activity occurs through regional clusters such as the European Union, the Asia-Pacific region, and Northern Europe, rather than within a singular global framework.
Moreover, one can also refute the claim that globalization has negatively impacted the role of the state. Governments still play a crucial role. They organize and coordinate economic activities, trade agreements, and liberal economic policies. National governments have retained considerable authority and influence despite the growing phenomenon of mutual economic reliance among states. However, the nation-state in its retrogressive nationalist form adopts a more active perspective and is characterized by greater effectiveness with the steady advance of globalization.
Thus, globalization is not a singular linear process towards achieving a greater degree of integration among states; rather, it is a dual process of the flow of information and influence that leads to different outcomes.
Based on the above, one can say that the status quo remains decisive. What is rational, in Hegel’s terms, is real, and what is real is rational. If what is happening in Syria is not rational, then the real (the actual) is rational. As the poet Tawfiq Sayigh put it, “the last word is always for the beast.” The Syrian experience, before and after the health pandemic, establishes the right of might rather than the might of right. It does not establish a new cognitive approach but rather reinforces an old cognitive method, perhaps encapsulated by Ibn Khaldun’s introduction:
“If the king is oppressive, harsh with punishments, and probing into the disasters of people and enumerating their sins, fear encompasses them, and they resort to lying, cunning, and deception, they become accustomed to it, and their perceptions and morals deteriorate. They may even betray him in battles, leading to the corruption of protection due to the corruption of intentions. This may result in a collective agreement to kill him; thus, the state deteriorates, and the fence is ruined. Even if his rule remains over them and his oppression continues, the solidarity weakens as stated above, and the fence itself becomes corrupt due to the inability to provide protection.”
Perhaps what precedes indicates a potential reason for the decline of globalization under the umbrella of dominating powers and its failure to position an ethical goal or even approach one of the most prominent elements of the suspended Syrian massacre, namely what is called “cosmopolitan democracy.” This democracy is opposed in its positioning by prominent thinkers such as Chomsky and Samir Amin, to name a few.
Indeed, the criticized cosmopolitan democracy serves as a reference model for a political system that calls for the implementation of fundamental human rights that transcend borders. Rights that David Held, a theorist of globalization, places within a context of foundations that permeate a time period in which the global system is established through multiple networks of power, including intermingled human categories, close cultures, and international links of mutual dependence, thereby making cosmopolitan democracy a human right that balances the dominating powers and states.
Discussing the utopia of globalization theorists leads us back to reality, which in turn redirects us to the retreat of globalization to its opposite. In his book “Capitalism in the Age of Globalization,” Samir Amin argues that globalization is in a state of undesirable polarization that can be avoided. He dismantles the IMF and the World Bank, considering them administrative mechanisms dedicated to protecting the profitability of capital. He also critiques the equation of the concept of development with market expansion, asserting instead that each society individually needs to negotiate the terms of its mutual dependence with the global economy. Furthermore, Samir Amin explores the role of the United States, arguing that the roots of the American project for global dominance through military force lie in European liberalism, which the United States has developed to serve only the interests of capital, and that it is now exporting this economic model worldwide.
The forgotten Syrian massacre in its global conflict with the prevailing regime reveals that the conflict is not with the capital that the country needs, but with the humanitarian pandemic preceding the health pandemic. This destructive pandemic for humanity and the environment represents the greatest humanitarian and political crisis of the twenty-first century, raising considerable astonishment.
Why, then, do some anti-globalization advocates with a democratic intellectual framework ignore the massacre that claimed millions of Syrian lives?
There is no doubt that there are points of overlap and intersection, sometimes evident and sometimes hidden, between the utopia of globalization and the utopia of its opponents. It can even be said that the spontaneous intersection between them suggests the emergence of three dynamics:
The first is related to the reinforcement of nationalist tendencies. The Russian Federation, as the heir to the Soviet Union, has become a quintessential expansionist imperialism. A state that builds upon a past rooted in czarism, emulating the West while constantly seeking to appease it. Its chronic president openly boasts of experimenting with tons of Russian-made weapons on Syrians. The dreaded partner manifests in the form of Persian imperialism, which invokes religion, a theocracy that exploits its sectarian system to declare its colonial control over Arab capitals. Two empires establish an Eastern despotism amidst the rubble.
I conclude my reading by saying that dialogue only occurs between self and other. The other, as expressed by poet Samih Al-Qasim, is the antithesis:
“I do not love you, O death, but I do not fear you,
And I realize that your bed is my body and your blanket is my soul,
And I know that your shores constrict upon me.”
