MIDDLE EAST: UNDESIRABLE CONSEQUENCES OF INSENSITIVE GLOBALIZATION

Since the end of the cold war the Arab world has been subject to a massive and unprecedented process of “creative destruction”. Despite its highly pernicious effects at numerous levels, including the distortion of political life and the stark polarisation and increasing disparities between rich and poor, creative destruction is the instrument of choice in the process of globalisation run by the major Western powers, and functions in place of more costly direct military interventions, but can be used to serve similar ends. These powers engage in trafficking in protection, and American policies impose international axes conflicting by design for the purposes of managing their concerns whether such be through playing off political rivals against one another or running low-intensity wars that serve vested interests or grander imperial designs. The demand for greater social justice and a different developmental model had been largely ignored in most cases. In fact, both Western and Saudi owned and managed Arab media avoided discussion in any depth of socio-economic issues that caused the uprisings of large masses of people for whom poverty and marginalisation prevent them aspiring to priority or individual political liberties and freedoms. For Western media and decision- makers emphasising the political demands for democracy and human rights almost exclusively permitted escaping the political discussion of the negative socio-economic effects of implementing neo-liberal economic prescriptions and recipes that Arab countries have been following over the last decades under the powerful influence of the International Monetary Fund, The World Bank and the European Union. What was actually happening in terms of real economy in the Arab countries was out of their respective fields of vision. In spite of many studies by Arab economists indicating the deteriorating living conditions in rural areas along with the development and proliferation of shanty towns on the outskirts and suburbs of Arab cities, and despite available data on the burgeoning unemployment crisis and brain-drain detrimental to the productivity of the real economies, Western attention has remained focused exclusively on macro-economic balances and liberalisation drives according to neo-liberal ideology. The recent economic history of the Arab world is one of an increasingly negative model of bad growth to which few have yet paid attention which largely explains the vital socio- economic dimension of the Arab revolts. It is under this model that corruption has flourished and that unhealthy links were created between the business establishment and the political establishment