Globalisation and people power are a combustible mix

The factors of globalisation have coalesced in the Middle East in an unsavoury mix of unrest, writes Alan Philps.

Never before have we been deluged with such an avalanche of instant news, comment and analysis as with the revolution which toppled Hosni Mubarak. Anyone with a Twitter feed has been able to get a new insight every five minutes throughout the day. It has been addictive.
But many have been left with a headache by this non-stop battle of interpretation. The American Right has lost no chances to portray the protestors in Tahrir Square as a mob of dupes paving the way for the return of the Islamic Caliphate. More thoughtful academic voices, such as Professor Paul Amar of the University of California at Santa Barbara, see the protestors as young progressives whose aspirations have been moulded in the ferment of Egypt's economic liberalisation.
Is the Muslim Brotherhood the wily cat's paw of the Iranian takeover of the Middle East? Or is it a leaderless group whose deep divisions - between young and old, affluent and poor - have forced it to take a back seat?
Amid this to and fro, US commentators have now moved to the safer political ground of who to blame. Niall Ferguson, the new star columnist for Newsweek, was careful to keep his political views untainted by the reality on the ground. Having sat out the Egypt events in the cocoon of the Herzliya security conference in Israel, he declared the passing of Mr Mubarak a "foreign policy debacle" for the Obama administration.
Into this noxious broth, the former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has thrown a truly repulsive ingredient. As the man who oversaw the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (and who has a book of memoirs to promote) , he claims to have shown the Egyptians the benefits of democracy.
The truth is that no one, and certainly not Mr Rumsfeld, knows in which direction the Egyptian revolution is heading. Likewise we cannot know what will happen elsewhere.
Tunisia, it will be recalled, was seen until this summer as a model of economic development. From the European point of view, the only indisputable fact about the Jasmine Revolution is that it has encouraged even more Tunisians to give up on their country and set sail for the northern shore of the Mediterranean.
But if we stand back we can see some common threads in this wave of unrest. Not all of them point to a happy outcome.
The first of these is glaringly obvious. The youth from Iran to Tunisia want much the same thing: thanks to the revolution in communications and the spread of education, they aspire to a life of dignity with a decently paid job. This is a Middle Eastern "me generation". They do not see why they should not have what is enjoyed by people in more dynamic parts of the world.
It is a fair guess that if the existing regimes could provide the urban population with the kind of life they aspire to, then democracy would come second. But where they see cronyism (Egypt), isolation and gross economic mismanagement (Iran), first family corruption (Tunisia) or sclerotic lack of national ambition (Egypt again), they seek political change.
Not so long ago governments in some Middle Eastern countries guaranteed graduates a non-job in the state bureaucracy. It did not pay much, but it raised you from the gallabeya-wearing classes to the collar-and-tie class. Horizons are broader, and that is not enough now. Egypt's farmers cannot support a parasitic army of state employees, particularly with the population predicted to rise from 84.5 million now to 291 million by the end of the century.
All this dissatisfaction coalesced in Tahrir Square into a demand for a revived and self-confident Egyptian state befitting a 7,000-year-old culture.
Without wishing to spoil the party, actually this is unlikely to happen. The idea of a nation state making its confident way in the world is sepia-tinted with nostalgia. The gears of globalisation are crushing it. Just as young people are demanding more of their governments, those same governments find themselves less and less capable of meeting their expectations.
As we can all see, the price of food and energy is beyond the control of any country. The forces of international finance -the "bond markets" - are more powerful than any government. Finance seeks out the lowest cost producers, which drives down wages in countries such as Egypt. Even the most powerful countries are not immune, witness the end of well-paid manufacturing jobs in the US.
One person who has studied these effects over the past 20 years is Mark Malloch-Brown, former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. In a new book, The Unfinished Global Revolution, he discusses the fatal contradiction between democracy and globalisation.
People power on the streets, he said in an interview this week, does not easily translate into "people power in the distant, global places where more and more of the decisions that shape our lives must be made."
As an international civil servant, and more recently a minister in the British government, he knows how those "distant global places" work, and he is not optimistic.
"Regulating finance, trade, public health, security and all the other dimensions of a global economy is beyond the power of individual countries - even the most powerful. A country only controls one or two links in the chain of finance or the spread of an infectious disease."
Lord Malloch-Brown wants these global forces to be democratised, which is a very a long-term goal.
One should not despair entirely. Brazil, for example, removed the generals from power in 1985 and can now look the bond holders in the eye. But it is blessed with ample farm land, mineral resources and a world class business community. Two of these at least are lacking in Egypt where poor educational achievement is a problem.
Clearly the first step must be to make the government more responsive to the people and more ambitious for the country. The lesson, however, is that for all the expressions of goodwill from abroad for the protestors of Tahrir Square, the forces of globalisation are harsh and unforgiving.
 
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