Tuesday, March 01, 2011

MENA’s Third Wave-Knowledge Revolts

The Heritage Foundation partly channels Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave and what I have called as the Hayekian knowledge revolution via the web/internet as previously discussed here.

Heritage’s Conn Carroll writes, (bold highlights mine)

The first wave of revolutions in the region came in the middle of the last century and was made up of nationalist revolts against European colonialism. The next wave, the Islamist revolt, came a generation later, upending corrupt monarchies and nationalist regimes set up after the colonial era. Each of these movements—nationalist and Islamist—pretended to be “pan” movements of some kind. But they never caught on because their universal claims were myths, undermined by tribal, religious, and nationalist divisions. The third wave we are witnessing today is completely different. Heritage Foundation Vice President and former Assistant Secretary of State Kim Holmes explains:

“Arab nationalism was largely an elite phenomenon that drove and exploited popular sentiments. Islamism is driven by clerics and political ideologues like the Muslim Brotherhood who likewise exploit peoples’ religious beliefs and social resentments. The current third wave of revolt is truly a bottom-up, people driven movement. It’s driven not by nationalism, Islamism or any other 20th Century “ism,” but by a 21st Century socially linked-up mass movement of people who are sick of corruption, the lack of representative government, and being poor. … Despite the unique national and tribal features of each movement, it is united by the same emotional revulsion to the ruin and corruption created by the first two waves of revolution in the Middle East. The people of Libya are no less disgusted with Qadhafi than the people of Iran are with Ahmadinejad. One may be largely Sunni Arabs and the other Shiite Persians, but both are utterly finished with the ideologies, pretentions, and results of the Middle East’s first two failed revolutions.”

The evolving political order in the Middle East can somewhat be viewed in the context of the developmental stages of the global economy.

The first wave’s “nationalist revolts against European colonialism” can be paralleled to the closure of agriculture based economy, where colonialism signified as the political economy of conquest and plunder.

The second wave’s “Islamist revolt” directed against the “monarchies and nationalist regimes” could be seen in lens of the industrial age, the age of centralization through mass production. Again these revolts perhaps reflected on the evolving desire to see a shift of political ‘centralized’ power from the failed nationalist model to an experiment with theocracies.

And the third wave’s “bottom-up, people driven movement” fundamentally an Étienne de La Boétie paradigm of grassroots based nonviolent revolution appears to represent a non-ideological backlash “sick of corruption, the lack of representative government, and being poor” against centralized institutions. And the internet has been a crucial force in providing the platform for information, inspiration and the spontaneous coordination and mobilization of these grassroots activities.

Of course one may argue that the old order (e.g. military) are the still dominant force and still would resist changes that has benefited them. While this is may be true, as all changes will be met by resistance, this ignores the point about the evolving character of how these revolutions have been taking place, which the Heritage have clearly explained.

As a caveat: since economic development varies from country to country and the timeline for these political transitions cannot be concretely established.

The Heritage Foundation raises the point that foreign policies applied by the US government have been outdated or obsolete.

I don’t think it is just the US government. I think this applies to all governments and to conventional or mainstream insights or analysis as many refuse to see how informational flows, mostly channelled through the social media, have significantly influenced the ongoing revolts against the old centralized political order.

The evolving economic order simply influences the political order. The point is that the current centralized institutions will undergo a flattening process or decentralization, which is what people power revolts have been about.

The presumption that people will simply revert to past models, simply ignores human action or the people’s capacity to LEARN and ADOPT to the changes in the environment and technology as manifested through evolving social interactions.

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