A world without borders

Ismail Sabri Abdalla can't see the nation-state for the transnational corporations
The prolonged preoccupation with "the clash of civilisations," that dubious theoretical fabrication, and the diverse views that have been expressed on the topic, have produced no useful results, because the notion under debate is fallacious to begin with. The course of human history has never at any point been determined by a clash of civilisations; so who is responsible for fostering the obsession with issues that have no bearing on independent comprehensive development and the effort to eradicate poverty altogether?
Our Pharaonic forefathers did not seek to invade their neighbours and plunder their wealth. When the Egyptian army first ranged beyond our borders, it was to pursue the remnants of the invading Hyksos. This occurred in 1770BC, some 2,500 years after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. It follows that our ancestors built the Great Pyramid -- the first of the seven wonders of the ancient world -- without enslaving another people, without "foreign expertise" and without needing technology transfer to copy a precedent made abroad.
Although the Hyksos invasion made it clear to the Ancient Egyptians that the approach to their country passed through Syria and Palestine, this knowledge did not compel them to force their language and culture upon the peoples of those lands. The Pharaohs were content to have neighbouring rulers as friends and allies, leaving them to their own forms of worship and their own modes of life, while pursuing commercial relations in the eastern Mediterranean, importing cedar from Lebanon for example.
Well before Alexander the Great conquered the country, Egypt welcomed Hellenic immigrants, who settled primarily in Fayoum and Mariout. More significantly, such was the prevailing respect, indeed reverence, for the indigenous culture that upon conquering Egypt, Alexander went first to the temple of Amon in Siwa in order to be consecrated as Pharaoh. Throughout the three centuries of Ptolemaic rule, Hellenic culture may have thrived in cosmopolitan Alexandria, but over the country as a whole the Greeks ruled as Pharaohs and observed the rites and rituals of the Ancient Egyptian religion. The custom of investing the Ptolemaic ruler as pharaoh persisted down to Cleopatra VII, the last of the Ptolemaic line in Egypt, who can be seen portrayed in the Temple of Dendera in Pharaonic dress. But the Ptolemies' reverence for the indigenous culture and religion went much deeper. Many restored, expanded or built new temples, to which the temples of Edfu, Elephantine, Esna and Kom Ombo bear testimony.
Egypt under the Romans was declared a province directly subordinate to the emperor, who also prohibited Romans from settling here. Like the Ptolemies, though, the Romans preserved Egyptian monuments and built new temples. Indeed, many Romans adopted Egyptian cults, notably that of Isis, to whom they consecrated a temple; its remains can still be seen today.
The first fundamental changes to the Egyptian language and culture came with the conversion to Christianity and the adoption of Arabic. These transformations were not externally imposed and took place over centuries -- the former taking place in the first and second centuries CE, and the second over a period of 300 years following the Arab conquest of the country. They were, in other words, indigenous processes. It was only much later that the Coptic Church translated its scriptures into Arabic, in order to render the ancient liturgy comprehensible to the Arabic-speaking flock.
One of the most striking illustrations of people's ability to preserve their own culture and identity, even under foreign occupation, is very close to home -- literally. For thousands of years after the Alexandrian conquest, Greek was the official language of the Egyptian court, and Egypt's Greek-speaking rulers gave Greek names to Egyptian places. Yet, no sooner had Islamic rule established itself in Egypt than the Greek place names vanished to reveal the Ancient Egyptian place names that had survived all that time. My native village in Upper Egypt is called Al-Ririmon: the name, an Egyptologist told me, means "the mouth of Amon."
In the ancient world, clashes may have occurred over the fruits of power, but there was no clash between civilisations. Rome conquered Greece, but not Hellenic civilisation. On the contrary, the Greek pantheon was wed to the Roman -- Zeus became Jupiter, Aphrodite Venus, and so on. More importantly, the Romans recognised and absorbed the vast legacy of Hellenic culture, from philosophy, mathematics and logic to art, poetry and theatre.
For nearly two centuries, from 1096 to 1291, the Levant, and sometimes Egypt, suffered eight invasions emerging from western Europe. Today, we refer to these wars as the Crusades, although it is significant that contemporary Arab chroniclers referred to them as the invasions of the Franj (Franks).
Spurring these successive waves of invasion was the appeal, first, to undertake the pilgrimage to Christ's birthplace as a form of atonement for one's sins that would earn the pilgrim entrance to paradise and, second, to wrest the Holy Land from the grip of the "heretics" the Catholic Church called "Mohamedans." The pope who had launched the appeal and given it its ideological thrust ordered the pilgrim armies to bear the cross as their emblem, giving rise to the term Crusade.
The Arabs, however, refused to countenance this Frankish monopoly on the cross. Many Christian Arab tribes had migrated to the Levant before the emergence of Islam, such as the Taghlab, which bequeathed to us Al-Akhtal, the Christian poet of the Umayyad court, and the Bakr, whose memory is preserved in the city of Diyarbakir in southern Anatolia. Also, to the Arabs, it was Greek-speaking Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, that was recognised as the seat of the Christian Church, with which they had long-established peaceful relations, as they did with the communities of the other eastern churches that remained independent from the Byzantine: the Armenian, the Assyrian and the Copt. The Arabs were aware that the invading Franks were descended from one of the Germanic tribes that had swept into the Latin-speaking countries of western Europe, defeating the declining Roman empire and adopting the language and culture of the defeated peoples.
Amin Maalouf's highly acclaimed The Crusades through Arab Eyes furnishes an excellent and thought-provoking insight into the period through the juxtaposition of European and Arab accounts of the invasions. The study forcefully shows that the invaders slaughtered both Muslims and Christians, a point which tends to undermine the religious pretext of the confrontation. Mediaeval Europe was a plague-ridden cesspool of poverty and ignorance, whereas Arab civilisation in the East bristled with the manifestations of scientific and economic prowess. Much as Third World peoples today escape destitution through emigration to Europe, the US and even Australia, the rank and file Crusaders came to the Levant lured by prospects of material enrichment. This applied just as strongly to the knights, in view of primogeniture, the inheritance system that prevented the division of feudal estates and left remaining descendants dependent upon the mercy of the sole legatee. This system generated a class of nobles who knew nothing but the arts of warfare and chivalry, but were financially bankrupt and had no hope of improving their circumstances at home.
Mediaeval Western Europe had no centralised government; feudal lords were at once masters of their land and subjugated to feudal lords higher up in the hierarchy. This system was, in turn, conducive to the petty feudal wars and territorial raids that plagued the region. Such circumstances propelled European knights to join the hordes of pilgrims advancing on the Holy Land, which held the prospect of a feudal estate as a reward.
There thus emerged in the Levant feudal kingdoms, the most famous being the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted 90 years and was followed in importance by the Kingdom of Antioch and numbers of smaller entities. Many of their citadels still stand today. Naturally, these settlements engendered a mercantile and banking class that grew wealthy on the export of Oriental products to Europe, the import of knighthood necessities from Europe and the exorbitant interest rates they charged on loans (in spite of the Church's prohibition of usury). The transformation of the Order of the Knights of the Temple into the first bank of its kind may embody most succinctly the importance of the worldly, and its preeminence over the call of the divine, in the European crusader movement. Through their financial dealings, the Templars became so powerful and influential that, in the 14th century, the king of France, in collusion with the Pope, moved to confiscate the organisation's assets and execute its leaders.
It is clear, then, that the reality of the Crusades was far removed from a "clash of civilisation." The invaders were a backward people and the invasions aimed at colonising land and satisfying the aspirations of a feudal nobility. By no means were the invasions a war of Christianity against Islam. The rhetoric of the pope in Rome was essentially a campaign to mobilise the destitute masses and landless knights at a time when it was well known that the Arabs in the Levant had never obstructed Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, if only because Islam sanctions freedom of worship for adherents to the divinely revealed faiths.
At the time of these invasions, Andalusian civilisation had reached the peak of a glory to which Jews and Christians contributed, and served as a model of cultural diversity and peaceful coexistence. Only subsequently, when the Muslim kingdoms of Spain came under attack from European kings to the north, were the Christians of Andalusia compelled to make a horrible choice between allegiance to an armed religious authority and to their fellow citizens.
Islam is the religion of a fifth of the world's population. A third of the world's Muslims live in Asia, with 478 million concentrated in Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Muslim Arabs constitute approximately a fourth of the world's total Muslim population. We have had a long history of interaction with the West, one that cannot be reduced to a confrontation between Islam and Christianity, both religions that preach peace and brotherly love. Yet it is also true that Muslims and Christians have engaged in bitter warfare. Europe in the last century alone witnessed two world wars, less than a quarter century apart. In the first, a Muslim power -- the Ottoman Empire -- allied itself with Germany; in the second, no Muslim government took part. The history of Islam is also replete with warfare, from the first fitna (656CE) to the present day, when it is sufficient to point to the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the decade of strife in Algeria. So much internecine bloodshed cannot be subsumed under the clash of civilisation rubric and, thus, demands an explanation derived from present day realities.
Given this rich and diverse history, then, it is astounding that the "clash of civilisations" notion should create such contention. Arab intellectuals' preoccupation with Huntington's ideas, and the subsidiary issues of cultural invasion and cultural identity, far exceeds any such preoccupation in the West.
Yet responses here, as extensive as they have been, have overlooked Huntington's essential premise: the supremacy of capitalism over the world's societies, and the accompanying assumption that the mechanisms of the free market economy will resolve all disputes between and within nations. As Western capitalist thought is essentially Darwinian, it is difficult for it to imagine human life on this planet without conflict -- a conflict to be resolved at the expense of the world's weaker populations. This fabricated conflict must take place over issues that have no bearing on material concerns -- such as poverty, impoverishment, exploitation, ignorance, disease and the whole gamut of ills Third World peoples and certain classes in Arab societies suffer. The battle lines of the universal conflict, moreover, must be drawn so that patriotism, national liberation, independent development and social justice become irrelevant. It requires no great effort to realise that such claims serve global capitalism above all.
Without entering a lengthy explanation of globalisation, it is sufficient to point out that, in 2000, the revenues of the world's 500 largest transnational corporations exceeded $14 trillion. This staggering figure amounts to almost half the combined GNP of all the countries of the world for that year, which stood at $29 trillion. In 2000, too, the collective GNP of the Arab nations totaled $473 billion, the revenues of Exxon Mobil stood at $210 billion and, excluding the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the total GNP of the rest of the Arab world did not exceed $295 billion.
Transnational corporations are so called because they have made the entire globe their market. In so doing, these voracious entities, which aim to augment profits by any means, have placed themselves beyond the confines of a single national affiliation. The tentacle-like thrust of global capitalism is clearly embodied in the WTO, which seeks to open markets in those nations that signed the 1994 GATT to services as well as goods, in a manner that offers foreign exporters and entrepreneurs the same rights as the citizens of the recipient countries. The WTO is also currently seeking to establish a single universal law for foreign investment, as well as a unified labour law. It has its own judicial apparatus and claims the right to inspect the performance of member nations once every five years at most. In short, the WTO has established itself as an economic authority above the nation state, unchecked by any commensurate political authority, in defiance of the democratic principle of the separation of powers.
Most of the world's people are unaware that this supranational organisation with a monopoly on legislative, executive and judicial powers exists. They are now accustomed to the notion of the independent nation-state as their sovereign authority. But we have also forgotten that the nation-state is a relatively recent phenomenon, little more than two centuries old. Prior to that, the imperial state's contours were defined by the territory over which a ruling house could exert its hegemony, regardless of the diverse languages and ethnic affiliations of the constituent populaces. The last examples history offers of this form of state were the Ottoman Sultanate and the Hapsburg Empire. The former, at its height, ruled from the gates of Vienna in the north to Bab Al-Mandab in the south, and from the Crimean in the east to Algeria in the west. The Hapsburg Empire governed a similarly diverse mixture of human beings. Both empires became extinct with the end of World War I. In Europe, monarchs claimed a divine right to absolute power while the Mamelukes in Egypt, for example, kept an Abbasid caliph in power to sanctify the rule of a victorious amir, who could easily be overthrown by a more powerful rival in a matter of months.
The 18th century brought several developments that would end such forms of tyranny. The first was the French revolution, which abolished the monarchy and made the people the source of power through their elected representatives. The second was the industrial revolution and the transfer of capital from mercantile trading and lending to manufacture and industry. The third major event was the appearance of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which defined nationhood as a set of fundamental properties, such as language, shared by a people within a specific geographical boundary.
These events marked the beginning of the intellectual quest for the definition of the nation state. They also marked the beginning of the end of the old empires, which disintegrated along national lines.
As the nation-state flourished, so did the principle of the right to national self-determination. This principle is felt just as strongly in those nations where diverse peoples decided to share a single state. The United Kingdom, combining the peoples of England, Scotland and Wales, and Switzerland, for 700 years an independent entity that gives official equal recognition to the four languages spoken, are the two foremost examples of multinational states.
Capitalism was fundamental to the emergence and development of the modern nation-state. It generated the impetus for the unification of the national market and the adoption of any means necessary to protect that market from foreign intervention. The nation-state, too, promulgated bodies of law regulating interaction among members of society, the most prevalent historical model being the Napoleonic code, which enshrined the individual's right to hold property and dispose of it as he wished. Naturally, these corpuses necessitated the creation of an effective judicial system. Capitalism also required an organised police force to quell the angry masses, which wretchedness spurred into strikes and, sometimes, revolutionary activity. National capitalism needed armies to expand the borders of the state, to invade Latin America, Southern Asia and all Africa; to facilitate the exploitation of subject peoples and their resources, national capitalism systematically worked to eradicate their bonds of national affiliation or to marginalise them in reserves or cantons. If European capitalism encouraged the plundering of other peoples' lands on the assumption that those peoples were inherently inferior (the English term for a land over which no European flag had been hoisted was "no-man's- land"), however, it also fostered rival nationalisms and ethnocentricities so intense that two world wars could not settle their territorial disputes.
In the second half of the 20th century, Western capitalism was forced to change tack. The emergence of vast nuclear arsenals made it impossible for capitalist nations to do battle without mutual annihilation. Other systems and mechanisms were devised to resolve contradictions and reconcile divergent interests through peaceful means. Western capitalism was propelled in this direction by the Soviet challenge and the wave of Third World national liberation movements, now too costly, military and economically, to suppress. Against this background, colonial armies withdrew, former colonies gained independence, and European countries sought to unify.
The new mechanisms that emerged were the transnationals, which have extricated themselves from the national framework and resolve their problems through merger or acquisition. Transnationals have dispensed with many services and functions formerly provided by national governments. National postal and messaging services are no longer necessary to them, since privately owned firms can ensure safe delivery within a day or two, while faxes and the Internet offer instant communication. Indeed, the privatisation of telephone service, alone, has precipitated a fever of private acquisition and merger that will eventually coalesce into three or four globalised transnational conglomerations in the communications industry.
Transnationals no longer depend on national police agencies, for private security firms can furnish the latest security equipment and the most highly trained personnel available on the market. Nor do they rely as heavily on national diplomatic missions to seek and open new markets, since they are powerful enough to pressure many governments at once. Besides, transnationals can go where diplomats and official commercial representatives cannot. Their agents and subsidiaries are equipped to negotiate the deals they need. This is why official aid from the industrialised world to Third World countries is channeled primarily into technical areas, while grants are directed to NGOs on the grounds that the recipient governments are too corrupt. Investment, however, is left to the transnationals.
The armed forces are important to transnationals only as major consumers and therefore as stimuli to large public allocations for research and development, conducted primarily by companies or research institutes. The technology produced for the military is then modified and reproduced for civilian use and consumption. Perhaps the best example of this is the Internet, originally developed as part of a nuclear war scenario according to which Washington had been annihilated while US forces were still stationed strategically across the globe. This scenario called for a communications network that would permit its users to contact one another without having to pass through a control centre. Then the Internet became available to civilians for any number of activities, including crime.
Still, transnationals needed no armies to invade and occupy other countries or to redistribute colonial possessions. In the Third World, we roll out the red carpet to welcome those we once evacuated at gunpoint -- at a time when their aim was to invest in the country.
Nor do transnationals need national judiciary systems; contractual matters are worked out in exhaustive detail to avert time-consuming litigation and exorbitant legal costs.
Finally, these companies have assumed one of the fundamental rights of sovereign nations, indeed one of the symbols of national sovereignty -- the right to mint currency. The credit card is now accepted almost everywhere. There is no way of knowing where one's card was issued and whether the Central Bank, for instance, had any say in the matter.
Transnationals, indeed, not only find the nation state dispensable: it is to them a source of endless obstacles -- border controls, customs, currency exchange complications... There is no place for it in the world without borders that these companies seek to create. And as they go about jettisoning the concept and functions of the nation-state, Third World peoples will be expected to abandon such concerns as national independence and independent development, and instead give priority to the "clash of civilisations" at the global level, and ethnic and tribal disputes on the regional scale.
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2001 Special Supplement
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