The World .. As it really is.

By

Tarek Heggy

Most people have more than one person living inside them. Apart from fanatics, who believe they are the keepers of absolute Truth and who do not for a moment doubt that their viewpoint is the only right one, most of us have what seem to be two people living inside us, each seeing matters from a different perspective. This is a healthy phenomenon, for doubt in all matters, more precisely, doubt in our understanding of things, is one of the main engines of progress. Doubt is what drives the human race to constantly try and expand the horizons of knowledge, to learn and reassess its understanding in the light of the new knowledge it acquires so as to attain ever greater intellectual maturity.

In my case, for example, I often find myself pulled in opposite directions by the two people living inside me. One is a man from the world of management who trained in a multinational corporate before attaining the top executive position in an international petroleum company. The company he ran had a culture derived in equal measure from its venerable European roots and the wide international experience it built up in every part of the world since it was founded in the nineteenth century.

The other is a man who indulged his insatiable appetite for knowledge from an early age, a voracious reader fascinated by the social sciences and the great masterpieces of human creativity. Often the ideas of these two people are contradictory, sometimes even confrontational. One issue on which they frequently clash is American and European policies towards the Middle East. While the intellectual is filled with admiration for European sophistication, the CEO is filled with anger at the ineffectiveness of European policies. The anger is compounded by his awareness of the economic interests and motives behind these policies, which appear to the naïve denizens of the Third World to be based on an idealistic, not to say Utopian, world view. And, while the intellectual within me despairs at how lacking in sophistication and ill-informed America's policies sometimes are, the CEO believes that creative and decisive action can affect these policies and, ultimately, the American mind-set in general.

The intellectual aspires to a world order in which all decisions and actions on the world stage are clothed in international legitimacy, while the CEO deplores the inability of international legitimacy to act rapidly and effectively in nine-tenths of cases.

When lecturing at universities and research centres in the United States, I, sometimes, find myself thinking what a pity so much progress is not matched by an equivalent degree of sophistication, while when I am lecturing at similar institutions in France I ask myself why so much sophistication remains in the realm of the abstract, why it is content to stop at couching elaborate ideas in beautiful language without translating them into effective and creative action. It seems it is incapable of acting, indeed, that it does not want to act in the first place, because many French, like many Arabs, have come to believe that sound can replace substance, that words speak louder than actions!

I know many readers in the Arabic speaking countries will be shocked when I say that if I am forced to choose between one of these two approaches, I would, without a bit of reluctance, choose the American. The reason is that the executive manager who lives inside me would never forgive me for choosing the path of inaction over that of action. In his eyes, action, even if, sometimes, misguided, is preferable to the paralysis that has unfortunately come to characterize many French and Arab positions of late. At the same time, however, he is aware that decisive action can only produce positive results if undertaken by those who dream of a world governed by the rule of law, in which justice and stability prevail and where every person on the face of the earth is entitled to strive for development and prosperity and to enjoy freedom of belief without discrimination and oppression.

The ideal approach would be a blend of the American, French/European and Arab approaches, minus the many negative aspects displayed by each. Conscience dictates that I include in the blend the positive elements in the Israeli approach, even though I know this will offend many of the Arab readers. Of course, we would first have to remove from the Israeli approach the defects from which it is suffering as a result of an ascendant right-wing trend fuelled by religious fanaticism. Actually, when it comes to fanaticism, Islamic fundamentalism has more than met its match in the extreme Jewish right wing. But because of Judaism's close ties to Western culture, Jewish extremism has managed to project a much less negative image than its Islamic counterpart, which is seen (and actually is) as primitive, detached from the age and inimical to Western civilization.

If I were asked to list these approaches in order of priority based on logic and pragmatism, I would rank them as follows:

• The ideal approach would be one that blends the advantages of the European approach with those of the American, while avoiding all or most of their defects.
• Then would come the American approach as it is, despite the many negative aspects in.
• Then would come the European approach as it is despite the many negative aspects in.
• At the bottom of the list would be the so-called Arab approach, which in fact does not exist. Can anyone claim that there is a coherent Arab position when it comes to relations with the outside world? To democracy, progress and modernity? To human rights or women's rights?

I placed the Arab approach last because it is in fact not an approach at all but a mixture of emotions, excitability and confused thinking characterized by an overwrought imagination that is totally divorced from reality, rooted in the past and based on sectarian or ideological considerations in an age when the role of sectarianism and ideology is fast receding. In addition, most Arab positions epitomize the defects from which the contemporary Arab mind-set suffers [conformist thinking, overblown rhetoric, a lack of objectivity, an unhealthy tendency to escape into the past in a nostalgic bid to recapture glories that are sometimes without any historical basis, etc.]

For any criticism leveled against US policies to be credible, the critic must prove that his criticism is meant to be constructive, not destructive. This he can do only by admitting at the outset that, despite the defects in its policies, the US is the leading power in the world scientifically, technologically, militarily and economically, and that it could not have attained such a position unless it was better qualified than others to occupy it. Moreover, American society provides the best environment in which these abilities and talents can flourish and reach the goals they aspire to and deserve. It is also important to add here that while there is no perfect democracy anywhere, the political system in the United States comes closest to the ideal that any lover of democratic freedoms can hope for.

Still, the United States is far from perfect and much of what is going on in its political kitchen needs to be put right. The same goes for Western Europe in general and for France in particular. The Arab citizen who admires some of France's stands is not aware that the motives behind these stands have nothing to do with justice and integrity or righteous anger for the sake of Arab rights. As I write, I have before me several reports on the extensive business dealings France and Germany had with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as well as reports on France's demands for a share in the spoils of the war on Iraq in the form of reconstruction contracts, all of which were turned down by the Americans. The Arab mind-set, which remains isolated from the age and is the product of a culture of grandiloquent poetry invoking imaginary glories, is incapable of grasping reality in a sober, clear-headed and unemotional manner. The millions of Arabs lamenting the fact that the world is now governed by a single superpower and grieving over the demise of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, conveniently forget that the first two nations to recognize Israel were the United States and the Soviet Union. They also forget that it was when the Soviet-Arab bond was at its strongest that they suffered the worst defeat in their history, and that they are still paying the price of what happened to them on June 5, 1967.

It is obvious from a dispassionate reading of history that the preeminence enjoyed by the Roman Empire in the distant past, by the British Empire in a more recent past and by the United States today did not come about by virtue of ideas or theories but as a result of the imperatives of history, geography and economics. It is thus as futile to object to America's supremacy in today's world as it was to object to Rome's in the ancient world. To protest at the inevitable is self-indulgent and naïve. A grave mistake that is made by the overwhelming majority of the Arab intelligencia.

What the Arab mind-set needs at this stage is a leadership that can reconcile it with the past [which was never as glorious as the nostalgic tales spun by over-active imaginations would have us believe], and the present [which is no worse than it was in previous times when other great powers prevailed]. What it needs, in short, is a leadership that can induce it to set its sights on a more realistic target.

In asking themselves how they can change reality to fit their aspirations, the Arabs are banging their heads against a brick wall. What they should be asking instead is how they can find themselves a role in the context of that reality. For, just as we cannot hope to change the fact that the sun inevitably rises in the East, never in the West, so too we cannot hope to change the reality of the world as it really is.