In the the two Economist articles, "Waking from It's Sleep" and "Which Way Will They Go?" both exemplified similar Eurocentric, Islamophobic worldviews that have permeated through the political ideology of the the West. I make the distinction between the West vs. Middle East in this discourse because this distinction allows one to understand the desire of Western countries to democratize Middle Eastern nations during times of conflict. Karl Marx wrote extensively about conflict theory and the dialectical nature of its presence. Arab Spring is the materialization of Marxist theory and embodies the nature of antagonism being the impetuous of these epochs.
Given the climate of these epochs, Western nations are trying to secure their position in the social and political climate of the surge of resistance to implement their own self-interest and their agenda under the farce of "democracy." Both articles make the assumption that with the economic nature of these countries, they yearn for Western style democracy. Though Emile Durkheim's thoery of the collective consciousness may have significance in light of the current resistance movements, the application of the collective consciousness does not resonate so much in so far as the replication of democratic systems.
Western Democracy has failed throughout the Middle East. Whether if its overarching corruption found in Afghanistan to the friction in Iraq, governments who have adopted the farce of Western Democracy has lead their countries to sectarian violence, the rise of extremism, and internal corruption. What's more trivial is the West imposes their false presumption that these systems work and that it takes time for these countries to adopt Western values. One thing that is apparent that's the immersion of religion and the state in regards to Middle Eastern politics.
In Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic, the analysis of how religion plays an intersecting role in politics is much apparent in the Middle East. Though in "Which Way Will they Go?" article in the Economist will debate Iran's status of being Arabic, it does point out the importance of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran's nationhood. This theocratic position has shown its opposition last year but understanding the history of Iran, the regime proceeding the current was that of a bourgeois autocracy/monarchy lead by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was appointed following a coup detat by the C.I.A that ousted the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The phenomena of Arab Spring is that which has not specific location to it. As pointed in both Economist articles, there are several outcomes that may come from the uprisings but the it's hard to discern what path one nation is going to take. Nevertheless, the imposition of American/ European values in the Middle East is only going to reinforce the already existing mistrust that is amongst the Arab world to the West. It's naive to believe that the answers in the Middle East lies within Western foreign policy; nevertheless, one can make such assumptions by believing that their system actually works.
It really is interesting to see how the US has turned around to use a strategy of "injecting" democracy into these countries. I almost laughed when I read that the US has been using "soft power" to spread these ideas (I believe it was in "Why way will they go?"). The entire Iraq war was a direct testament to the fact that the US government felt it had the right to invade another country, forcibly remove a dictator (that it put in power, of course) and to establish democratic rule. I found the ideas noted in an Al-Jazeera opinion piece I mentioned in my blog post pretty accurate -- the idea of a US-Saudi axis that seeks to either eliminate anti-US revolutions or co-opt those that can be integrated into a beneficial relationship seems all too true. We wait for the revolutionaries to take the first step, see where the dust settles, then pick sides.
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