15 september 2015

#332. Vad är det som händer...?

Om du bara har tid att läsa en artikel och vill förstå lite mer om vad som händer runt om i vår värld och varför så är Koert Debeufs artikel "Tribalization; Or the End of Globalization" att rekommendera. Han lyfter upp och pekar på många globala pusselbitar i det som händer i vår tid. Här några utdrag. Men läs gärna hela artikeln, länk nedan.

"When societies and countries lose direction and face identity crises, they tend to look back. They dig through the old sandbox of ideas and beliefs that seem to have worked in the past. For societies, just like for people, a loss of status is hard to swallow. So instead of looking forward, societies look back to what they believe was the basis of some past grand status. This anchoring in myths of the past, this use of old discourse is exactly what we are witnessing in the world of today. […]

Most Arabs feel totally lost now. All ideologies are broken. Not one has fulfilled its promises. They don’t know anymore what to make of their religion. The ones with the deepest identity crisis see the Islamic State as the last resort, in the Arab World but also in Europe. It is no doubt the most extreme example of tribalization and people’s preference for extreme negative identity over a weak identity. For all the other Muslims, the Islamic State is proof of the lack of new ideas. As long as these ideas are not there, most Arabs don’t know what to choose anymore: stability or democracy, religion or secularism, pan-Arabism or nationalism, looking to the West or turning away from it. […]

European integration is in danger. Traumatic experiences have raised questions in the minds of many Europeans whether the EU is the problem rather than the solution. There are voices to leave the eurozone and in the case the UK leaves the EU itself. Fearing Russia Eastern European countries ask for a new militarization. Feeling lost and anxious they go back the old European tribal ideology: authoritarian nationalism. Nationalist and even racist parties in almost all European countries are calling for less European integration. For the first time since WWII racist mass demonstrations are seen in Germany. This time the enemy is not the Jew, but the Muslim, whether he lives inside or outside Europe. The current refugee crisis will make things only worse. Tribalization is hitting again in the heart of Europe. It is further weakening the EU internally and externally. It’s hard to say how this is going to end but a disintegration of the European Union may be around the corner. […]

Putin’s tribalization strategy is not only popular with Russians, who seem to be happy that their country is again stable inside and feared outside. In the Arab world and in Turkey new soft dictators are learning lessons from him. Now president of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, was elected after having served his maximum term as prime minister. Together with current prime minister Ahmed Davutoglu, Erdogan is looking back to Turkey’s pre-Atatürk Ottoman past, where Islam was a pillar of the state. Erdogan too has created quite a lot of ennemies: the liberals, the Gülen supporters, the army, Israel and now Egypt.

Putin’s strategy is even popular in Europe where the extreme right finds in Putin an ally against liberal democracy of the ‘decadent’ West. It is hard to overestimate how the tribal strategy of Putin’s authoritarian nationalism is hurting the cause of human rights and democracy on a global level. […]

The combination of these traumatic experiences made many Americans plunge into an identity crisis. The high-achieving country par excellence has lost a great deal of confidence in a relatively short period of time. More importantly, there is no clear way out of this. In the United States too, the result is tribalization. More people than ever are in favor of a new kind of isolationism. PEW Research shows that not less than 52 percent of the Americans thinks that the US “should mind its own business internationally’, the highest score since the research started in 1964. However, an even more trend is that people, feeling lost, are entrenching themselves in the tribe they know best: their party. […] This tribalization is hurting the United States. It has become more difficult to pass legislation in Congress. It also hurts American foreign policy. […]

All indicators show that the world is again reaching again a decline of globalization. The cause is to be found in a few traumatic experiences. For every continent these traumas are different, but the result is the same. There is a general loss of confidence, leading to a collective identity crisis. The reaction to these crises are similar: people look back to what they know best. They look for psychological security in their tribe, be it a religion, a nation or a party."

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