http://www.asianage.com/
How to light up Google’s map, from Morocco to
India’s border
- By Thomas L. Friedman
Davos, Switzerland: For the past few weeks I’ve tried to lay out
the tactics we in the West can adopt to strengthen the moderates
in the Arab-Muslim world to fight the war of ideas against the
forces of intolerance within their civilisation — which is where
the real war on terrorism will either be won or lost. But if there
is one thing I’ve learned in examining this issue it’s this: ideas
don’t just spread on their own. Ideas spread in a context. So
often, since 9/11, people have remarked to me: "Wow, Islam, that’s
a really angry religion." I disagree. I do agree, though, that
there are a lot of young Muslims who are angry, because they live
in some of the most repressive societies, with the fewest
opportunities for women and youth, and with some of the highest
unemployment. Bad contexts create an environment where humiliation
— and the anger, bad ideas and violence that flow from it — are
rife. In short, it is impossible for us to talk about winning the
war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world without talking about the
most basic thing that gives people dignity and hope: A job.
"For a long time now,
I’ve felt that what we’re really facing is not a clash of
civilisations, but a clash of generations," argued David Rothkopf,
a former acting US under secretary of commerce. "You have an
ageing developed world, particularly Europe, that is trying to
protect its jobs, and you have a young, job-seeking, job-needing
emerging world, particularly the Muslim world, that will go
anywhere and do anything to either seize the job opportunities or
express their frustration with not having opportunities."
Just read the numbers
and weep: of the 90 million Arab youth today (between the ages of
15 and 24), 14 million are unemployed, many of them among the 15
to 20 million Muslims now living in Europe. "There’s not enough
jobs and not enough hope," Jordan’s King Abdullah told the Davos
economic forum. According to the 2003 Arab Human Development
Report, between 1980 and 1999 the nine leading Arab economies
registered 370 patents (in the US) for new inventions. Patents are
a good measure of a society’s education quality, entrepreneurship,
rule of law and innovation. During that same 20-year period, South
Korea alone registered 16,328 patents for inventions. You don’t
run into a lot of South Koreans who want to be martyrs.
I was at Google’s
headquarters in Silicon Valley a few days ago, and they have this
really amazing electronic global map that shows, with lights, how
many people are using Google to search for knowledge.
The region stretching
from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights. I
attended a breakfast at Davos on the outsourcing of high-tech jobs
from the US and Europe to the developing world. There were Indian
and Mexican businessmen there, and much talk about China. But not
a word was spoken about outsourcing jobs to the Arab world. The
context — infrastructure, productivity, education — just isn’t
there yet.
So what to do? A lot
of help can and should come from Europe. Although America is often
the target, Europe has been the real factory of Arab-Muslim rage.
Europe has done an extremely poor job of integrating and employing
its growing Muslim minorities, many of which have a deep feeling
of alienation. And Europe has done a very poor job of investing in
North Africa and West Asia — its natural backyard.
America is far from
perfect in this regard, but by forging the Nafta free trade
agreement with Mexico, the US helped create a political and
economic context there that not only spurred jobs and the
modernisation of Mexico, but created the environment for its
democratisation. Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked
to me: "I don’t think I would have been successful in political
reform without the decent economic growth we had (spurred by Nafta)
from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5
percent." It was in that optimistic environment that Mexico had
its first democratic transition from the ruling party to the
Opposition.
So if you take
anything away from this series, I hope it’s this: The war of ideas
among Arabs and Muslims can only be fought and won by their own
forces of moderation, and those forces can only emerge from a
growing middle class with a sense of dignity and hope for the
future. Young people who grow up in a context of real economic
opportunity, basic rule of law and the right to speak and write
what they please don’t usually want to blow up the world. They
want to be part of it.
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