The Costs of War: International Law, the Un, and World Order After Iraq by Richard A. Falk

Author:Richard A. Falk [Falk, Richard A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135917364
Google: K_Rqyr3-5CoC
Goodreads: 16649706
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Democratizing the Middle East

The affirmation of “democracy” is almost universal at this point, but the meaning of that affirmation remains very much in doubt. That doubt is most acute in the Middle East and North Africa, because the promotion of democracy has become linked to the practice of controversial geopolitics in the region. The debate surrounding democracy centers on an assessment of the American role and methods, especially the distinction between its professed intentions and actual behavior. Turkey is to some extent caught in the middle, engaged in its own process of democratizing reform, as well as being an ally of the United States while at the same time seeking to move closer to Europe and eventually to be accepted as a member of the European Union. For these reasons and others, the promises and concerns provoked by the unveiling of the Greater Middle East Initiative and North Africa Project (GMI) make it a natural focus for discussion, heated controversy, and evaluation.

There is little dissent from the broad goals of regional reform as articulated by the Greater Middle East Initiative, to some extent complementary to and superseded by their formulation at the G-8 Meeting in Sea Island, Georgia, on June 9, 2004, as the Partnership for Progress and a Common Future. These goals for development in the political, social and cultural, and economic spheres are widely endorsed pieties in international society, and echo objectives set forth for the world in an array of UN documents, including the Millennium Report of 2000. The important uncertainties relate to the degree of resources that might be made available to help with implementation, the extent to which progress should be promoted by nonregional actors, and the evaluation of whether these goals are congruent with the realities present in the region and in accordance with the state-by-state circumstances of each country. My focus is on whether the United States is able at this stage to exert a positive influence with respect to these challenges of regional reform, which also bear on how Turkey can best participate in a constructive process for the future. Two issues that cannot be discussed fully relate centrally to this inquiry: the future of Iraq in light of the persisting American occupation, and the resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

I. The Strategic, Ideological, and Diplomatic Background of the GMI

Perhaps the most notable development in the grand strategy of the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War was to shift its understanding of the geographic locus of world history from Europe to the Middle East, and more generally to the Islamic world. The site of both world wars of the twentieth century, as well as the central confrontation of the Cold War, had been in Europe. It thus represented a sea change in thinking about the future to regard the Middle East as having become the decisive history-making region with respect to world politics. In each of these earlier wars the Middle East had been deeply affected, despite being geographically peripheral to the main war zone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.