READER COMMENTARY ON 5GW
This must be short as I am multitasking my way to amusement while attenpting to do mindless administrivia, but there were some excellent bursts of feedback from the 5Gw discussion initiated by Tom and continued by John, myself, Dan, Curtis, Purpleslog and perhaps others (will check later and update).
From Phil:
“Yes. The contest over globalization is more than just about laying fiber optic cable, building power plants and adopting certain financial and political institutional structures, it is at a very fundamental level, about people’s attitudes, beliefs, identities and aspirations. Shrinking the Gap needs to be accompanied by an effort to export and foster the kinds of beliefs, attitudes, ideas etc. that are necessary to sustain a successfully connected society. As you mention, the foot soldiers of Islamic extremism are connected, but are suffering from status anxiety, alienation and loss or absence of a viable identity, etc. The fundamentalists swoop in and fill that vacuum with their ideology. The Long War will be won or lost in the minds of millions of people. So what ideas do we export to counter those of the extremists?
Well, a few days ago Tigerhawk posted a comment by a young Saudi blogger:
“Looking forward to the future, I wonder: do we dare to dream? I, for one, do. I dare. And I don’t have only one dream; I have many dreams actually: I want to live to see the day when this country becomes a real democracy with a fully elected parliament; when freedom of expression is guaranteed to all, and no one is afraid to speak his mind no more; when women have their full rights and stand on equal foot with men. This was to name a few. Call me a dreamer. Maybe I am. I know one thing for sure, however: change is coming. This country is changing, not as quickly as I wish maybe, but it is changing nevertheless. Probably I’m just a young lad who can’t wait for this to happen, but who can blame me? If it wasn’t for the young to push change then who would?”
This young Saudi dreamer, and many more like him around the Muslim world, is the antidote to Islamist extremism. His dream is the alternative to the Islamist’s Caliphate. What needs to happen is that he and his fellow dreamers throughout the Muslim world need to create the kinds of networks amongst each other that the Islamists have used so successfully. They need to share ideas, inspire and support each other, and just know that there are others out there who feel the same way. Any pro-Globalization campaign will have to include these kinds of networks. We also need to connect with them to disseminate ideas based on our experience. Development in a Box allows us to combine the aspirations of the dreamer with practical steps to achieving the dream.”
From Purpleslog:
“The strategic choice isn’t globalization or statism so much as globalization vs. anarchy – and even that failed state chaos contains a a corrupt strand of connectivity to the Core.”
I am not so sure about this. The third force out there is a sort of global-islamofication force that is different then anarchy or globalization as we think of it in the West. Imagine a PNM theory variant for Global-islamafication that has it building connection among itself (the G-islam core) and the gap. There is a war of ideas that PNM theory does not seem to address directly or recognize.
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The same shows up in Bobbit state evolution model that has the nation-state giving way to the market state (with 3 three variants). It is really giving way to a post-nationalism state. The postnat-state has as variations the globalization friendly market-state, the somewhat globalization friendly prosperous-autocracy-state. It also has the globalization unfriendly (global-islamoficiation friendly) Caliphate-state (note: I swiped the term from an old post of yours). The world of course will still have nation-state or partial-nation states for awhile (along with the odd state-nation like North Korea).”
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