Who’s Afraid of Jasmin
by Nick Glossop on January 19, 20117 comments
Professor Hall Gardner of the American University of Paris gives a good general account of recent events in Tunisia, commonly referred to as the Jasmin Revolution – although the name may suggest misleading parallels with the color-coded revolutions of the W. Bush era. He explains who in North Africa, in the broader Muslim world and beyond, has reason to fear the outcome, and therefore has motive to become involved.
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7 comments
Andrew Loewen on January 20, 2011 at 7:50 am. #
Another great piece on the Tunisian revolution is UC Irvine History Prof Mark Levine’s analysis of the Obama administration’s response:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/01/20111167156465567.html
Andrew Loewen on January 20, 2011 at 8:22 am. #
To be honest, Gardner sounds like a neoliberal to me. “Foreign Aid” (IMF, WB), “foreign investment,” “more competition,” etc. As McNally makes clear in the blog post I linked to, Tunisians have already been suffering from the consequences not just of corrupt elites but of neoliberal globalization.
They deserve better and I hope they continue to demand it.
Matthew Payne on January 20, 2011 at 9:26 am. #
Andrew, much of this is being driven by spikes in food prices around the world. Since a good deal of world grain supplies are being driven by state subsidies into fuel production, discussions of “market solutions” and “competition” ring particularly hollow. Archer Daniels Midland would cease to exist as a corporate behemoth without these subsidies and these subsidies are literally starving people. So much for “neo-liberalism.”
Matthew Payne on January 20, 2011 at 9:35 am. #
I think this is Mark LeVine, right? (http://www.humanities.uci.edu/history/faculty_profile_levine.php). Definitely not the usual wonk on the Mid-East. As for Gardner (http://www.aup.edu/faculty/dept/icp/gardner_h.htm) he’s an IR guy who thinks he knows as much about Russia as Tunisia. He’s really a NATO scholar and seems to have “gone native,” i.e., aligns his scholarship with the views of NATO muckety-mucks. No evidence he reads Arab or Russian. Forget the ne0-liberal label, he’s a neo-imperialist. And given his holding forth on things he has no training to analize, a hack.
Andrew Loewen on January 20, 2011 at 9:55 am. #
Matthew, thanks for the info on Gardner! And yeah it’s LeVine not Levine…. He wrote the book Heavy Metal Islam! and speaks like 8 languages or something. Inspired scholar.
Re: neoliberalism. As David Harvey has been at pains to insist, we must always distinguish between the utopian theory and the historical practices of neoliberalism, the latter of which has always included massive state involvement in the economy.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html
Nick Glossop on January 20, 2011 at 11:18 am. #
In defense of the post, if you tune out his prescriptions as the empty boilerplate I took them for, Gardner gave a more useful A-B-C of the story than did say Juan Cole at Democracy Now, as the latter spent all of his time sidetracked on the lesser issue of American media’s (non) portrayal of these events. But if you want to actually follow the story, Cole’s Informed Comment is the place to go.
Matthew Payne on January 20, 2011 at 8:18 pm. #
Nick, agreed.