Model, Event, Context: Globalization, Arab Social Movements, and the Modeling of Global Order

Abstract

In this article I scrutinize a particular discursive strategy that attempts to straightjacket the new social movements in the Arab uprisings. Rather than being open to new forms of polities and alternative modes of economic and social organization, an emerging governmental and scholarly discourse calls for a model of development for the Arab world. I argue that this model limits political imagination; and that it is the effect of a late modern logic that seeks to impose a particular form of politics in global political life. In, and through, the language of an archetype, these social movements, and the emerging polities, are being tamed to inherit the tensions and fragilities of a certain form of political and economic globalization.Keywords: globalization, modernization and development, North Africa and the Middle East Several governmental officials in the West, pundits on international networks, and scholars of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have suggested that Turkey could be a model for the transforming polities in the region. 1 Indeed, in order to quell suspicions of an Iranian trajectory, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have expressed their desire to follow the Turkish model (Yezdani, 2011). Setting aside the applicability of a historically unique experience to different polities, one might ask why there is a persistent attempt to export a model to MENA? In this article I question a particular discursive strategy that seems to straightjacket the 'newly-founded agency' on the Arab street. Rather than being open to new forms of polities and different modes of economic and social organization, this emerging governmental and scholarly discourse on a model seems to limit political imagination. This limiting, as I will argue, is the effect of a late modern logic that seeks to impose a particular form of politics on global political life, and most recently on top of recent Arab social movements. 2 In, and through, the language of a 'model', these new social movements are being tamed to inherit the tensions