Deglobalization & The Muslim World. Middle Nation Podcast (E:13)

This is Shahid Bolson and the Middle Nation podcast episode number 13. According to most geopolitical analysis, the international order that facilitated globalization was established after World War two and was built in the context of the Cold War between The United States and The Soviet Union. The US wanted as many allies as possible on side against the Soviets and therefore largely guaranteed global security, which also meant the security of international trade. The Cold War has been over now for thirty years, and the general consensus is that The US has been steadily losing interest in maintaining that system of order for at least the last twenty years. Accepted opinion is that the world is now going through a period of deglobalization, and we're going to increasingly see nation states reemerge as each country has to start fending for itself amidst a reduction in the globalization process.

Borders that had melted away under globalization are expected to harden once more, and the repercussions of all of this are going to be enormous, particularly given the dire demographic decline in most countries. Export driven economies will suffer and will be unable to profitably transition into consumer led economies because they will have to manufacture goods to sell domestically, but to a shrinking population. Only those countries with significant young populations will be able to successfully make such a transition. That's the general analysis of the situation today in the world. And I would say that this analysis is at least partially correct.

There is indeed an increased movement towards reining in supply chains and bringing manufacturing back within a country's domestic workforce. The far flung supply chains that characterized globalization in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands do appear to be going away. But what does that actually mean? I was writing over twenty years ago that the logic of corporate ascendancy meant that no country would be immune to the neoliberal program, including Western nations. Corporations are not patriotic.

They are power entities that transcend nation states, and billionaires are a class of people who can truly call themselves citizens of the world and not citizens of any particular nation. When Trump was elected in 2016 with promises of bringing American manufacturing jobs back from China, I wrote at the time that this did not constitute, quote, unquote, making America great again, but rather making America more like China. Because after all, the president of The United States has almost nothing to do with jobs. Job creation is solely the purview of the private sector, and what transpires in the private sector is driven solely by profitability, not nationalist ideology. So if jobs were going to come back from China, it could only ever be because doing so was better for the corporate balance sheet.

Sure enough, by all metrics, the conditions of American workers have been in steep decline. Indeed, the society as a whole is increasingly reminiscent of a country in the developing world, which is to say a country that has been ravaged and exploited by neoliberalism. For the four fifths of all privately employed people in The United States, including those in manufacturing, construction, health care, and the service sector, real wages have been falling for years. Worker safety standards are deteriorating. Small pockets of extreme wealth amidst the sea of poverty, such as one would normally see in the developing world have become a conspicuous feature of American society.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, The US is trillions of dollars behind in building and maintaining infrastructure. Whole cities like Detroit, and indeed most of Michigan, resemble failed states. Mass surveillance, the militarization of the police, a higher incarceration rate than anywhere else on earth, the ludicrous and largely undisguised influence of money in politics, all of these are indicators that The US has, in essence, become a functional Banana Republic? Because, of course, it has. What has been profitable for corporations globally would inevitably be imposed throughout the Western world.

The differences between China and The United States are mostly rhetorical, not actual. In fact, if you look at the labor laws between the two countries, there are a number of areas in which Chinese workers actually have more legal rights than those in America. De globalization is just a euphemism for the third worldization of western countries. But suffice it to say, multinational corporations are not going to shrink. Reestablishing borders and nation states represents a move to restrict the power and reach of national governments and the movement of their populations.

It's not going to restrain global corporate power at all. Quite the opposite. The trend labeled as deglobalization will only increase the power of the biggest private sector players, further disempower states, and drive hundreds of millions of people into abject poverty and hunger. Consider this, industrial agriculture relies on natural gas and oil for the transport and use of equipment, for pesticides, and for fertilizer. As international shipping decreases overall, the cost of importing these products will rise.

Now remove or disrupt the availability of the easy access to petroleum products and crop yields will be cut roughly in half. Rich nations with large tracts of farmland or rather large tracts of farmland that are owned and managed by big agribusinesses will be able to maximize even limited access to petroleum products through GMO processes, gene editing, and individuated crop maintenance through technology. Thus, deglobalization is expected to allow the world's biggest agriculture companies like ConAgra and ADM to completely dominate farming and food supply, while potentially also creating even greater inequalities worldwide in access to food. There will be famines wherever these companies do not control farming and where technology cannot be utilized to accommodate decreased access to pesticides, fertilizer, and equipment reliant upon petroleum products. In other words, if a country wants to produce even enough food for domestic consumption, their farmland is going to have to be surrendered to major global players who can afford the new cost of efficiency.

In deglobalization, instead of offshoring physically, companies will be able to do it remotely in many sectors, thus continuing many of the mechanisms of globalization without the attendant costs. That eliminates the indirect benefits of offshoring for host countries. For instance, the economic boost of buying, renting, or building physical office space, worker transit, foreign direct investment, and infrastructure support often subsidized by foreign companies to facilitate business. It can all be done online now. So the most predatory aspects of globalization are therefore likely to intensify through deglobalization.

Workforces around the world will still be pitted against one another in a race to the bottom, and corporations will become even more liberated from government oversight. Now as I talked about in the last podcast, the Muslims are in the best demographic position in the world. We are, as a group, the youngest population on earth. This means that our economic and political sovereignty are more important than ever. As multinational corporations, anational corporations will inevitably target our countries for exploitation.

As a workforce and as a consumer group, we are going to be among their most important potential resources for continued profit growth since markets around the world are in a state of gradual evaporation. Our individual countries are gonna be vulnerable. Our major companies will be in the crosshairs of predatory multinationals who wanna swallow them up, and our natural resources, literally nature itself and our lands will be subjected to attempts to commoditize it. For those of you who don't already know, there's a new type of corporation that's been invented called nature asset companies, NACs. That basically means that they will select an area of nature, some asset of nature, so called, be it a lake or a forest or what have you, and they will assign a a dollar value to that and then convert it into a publicly traded security on the stock market.

This is already happening in Costa Rica, and it's certainly foreseeable in many Muslim countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and any number of Muslim countries in Africa. It is crucial for us to build solidarity between Muslim countries and to develop a pan Islamic economy, a Muslim economic block, not entirely dissimilar to the European Union. As the deglobalization trend drives a resurgence of nationalism across western countries, we have to initiate a countertrend amongst our own, reestablishing, if you will, at least on the economic front, the organizing model of the Khilafa. This may seem so distant and unattainable now, but our rise is going to span decades. There is no reason why there cannot be a union of Muslim states by the year 2100, if not sooner.

We just have to shake off the rapidly vanishing paradigms of the last century and properly understand the inevitable trajectory of the global economy and recognize that Muslims are quickly moving into a position of unparalleled importance. But we can only utilize our advantage if we organize as a unit, as an ummah, and stop seeing ourselves as the hapless and helpless victims of western hubris. Now the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Conference, has been a lame duck organization for years, if it ever had any significance. But it is still conceivable that the OIC could actually start to mean something if we choose to make it mean something. Global Muslim unity has to become real, practical, and not just symbolic or rhetorical.

The OIC's framework agreement on a trade preferential system between member states was drafted thirty years ago, but has never been put into effect. We need to understand that this sort of agreement has renewed importance and urgency as Muslim countries become more and more the focus of the global economy. For a long time now, we've treated these matters lightly because no one could see any real potential independent economic revival in the Muslim world. But today, the potential is real enough and substantially enough to pivot the whole global economy in our direction. We have to start taking this seriously.

Otherwise, any single Muslim country on its own will face a tremendous struggle against the power of multinational corporations who combined wield economic influence that eclipses their national budgets. I mean, the fact that the entire GDP of Egypt is barely a third of the money controlled by an investment firm like BlackRock or Vanguard. Our countries simply have to work in unison with policies of pan Islamic protectionism and unified approaches to trade and investment that can start a reversal of the deindustrialization and disempowerment of the previous century in a way that will make the Muslim world rise together. This is entirely doable, though difficult, and the only truly important thing that is required of us is just to readjust our thinking. Western domination was never a consequence of their inherent superiority, and our decline was never a consequence of our inferiority.

They enjoyed certain advantages at a particular moment in history due to a combination of factors and they maximized those advantages to gain ascendancy. But now they are beset by an enormous number of defects and we are poised today to enjoy multiple advantages which we now have to maximize And if we do, our ascendancy is certain.