These are the kinds of questions that the articles in this collection raise. The answers do not speak with one voice, but their concern is the same, to place a critical focus on the process of globalization in the Middle East, but also to see the Middle Easterners as actors and not just as victims in the process.
Globalization can as many such 'topical' concepts have many meanings.
In a reverse of this discourse, globalization means the imposition of cultural values from the West and North on the South and East, and the inherent destruction of the values, positive as negative, that were specific to these regions and societies. In another type of discourse, globalization is primarily an economic term, where the agent for change is partly the collapse of closed and protectionist state economies in most or all countries of the Third World, and partly the active policies of global economic actors such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and others, who make economic liberalization and the removal of any remains of 'socialist' or even social economic policies a requirement for the economic aid these countries need to survive. For some, a necessary but traumatic restructuring brought about by the fallacy of socialist economics, for others a conscious plan for the economic world domination of those who now hold the reins of economic power. It is not the aim of this book to present a final answer to these, basically political, questions of what globalization means and whether it is good or bad. In other words, to look at the Middle East as not only the receiving end, but also the acting end of the bargain, in various aspects and conceptions.