Militarization, Globalization, and Islamist Social Movements: How Today’s Ideology of Islamophobia Fuels Militant Islam

At the dawn of the 21st century, the September 11th terrorist attacks and U.S. embrace of a so-called global war on terrorism shattered illusions of the universal spread of liberal cosmopolitan globalization promoted by theorists of the end of history after the collapse of the Soviet empire and break-up of the Soviet Union (Fukuyama, 1992). Yet, rather than revising such teleology, radical Islam quickly took the place of communism as the newest obstacle to achieving peace, prosperity and liberal capitalist democracy; one that called for an aggressive military response (cf. Fukuyama, 2001/2002; cf. Huntington, 2001/2002; Reifer, 2006a, b, c). Rather than ushering in the dawn of a new era of democracy, peace and prosperity, though, reliance on crude military power has revealed instead the growing contradictions of U.S. power in an age of neoliberal globalization and militarization. (1) Today the world faces the prospect of an endless war and intensifying global polarization. U.S. military expenditures are slated to rise to $622 billion for fiscal year 2008, including $140 billion in war-related expenses, making it "the highest level of spending since the height of the Korean War," according to Steven Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. (2) While extremist forms of Islam have gotten great attention, the media and academic scholarship have been much slower in addressing the varieties and vibrancy of Islamic mobilization that are leading to a global Islamist resurgence. How does one explain this paradox represented by the simultaneous duality of the efflorescence of U.S.-led neoliberal globalization and militarization and Islamist mobilization on a global scale? Crucial to answering this question is a recognition that, while global integration originated as early as the 15th century as a long term historical process, it is never linear and is always conflicted, for its impact is always mediated by specific, historically situated local institutions. Thus globalization reflexively suggests localization of the global or translocalization (cf. Benedict, 1999: 113-115). Nor is globalization continuous: rather it is characterized by rapid spurts of growth, followed by tension, resistance and stagnation. Indeed, like the relative decline and subsequent efflorescence of British hegemony during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, globalization in our own time is characterized by what Karl Polanyi (2001) called the simultaneous rise of the self-regulating market and movements for the self-protection society against the unregulated market mechanism. The current phase of neoliberal globalization and militarization began in earnest in the late 1960s and early 1970s and has been intimately related to the contradictions and changing fortunes of U.S. hegemony during this period. Contemporary globalization is simultaneously characterized by ruthless processes of global integration--of finance, production and trade--and marginalization, disrupting traditional livelihoods and leading to a resurgence of what Immanuel Wallerstein (1983, 1999) calls ethno-national (and what we might call ethno-transnational-religious) movements. These movements are today in the vanguard of anti-systemic struggles against Western intrusion, having largely supplanted formerly secular anti-imperialist struggles. Globalization is characterized by what theorists call space-time compression, shrinking the globe and effectively creating a new culture of simultaneity, where networked interaction transcending national boundaries across the globe becomes ever present. From the communications-satellite-telecommunications revolution to long-distance air travel and internet communication and media, most recently with Al Jazeera broadcasting satellite television pictures of the U.S. and Israeli invasions of Iraq and Lebanon across the Middle East, we are increasingly living in one world (see Khadar, et al., 2003). …