الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Globalization and the Contribution of the European Muslims

“Democracy is subject to what the German sociologist and Social Democrat Robert Michels a century ago called, ‘The iron law of oligarchy.’ Wherever there is democracy there is also oligarchy, and with it the deprivation of the right to make decisions — down through the centuries.” The Swiss Jean Ziegler notes how new feudal structures, manipulated by cosmocrats without any loyalty to nations, already control the corporations. In his book “The empire of Shame” Ziegler writes:

… a brutal massive refeudalisation is taking place right now. The new colonial masters, the multinational concerns – I call them cosmocrats– are embezzling the riches of the world. This new feudal hegemony is a thousand times more brutal than the aristocratic one at the time of the French revolution.

Many European thinkers today already see the actual enemy of democracy in global capitalism. The German Peter Sloterdijk fears an authoritarian capitalism – i.e. a capitalism which does not really need “democracy” anymore. Terrorism from this point of view is only an episode - but which accelerates the establishment of the structures of the world state and which changes the form of states. And it is true: Terrorism has altered the western world in an alarmingly rapid manner. These changes have been triggered (even if not exclusively) by terrorism - which has helped the new power structures to establish far-reaching exceptional rights, or, as the Italian intellectual Agamben puts it, a permanent state of emergency. “In all Western democracies,” states Agamben, “the declaration of the state of emergency is being replaced by an unprecedented expansion of the security paradigm as a normal technique of governance.” The example of Guantanamo in particular, but also the new camps on the external borders of the EU have shown the world that the establishment of exceptional rights and exceptional places is once again possible at any time in the modern age.

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