11 / Summary

SUMMARY OF

Noam Chomsky’s

Contours of Global order: Domination,

Instability and Xenophobia in a Changing World

Current situation of the world is mostly a necessary consequence of the issues which have developed through 20^th century. Noam Chomsky explains the keys to understand nowadays’ complex reality.

The so called “Arab Spring” and the protest movements in developed countries claiming for authentic democracy mean an encouraging increase of popular forces. These two courses of action, nevertheless, run in different directions. In Arab world, towards getting elementary rights, denied by dictatorships and, in the west, towards defending rights, that had been won in long and hard struggles, now under severe attack. For the moment, we don’t know for sure how those movements will influence in the US declining as hegemonic country and in the “most strategically important area”, in Eisenhouer’s words.

Grand Area doctrine is a policymaking which was consolidated during the world war II. According to it, the US, as hegemonic country, had to dominate a Grand Area, including Western hemisphere, the Far East and the former British Empire, with its Middle East energy resources. Grand Area doctrines clearly license military intervention at will to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources. We have to in this context the invasion of Iraq or the so called Iranian threat, which is nothing but am exercise of sovereignty that might interfere with US freedom of action in the region. In addition, the support that the US and their allies to the Arab Spring, means actually that those revolutions, for example in Egypt or Tunisia, have consisted in a change of names, but the regimes remain. Grand Area doctrines have no problem to support dictatorship or democracy whatever they are obedient. While Grand Area doctrine still prevails, the capacity to implement it has declined, as has declined the US and allies hegemony.

To understand Current world we have to point the sharp change in economy towards the concentration of wealth and power, while the population real income have stagnated and people have been getting by with increase work hours, debt and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crisis, that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled from 1980s.

Another face of nowadays world, also inherited, is the situation of immigrants in the US and Europe, even more so at times of economic crisis. Immigrants are seem as a threat as well as white people will becoming a minority. As a result, racism is increasing in Western society and, what is more frightening, neofascism parties are rising in France, England and other developed countries.

To finish the sad picture, the ecological issues, including endangered species and global warning are denied by many powerful people, even trusting in the God’s promise to Noah that there will not be another flood. This is not the only frightening fanatic faith, the dogma of the efficient market, for example, is as dangerous as a religious dogma.