Keynote address: terrorism and globalization; an international perspective.

• Author: Lim, Linda

My talk today will address two questions: first, what has terrorism to do with globalization; and second, what have corporations, and corporate governance, to do with peace.

TERRORISM AND GLOBALIZATION

The answer to the first question is easy. Terrorism has little or nothing to do with globalization, just as it has little or nothing to do with Islam. Most of the many varieties of terrorism that afflict and have long afflicted the world are responses not to global phenomena, but to intensely local ones. Examples include particularly ethnic, nationalist, and religious fault lines such as violence by Catholics and Protestants in Ireland; Basques in Spain; the Hindu Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka; Kashmiris, Sikhs, and Hindu nationalists in India; the Aum cult in Japan; and Uighurs in Xinjiang, China.

The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center on September 11 were also not making a statement against globalization, unlike the anti-globalization activist who leads French farmers in trashing McDonald's outlets there. (1) Rather, as far as can be discerned from the propaganda of the hijackers' assumed leader, Osama bin Laden, they were making a statement against, variously, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, (2) its insistence on continued bombing of and economic sanctions against Iraq, (3) and its support of Israel against the Palestinians. (4) In my experience, and from what I read, these same resentments are felt by most Muslims everywhere, who nonetheless condemn terrorism and recognize it to be counter to the teachings of Islam. On October 10, the sixty countries which belong to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), unambiguously declared of the September 11 attacks that "such deplorable terrorist acts run counter to Islam's tolerant heavenly message of peace, harmony, tolerance, and respect among people.... Islam values human life and denounces the killing of innocent people." (5)

Islam itself is not against globalization, capitalism, the West, or the enfranchisement of women, contrary to what many editorialists in the Western press proclaim. (6) Rather, Islam was spread by globalization in earlier eras, including by Arab traders who ventured into Southeast Asia beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (7) Islam has always been a religion of world trade and of world traders. The Prophet Mohammed's wife was herself a trader, whose market-derived wealth enabled him to concentrate his efforts on preaching and spreading the religion. (8) And it was Muslim traders' control of the lucrative spice trade between South and Southeast Asia and Western Europe that motivated the European Age of Exploration, which has landed everyone here today.

Today, many of those throughout the Muslim world--one hundred thirty million each in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, two hundred million in Indonesia, perhaps another two hundred million in all of Africa, together outnumber Arab Muslims by almost three to one (9)--who share the above-mentioned grievances about U.S. foreign policy, are highly-educated, even Western-educated professionals and business executives. (10) These highly-educated Muslims study in U.S. MBA program and read the Quran online. The women among them work and occupy leadership positions in society. (11) Muslim women leaders include a past prime minister of Turkey, (12) a past president of Pakistan, (13) the current and past presidents of Bangladesh, (14) and the current president of Indonesia. (15) In Malaysia today--where nearly two-thirds of all Muslim college students are women (16)--the Governor of the Central Bank, the Solicitor-General are Muslim women, as is the Minister of Trade and Industry, who is the most senior cabinet minister besides the prime minister and a tireless promoter of foreign investment, are all Muslim. This is a record of female political and economic leadership that Western countries individually and collectively cannot match.

Most of the activists in the so-called "backlash against globalization" that has been played out, often violently, around international economic fora in recent years have been Westerners, not Muslims. It would be as inaccurate to say of their much more frequent and populous protests that "the West" is against globalization, as it would be to say of the World Trade Center terrorism that Muslims are against world trade.

The mass anti-U.S, demonstrations in numerous Muslim countries, from Pakistan to Indonesia, since the bombing of Afghanistan began are demonstrations against the bombing, and not in support of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center terrorism...