[SIZE=+1]Is Iran's Strategy Counter-Hegemonic?
[/SIZE] [FONT="] The questions regarding variations in social development, economic progress, and political empowerment have produced a voluminous literature over the past century, and because of the complexity of these issues, much important reflection will continue well into the future. In the early 1980s, a United Nations' Commission coined the term "sustainable development" as a public statement regarding the deteriorating socio-economic, political, and environmental conditions. Since then, the use and abuse of the term has rendered it dubious and almost irrelevant. This paper proposes Comprehensive Sustainable Development (CSD) as a substitute in the hope that re-conceptualization of the term would incorporate critiques of various manifestations of capital's hegemony – its control over science and technology, particularly in the contemporary period, by way of restricting homegrown, national technological development. It is argued that in the pursuit of its interests contemporary global capitalism, as a continuation of the 19th and the 20th century colonialism/imperialism, is resorting to the policy of imperialism through the implementation of dependent industrialization (imported technology) rather than CSD. [/FONT]
[FONT="] The indices used to measure comprehensive sustainable development are diametrically different than those used to measure dependent capitalist development. At the core of the indices of CSD are the contribution to human development, social progress, and radical democracy. It involves the negation of atomistic indices such as rugged individualism, competition, and alienation of people dependently embedded in capitalist development. CSD is a rejection of neoliberal economic policy and its foundation: Social Darwinism. It is in favor of collective well-being as measured by indices such as national liberation, human emancipation and progress, social inclusion, and political empowerment. CSD requires an able and willing national political front and a strong public sector. It requires boldness in initiation and innovation in the development process with an awareness that there will be repercussions and consequences from hegemonic global forces. [/FONT]
[FONT="] The foundations of CSD are social justice, human emancipation, and dignity. Very few developing countries have initiated a development process which contains elements of the CSD outlook. The case of Iranian development, and its nuclear program in particular, demonstrate a clear national desire for CSD. Likewise, it has evoked a manifestation of the behavior of the hegemonic powers with regard to the control of science and technology. As a rapidly developing country Iran has concentrated its efforts on the development and expansion of basic industry while acknowledging with every development initiative the indispensability of social development, social justice, health, and a rising standard of living. To what extent Iran can deliver on the social justice front remains to be seen, but the realization that it cannot comprehensively sustain its development without regard for social justice and respect for the rights of its citizens is a promising departure. And precisely, it is with the delivery of some measure in the areas of justice and social inclusion that Iran can be an effective player in the process of comprehensive sustainable development.[/FONT]
[FONT="] SUSTAINABLE STAGNATION: PRELUDE TO THE RISE OF AN UN-SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. [/FONT]
[FONT="] The history of the global political economy in various epochs (beginning with the rise of European colonial empires) is a history of hegemonic policies and inter-imperial rivalries on the one hand and the struggle to resist hegemony on the other. From the 19th century European colonial penetration of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the context of a multi-polar system and its demise by the first inter-imperialist war of the 20th century (WWI), to the rise of the bi-polar system of East/West competition, to the present uni-polar world system led by Anglo-American corporate empire, the common thread has been the hegemonic tendencies and an international system based on the hegemonic rule by the economic elites. In the 19th century, colonial powers divided the world amongst themselves. Between 1870 and 1898, Britain added 4 million square miles and 88 million people to its empire. France gained nearly the same territorial area with a population of 40 million. Germany won one million square miles and 16 million people. Belgium took close to one million miles and 30 million people. Portugal joined the race with 800,000 miles of new land and 9 million inhabitants (Heilbroner, 1966:1630). In the first 75 years of the 19th century, colonial empires added to their territories an average of 83,000 square miles every year, primarily for the purpose of economic exploitation. Between the 1870s and WWI this area of colonial control increased to about 240,000 square miles (about 85 percent of the earth's surface) by 1914 (Magdoff, 1978). By 1900 Britain had fifty colonies and was in control of 450 million people while its own population was no more than 10 percent of that (45 million). France had thirty-three colonies with a population of 56 million, Germany was in control of thirteen colonies with a population of 15 million people. These extraterritorial gains were to support the development of the colonial metropolis – for the most part at the expense of the colonies. As providers of raw material and agricultural crops, the colonies were the center of an ongoing primitive accumulation. Then as now, accumulation proceeded as an end in itself. The colonialists introduced an ecologically destructive agriculture as a means to that end and as a substitute for traditional agriculture. The German chemist and agronomist Justus von Liebig (1859) documented the case of the British destruction of the Irish ecology through surplus extraction by way of intensive agriculture. Liebig referred to this system of taking more from the land than was ever put back into it, as the "robbery system." The English agricultural system imposed on Ireland for a century and half "indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil" (Marx, 1976:638). By relying on the work of Liebig, Marx (1976:637-638; 283-290; 1981:949-950; 1964:112) borrowed the concept of metabolism and subsequently utilized it to illustrate systemic dysfunction within capitalism. "Metabolic interaction" between human beings and nature conveys the realization that we live in a natural system that must be governed by the laws of that natural system itself, which involve also "systemic restoration." He went on to suggest that the process of capital accumulation has created an "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism." This rift in social metabolism is the excessive accumulation of private wealth at the expense of the earth and the human public's well-being, a distortion which causes imbalances in social development. Sustainability requires a symbiotic relationship between humanity and the natural environment.[/FONT]
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