Abstract
In his book The Paradox of Americctn Power Harvard’s Joseph Nye argues that while the United States is militarily more powerful than any other nation on the earth, such power alone has not been the only source of its current eminence. Rather, he points out that this hard power has been complemented with economic power as well as what he termed “soft power,” which is based on the United States’ underlying philosophical and moral appeal—particularly freedom, enterprise, and equality under the law.
From Napoleon to Bush and the numerous local despots in between, the modern state in the Arab world is at war with the people. As the resistance to it mounted, it also worked to increase its repressive capacity, culminating in the “Black Hole State” [with] no independent civil society or economic sphere.1
Abdel Wahab El Affandi
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Notes
El Affandi, Abdel Wahab, “Political Culture and the Crisis of Democracy in the Arab World,” Democracy in the Arab World: Explaining the Deficit, ed. Ibrahim El Baddawi and Samir Makdisi, Routledge, 2011, p. 36.
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Rifkin, Jeremy, The Empathic Civilization, New York: Penguin Group, 2009.
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© 2012 Wissam S. Yafi
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Yafi, W.S. (2012). The Paradox of Arab Weakness. In: Inevitable Democracy in the Arab World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011022_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011022_5
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