Globalization and a misshapen world

By Ira RifkinMSNBC CONTRIBUTORNov. 4 — A year ago, Agbani Darego, a tall, thin 18-year-old from Nigeria, became the first black African to win the Miss World title. But do not confuse her victory with the recognition of traditional African beauty. Darego won not because she personifies female fairness in accordance with the Nigerian norm — which values a degree of voluptuousness at odds with Darego’s fashion runway minimalism — but because she conforms to the prevailing international (read Western) image of the ideal woman. THANKS TO Darego’s success, this year’s Miss World competition is scheduled for Nigeria, where the government, desperate for favorable publicity for itself and its violence-wracked nation, has eagerly embraced an event broadcast to 140 countries. It has not gone smoothly, however. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state, is nearly equally divided between Muslims and Christians, who are in growing conflict, and Miss World has now been sucked into this dangerous vortex. CULTURE CLASH What we have is a Nigerian elite seeking to pander to Western sexual fantasies even as a sizeable segment of Nigeria’s citizens seeks to retreat into a religious fantasy of purity that stands in sharp contrast to the West’s general openness on sexual matters. Within the tale is another example of the cultural dissonance that globalization has wrought, and its ability to exacerbate existing local tensions. Nigeria’s Muslim militants view the entire Miss World enterprise as an immoral "parade of nudity" and have threatened to disrupt the pageant. Alhaji Ishaq Kunle Sanni, president of the National Council of Muslim Youth, said, "We cannot fathom what benefit would accrue to the nation, in a show in which nakedness of women is exhibited with absolute (recklessness) and all sorts of immoralities come in its wake." Meanwhile, a number of Miss World contestants — Spain, France, Denmark, Switzerland and Kenya, among them — have threatened to boycott the event because of the death sentence (by stoning) an Islamic court has meted out to a 31-year-old Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal, for becoming an unwed mother. While the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo has spoken out against the sentence, it has chosen not to intervene so far, insisting that Nigeria’s federal justice system is sure to ultimately overturn it. In an effort to placate Muslim critics, the beauty competition, originally scheduled for Nov. 30 in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, has been pushed back a week so as not to fall within Islam’s holy month of Ramadan — a conflict that could have easily been avoided in the first place by simply consulting a calendar rather than TV production schedules alone. As for the death sentence faced by Lawal, its been stayed until at least January 2004, when it is presumed she will have completed breast-feeding her child. The international anti-death penalty group Hands Off Cain says it trusts Obasanjo to make sure the sentence is never carried out, and so it opposes the threatened boycott because of the deleterious impact that scuttling the Miss World competition could have on Nigeria’s fragile democracy. BACKLASH AGAINST GLOBALIZATION In Nigeria and elsewhere in the developing world, much of the backlash against globalization stems from its failure to deliver the economic benefits promised in return for bowing to transnational corporate dictates — which is what virtually every nation has done for fear of being left out of the dream. The seductiveness of riches seems too much for political leaders already seduced by power. But not to be overlooked is the depth of resistance within the developing world’s populations to the Western values that come with globalization’s economic promise. Many Muslims, as the West has hopefully learned since Sept. 11, 2001, are particularly antagonistic toward globalization because of its association with the Christian West. For them, globalization seems just another Western plot to smother Islamic values. In the absence of economic gain, cultural virtues become even more cherished. Miss World is hardly just compensation. DIVIDING NATIONS As complicated as it is, economics is rather cut and dry compared to the social complexities that constitute culture. In essence, you’re either making money or you’re not, and you react accordingly. It’s far more difficult to deal with long-held sexual mores that are tied up with issues of pride, honor and life’s perceived cosmic implications, as are evident in Nigeria’s Miss World conundrum. Lawal’s death sentence may well be reversed, since Nigeria’s courts overturned a similar case earlier this year. But that will not address Nigeria’s bigger problem, which is also representative of globalization’s bigger problem. In the absence of fair economic progress, grass-roots support for globalization is destined to wither when local cultural values are ignored. Rather than promoting peace and cooperation through transnational economic and cultural enterprises, globalization will further divide nations. Or, as in Nigeria’s case, further fracture states along religious, ethnic and class groupings.