American dreams of reinventing the ‘orient’ : digital democracy and Arab youth cultures in a regional perspective

Abstract

The histories of foreign influence in the Middle East have come to be dominated by numerous military interventions. The dominance of hard power has helped mask the equally influential role that ‘softer’ forms have had on shaping local cultures and societies. The construction of the ‘Orient’, as what Edward Said called a ‘living tableau of queerness’, has been ripped from the pages of Goethe, Flaubert and Renan, and is now presented through a new mixture of government, NGO, philanthropic and private flows (Said, 1988: 103). This chapter, therefore, attempts to construct an alternative genealogy of interventions in the Arab region by putting non-militaristic and diplomatic techniques at the heart of the story of influences to shape the character of the contemporary Middle East. The particular role of educational support and training, which is often sold as a benign and benevolent practice, has historically been central to such cultural strategies. This is evident from the growing influence of foreign universities in the Middle East during British and French colonial rule, to the development of philanthropic funds, Fulbright scholarships and the restructuring and re-facultisation of university departments under the auspices of the United States – whose influence in the region has come to replace that of the former colonisers in the post-Cold War era. Moreover, such processes have been considerably affected by today’s era of globalisation, with its increasing spread of North American universities across the globe and the more general trend of the privatisation of higher education. These global processes are having a considerable impact on present trends in the development of higher education in the Middle East.