“What will happen if developing countries don’t have anything to export?” asks, Nabi Sonboli, a columnist, with the Tehran Times (31st of May). This is, indeed, a very important question that Third World countries will need to ponder about in the context of Iran’s nuclear saga.

The author, in the article, may have not attempted to address the question adequately, but it forms one of the core issues that the Scandinavian thinker Johann Galtung had dealt with quite exhaustively when he was expounding his centre-periphery treatise. I want to carry the discussion a bit further. Johann Galtung, in his structural theory of imperialism, said that the world is divided into the centre (erstwhile colonial powers, now joined by the United States) -- otherwise known as metropolitan countries, and the periphery -- formed by countries in the Third World camp, many of them being former colonies. In the setup of the unequal centre-periphery relationship, the periphery is positioned on the receiving end. Look at what happened after the colonial invasion of colonies, and the reappearance of globalization in its current phase after the demise of communism, whereby economic liberalization (in the Third World) is actually opening up doors for mass-produced goods in the centre to flood our shops, while their gates are closed. Whereas Third World countries are discouraged to invest in heavy industrial and technological development, and instead are cheated to believe that to export industrial products and technology from the West is the cheapest option. How is this option cheaper? You will find part of the answers to this question in the latest development of the Iran nuclear saga. I will go to that question later?

It is true the inequitable globalization process seeks to coerce Third World countries to synchronize their economies and cultures, and unfortunately, their thinking, with that of the West. In this kind of unequal structural relationship, the Galtungian philosophy will tell you that the centre will always dictate what the periphery will have to oblige, whether it likes or not! Galtungian theory indicates that globalization, since its first appearance as colonialism, has a tendency to disable our ability to think, to invent, to fashion our tools, and to plan what we want to do for ourselves. Globalization always told us that it was cheaper to buy from Europe, America or Japan, than to manufacture the same products in our countries. They will use our leadership’s credulity (whenever they find it ready to be used as leverage), our weak economic base, and less powerful military and diplomatic positions to coerce us to accept their proposals that we stop producing locally.

The same approach is now being used euphemistically as a strategy to wave off the nuclear stand-off. Iran is being asked to import nuclear fuel from the West on top of hefty financial tongs being dangled to the country. In this process, according to Galtung, Iran will have to kill its nuclear technological initiative, and relax, as it waits for nuclear and financial handouts. If Iran had thought of importing nuclear technology or electricity born of the beleaguered project in Ifsahan, then the EU-American proposal wants to make that dream still-born, hence the essence of Nabi Sonboli’s question, “What will happen if developing countries don’t have anything to export?” They will simply die, and they are already dying anyway, though slowly, as a result of waiting to be fed by financial resources from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; dying of asphyxiating floods of cheaper imports that kill local industry and technological initiative in most Third World countries, and, as I have written elsewhere, one of the unfortunate things is that one of the problems of Third World countries is accepting to run on borrowed ideas, in fact, borrowed everything; dying of attempts to become copycats of Western democratic ideals which, we erroneously believe, are capable of solving both our economic and social ills. What is happening in the Third World now is like a small time fisherman being asked to stop fishing because a rich neighbor has promised to supply fish to him. If the fisherman accepts the offer, then he loses his initiative, loses his will and power determine the essence of being, and what will happen to him, after years, when the rich neighbor dies or stops being cooperative, the man will have forgotten how to fish!

If it accepts the EU-American offer, Iran will stop being a country of scientists, and it will revert to its position of being an importer of ideas, just as other Third World countries have been made to become. You can imagine how nuclear research can spur research in all other related aspects of sciences and technology. But stopping the project will have serious consequences, it will make teachers at the university stop thinking and ask students to study not to become thinkers, but to become copiers of borrowed ideas, for this is what the EU-American offer all means. And it is such offers that are asphyxiating Third World countries which have been asked not to think.

One must remember that globalization had always come with the stereotypical ideals that the West is the standard, the template of ideas, the norm for democratic principles, while the rest of the members of the world are treated as not capable of having an independent path to development. Iran is in the struggle to generate local knowledge, or indigenize nuclear technology, and the West is saying this can only happen in terms laid down by them: stopping the nuclear research, accepting handouts, at a cost of course, and thereby stopping the quest for the generation of knowledge. And this is what Galtung has said, imperialism will ask you to exchange your thinking and innovative capabilities with ready-made products whose technological know-how you will never come to know, to imitate, and if you do, at financial, political and diplomatic terms which are more costly. But what is more costly than making your own people unable to think and generate information which local people can use and access at cheaper costs?

Third World countries, I suppose, must look at the saga from the angle of having their hands being tied behind their backs and someone asking them to write what they think. Some Western philosophers and thinkers, even to date, still think of people in the Third World as less intelligent, possessing lower IQs and with all other such labels that prophesy weakness of Third World people’s intellectual capabilities. However, when Third World people challenge these stereotypical notions by engaging in serious thinking, research, and innovation, that endeavor is negatively labeled as rebellion and, if proper excuses are found, will be said to be fostering grounds for global terrorism.

Indeed, as a rejoinder to Nabi Sonboli and to prove Galtung’s theory true, I will say that Third World countries will never have things to export and to show off as achievements to other races and people of the world as long as they accept to import knowledge instead of generating it themselves.