Are all politics local?

The Arab Spring

        Are all politics local? I think ideally it should be. However, so much is dependent on international relations and foreign policy that it is hardly the case that all politics are local. In the United States, a strong case can be made that all politics are local. This is because of the political system the US was built on. There are local and state governments, besides the federal government, that give flexibility to politics in the United States, allowing locals to focus on issues and situations that affect them and them alone, and come up with solutions for it. This is a very elaborate and complicated system that can only work in a very orderly society. For example, it would never work in the MENA, which is anything but orderly. It can be said that it reflects the isolationist approach of the United States from the foundation of the republic until its emergence as a superpower at the end of the second world war. During that period, both the US government and people simply chose to ignore power politics and distanced themselves from Europe. The US government avoided any alliances with European countries, with the exceptions in the two world wars, and people were simply uninterested in the world around them, as they simply focused on local news. That changed, of course, with the US becoming the superpower in the world, and the US felt morally obliged to bring order and democracy to the world (and holding the USSR and communism off). However, even today in local communities people are often unaware of what is happening in the world, as they only care about local issues and politics.

        Taking a look at the MENA, the first thing that stands out is that the MENA consists of many countries with different regime types, whereas the US is a single country with one central government. The MENA has always been a magnet of chaos, and its impossible for an event that happens in one country to not affect another country in the region. One would think about the proximity of the countries at first, but indeed not all countries in the MENA are that close to one and another. It is hard to think that one event that happened in Morroco would affect people in Iraq or Syria. Yet this was the case with the Arab spring, when one revolution sparked another, and then another. This shows in reality that politics cannot be local, even though I feel like it would be much more efficient and beneficial if it were so.


photo: http://pol297thearabspring.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/arab-spring-map.jpg