While visiting Marrakesh in October 2002, I soon found myself at the legendary market place of Jemaa el Fna once more. I went from stand to stand, finally stopping in front of a T-shirt with the words »Hard Rock Café Marrakech« printed on it. At this stage I had been in the Moroccan metropolis for some days and wanted very much to fill this gap in my knowledge. So I asked the owner of the stand where the café was. »What?«, he asked in his turn, putting on a bit of a dumb act. »Well,« I said, »does the Hard Rock Café Marrakech exist at all?« He said, »Of course!« »And where?«, I asked, a little impatient now. With a broad grin, he replied, »Here, on this T-shirt!« I bought the T-shirt straightaway, knowing well that the world trade agreement had been signed in Marrakesh in April 1994 – an agreement that decisively shifted the axis of globalization. »The free world trade order took priority, the Agenda 21 was degraded – and barely anyone noticed the contradiction between the two plans for the world,« as Hermann Scheer noted in this connection.1 The »Hard Rock Café Marrakech« T-shirt seemed to me to exemplify these contradictions: although this branch of one of the biggests chains in the world2 does not exist in Marrakesh, its image is extremely present there.

It would seem a good idea to examine all the brand-name fakes distributed at the edges of the global system under the aspect of their symbolic capital. After all, they began to reflect and comment on the logic of global capitalism long before the semiotic warfare of the brand activists3. Instead of their product status, however, it is above all the contexts in which copies and fakes circulate that should be scrutinized. Here, a good example is the bazaar – a Persian word that means a market, a shopping street or district, and which Karl Schlögel, a historian who specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, has accorded the status of an indicator. According to him, bazaars in formerly socialist countries are gauges of what stage the transformation towards a free market economy has reached4: Where bazaars have disappeared, the process has been completed; where they still exist, they are still needed. One should however put Schlögel’s theory more generally, and see the bazaar as a gauge of globalization. Post-Saddam Iraq shows why.

Immediately after the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad in April 2003, above all the capital of the Arabic country became a symbol of making a fresh start: Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship had been overthrown, a new era was beginning that was intended to be characterized by its freedom. The catchwords were »democracy« (the US Defence Secretary compared the toppling of the statue to the fall of the Berlin Wall) and »free market«. As well as global players, who took up position there as if attending a world exposition, individual entrepreneurs also headed for Baghdad – enticed by a mixture of desire for adventure, pioneering spirit and a readiness to take risks.

The hotels that had been inhabited by foreign guests even during the war quickly became a bazaar for information. Now, they were where businesspeople met those of like mind, rivals, potential partners and characters from novels like Leggy Starlitz, a »small gangster and international smuggler who could perhaps best be called a ›petty bourgeois criminal‹«, as the Texas-based futurist and author Bruce Sterling once called his creation.5 Myths grow up around hotels, mostly lodgings in the upper price range, but often also establishments that change overnight during a military operation from a shabby dollar-a-night dive into a technologically highly sophisticated broadcasting station. Yesterday, a run-down hole with insufficient electricity and power supply in a town that is perhaps not even marked on the map, situated in a region that is remote and undeveloped; today, with the help of organizations such as the European Broadcasting Union, a media centre in the global stream of information. But what does this gauge of transition reflect when it is constantly under fire despite the system conversion?6

As well as the hotels, the streets of Baghdad moulded the image of post-Saddam Iraq as an excavation site of capitalism: pictures of clattering and stinking street markets where traders set up their stands among rubble, ash and rubbish, second-hand markets that were lit up like a fun park in the evenings. While the »Spiegel« described the range of goods on offer there with the alliteration » Kühlschrank und Kalaschnikow« [Eng: Kelvinator and Kalashnikov]7, a German businessman said outright:»Baghdad is attractive for businesspeople from abroad, because commerce is tax-free for the time being; here, for a lot of money, you can get rid of things that also go well at home: BMWs and satellite dishes.«8 When Naomi Klein stressed that »the country is becoming part of the free market quasi overnight and in the dark«,9 she hit on an important point: the conditions of the transformation appeared as a question of transparency and obscurity. Baghdad now stood for a change that was beyond the dimension of the visible: the bazaar was, accordingly, to be understood here as a black market, as the centre of a black economy, the extent of whose value creation is, if not impossible, at the very least extremely difficult to estimate.10 Another thing that sets the post-Saddam market place apart from the conventional bazaar is that it represents the niche of a system in its spatial materiality: of a system that shows fractures above all in the places where the structures of (transnational) economy and the (neo-colonial) state overlap under the conditions of a post-war/reconstruction period. Although this period represents a transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, and thus a free market economy, it is overshadowed by a guerilla war that seems to show no sign of stopping.11 It is thus a process whose start and finish cannot be easily fixed on a temporal axis, no more than can its spatial coordinates.12 The bazaar as a gauge of the stage of transition thus possesses a characteristic that is, in Jamesonian terms13, schizophrenic; a characteristic that Alexander Osang, talking about the re-unification of Germany, described as follows: It is right nearby and it is now.14

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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