Impact - Wealth Disparity

The deconstruction of European narratives around the risks associated to the MSP has consequently pointed to three major implications of institutional orientalism. In the politico-normative sphere, institutional orientalism constitutes a power discourse that arbitrarily defines the meaning of “rationality”, based on self-referred parameters. In transnational infrastructure projects involving both developed and developing nations, it allows Northern countries to present their own regulatory framework as the most suitable for the common enterprise and eventually also compels Southern countries to modify their domestic rules. In the economic sphere, institutional orientalism reproduces mutatis mutandis the colonial mechanisms of wealth transfer from Southern to Northern countries because it legitimizes subjective risk narratives that make Southern countries' access to international finance significantly more difficult and expensive. Finally, in the politico-cultural sphere, the concept enables us to identify the essentialization of identities in which MENA countries are all similarly associated with violence, terrorism and turmoil. The orientalist literature ignores the negative role played by European governments – during as well as in the aftermath of the colonial period – in sowing regional conflicts. It also represents as a permanent condition those cyclical unrests rooted in economic circumstances that could rather be mitigated by investments in strategic sectors such as the RE industry