tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-100817912024-03-13T23:23:58.725-07:00nisralnasrOccasional thoughts on Middle Eastern and US politicsEllishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-75272505314623928302018-07-19T10:24:00.002-07:002018-07-19T16:58:22.339-07:00Five Years After the Coup: The Liberation of Abdel Fattah Sisi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Five
years after the coup in which he overthrew President Muhammad Morsi, former
general and Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah Sisi has freed himself from all
formal restraints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This includes freedom
from the Egyptian constitution and his own supporters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That Sisi
would crush the Muslim Brotherhood represented by Morsi was a foregone
conclusion. That he would free himself from the liberal political figures who
served in the first government after the coup also seemed inevitable once they
argued for an early reconciliation between the Armed Forces and the doomed
Muslim Brotherhood. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unexpected is the
rapidity with which Sisi has freed himself from formal subordination to the
very institution that brought him to power: the Egyptian Armed Forces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a profound and enduring paradox of
late 20<sup>th</sup> century Egyptian politics at play here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sisi has transformed what first looked to be
a collegial coup in which he was <i>primus inter pares</i> into one in which
his supremacy is unchallenged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has
happened in the past, under Gamal Abdel-Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosny Mubarak
although it usually took longer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
paradox is that each time the military was weakened by an increasingly
personalized dictatorship it re-emerged in periods of unrest and contention to
re-assert its authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Just how Sisi has
gained his freedom requires a close look at Egyptian politics and especially at
the nearly continuous shifting of top personnel over the past five years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What has developed is simple to state: President
Sisi can now ignore the constitutional guarantees to the Armed Forces of its
autonomy as well as purely formal parliamentary constraints on the formation of
governments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite the waning of the
public cult of personality that initially accompanied the coup, Sisi has
increased his personal dominance over the regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may be time to think again about the role
of the Armed Forces in the political economy of Egypt and the nature of
Egyptian authoritarianism.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Any
account of contemporary Egyptian politics must reckon with the Supreme Council
of the Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was created in
1954 by Gamal Abdel Nasser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A regime of
colonels turned itself into a regime of self-promoted generals and SCAF
provided the armed forces with an institutional mechanism to influence the
government after the dissolution of the Revolutionary Command Council.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Composed of 25 senior members of the air,
land, and naval branches, it could only meet in the presence and with the
approval of the president of the republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It convened during the Suez Crisis (1956), the Egyptian intervention in
Yemen (1964-7), and during the prolonged period of conflicts punctuated by the
1967 and 1973 wars with Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF
largely vanished from public view thereafter and played no public role even
during periods of high tension between the government and the armed
forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It did not, for example,
intervene when Defense Minister Abd El-Halim Abu Ghazala abruptly resigned in
1989 after conflict with then President Hosni Mubarak.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>SCAF
reappeared or was resurrected during the demonstrations against Mubarak in
early 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On February 10, 2011 SCAF
issued its first communiqué and pointedly noted that it affirmed the armed
forces’ support for the Egyptian people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As it became obvious that Minister of Defense Mohammad Tantawi chaired
its meetings in the absence of President Mubarak, Mubarak’s loss of support by
the army also became obvious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mubarak
turned executive authority over to SCAF, and it also assumed legislative power
after the dissolution of the national assembly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF remained intact even after
the election of Muhammad Morsi as president in 2012.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A crisis in August 2012 led Morsi to replace
Tantawi with Sisi who was thus in place to lead the coup against Morsi in July
2013.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
role SCAF would play in the wake of a military coup remained open.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike what occurred after Mubarak left
office, SCAF did not itself stand in for government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Constitutional Court, Adly Mansour was sworn in as interim president. But was
SCAF unnecessary if the Armed Forces really controlled the post-coup
government?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On February 25, 2014 Mansour
issued Law 20/2014 publicly structuring SCAF. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This appears to have been the first time its
internal structure was made public and indeed may have been its first formal
internal structure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although the
president of the republic had the right to call and attend meetings (and to
chair meetings he attended), he was not listed as a regular member.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The regular president of SCAF is the Minister
of Defense for whom the Chief of Staff is the deputy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The members include the heads of the various
branches as well as the major staff divisions within the service (such as engineering,
legal, training, and fiscal organizations), and the leaders of the army
divisions (such as the Second and Third Field Armies) and the head of military
intelligence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under other terms of the
decree, SCAF should meet regularly and requires a quorum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Formally, SCAF can make decisions by a
majority vote and the Minister of Defense transmits its decisions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In its very constitution SCAF embodies a
contradiction of authoritarian Egypt: it represents a completely hierarchical
institution but is formally empowered to make decisions democratically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Law 20/2014 specifically mandates SCAF to
approve any appointment of a minister of defense during the first two
presidential terms after the adoption of the 2014 constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The law thus implemented the constitutional
mandate of article 234 that, during these two initial presidential terms, the
Minister of Defense can only be appointed with the approval of SCAF.</div>
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This might all be
arcane minutiae had it not been the culmination of a prolonged and bruising
battle fought between 2011 and 2014 in which the Armed Forces insisted an
achieving just this privilege.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among the
most divisive and problematic issues of that period was the conflict over how
independent the armed forces would be from the executive or legislative
authorities. In an April 2012 interview with the New York Times, former
associate justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court Tahani Gebali asserted
that as early as May 2011 she was talking to SCAF about how to write a constitution
that would preserve the autonomy of the military.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In November 2011, then Deputy Prime Minister
Ali Selmi issued a set of “supra-constitutional” principles to guide the
writing of the new constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I noted
in a blog post at the time the Armed Forces had embraced principles
guaranteeing its nearly complete autonomy and the possibility that it would
choose its own Minister of Defense (<a href="http://nisralnasr.blogspot.com/2011/11/modest-constitutional-proposal-by.html">http://nisralnasr.blogspot.com/2011/11/modest-constitutional-proposal-by.html</a>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shortly thereafter conflict over this issue
led to large scale street demonstrations and significant violence on Muhammad
Mahmoud Street just off Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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These violent
confrontations were a response to rising fears that the Armed Forces had no
intention of relinquishing power and contributed to the political polarization
that later enveloped Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Military
autonomy was written into both the constitution drafted under by a committee
largely dominated by the Muslim Brothers in 2012 and the one written after Morsi’s
ouster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a widespread
presumption that in the post-coup government the constitutionally protected
position of Minister of Defense was even more potent than that of president. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces had vigorously beaten back
all attempts since 2011 to subordinate the military to civilian authority in
any way.</div>
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Now we need to
look a bit more closely into the people and institutions engaged in re-making
Egyptian political life in the last five years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In mid-2012, after an assault on an army checkpoint in Sinai took more
than a dozen lives, then President Morsi ousted the Minister of Defense,
Mohammad Tantawi, and the Chief of Staff, Sami Anan. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi replaced Tantawi with Sisi and Sisi chose
General Sidki Sobhi (formerly head of the Third Field Army) to replace Anan as
chief of staff. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then Mahmoud Hegazi
became Director of Military Intelligence, the position from which Sisi had just
been plucked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sobhi became Minister of Defense
in 2014 when Sisi ran for president, and Hegazi was appointed in his place as
Chief of Staff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This appeared to be an
elaborate but not terrifically important game of musical chairs in which a
small group of closely connected officers took control of the state by ousting
Morsi and then succeeding each other in positions of increasing importance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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It was therefore
surprising that at the end of October 2017 the music suddenly stopped and
Mahmoud Hegazy was dismissed as Chief of Staff and given a role with little
substance—as a presidential counselor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His ouster occurred after at least sixteen
policemen were killed during an operation in the Western Desert. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the months since Mahmoud Hegazy’s removal
there is reason to doubt that it was caused by the deaths on the Oases
Road.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There have been many assaults on
ill-prepared and surprised soldiers and police in which no senior officer was removed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These tragic events occur sufficiently
frequently that they provide expeditious excuses, not amenable to public
debate, to sideline general officers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mahmoud Hegazy was replaced by a general with whom he shares a name but
to whom he is unrelated: Muhammad Farid Hegazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Farid Hegazy had earlier
benefited from Morsi’s ouster of Tantawi and Anan: he became Secretary General of
the Ministry of Defense and Secretary of SCAF under Law 20/2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was only the first of several personnel
changes in the Armed Forces.</div>
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In January 2018
Sisi removed Khaled Fawzy as head of the General Intelligence Directorate. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fawzy was chosen to head the National Security
Agency in 2013 and GID in late 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
was therefore closely connected to the making of the 2013 coup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abbas Kamel, who had served as Sisi’s own
chief of staff, temporarily replaced Fawzy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In June 2018 was Kamel installed as the permanent head of GID.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Within a small coterie of high-ranking
generals Sisi had replaced one of his supporters with an even closer
confidante. </div>
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Before going
further I note two points that are crucial to understanding the changing
politics of military dictatorships.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>First, dictatorships (or authoritarian governments—the preferred moniker
in political science) change over time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Initial coalitions of army officers, economically powerful individuals,
and prominent social figures give way to new constellations of power and
authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can grow or shrink, use
violence more or less broadly, and coopt or exclude new social forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, when the armed forces are the
institutional foundation of dictatorship, higher officers must maintain the
unity and integrity of the military as it is affected by the push and pull of
the political coalition that supports it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has been a recurring theme of Egyptian
politics since the 1952 coup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then-General
Muhammad Naguib and Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser disagreed about returning
governance to an elected civilian government. Having defeated Naguib and placed
him under house arrest for nearly 20 years, Nasser faced challenges from other
figures including his own Minister of Defense, Abdel Hakim Amir.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even now we do not know certainly whether
Amir voluntarily committed suicide or was summarily executed in the wake of the
catastrophic defeat in the 1967 war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anwar
Sadat and Husny Mubarak both faced challenges from the security establishments but
each time the officer corps closed ranks behind a president who, himself, had
come from their ranks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every Egyptian
leader overthrown by the Armed Forces beginning with King Farouk and including
Neguib and Morsi was at least formally associated with a policy of establishing
civilian control over the military.</div>
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The growth of Sisi’s
control over Egypt’s state machinery has been slow but sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Immediately after the coup Sisi served as both
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense but members of the government
headed by Prime Minister Hazem Beblawi floated plans for economic reform and
national reconciliation between the army and the Muslim Brothers. Beblawi’s
government included several noted liberals including Mohammad El-Baradei,
Hossam Eissa, Ahmed Galal, and Ziad Bahaa El-Din.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baradei, a Nobel laureate work as Director General
of the International Atomic Energy Agency, resigned in August after the assaults
on demonstrators in front of Cairo University and the Raba’a Al-Adawiyyah
mosque took hundreds of lives. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bahaa
al-Din unsuccessfully proposed reconciliation between the government and its
opponents but the military was not interested.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He quit the government in late January 2014. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In February 2014 Beblawi suddenly resigned on
his own behalf and that of his government evidently at the insistence of
Sisi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The armed forces had begun to free
themselves from the fetters of constitutional government but Sisi still
appeared as <i>primus inter pares</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the interim between the coup which had suspended the Morsi-era constitution and
the election of Sisi as president under a new constitution, the new Egyptian
government (like others before it) maintained formal adherence to legality and
sought to present an air of elite continuity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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The first post-Beblawi Prime Minister, Ibrahim Mahlab, had been Housing Minister under Beblawi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sherif Ismail remained as Petroleum Minister
and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sisi briefly remained as Defense Minister
until he resigned to run for president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mahlab
retained the former Minister of the Interior, Mohammed Ibrahim Moustafa, who
Morsi had initially appointed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
debate about army autonomy ended on the army’s terms: the new constitution
stipulated that for the first two terms of an elected presidency the Defense
Minister had to be an army officer and could only be appointed with the
approval of SCAF. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Article
146 of the new constitution also gave the president the right to appoint a Prime
Minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was congruent with
longstanding Egyptian constitutional practice that the Prime Minister
represents the executive authority rather than a parliamentary majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only change was a stipulation that within
30 days of the decision on a new Prime Minister, Parliament must give the new
government a vote of confidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
the Mahleb government was installed before the constitution was ratified his
government required no approval.</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mahlab’s
government ultimately collapsed in a flurry of revelations about corruption and
he was replaced by Sherif Ismail in September 2015.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No parliament had yet been elected by the
installation of the Ismail’s first government and so it neither required nor
obtained parliamentary approval. Parliamentary elections were held later that
year and the first post-coup Parliament seated in early 2016. By mid-April 2016
Ismail’s government had obtained a vote of confidence from a sitting
parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given the length of the
parliamentary interregnum the delay in approving a Prime Minister who had been
in office for six months might be considered irrelevant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pro-Sisi “independent” members dominated
Parliament largely because the government seemed determined not to create a
political party with even nominal autonomy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The legislature was subservient to the executive and it had belatedly
undertaken its constitutionally necessary role.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unremarkably Ismail’s government also exhibited continuity with the
past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many ministers remained at their
posts and, of course, Sobhi remained as the constitutionally protected Minister
of Defense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Ismail’s
government was dissolved on June 7, 2018 and Mustafa Madbouli, who had replaced
Mahlab back in 2014 as Housing Minister, was asked to form a new government
which was duly sworn in on June 14. This government exhibited a surprising lack
of continuity in personnel and also remarkable disregard for the formalities of
the Egyptian constitution. The new government presented by Madbouli did not
include Sidki Sobhi as Minister of Defense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">SCAF has never issued its official approval of his ouster or his replacement; it has said nothing. </span>In his place as Minister of Defense was Muhammad Ahmed Zaki.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Zaki had been head of the Republican Guard
from August 2012 until his appointment as Minister of Defense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Republican Guard played an important role
in the 2013 coup if for no other reason than that it provided the security for
then President Muhammad Morsi, security that quickly turned into arrest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As of today, a month after the dissolution of
the Ismail cabinet Madbouli’s government has yet to acquire a vote of
confidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government has presented
its program and there is every reason to think that the majority will
approve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “25/30” bloc (so named for
January 25, 2011 and June 30, 2013—the dates of mass protests that marked the
collapse of the Mubarak and Morsi governments) has shown vocal opposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is impossible to imagine that the bloc
will derail the process of approving the new government or force Sisi to pursue
other remedies under Article 146.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Article
146 was written by people who were thinking, perhaps naively, that future
parliaments would be chosen in competitive elections in which relatively strong
parties would be dominant voices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus
the article proposes that, in the absence of rapid ratification, the president
must turn to the party with a plurality and establish a government with
parliamentary approval in a total of 60 days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Failing that a new parliament must be elected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Former
Minister of Defense Sobhi seemed to simply disappear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The contrast with President Morsi’s decision
to honor former Defense Minister Muhammad Tantawi with the Order of the Nile,
the country’s highest honor, on his ouster is sharp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sami Anan, Chief of Staff, was awarded the
Order of the Republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The circumstances
and negotiations around Tantawi’s and Anan’s retirement are opaque but Morsi
was signaling, possibly with the approval of Sisi and the rest of SCAF, that he
had no intention of significantly affecting the army’s own chain of command or
of subjecting its leaders to penalties for their actions after January 25,
2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This would include hundreds of
deaths, thousands of injuries, and tens of thousands of detentions as well as
the infamous “virginity tests” to which women were subjected and that Sisi
later defended as necessary to maintain the army’s reputation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite Sobhi’s prominent role in
facilitating the ouster of Morsi and the emergence of the new regime he
received no official recognition for his service.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Morsi
had better reason than Sisi to fear the Egyptian Armed Forces and to try to
placate their leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His, and the
Egyptian people’s experience, with generals and former generals underlines the
obsessive secrecy with which the Armed Forces guards the secrecy of its
internal disagreements—existing or merely incipient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The consistent tendency of outsiders is to
underestimate both the existence of such conflicts among generals and their
ability to resolve them decisively and with force when necessary. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
may have been true from the very beginning. Morsi became president by defeating
Ahmad Shafiq in the 2012 presidential election. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of Hosny Mubarak’s last official acts as
president was to appoint Shafiq as prime minister on January 29, 2011 in a vain
attempt to appease Egyptian demonstrators (and perhaps the Armed Forces).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shafiq was seen as the preferred candidate of
the military and the supporters of the old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So much so that if the 2012 legislature had
had its way officials of the old regime such as Shafiq would have been stripped
of the right to hold office in the new regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Shafiq had been a fighter pilot and ultimately commanded the Air Force
before he resigned in 2002 to become Minister of Civil Aviation, a post he held
until his appointment as Prime Minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On March 3, 2011 the SCAF, having replaced Mubarak as the executive
authority in Egypt, accepted Shafiq’s resignation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While it may very well be that the extent of
popular unrest made it impossible for the generals to keep a former colleague
in power, there are other possibilities to consider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Minister of Civil Aviation, Shafiq was
very close to the burgeoning tourism industry which was the entering wedge of a
re-emerging large-scale private sector in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The growth of Egyptian tourism required
significant changes in the structure of the country’s air travel industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This included the need to open both the
tourism and its infrastructure to foreign investment and competition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shafiq’s years as a minister in the Mubarak
era required a far greater willingness to work with the emergent private sector
than has been true of other generals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is not possible to read off policy preferences from anyone’s in-laws but the
connections can be tantalizing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shafiq’s
father-in-law, Tawfiq Abdel-fattah, an officer on the periphery of the group
that overthrew the monarchy, served as Minister of Social Affairs and Labor
under Nasser in 1958.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shafiq would, at
the least, have been more aware of the problems of organizing a command economy
than most officers in the armed forces.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Had
it not been for a decision by Sisi to transfer two small islands in the Red
Sea, Tiran and Sanafir, from Egyptian control to Saudi sovereignty this would
all be irrelevant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These two islands
dominate the entrance to the Red Sea and thus were once important strategic
sites for Egyptian attempts to limit sea traffic to the Israeli port of
Eilat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They consequently figure
prominently in regional strategic imagination and history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under the terms of the Camp David Accords,
Israeli assent to the transfer was necessary as well as Saudi agreement to the
maintenance of the treaty itself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Despite some
leaked tapes indicating that many Egyptian generals viewed Saudi Arabia and
other Arabian peninsular countries with disdain, President Sisi announced the
transfer during a visit by Saudi King Salman in April 2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The economic rationale for the transfer—to construct
a $4 billion causeway between the Arabian and Sinai peninsulas—is far-fetched.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
legal and historical decisions regarding the two islands are complex and
irrelevant here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What matters is that
there was significant political opposition in Egypt to the transfer of the
islands from the initial proposals in 2016 until it was accomplished in June
2017.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cession of the islands created
significant political and legal problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The new constitution requires a referendum as well as parliamentary
agreement to transfer sovereignty over national territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The claim by the two governments was that the
islands, despite being under Egyptian control, had really always been sovereign
territory of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and thus no referendum was
necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Although
the islands were transferred (or returned) to Saudi sovereignty in June 2017,
there are reasons to believe that there were disagreements within the Armed
Forces as well as among the public at large.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sidki Sobhi, for example, does not appear to have endorsed decision in
public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Six
months later, as 2017 came to an end, so did Sisi’s term as president and with
it the necessity to run for a second, and constitutionally final, term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In November Ahmad Shafiq announced his
decision to return to Egypt from the United Arab Emirates and contest the
presidency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shafiq abruptly left Egypt
after losing the 2012 contest with Morsi at least partly under the threat of
criminal charges for corruption issued by Morsi’s government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was living in the United Arab Emirates
when he announced his 2018 candidacy but shortly afterward unwillingly found
himself back in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether Shafiq
was deported by the Emirati authorities or kidnapped by Egyptian ones with
Emirati connivance remains unclear but shortly after his announced candidacy he
was being held effectively incommunicado.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In early January 2018 Shafiq used his Twitter account to inform
Egyptians that he had thought better of running and no longer considered
himself a plausible candidate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In March
he endorsed Sisi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could Shafiq have
mounted a serious opposition campaign?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Would he have?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will never know
but as someone who had won more than 12 million votes in 2012 the government would
have been hard put to explain an outcome in which he won only a handful of
votes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Shortly
thereafter, on January 20, 2018 Sami Anan announced that he would contest the presidential
election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was arrested on January 23
and has been detained since.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anan’s ties
to the military establishment are more recent and more powerful than
Shafiq’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anan was Chief of Staff
between 2005 and August 2012 as well as Deputy Chairman of SCAF from its
revival in February 2011 through June 2012.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The government wasted little time or effort on squashing Anan’s proposed
candidacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though Morsi had
discharged him, Anan was arrested for violating military regulations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces claimed that he had ignored
the need to request and receive official permission to run for office as
required by a November 2011 decree placing all members of SCAF on military
status for life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has also been accused
of the theft of sensitive military documents that may shed embarrassing light
on the current regime. The Central Bank of Egypt placed his assets and those of
his wife and daughters under its control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One of Anan’s campaign associates was former head of the Central
Auditing Organization, Hisham Geneina.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Geneina had been dismissed from this government oversight body in early
2017 for charging governments before and after the coup with engaging in
widespread corruption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has been
engaged in court hearings since in which he has been charged with providing
false information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Days after Anan was
arrested Geneina was assaulted in public view and left on the pavement for
nearly an hour before being taken to the hospital.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anan’s candidacy was over and Sisi won an
election in which a sole supporter posed as an opponent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anan has been in custody ever since and over
the weekend of July 14 Reuters News announced that he had been transferred to
the intensive care unit of the armed forces hospital in the Cairo suburb of
Maadi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anan would, of course, not be the
first detainee of the regime to die in custody but he would be the first
high-ranking former general to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
summary ouster of Sobhi from the Defense Ministry without public SCAF approval
and the installation of a new ministry without parliamentary approval thus
comes as the conclusion of a lengthy process of the consolidation of Sisi’s
personal control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor did Sisi soften
Sobhi’s ouster by awarding him a medal or other honor. But does this mean
Sisi’s control is complete?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
may but there is one last recent news report to consider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parliament, which has not yet been able to
ratify the new government, did manage to pass a law on July 3, 2018 regarding
SCAF.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a session from which the press
was barred Parliament passed a law giving the president of the republic the
right to award special (and unspecified) benefits to SCAF members now and in
the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition, no SCAF members
can be held judicially accountable for acts committed between July 3, 2013 (the
date of the coup) and January 10, 2016 (the restoration of parliament).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition, if traveling abroad the law
confers diplomatic status (and thus immunity) on SCAF members.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The law gives the president significant
discretion in deciding its application.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Besides
Sisi’s dominance, what can we say about Egyptian politics now?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are three possible ways to interpret
recent events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is that Sisi is
slowly undermining the military and necessarily preparing for the day when some
form of real civilian government is in place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sisi himself has no particular reason to desire the successful
transition to a civilian democracy but, the argument would go, the writing is
on the wall. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The emergence of
authoritarian civilian regimes from China to Turkey to Hungary implies that the
collapse of military rule need not mean the installation of successful
democracy, but the threat to armies is that new regimes may want to make the
military pay for years of violence and incompetence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new law is meant to deny any future government
with the option of pursuing Army officers with criminal penalties for its worst
offenses.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
A second
possibility is that the armed forces recognize, especially in the wake of
Sisi’s attack on Anan and Shafiq, their own vulnerability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this reading, the armed forces accept
Sisi’s dominance and will refrain from insisting on their institutional
prerogatives as long as he rewards them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The most recent legislation would then mean that Sisi and the Armed
Forces have reached a truce and agreed to remove the weapon of criminal
prosecution either at home or abroad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
generals have acquiesced in Sisi’s dominance but insist on some protection from
continued prosecution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
There is a last
and more ominous interpretation: Sisi has created an instrument that allows him
greater control over the Armed Forces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He now has a tool through which he can reward
and punish active members of the military as he sees fit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces have resisted providing any
executive with the tools to create or exploit their divisions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Officers have been rewarded with sinecures
after their service concluded and have generally been free from threats of
prosecution while on active duty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
murderous assaults on Morsi supporters and especially the Muslim Brotherhood at
Rabi’a al-Adawiyah and in front of the Republican Guards headquarters in the
summer of 2013 in which more than a thousand people were killed were
exceptional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the legal proceedings
against Anan and Shafiq show, the government has many ways to threaten generals
and former generals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this view the
ouster of a defense minister, the installation of a new cabinet, and the
legislation safeguarding some but not necessarily all officers for their
participation in the events of 2013-2016 is an indication of the degree to which
Sisi has escaped the influence of his close allies as well as his enemies and
his lukewarm supporters.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
does this mean for continued dominance of the military in Egypt’s
politics?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recently the well-known
novelist, political commentator, and former diplomat Ezzeddine Choukri Fishere
proposed that Egypt’s armed forces must, sooner or later, cede control to
civilians and accept that only by democratic means can Egypt be well
governed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The events of the last few
months show just how difficult any such political transformation will be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian Armed Forces are a corporate
institution many of whose officers are connected by marriage, education, and a
network of social facilities including clubs and hospitals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Post-retirement careers include entering
private enterprise and civil administration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They will resist removal for obvious reasons of interest but they also
play significant roles in making many Egyptian enterprises and agencies work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their initial education and training may be
for war but like most armies in the world today they rarely if ever engage in
combat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What studies we have of the
Egyptian military suggest that its strengths are engineering and logistics and
these are the skills that officers may have withdrawn during the Morsi
presidency when shortages in fuel, water, and food began to appear to a greater
degree than during the Mubarak years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Egypt has many other talented professionals with expertise in
engineering, construction, and logistics but for the moment army officers have
the set of informal ties as well as technical qualifications that are
especially important for large bureaucracies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Once
again a general has emerged from a period of instability and managed, with the
support of a unified high command, to place himself at the center of political
power in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In place of the feverish
cult of personality that emerged in the wake of the coup, Sisi has instituted,
as did his predecessors, his own control over the executive and its
administrative arms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has hollowed out
the legislature and military as independent sources of authority even though he
dominates them. There is little reason to doubt this will be successful in the
short run and little reason to doubt that it will fail over the longer
run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bulwark of Egyptian regimes
whether new or old over the last half century has been the unity—not the
loyalty—of the Armed Forces.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-7766622630061679022018-02-04T11:56:00.001-08:002018-02-18T16:31:04.708-08:00Rage, Fear, Hope and the Emotions of Revolution<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In its own telling the
Egyptian revolution began with days of anger that broke the barrier of fear. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians raised their heads and proudly
looked to a new day. It ended with ecstatic manifestations of popular
acclamation as the military took power from an elected civilian president and
embarked on a campaign of violence against his supporters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the intervening years scholars,
officials and activists have sought to explain the successes and failures of
the uprising largely with reference to the interests, analyses, and practices
that shaped the activity of the many actors in these events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The language of emotion has largely
dropped out of the analytic frame despite subsequent allusions to revolutionary
betrayal, disillusion, and despair. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One exception is an
article by Wendy Pearlman, “Emotions and Microfoundations of the Arab
Uprisings” published in 2013.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Pearlman argues for the importance of emotions as crucial to any
analysis of the uprisings, including the Egyptian revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her viewpoint differs significantly
from the one I employ here because she appears to think of emotions as more
akin to what many researchers in the field would call moods or background
feelings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She describes emotions
as orientations toward the external environment that shape cognitive
evaluations of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus she
presents emotions as influencing cognitive evaluations or as themselves
influenced by them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She proposes
consequently that changing the emotional orientation of people toward external
events, including political ones, will change their evaluations of those
events.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The seventh anniversary of the
Egyptian revolution of 2011 is an appropriate time to revisit those initial
claims about the importance of emotion. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did emotion play a significant role in the revolutionary
period and, if so, how?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were
Egyptians insufficiently rational and emotionally too volatile to make a
democratic transition feasible?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even
a first attempt to respond to these questions requires a more careful look at
how we understand emotions and their historical and social contexts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Initially it is crucial to understand
that there are now and have been, for centuries, two distinct ways of
understanding human emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
way of looking at emotion is as the antithesis of rational cognition; the other
way, now backed up by significant research and philosophical inquiry, is that
emotions are a form of cognition and without them we cannot be rational.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In what follows I pursue the view
that emotions are neither the antithesis of cognition nor a background
condition that affects and is affected by our evaluations, including our moral
evaluations, of the world external to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Emotions, in this framework, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">are</b>
those evaluations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are
cognitive processes without which human beings cannot engage in purposive
rational activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As might be
expected with any evaluative process of something as complicated as the
situation of human beings in the social and physical world, emotions reflect
our beliefs about the nature of that world, about the possibilities and dangers
it holds, and about how others respond and expect us to respond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian government, then led by
President Hosni Mubarak, established January 25 as Police Day as a national
holiday in 2009. Police Day commemorated an event that decades earlier had
provoked Egyptian anger. On that day in 1952 British soldiers assaulted an
Egyptian police station in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia and 41 Egyptians
died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fury at that assault is
often said have ignited the attacks on European-owned stores and European
individuals in Cairo the following day when shops were destroyed and scores
of people were killed and injured in an event whose specific origins remain a
mystery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Police Day was thus a
somewhat ambiguous holiday.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
celebrated resistance but it also celebrated a police force and ministry of the
interior that, with its violence and corruption, no longer merited the respect
of millions of Egyptians. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Tens of thousands of Egyptians
demonstrated January 25, 2011 until dispersed by the police using tear gas,
clubs and concussion grenades in Cairo and other cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Public support for the government
plummeted over the following days especially as demonstrations were violently
repressed in Suez.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One widely
viewed video featured a lone demonstrator who opened his jacket and approached
a policeman, daring him to shoot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Filmed on a cellphone from a balcony overlooking the street you can see
the demonstrator drop to the ground, the pop of the gun, and the sudden cries
of the observers in the apartment. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Organizers announced that January
28 would be the Friday of Rage. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hundreds
of thousands of people demonstrated in Cairo and other cities after a tense
couple of days. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to the
mass demonstrations, scores of police stations were attacked and thousands of
prisoners were released as local jails and prisons were destroyed or left
unguarded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Police disappeared from
the streets and a prolonged period of public insecurity followed. Even the
first deployment of tanks by the Egyptian armed forces into Tahrir Square in
Cairo was met by violence until it became clear that the army was not about to
launch an armed assault on protesters. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As William Reddy
argues, naming emotions makes them less ambiguous and us more committed to
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If true for individuals in
the moment it is equally true of historical reconstruction. January 28 was the
“Friday of Rage.” Must it necessarily have been a day when all protestors
expressed their rage?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is “rage” a
good description of what hundreds of thousands of Egyptians felt that day?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And is it the only valid
description?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the noon prayer
came to an end on January 28 I stood among hundreds of Egyptians who had
gathered at the Mostafa Mahmood Mosque.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Surrounded by young riot policemen with shields, helmets and batons, my initial
response was fear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the police
opened a path for the crowd to head down Arab League Street and as it became
clear that demonstrators vastly outnumbered police I felt relief and
exhilaration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps as a
foreigner I lacked an adequate appreciation of Egyptian emotional responses but
given what people around me were saying as well as videos still available on
YouTube I think my own experience was common.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So clearly there was not just rage, even if we had all
assembled in response to a day of rage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rage may also be too blunt a word although it is a good and correct
translation of the Arabic word, <i>ghadab, </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">that named the day</span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps outrage is a better approximation of the relevant emotion or
perhaps indignation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These words,
however, give a very different sense to the dominant emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They clearly add a moral dimension to
the emotional description.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If anger was the right
word, the source of the anger is more difficult to discern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One common explanation is that deprivation,
hunger, and poverty cause anger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From Egypt to Iran and Tunisia and the United States inequalities of
wealth and income provoke anger that then translates into disruptive political
interventions by the afflicted. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anger is said to drive the poor to attack the rich and appropriate
their property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
But, again, is anger the right
name? Why is anger rather than envy or greed the dominant emotion fueling such
an attack? Angry people might demonstrate but in Egypt there are good reasons
to think it was urban middle and lower middle-income people who demonstrated
and talked up their anger at the regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Property theft, by the rich and poor alike, was widespread during the
revolution but it does appear to have been driven primarily by greed or avarice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes it involved violence but more
frequently state property and unguarded private property were simply stolen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Anger was widely perceived as the
dominant emotion of the early days of the uprising. We might be forgiven for
forgetting that for decades Egyptians and external observers have debated the
role of anger in the country’s social and political life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are many convenient
explanations besides deprivation for the anger of Egyptians. Rage figures
prominently in some accounts of contemporary Arab and Islamic politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Take, for example the 1990 article “The
Roots of Muslim Rage” by Bernard Lewis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Lewis proposed that a significant (but undefined) number of Muslims,
whom he termed fundamentalists, were at war with secularism and modernism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this he was largely echoing
modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s that argued the transition from
tradition to modernity provoked profound psychological unease or disease among
affected populations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lewis proposed
that the introduction of Western economic, political and social institutions
had led to worsened outcomes for most of the population in Muslim majority
countries and that what he called a “mood” of anger and resentment spread among
people who were increasingly aware that, as heirs to “an old, proud, and long
dominant civilization” they were being cast aside by their inferiors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He argued that the “instinct of the
masses” in locating the sources of their increasing poverty and lack of freedom
in the West was not wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
further argued that there are “moments of upheaval and disruption, when deeper
passions are stirred, [and]…dignity and courtesy towards others can give way to
an explosive mixture of rage and hatred….”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Lewis’s critics were not slow to react.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this they followed a path set out by
Edward Said. Muslims, Arabs, and especially Palestinians were indeed angry they
agreed but not because of lost civilization glory, modernization, or
secularism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their anger rose from
precisely what Lewis scanted: dispossession and despoliation, particularly, of
Palestinians. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They thought Lewis
was wrong to suggest that anger was unjustified or that it was rooted in a centuries-long
cultural tradition but he was not, evidently, wrong to think that pervasive anger
ran deep and wide and that it was a societal rather than an individual
response. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Palestinians are
frequently angry (and likely far angrier than Israelis) it may have less to do
with their mood or their culture than with the constant repetition of word and
actions that are demeaning and destructive and the absence of any safe spaces
in which to recover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So at least
one Palestinian psychologist proposed to me over lunch one day many years ago
during a seminar I had helped to organize about trying to ameliorate the trauma
of seeing a loved one die violently.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Anger, in the way that Lewis and
many of his critics use the word, is usually described in hydrological,
geological or meteorological terms. This is often called a “hydraulic” theory. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anger is a fluid and, although it can be
dammed, channeled, or contained, these attempts can fail. Then the pressure
becomes too great and like a volcano or a geyser it overflows, erupts and
destroys everything in its path.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such metaphors are common but research in psychology, cognition, and
philosophy all indicate they are both wrong and useless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An emotion, including anger, is a
cognitive process not a hydraulic one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is a way we have of evaluating events in the external world.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
To the degree that accounts of the
Egyptian revolution place emphasis on cognition, they focus on interests and
behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frequently they focus on
the interests and behavior of the working class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is so for all versions of political economy whether
so-called rational choice microeconomic modeling or the soft political economy
critics of neo-liberalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a
field still torn by the debate over Orientalism it is understandable why
emotions vanished from an academic literature concerned that Egyptian workers
appear more or less as rational as European or American workers. Thus, in line
with contemporary theories of social movements the interests of Egyptian workers
are held to be destabilizing and oppositional but not necessarily emotionally
profound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed most scholars consider
the discontent of the lower classes and their desire to redistribute the wealth
of society a permanent feature of social life that, in non-democratic
societies, only the coercive might of the state prevents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The intrusion of emotions into social
life in this literature is often seen as an idiosyncratic aspect of Egyptian
society or culture.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The insistence on interests and the
exclusion of emotions from understanding revolution is more surprising
considering that revolutionary leaders have often not shared it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ayatollah Khomeini famously asserted
that revolutions were not about the price of watermelons although he provided
no definitive answer as to what they were about. Lenin described revolutions as
festivals of the oppressed, a description echoed in a discussion by Sahar
Keraitim and Samia Mehrez of Tahrir Square as a <i>mulid</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One bit of evidence in my own
experience supporting their view is that when I entered Tahrir Square very
early in the morning of January 29 one of the first people I encountered was a
man with a large tray of cookies that he was giving out in celebration as if at
a popular religious festival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
understanding of the argument Keraitim and Mehrez make is not that the
demonstrations in Tahrir were religious but that the repertoire of practices
deployed in revolution must make some emotional sense to the participants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, to see the demonstrations in
Tahrir as if they were events in which marchers proceeded to a central
location, listened to speeches, and then dispersed is misleading. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, too, estimating the number of
demonstrators based on <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>the idea that Egyptian urban
squares could only hold a limited number of people is misleading because, as in
a festival but unlike a rally, people were constantly coming and going.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
So far I have drawn on contemporary
research on emotions from many directions—psychological, philosophical, and
even medical—all of which suggests the hydraulic approach to understanding
emotions is both wrong and useless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This includes the work of Antonio Damasio on the neuroscience of the
brain, summed up usefully in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Descartes’
Error</i>, the lengthy work of political philosophy by Martha Nussbaum, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Upheavals of Thought</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Navigation of Feeling</i>, historical
sociologist William Reddy’s study of the period before and after the French
Revolution. The common thread of these works and many more is not simply to
reject the Cartesian dualism of mind and body (including the brain) and the
Humean dualism of passionate attachment to goals and cold reasoning about how
to reach them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather they propose
that emotions are cognitive processes that direct our attention to events in
the world through which we evaluate their implication for our own goals and
well-being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Emotions are cognitive
processes even if we are not always conscious of how they work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As evaluations emotions combine our
beliefs about the world, including the social world, with our understanding of
the importance of our goals for ourselves. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Anger is not a deep well-spring of
energy ever-ready to be tapped nor is fear an immobile barrier to be broken
once and for all. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Fear can immobilize us when
we understand the danger of an occurrence and re-evaluate downwards the
importance of an activity or goal in which we are engaged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fear, like anger, is a cognitive
response to events external to our own lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before January 25 Egyptians did not confront a barrier that
was later shattered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before January
25 most Egyptians understood that the police state in which they lived was
intact even if it was not as concerned to prevent the presence of all
oppositional speech or actions as had been the case under Nasser, Sadat and
even the early Mubarak period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
January 29 Egyptians observed that the capacity of the police forces had been
severely weakened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consequently
there were few limits imposed by the government on overt speech or public
mobilization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Political leaders,
from the Muslim Brothers to the Revolutionary Socialists, thus became bolder
and appeared to be less fearful and more courageous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What had not changed was that, no matter how courageous the
opposition became, most high government officials including within the armed
forces had not accepted in principle or in practice that freedom of expression
or association as foundational.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
To the degree that anger combines
an ethical evaluation (are we legitimately obstructed?) about our own goals
with a sense of their importance the expression of anger will differ across
society and within society as well as over time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So too will any action we undertake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Neil Ketchley has proposed in a
recent book, many Egyptians viewed the police and the jails attached to police
stations as the most salient obstructions to their lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These Egyptians, almost entirely from
working class neighborhoods, experienced profound anger about particular police
and particular stations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something
like one quarter of all primary police stations in Egypt were destroyed during
the last few nights of January 2011 by local residents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ketchley’s account suggests that
the destruction of the police stations in such large numbers and short a period
of time occurred because the police had already concentrated their efforts on
the massive demonstrations in Cairo and other cities.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The demonstrations had been called
to express anger but it does not require deep analysis to think that the anger
of the demonstrators was different than the anger of those who attacked police
stations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is it a stretch to
think that as news of the assaults on police stations and some of the large
prisons where prisoners were freed over the following days Egyptians came to
realize that the threats of police violence that had inhibited speech and
public presence were greatly diminished. Thus rather than seeing these
differences as based on preferences or styles or interests, contemporary
understandings of emotion suggest that different Egyptians evaluated the role
of the police in their lives and the ways in which they significantly affected
their lives in different ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was and is no single kind of anger that Egyptians expressed or
ought to have expressed if we think of anger as evaluative and cognitive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What shook the Egyptian government was
the confluence of these two streams of anger, themselves made up of many
decisions by particular people on their own or in small groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If anger often involves a belief in
the illegitimacy of an obstacle then what particular obstacles did Egyptians
focus their attention on and how did they come to see them as
illegitimate?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How did they come to
believe that attacking that obstacle to their well-being was more important than
the response it threatened?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Answering this question will require us to look more carefully at how
different groups among the Egyptian population understood government policies
to be unfair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For some Egyptians
police corruption and brutality were immediate concerns; for others these were
significant concerns but appeared to be systemic problems rather than immediate
threats; for others no doubt the decision by the government to shut off any
electoral path to change the previous fall was more telling.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Whatever emotions Egyptians
expressed in 2011 they likely still experience today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anger, fear, and courage (not to mention many other
emotions) are still part of Egyptian life, but they are now evaluations that
must be made within the context of the difficulties of the revolutionary period
itself, the reconstruction of the police forces, and the implacable
unwillingness of the armed forces to accept peaceful disagreement and political
opposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is thus not
surprising that for many Egyptians new emotional responses to the world have
become dominant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is to explore
more of these issues that I hope to devote forthcoming entries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I plan to write several more
entries on understanding the revolution through the emotions but before ending
two points are worth making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First
is that if emotions are indeed cognitive evaluations of the events in the world
external to ourselves then revolutionary periods must be emotionally fraught
and we should expect to see a maelstrom of rapidly changing emotions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the ordinary institutions and
expectations break down in a revolutionary upheaval we should expect that
people—individually and in contact with each other—should rapidly revise their
evaluations of the meaning of those events for their own well-being. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rapid emotional change may have been
indicative less of the volatility of Egyptians than of the volatility of the
social and political environment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In such a situation ,it hardly seems plausible that people
would retain the same cognitive evaluations of (or consequent commitments for)
abstract goals such as democracy or “rule of law” whose very definitions are
subject to significant debate during a period of intense, rapid, and nearly
constant change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This does not
imply Egyptians did not desire democracy, rule of law, or an Islamic state, or
socialism; it simply implies that by 2013 they may have had very different
ideas about what those goals might be or what the impact of trying to attain
them would be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Second, while human emotions are
plastic to some degree there is reason to believe that a prolonged period
during which it proves to be impossible to solve problems posed in the external
world itself has emotional consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The unethical psychological practices designed by American psychologists
to induce “learned hopelessness” among Iraqis were based on real psychological
research. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The primary method
involved is to ensure that experimental subjects are conditioned to believe
that nothing they can do affects their condition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In one of the earliest entries to
this blog I noted that the Egyptian Armed Forces wanted one thing above all
else: to ensure that Egyptians never came to believe that their words or
actions affected state policies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even when state policies do change it is crucial that they not be seen
to change in direct response to popular participation or public criticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hannah Arendt once wrote of the
importance of arbitrary rule as more than a result of dictatorship; it was, she
proposed, a method of rule because it sapped any sense of agency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians are not experimental subjects
and the analogy is necessarily inexact but it looks as if the years since 2013
have been a prolonged and significantly successful attempt to deprive Egyptians
of belief in their own agency or, in other word, of hope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the past is any guide it will not
last forever but while it does it will be a profoundly unpleasant world in
which to live.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-87110409423985589732017-04-13T19:15:00.001-07:002017-04-13T19:45:43.091-07:00Egypt's Oligarchs in Dubious Battle<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Harsh as the government of Abdel
Fattah Sisi continues to be it has suffered some significant setbacks at the
hands of the judiciary, the religious establishment and the parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is so despite its tens of thousands of
political prisoners and severe repression of civil society associations
committed to defend free expression and the rule of law as well as its more
obvious political opponents. Each individual defeat can be explained as the
result of a combination of idiosyncratic factors, but the growing list suggests
reconsideration of our understanding of the regime as simply an authoritarian
state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
These conflicts are worth attention
because these institutions have been so closely identified with the creation of
the current regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many trial judges enthusiastically
supported the new regime and issued guilty verdicts against a wide swath of
opponents of the coup who were frequently labeled terrorists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In hundreds of cases defendants were
sentenced to death and in thousands of others they were given long prison terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The chief justice of the Supreme
Constitutional Court served as interim president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Leading religious figures, including the head
of the Azhar, associated themselves with the ouster of former president
Muhammad Morsi and with Sisi himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The parliament, elected in 2016 under the constitution that replaced the
one written during the Morsi era, is widely viewed as a docile, rubber
stamp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It affirmed most of the decrees
Sisi issued during the year and a half in which Egypt had no legislative body
whatsoever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parliament was to some
degree the creature of the intelligence agencies which influenced the election
process. To the extent that it represents anyone at all, it represents the
interests of powerful local elites who were threatened by the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Morsi presidency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
religious establishment, notably the head of the Azhar but including past and
present officials, opposed the Morsi government and publically provided support
to the coup in the days leading up to it and in the formation of the government
afterwards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is a widespread presumption
that each of these institutions is subservient to and directly controlled by
the president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may not be the
case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may, in fact, be the case the
Sisi presides over an elite coalition whose internal disputes and conflicts
make its members difficult, if subordinate, partners in the current
regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is convenient to think of
each of these institutions as completely under the control of the armed forces,
President Sisi, and the security forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They are certainly not independent or unaffected by the army, the
president, or the intelligence agencies, but they also have independent reasons
to support the current regime and on occasion to dissent from its
policies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Examining those moments of
dissent is revealing of the contours of the Egyptian state and politics today.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Contemporary political science has
a dichotomous understanding of political regimes: democratic or authoritarian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although
there are various “flavors” of each type, when political scientists speak of
the types of governments there are they invariably are interested in how
political officials are chosen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speaking
of democracy it is common to point out that more than free elections are
required and to propose a list of individual freedoms that democracies must
protect if they are to be considered real.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Political science describes dictatorships in a variety of flavors which
themselves are largely devised to explain how public officials are chosen or
choose themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Interesting as this is and useful
as it may be for American policy makers and pundits, it is different and
possibly far less sophisticated than the political analysis of political
regimes that dominated much European political thinking for hundreds of years
when there were no democracies and most executives were ruling monarchs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the centuries in which early modern
Europe was made, almost no states were (in our contemporary sense) democratic
nor was democracy generally conceived as either a viable or a valuable form of
political organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until very
recent times, when critics of autocratic rule thought about how socially
prominent, politically powerful, and wealthy groups could temper the power of
centralizing rulers they rarely mentioned democracy and they paid little if any
attention to the rights of the lower classes, women, or religious
minorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They thought in terms of
aristocracies, oligarchies, or mixed governments in which elites shared power.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Egypt is by no means a democracy
and the government does not shrink from savage violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can understand it better if we think of it
as an oligarchy composed of a coalition of interests and institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can ask ourselves when their interests (both
material and institutional) are aligned or at cross-purposes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doing so casts light on contemporary Egyptian
politics and it also casts light on why Egypt, in the wake of the Arab Spring,
has turned out to be a very different place than Tunisia, Yemen, Syria or
Libya.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to say that Egypt
today is in a better place than its neighbors or even a particularly good place,
only that it is worth trying to understand how it is different.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The regime is not unstable and the
president will usually get his way, but occasionally some actors manage to
outmaneuver the president. They do so at least partly to keep their own
institutional power intact as well as for more direct reasons of interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian parliament, the Azhar and the
judiciary are closely aligned with the presidency but they also have
significantly more autonomy than at any time in the last 60 years with the
obvious exception of the brief period between January 2011 and July 2013 when
one repressive regime ended and another began.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Among the most recent and perhaps important
defeats of the president came with an attempt to cede arguably Egyptian
territory to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with the attempted passage of a law regulating
the civil service, and most recently with the attempt to eliminate men’s right
to divorce their wives verbally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In each
case the government’s position has faced some significant popular opposition
but also ultimately was rejected by the judiciary, the legislature, and the
religious establishment respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Each of these challenges to presidential authority occurred openly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fate of the islands and divorce remain
open but the government made at least some concessions on the civil service
law. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Defense of
the nation’s borders is a constitutive element of modern nationalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>National sovereignty over national territory
has mobilized Egyptians for more than a hundred years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>British troops did not completely leave the
country until 1954 and Israeli troops occupied the Sinai Peninsula in 1956 and
again between 1967 and 1982.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Between
2011 and 2013 there were rumors that President Morsi planned to give Sinai to
the Palestinians so that they could withdraw from Gaza and create a state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During those same years Egyptian army
officers also frequently warned of plans to divide the country into separate
statelets. Unfounded and ridiculous as these rumors were, they served
to intensify a sense of existential threat and the fragility of national sovereignty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The failure of the armed forces to
prevent the creation of a sovereign Israel in Palestine in 1948 was a proximate
reason for the military seizure of power in 1952.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The army’s defeat in 1967 was a deeply-felt
national catastrophe weakening the Nasser regime. President Sadat carefully
nurtured the image of the 1973 war as a military victory to enhance his
legitimacy as did President Mubarak after Sadat’s assassination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even intellectuals highly critical of the
Nasserist regime and its repression have expressed fears that integration into
the global economy could threaten national sovereignty.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Egyptian writers have, on occasion,
expressed popular fears about tyranny, corruption, and existential threats to
the nation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes these expressions
have been humorous and sometimes nightmarish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Gamal Al-Ghitani is known in the US and Europe, to the extent that he is
known at all, as the author of the short novel <i>Zayni Barakat</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It first appeared in Arabic as a magazine
serial in 1971 and in 1974 as a single volume.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Its English translation, introduced with a foreword by Edward Said,
provided a much wider audience with access to a story of how a police state
works.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>El-Ghitani set his account of
authoritarian excess in early 16<sup>th</sup> century Mamluk Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other accounts of the Nasserist state by
authors like Naguib Mahfouz such as Karnak Café were set in the historical
present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While they detailed the ethical
and physical destruction such government produced they did not portend the
collapse of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By setting his
novel just as the Ottoman conquest of Egypt occurred, El-Ghitani seemed to
suggest that authoritarianism had deep historical roots as a strategy for
governance but that it also created a government that could be fatally
unresponsive to external challenge.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the
time of his death in 2015 El-Ghitani had long ceased to be an insurgent figure
in Arabic literature or the Egyptian literary establishment, but his early work
remains a useful touchstone. The recent decision by the Egyptian Supreme
Administrative Court voiding a treaty that would have ceded two islands in the
Red Sea to Saudi Arabia makes it worth revisiting his 1978 story, “What
Happened to the Land of the Valley” written when Israeli troops occupied the
Sinai Peninsula and Israeli settlers built towns along the northeast coast.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“No one
knew when it began,” Ghitani opens his story, but voices were raised against
allowing foreigners to own land even then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Elements of irony abound when we learn that initial purchases include
not only apartments and small stores but even pavement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A dystopian global market drives foreigners
who can no longer afford housing in London, Paris, and Sidney to buy more and
more property in Cairo and its environs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When they have purchased the entire country the new owners attempt to
evict the inhabitants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The eviction is
thwarted by the discovery of an acre in Upper Egypt which remains out of their
possession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a dramatic but uncertain
conclusion thousands of Egyptian men, women, and children link arms to protect
the acre from being flooded as the alien purchases open dams and dikes to flood
the single crucial acre of sovereignty that remains.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When it was
announced in early 2016 that the Egyptian government planned to cede control
over Tiran and Sanafir, two islands between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas to
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egyptians were stunned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saudi government claimed that Egypt had
occupied the islands in the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century at its request to protect
them from Israel. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt was not ceding
territory; it was simply returning islands mid-way between the Saudi and
Egyptian mainlands to their original sovereign.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
government never gave a clear reason for the transfer and popular and elite
suspicions blossomed that the regime was exchanging the national territory for
billions of dollars of aid it had already received from the Saudis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These concerns are not new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The billionaire Saudi investor and prince
Walid Bin Talal was forced to relinquish an agricultural project in Upper Egypt
in the early months of the 2011 uprising due to widespread concerns about
corruption and undue influence over the Mubarak government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is not
surprising that intellectuals, activists, and ordinary citizens quickly moved
to stop the transfer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Public
demonstrations occurred despite a ban that has frequently been enforced with
murderous violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Khalid Ali, an
attorney and leftist opposition candidate for president in 2012, initiated
legal action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Within weeks historians, legal scholars, and
others identified decrees, maps, and legislation showing that that the islands
were subject to Egyptian control in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If so the islands would have been Egyptian
well before the Saudi state came into existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
matters because the government cannot, under the existing constitution,
alienate Egyptian territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
government’s initial explanation of the transfer of the islands was that it
resulted from delineating the Egyptian-Saudi maritime boundary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument for border delineation made the
transfer an administrative decision rather than a legislative act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just for this reason the ultimate arbiter of
the legality of the transfer was the High Administrative Court rather than the
Supreme Constitutional Court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The court
determined that the evidence put the transfer outside the administrative power
of the executive authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It could
only be accomplished by a legislative act regarding the sovereignty of the
state.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The generally
compliant legislature has not voted either to transfer the islands or to grant
the president the right to do so. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is not the first time the legislature has been recalcitrant to government
initiatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In January 2016 the
legislature, reviewing laws promulgated before it was seated, rejected
President Sisi’s civil service law by a vote of 336 to 150.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The law, a revision of the pre-existing law
on the civil service, aimed to make it easier to discipline workers and to fire
them as well as to cut the growth of wages paid them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was unpopular with civil service employees
and their unions and led to public protests that, although illegal, were not dispersed
with the kind violence deployed against political protests.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A revised
civil service law was enacted at the end of 2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new law provided greater financial
incentives to government employees than the original proposal and was clearly a
defeat for Sisi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian analysts
differ over why the legislature opposed Sisi on this issue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some have argued that the police played a
significant role in electing the current parliament and that the conflict over
the civil service law reflects a continuing conflict between the police
establishment and the military.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another
possibility is that Sisi’s decree in July 2015 that the 75% of the seats in the
parliament would be individual candidacies and only 20% party lists has had
unforeseen consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Individual
seats strengthen the candidacies of wealthy businessmen and influential
families whose interests are not wholly dependent on the regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consequently the creation of the majority
“For the Love of Egypt” list by the late military intelligence officer, Sameh
Seif El-Yazal, did not or could not re-create the kind of pliant partisan
apparatus that former president Mubarak had with the National Democratic
party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Weakening the legislature may, in
fact, have weakened executive control over the legislators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lastly, the choice of the issue over which
the legislature confronted the executive is meaningful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over the last 20 years employment in
state-owned industry has markedly declined as privatization and market-oriented
policies have dramatically decreased the size of state-owned industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Civil service employment has decreased but
remains large.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As an example of what
this means, in 2010, government statistics indicated that just over 12% of
Egyptians were employed in manufacturing which is increasingly in private
ownership and almost 9% were employed in education which remains largely a
public function and almost another 8% were employed in either the civil or
defense administrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Fifty years ago the laws governing
civil servants affected only a small, relatively secure portion of the workforce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the work of Egypt’s Nobel prize winning
novelist Naguib Mahfouz recounts, these employees may have been subject to
chicanery and mis-treatment by their superiors but their positions were
nevertheless largely understood as desirable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Egyptian public service has grown larger and wages, especially at
the lower levels, have become increasingly hard to live on while service
rendered the public has become increasingly poor in quality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Less secure tenure not only eliminates one of
the important perquisites of the positions but is widely understood to make
employees even more subject to the whims of supervisors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
That parliament defended its own
constituency is by no means an indication of its support for freedom of
expression, liberalism, or support for any greater principle of good governance
or democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parliament has stripped
two members of their seats in the last year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The first, Tawfiq Okasha, was ousted by a majority for having had
contacts with the Israeli embassy without first gaining parliamentary
approval.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second, Mohammad Anwar Esmat al-Sadat,
nephew of the late President Anwar el-Sadat, was ousted recently for his
attempt to prevent passage of extremely restrictive legislation governing the
work of non-governmental organizations and his disclosure of wasteful spending
on parliament itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Last, the regime has felt
disaffection from the religious establishment including the public expression
of discontent by Shaykh al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayyeb.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Azhar is often described as a
thousand-year old university and the most respected global institution of Sunni
Islam. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Azhar does comprise an old
and significant set of institutions for religious instruction where many of the
officials who oversee Egypt’s mosques are trained.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also provides formal and informal opinions
(fatwas) for government and private individuals about the religious character
of their actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speaking of the Azhar
can also refer to the modern university with faculties of medicine, politics
and literature or the primary-secondary school system with more than a million
students. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “Azhar” comprises a broad
array of educational and religious institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the government educational bureaucracy
and the court system, reaches deeply into Egyptian society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the army and the bureaucracy the Azhar
has not been well or deeply studied, not least because it does not welcome
external scrutiny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A poignant account of
the life of a fictional Azhari graduate is to be found in Abderrahman
Sharqawi’s 1952 novel “Al-Ard” (This Egyptian Earth):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a graduate finds himself morally at odds with
a government official who steals land from peasants but also finds himself
trapped by his own economic insecurity in acquiescing in the theft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In 2016 the government proposed a
change in the law governing divorce in ways consistent with what many analysts
have referred to as “state feminism”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over
the last 60 years Egyptian governments have occasionally attempted to use the
law to shift the balance of social power toward women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These have generally enhanced the bargaining
power of women in family law but without empowering independent civil
associations of women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Egypt Muslim
men can divorce their wives at will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Divorce for men is what scholars call performative because saying the
words “I divorce you” three times ends a marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The act of speaking the words constitutes the
divorce which need not be communicated to the wife or registered with the
state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Women can initiate proceedings to
obtain a divorce but, unlike men, they cannot unilaterally end a marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sissi proposed that verbal divorce be
annulled to be replaced by a formal meeting with a religious official. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
stated concern is both that there are too many divorces and divorce is
increasingly common.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forcing the process into an administrative
process might diminish their number if only insofar as it becomes more
expensive, more cumbersome, and more public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Tayyeb publicly opposed this
measure which was unpopular with many of the Azhari ulama and especially the
governing council.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The proposed change
may very well disadvantage men to some degree and it is at odds with received
practice and understanding of family law as subordinate to Islamic norms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because the constitution mandates that
Islamic legal principles provide the basis of Egyptian legislation there is
tension between institutions that claim authority to interpret what constitutes
Islamic law or legal principles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
debates have become more acute as two constitutions were written, ratified and
approved in referenda in the past four years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This may appear to be a rather
marginal issue on which to oppose Sissi and his government, but it indicates
some important disagreement between the Azhari elite and Sissi’s proclaimed
project of reforming Islam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are
good reasons for insisting that verbal divorces be registered—not least
fairness to women who are divorced without knowing it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are also reasons why members of the
Senior Scholars Council which, in the wake of the tumult of the last few years,
now wields significant authority again might reject such a proposal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Azhar has gained both autonomy and a secure
constitutional role in the wake of the uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where the head of the Azhar (the shaykh) was
formerly chosen by the head of state, he is now chosen by the Senior Scholar’s
Council and the constitution guarantees that the institution will receive
government support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Azhar’s leaders
have every reason to protect it against any encroachment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Overall, the bench, the officers’
corps, the legislature and the religious establishment supported the coup and
the creation of the current government. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is in contradistinction to the 1952
coup, frequently taken as the model and progenitor of Egypt’s current
constellation of institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1952
large sections of the religious establishment and the free professions (from
which the legislative elite was largely drawn) opposed the seizure of power by
army officers and the Free Officers spent years subordinating the civilian
elite to their control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nasser spent
years in frequent, and frequently unsuccessful, attempts to create a single
ruling party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ultimate success of
Hosny Mubarak in creating the National Democratic party provided him with a
means to transfer authority away from the army and, he seems to have hoped,
ultimately to his son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decision not
to encourage a single majority party forecloses a possible repetition of that
move but may have strengthened the concern of legislators to retain some
independent influence over their electoral fate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The civil administration has grown
larger and far more important in Egyptian political and economic life than it
was in 1952 even if it is arguably often over-staffed, less expert and
inefficient.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the Egyptian political
scientist Ashraf el-Sherif noted several years ago, many of the bureaucratic
institutions and ministries have become more autonomous since the
uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may have begun during the
long stasis of the late Mubarak era but it progressed with some rapidity after
the uprising. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Institutional autonomy is
reinforced by the increased personalization of positions including
inheritance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The children of officers
become officers; the children of judges become judges; the children of
legislators become legislators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
mechanisms may be subtly different in each case but they also reinforce the
need and the ability to retain some institutional independence if only to
ensure that the children can inherit the positions and authority of the
fathers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In several well-publicized cases institutional
closure has gone even further so that branches of the judiciary have refused to
allow law school graduates deemed socially inferior to enter service.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Egypt is not a democracy nor is it
a liberal political order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may,
however, be a mixed political system in which a powerful president is both
sustained by and sometimes opposed by other powerful institutions that seek to
retain as much autonomy as they can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
set of political institutions that have emerged since the coup are more stable
than many people think and can probably survive a transition to a new political
leader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To forestall such a transition
Sisi will have to ensure the legislature and judiciary both agree to
constitutional amendments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it will
take more than simply amending the clause limiting the president to two terms
in office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will also require amending
the clause that forbids amending the limitation itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If there is indeed any desire among
legislators and the judiciary to preserve their independence that latter clause
is one they will have to hold dear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Jurists and legislators are now
faced with a new challenge: President Sisi’s decision to invoke a state of
emergency in the wake of the bombing of churches in Tanta and Alexandria. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is not much reason to think that the
legislature will refuse Sisi’s requests to extend the state of emergency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will be easy as well for legislators of
limited horizons to cooperate against a judiciary that is widely perceived as
self-interested, illiberal, and cruel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The decline of an oligarchy nourished in the long years of Hosni Mubarak
and that flowered in the wake of his collapse will not mean democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could it, however, lead to something worse
than the present?</div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-51258345353201178042017-02-20T09:17:00.004-08:002017-02-20T09:25:50.772-08:00Leninism in the Time of Trump<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No one knows just why
Steve Bannon, then an obscure media figure and now President Trump’s special
adviser, would have walked up to Ronald Radosh at a dinner party in 2014 and
told him “I’m a Leninist.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even
Radosh, who once upon a time <i>was </i>a Leninist, doesn’t know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor has anyone, in fact, been able to
confirm Radosh’s assertion including Steve Bannon who claims not even to
remember the meeting let alone what he might have said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s assume, however, since Bannon
hasn’t denied the story or claimed that it’s “fake news” that it happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What, we might ask, would a former
naval officer and employee at Goldman Sachs who grew up in a working class home
in Norfolk, Virginia have possibly meant by saying he was a Leninist?</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This anecdote has occasionally
been glossed with reference to Vladimir Lenin’s tract, “The State and
Revolution,” a work neither Bannon nor Radosh mention. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Bannon may only have had a
sophomoric desire to shock a neoconservative intellectual whose
political background is well known.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Or, in a colossal mis-reading of the Russian revolution, he may think of
himself as a system-destroying revolutionary.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Odd as it may seem, however, we
have much to learn by considering how Bannon, or indeed many contemporary
Republican voters and Tea Party activists, might read what Lenin wrote in the
months before the November 7 coup in Saint Petersburg brought him to
power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lenin’s pamphlet has little
relevance to Soviet governance, but it may have been and may remain far more
useful as a guide to American practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My aim here is not to write about what Lenin really meant and whether
Leninism betrayed Lenin or the Russian revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is to consider the themes of “The State and Revolution”
as they might be read by right-wing radical American activists. “The State and
Revolution” is far more concerned with bureaucracy, regulation and the
political power of expertise than it is with class structures, dialectical
materialism, or the role of a vanguard party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may be the least Leninist thing Lenin ever wrote.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The contemporary
bureaucratic and regulatory structures that most Americans know and that the
Tea Party generally abhors are just about 100 years old in this country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In France and Germany they are somewhat
older.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American academics tend to
focus on the German scholar Max Weber as the earliest and most important
student of bureaucratic structures but at the turn of the twentieth century
there were eminent scholars around the world who noticed the sudden emergence
of bureaucracy and state regulation as new methods of governance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound
noticed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, administrative law—the
law of the bureaucracy—was so new in the US that it was almost unstudied in law
schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is not surprising
that Karl Marx paid relatively little attention to the state because in the
country that most affected his view of the world and that he saw as the most
advanced, England, the administrative state was relatively unimportant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite the existence of a
theoretically strong parliament, government in the United Kingdom of the late
19<sup>th</sup> century, although the most advanced industrial and capitalist
country in the world, still existed primarily as a set of highly local
practices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marx’s view of
socialism was largely colored by his concern that labor be joyful and that
governance be, in essence, amateur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is instructive that Marx saw the state as a committee rather than as
a set of administrative and regulatory structures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marx understood that the state employed coercion, but neither
the Rhineland nor England—the two societies that most strongly shaped his
understanding of capitalism and government—had powerful bureaucracies during
his lifetime.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Lenin was heir to mid-19<sup>th</sup>
century debates about the nature of society and the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During his study of law at the
University of Kazan in the 1880’s, the first Tsarist experiments in creating
codified law were still being implemented and the peasantry, the vast majority
of Russia’s inhabitants, lived with almost no contact with the new legal
structures, their courts, or their administrative edicts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike his near contemporaries, Weber
and Pound, Lenin had a significant impact on the creation of modern political
structures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not least of these was
his insistence that political parties be made up of disciplined professionals
who carried particular discourses and practices (the party “line”) into
society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lenin’s invention was
thus of a party that ultimately allowed the state to organize and agitate
society rather than being a mechanism for the projection of social and civic
interests into government.</div>
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On the eve of the Bolshevik seizure
of power in 1917, Lenin briefly looked back at earlier utopian debates on the
ultimate goal of the socialist movement and discussed one of Marx’s old and
only briefly elaborated themes: the withering away of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was far easier in Marx’s day to
imagine the progressive disappearance of still weakly bureaucratized governing
structures than it would be in the aftermath of the mobilization for total war
that occurred for the generations that lived from 1914 until 1945.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lenin fully grasped that when Marx
proposed the necessity of smashing what he called the bureaucratic-military
machine his words only applied to France and the situation of French
revolutionaries in 1871 during the year of the Paris Commune.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>England then, and by extension the
United States, lacked both a military clique and an extensive bureaucracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consequently Lenin wrote, in Britain,
it was possible to imagine a people’s revolution (his words) without the need
to destroy the already existing machinery of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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It was not difficult for Lenin, in
the chaotic Russian summer of 1917, to assert that both the bureaucracy and the
standing army were “parasites” on the body of bourgeois society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Relying on Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune and on the
assumption that by 1917 Russian revolutionaries as well as those in England and
the US would need to smash the state, Lenin considered what would replace it,
or more accurately just who would replace the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Despite the association of Lenin’s
name with the pervasive and rigid bureaucracy of the Soviet state and its
highly privileged elite—the so-called <i>nomenklatura</i>—he foresaw a very
different outcome than the self-proclaimed leaders of twentieth century
totalitarianism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“All citizens,”
Lenin wrote in <i>State and Revolution</i>, “are transformed into hired
employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With rising levels of literacy and
numeracy, Lenin predicted that “all members of society, or at least the vast
majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken over the
work into their own hands….from this moment the need for government of any kind
begins to disappear altogether.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Whatever similarities exist between the bureaucracies in the fascist and communist states in
the 1930s, the utopian ideal proposed by Lenin is distinctly different than
that of contemporary fascist leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Both Hitler and Mussolini considered the state a tool to be seized and
used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hitler in <i>Mein Kampf </i>and
Mussolini in “The Doctrine of Fascism” saw the state as an instrument for social order and cohesion. It might be necessary to purge state
officials (an idea with which Stalin agreed) and it might be necessary to
develop new and more hideous instruments of coercion and murder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eliminating the state, even as an
ideal, was alien to their thinking and to their movements as it was for Lenin when he
finally acquired state power and even more so when he was succeeded by Stalin.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Eliminating the state
solves one of the most acute problems of government as a socially autonomous
institution. Political thinkers from Plato to Madison, to Foucault and Hobbes, all
wondered who governs the governors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>More specifically what prevents those with administrative authority from
using it on their own behalf?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are many different answers and Lenin was not reluctant to propose,
at least in theory, his own:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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“When all have learned to administer
and actually do independently administer social production, independently keep
accounts and exercise control over parasites…escape from this popular
accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a
rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe
accounting (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental
intellectuals, and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that
the necessity of observing…the rules of the community will very soon become a
habit.”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>European socialists
and revolutionaries at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century strongly opposed
the use of violence against minorities and Lenin was no exception.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless the independent action of
armed workers against government officials is close to lynch law which was
usually justified by asserting that the competent government officials were
derelict in their duty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One place
where armed workers possessed the capacity to threaten officials was the United
States and especially the American South, where tradition, statute, and
constitutional law (the Second Amendment) sanctioned white violence against
black citizens accused but not convicted to criminal acts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lynching was never promoted as a substitute for the judicial
system but it was frequently excused as the direct action of an emotionally
mobilized community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Those who defended
lynching recognized that it undermined the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Benjamin Tillman participated in the Hamburg Massacre of
1876 which was one of a long chain of events in which armed insurrection
overthrew the Reconstruction government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He later served as state governor and US Senator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speaking of lynching to the legislature
in 1895 he argued that in a government dominated by white supremacists, whites
had no reason to resort to lynching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet, as Tillman knew lynching often required not only
a mob but the collusion of state officials who (to paraphrase Lenin) undertook
to obey the rules of the community as a habit.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A far more common use
of arbitrary authority in the South occurred in voter registration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The states of the Old Confederacy after
Reconstruction never legislatively denied African-Americans the franchise directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much as they might have wanted to, white
politicians understood that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the
Constitution precluded such a direct assault.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead they created literacy and administrative
requirements that gave voter registrars significant leeway in determining who
could vote and how to validate ballots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The administrative mechanism they created was therefore quite distant
from what Weber or Pound might have expected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Registrars and other officials therefore had both the
incentive and the authority to eliminate the influence of large sections of the
population on government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many
Southern states ultimately more white than black voters were disenfranchised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The broad democracy that Reconstruction
was supposed to plant in the south withered.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Whatever Steve Bannon’s
views on race, ethnicity, religion and gender, however, he’s no Ben Tillman at
least in public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any listener to
recordings of his somewhat rambling talks available on the internet can attest
that his speech is devoid of racial slurs or ethnic epithets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That listener can also attest to
Bannon’s view that he believes in the superiority of Western civilization and
the culture of Christian religiosity without necessarily showing any great
familiarity with either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Compared
to the rants of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman or “The Great White Chief” James
Vardaman of Mississippi, Bannon is a mild-mannered politician.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But again neither Tillman or Vardaman
would have described themselves as Leninists who hoped for the destruction
either of the elite or the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Where Bannon’s vision is reminiscent of Lenin’s is when he reassures his
audience that their values—rather than the actual laws—ought to be what
animates government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Donald Trump has no
desire for the state to vanish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Someone
must keep track of deeds, clean the streets, patrol the borders, and prosecute
violent crime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beyond those
tasks, however, Trump and much of the leadership of the Republican party
question the need for the regulatory and social service bureaucracy of the
contemporary state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trump and the
Republican majority in Congress are in agreement to dispense, as far as
possible, with these institutions of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of Trump’s appointments, notably Betsy DeVos at
Education and Ben Carson at Housing, have little experience either with large
bureaucratic institutions or with the substance of the policy disputes they
must address.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They also both
prefer private and for-profit solutions to public and governmental ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They will therefore be neither inclined
nor able to ensure that their agencies function well either in society or in
the conflict for funds, influence, and the president’s attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is unlikely they will defend their
agencies vigorously against threats of dissolution such as bills recently
introduced into Congress to dissolve the Department of Education or the
Environmental Protection Agency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Someone must also defend the rights
of owners of private property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Trump exhibits greater ambivalence about government property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During Cliven Bundy’s April 2014 armed
stand-off with Bureau of Land Management employees over grazing rights in
Nevada, Trump acknowledged respect for Bundy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also recognized that government would collapse if everyone
did what Bundy was doing. While not exactly Lenin’s concept of armed workers
enforcing their will on bureaucrats, Bundy’s action was remarkably close.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Bundy’s armed actions posed a
problem for Trump but not primarily because it was armed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trump does not support transferring
Federal land to state governments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As a real estate developer who has frequently benefited from it, he
supports the right of government to take private land with compensation (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">eminent domain</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many Trump voters are closer to Bundy’s
way of thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, Trump
proposed a solution to the crisis in which Bundy negotiated his way out of the
standoff and his unpaid arrears to the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2016, Bundy’s son, Ammon, took over the Malheur Federal
wildlife refuge. Trump asserted that if he were President he would end the
occupation by calling the leaders and asking them to stand down and bring their
complaints to him. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gerald DeLemus,
co-chair of the New Hampshire Veterans for Trump Committee, saw the armed
take-over of Federal offices in a different light. He flew to Malheur to join
the protest where he was arrested.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Although they intervened with arms
against government officials, Bundy father and son are not Leninists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They descend from a long tradition of
the use of armed force against officials by farmers that began western
Pennsylvania with the whiskey rebellion of 1791.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This armed protest, like later ones, sought to change
government policy by preventing officials from carrying it out. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Limiting the power of the government to
tax and regulate was the issue, not the destruction of the state.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
So, too, neither Trump nor Bannon
seek the end of the state although they both, like paleo-conservatives and
neo-liberals, seek to roll back the administrative state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is different and what Bannon may
have recognized in “State and Revolution” if he ever read it is a two-fold
idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first is simply that
armed protest—of a kind that is almost impossible to imagine outside a
constitution that guarantees the right of private citizens to bear arms—plays
an extremely disruptive role with the institutions of the modern state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second is that increasing the
discretion of police officers to enforce law can enhance the ability of an
executive to accomplish popular but formally unconstitutional goals.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This suggests a different way to
understand Trump’s executive orders and especially his most recent conflict
with the Ninth Circuit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That these
orders are poorly written and that Trump had little understanding of their
content or how they would be received by the courts is clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither Steve Bannon nor
Donald Trump has a legal education and the President reads little and certainly
not closely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something of an
argument has developed about whether the poorly drafted orders are the result
of incompetence or some extraordinarily diabolic cleverness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suggest a third possibility: the
executive orders are not primarily meant as legal documents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are messages conveying to
officials such as immigration officers at the border or police in the field
that, rather than being strictly commanded to engage in extreme vetting, they
have been given extreme latitude to enforce the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If Steve Bannon really bounced up
to Ronald Radosh and provocatively announced that he was a Leninist, he didn’t
mean destroying the bureaucracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He meant transforming it from an organization bound by law into one
inhabited by a million little Trumps.</div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-91425490144045980952016-12-15T12:43:00.001-08:002016-12-15T12:43:10.475-08:00 The Klankraftiness of Donald Trump<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Donald
Trump’s selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education is revealing of more
than trouble ahead for public education in the United States. Because she wants
to turn much of public instruction private, it also reveals how profoundly the
politics of white supremacy has changed since the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan
was a mainstream social movement and had broad political influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no better way to understand
today’s Trump phenomenon than by comparing him with the Klan, but to do this we
must rid ourselves of the idea that the early twentieth century Klan was
identical to that of the mid-nineteenth century or the one of our day.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Klan was re-founded in 1915 in the Deep South not long after the release of the
popular movie, Birth of a Nation, which was itself based on an earlier novel
The Klansman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The expansion of the
Klan relied on techniques now associated with multi-level marketing firms such
as Amway as well as the synthesis of exotic rituals such as those earlier
popularized by fraternal societies such as the Shriners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>White
supremacy has always been a basic element of Klan ideology or Klankraft as it
was called with the organization. Despite its constant concern to avoid being
labeled as an organization whose members took the law into their own hands, the
Klan always employed violence as political terror and social discipline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Between 1915 and 1928, however, the
Klan was a broadly representative fraternal organization insofar as it mirrored
the beliefs of many white native-born Protestants and insofar as it projected
those beliefs into the political realm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Despite
the initial association of the Klan with the Confederate states, in the 1920s
it was an organization well beyond the South. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seeking to understand the spread of the Klan, contemporary
observers and later historians utilized the same causal links that have been
deployed to explain the Trump vote in 2016: fear of labor market competition by
immigrants, the transition to a new economy (more industrial) and new society
(more urban), as well as changes in social mores about sex and
intoxicants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
has been considerable scholarly debate about who joined the Klan in the 1920s. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A once dominant tendency was to believe
that Klansmen were marginal members of society: uneducated and impoverished
whites with a propensity to violence and profound ignorance about economic
structures and politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In part
this was simply a stereotype based on an esthetic that less attractive politics
must be held by less attractive people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In part it arose from the desire of middle-class and professional
opponents of the Klan who held similar ideas to differentiate themselves and
their social milieu from the organization.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Recent
studies, employing internal Klan documents, have shown that the Klan in the
1920s was broadly representative of white society, but that its members were
disproportionately drawn from semi-skilled labor and lower level civil
servants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Klan members were more
likely to have had modest incomes and modest educations than to have been
unskilled, illiterate, or well-off professionals with college degrees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Klan members, to a greater degree than
society at large, benefited from receiving education at a period in American
history when most pre-baccalaureate instruction was provided by public schools.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A moment’s
reflection dismisses the idea of the Klan in the 1920s as an organization of
the impoverished and dispossessed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unlike the Klan ‘s first incarnation in 1868 as an avowedly terrorist
group, the Klan’s revival in after World War I was the work of publicists and
advertising agents working out the basic elements of multi-level marketing in
the context of a fraternal organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Members paid the klecktoken or annual dues of $10 at a time when Henry
Ford had made himself nationally famous by offering skilled assembly workers $5
a day, which was twice the normal daily wage for factory employees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Members were also expected to buy their
own robes, other paraphernalia, and printed literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Formal membership in the Klan was
beyond the means of the impoverished and the economically insecure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paid organizers, the kleagles, retained
$4 of every klecktoken they received.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Higher officials retained smaller amounts but from a larger pool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the mid-1920s the national Klan
leadership often attained incomes of hundreds of thousands of dollars in
today’s money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Klan
membership was restricted to white Protestant native-born men although the
creation of the auxiliary Women’s KKK in 1923 opened up an avenue for women to
participate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan is best
known for the violence with which, especially in the South, it enforced white
supremacy and suppressed any bids for political or economic equality by Black
Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan also sought,
through legal and extra-legal means, to affect American society in a variety of
other areas: immigration, education, drugs, sexual relations, child support,
and divorce.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Since the
1960s, Americans have thought of drugs in terms of marijuana and a handful of
powerful stimulants and depressants such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine,
and briefly LSD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of these are
available through illegal markets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The hard drugs are sufficiently available to create public health
problems and they all contribute to the existence of an unregulated economy
that engenders wealth and violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Recently many states have effectively legalized marijuana although Federal
law continues to sanction its use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For hundreds of years, however, Americans thought of alcohol as the most
dangerous drug for its economic, social and moral effects on society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the latter 19<sup>th</sup> century
increasingly effective movements sought to ban the production and consumption
of alcohol and they were ultimately successful immediately after World War I
with the passage of the 18<sup>th</sup> Amendment to the constitution and the
Volstead Act.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mention
Prohibition today and it conjures up quaint images of flappers and speakeasies
or exchanges of gunfire between square-jawed federal agents and gangsters with
ominously Italian names along with the easy admission that it was obviously a
terrible policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet prohibition
had long been a staple demand of American Protestant churches. The Klan, along
with the Women’s Christian Temperance Organization and the Anti-Saloon League, also
fought for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like so many
issues, Prohibition was not directly a matter of intolerance or prejudice but
it sharpened opposition between immigrant groups and nativist whites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Jews and Catholics from southern
and eastern Europe wine was a sacramental item as well as an item of cultural
conviviality along with hard liquor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The inability of the Federal and state governments to
enforce Prohibition also gave the Klan license to enforce it by itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It did so with assaults on drinking
establishments and, in parts of the South, with public whippings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
alcohol was one popular issue that deeply concerned the Klan, education was another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It invariably supported the expansion
of the public schools and frequently also supported higher taxes to enhance
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the Deep South to the
Midwest and the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast the Klan fought consistently
to extend compulsory public education.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In Oregon in 1922 elected Klan officials passed a law requiring that all
children between eight and sixteen attend public schools. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Progressive as this might seem, the aim
of this and other similar legislation backed by the Klan was use the schools to
shape the values and allegiances of American citizens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As one Klan official put it in 1923, “the Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan should be the vehicle for this Bible reading and instruction and that
no atheist, infidel, skeptic or non-believer should be allowed to teach in the
public schools.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Klan’s opposition to the Catholic Church was rooted in beliefs that the culture
and society of the US were uniquely Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan viewed the massive immigration
that characterized the US from the 1890 to 1920 and had brought large numbers
of Southern and Eastern Europeans to the US (as well as Jews) as an existential
threat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Catholic Church
possessed a formidable institutional presence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its members owed allegiance to the Church and were enmeshed
in an institutional framework that included schools, parishes, and charitable
organizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike the various
Protestant sects that dominated the religious scene in the US, the Church had a
well-organized hierarchy and could mobilize its primarily urban worshippers for
elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Long before academics
thought about the reproduction of culture, the Klan grasped the importance of
controlling early education to affect the ties of citizens to the institutions
of civil society and the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Klan viewed the religious threat to American society as the primary result of
immigration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan viewed with
concern the large number of Catholics who had entered the US in the preceding
decades and especially that “a big percent of these immigrants are from the
lowest strata of Italy, Poland, and other Roman Catholic countries.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan strongly supported immigration
legislation that in 1924 ended the policy of nearly unlimited entry into the US
in order, in its words, to “prevent the glutting of the American labor market
and the Romanizing and mongrelizing of the citizenship of the United States.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No
one would deny that the Klan in the 1920s was committed to white supremacy, but
this is popularly thought to be a nearly unconscious reflex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For most white Americans, we are often
told, being white was a background condition and whites were rarely aware that
whiteness was itself a singular condition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not how the Klan presented the relevant issue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As noted above, the Klan undoubtedly
saw white dominance as intimately connected with Protestantism and
Protestantism they certainly believed to be under attack from Catholics and
Jews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
can be difficult to separate the Klan’s racism with that of white society at
large in the period between the two world wars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan was committed to maintaining the legal and economic
separation and subjugation of African-Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It held, as did many Americans in the era of “scientific
racism”, that Blacks were an inferior group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Criticism of the Klan at the time from those who believed
equally in white supremacy was often based on concern that the Klan provoked
violence both as a short-term policy and in order to spread fear among whites
that would bring more recruits to the Klan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writing in 1922, Henry Fry discussed the Tulsa race riot the
previous year in which whites killed some 300 Black people, destroyed property,
and drove citizens into exile. Speaking of what was probably the worse pogrom
in American history Fry, in his book The Modern Ku Klux Klan, noted that the
Klan at no time rallied to support the maintenance of law and order despite its
claims to be an organization committed to such goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oklahoma, Fry pointed out, was a stronghold of the Klan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite its state support for law and
order, the Klan was a constant source of disorder both through its propaganda
and through its mobilization of members for extra-legal and illegal
activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inciting and organizing
popular violence while piously asserting that its commitment to legality was a
hallmark of the Klan.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Klan was, however, solicitous of the police and local law enforcement. It was
here that the Klan, especially in the South but elsewhere as well, had its
greatest impact on local government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Klan in the 1920s, even in the South, did not deploy the Confederate
flag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the contrary, although it
deplored what it called an over-reaching Federal government during
Reconstruction, in the 1920s the Klan presented itself as a bastion of
Americanism and a supporter of American institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
2016 the Klan is no longer an organization of any importance in American
politics, but the so-called Alt-Right and political currents that swirl in and
around it such as the Tea Party and sections of the Republican party remain
strongly motivated by the issues and policies that the Klan pioneered in the
1920s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trump himself sometimes
articulates views very close to those of the Klan. Whether this is chance is
far from clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just because they
were once common views among white Americans of his father’s generation means
he likely heard them growing up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That his father was arrested at a Klan demonstration in 1927 and may
have been attracted to their nativist message and thus raised his son on it is
also possible.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Trump
is closest to evoking the Klan of the 1920s in his views on immigration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed Trump’s call for a moratorium on
immigration sounds remarkably like a 1923 statement by a South Carolina Grand
Dragon to restrict immigration for a decade while the US took “an inventory of
human assets and liabilities” with its border.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His view of Mexicans resembles those of Klan quoted above.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the 1920s the Klan was concerned primarily with Jewish and Catholic immigration
and secondarily with Japanese immigration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Muslim immigration was insignificant and the Klan never
mentioned it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The prevailing
infatuation with the Orient at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century may even
have played some role in the Klan’s ritual meetings which, unlike cross
burning, took place indoors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Citizens of the “invisible empire” entered a separate space from the
“alien” world of everyday America when the Klavern assembled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan constitution was officially
known as the Kloran and the sergeant-at-arms was a Klaliff which may have been
a portmanteau of bailiff and caliph.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Anti-Semitism
and anti-Catholic animus, major themes of the klancraft of religion, were more
than mere personal prejudice although they certainly included it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The persistence of anti-Semitism in
countries such as the US and Germany which had relatively tiny Jewish
populations owes more to its role as a discourse of mobilization than as a
lived experience for most people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Modern anti-Semitism is a way of transforming economic grievances into
ethnic ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the German social
democratic leader August Bebel once put it, anti-Semitism is the socialism of
fools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anti-Catholic sentiment was
more directly aimed at mobilizing sentiment against institutions that
necessarily sought to expand pluralism and what we would today call
“multi-culturalism” in American society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Many Protestants perceived the Church as an enemy to their dominance of
society and as recently as the 1960 presidential election it was possible to
argue that John Kennedy would, if elected, take orders from the Pope about how
to govern the US.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Anti-Catholicism
is no longer a main theme in American politics and anti-Semitism, while significant,
has not been a primary motivating tool of the American right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The religion most in the public eye
today in American politics is Islam and Trump has echoed many themes of the
older anti-Catholic discourse when he speaks of Islam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This sounds peculiar because antagonism
to Islam and to Arabs is often described as similar to anti-Semitism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considering the nature of the Klan’s
antagonism to the Catholic Church (and indeed the history of conflating anxiety
about Catholic and Muslim challenges to Protestant polities going back to the
16<sup>th</sup> century) it should be clear that much of what is called
“Islamophobia” resembles anti-Catholic sentiment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Muslims, like Catholics, are said to be incapable of
integrating into the American political community: they are beholden to
religious leaders outside our national territory; they are subordinate to a
particular textual tradition; they have not experienced the Reformation; in
addition to their religious incapacity to assimilate they are members of
equally problematic ethnic groups; they seek to transform American institutions
through subjecting them to alien religious norms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These complaints are rarely if ever addressed to Jews in the
United States but they have been commonly applied both to Muslims and Catholics.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
then of education?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Trump spoke
the fears of the Klan to a new generation of white Protestants (and of course
to some other Americans as well) his embrace of Betsy DeVos shows how different
our world is than that of the 1920s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The struggles to integrate and secularize the public schools in the
1960s ended the dream that they could be used to create a citizenry steeped in
white supremacy and Protestant religiosity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Catholics increasingly turned to the public schools to
educate their children as did Jews and school boards and local governments
increasingly withdrew Bible reading from morning exercises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Teaching became both a profession with
a pluralist workforce and increasingly committed to cultural pluralism as a
value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
rise of private schools as a safe space for the values of middle as well as
upper class white Protestants grew in tandem with the integration of the public
schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the south, but less so
in the north, the Klan existed in tension with an older, wealthier oligarchy
frequently rooted in land ownership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That oligarchy also believed in white supremacy and required cheap Black
labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conflicts between the Klan
and the oligarchy frequently arose over education and the leasing of convict
labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because much of the
prison population was Black, convict leasing threatened the wages of
impoverished white workers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
until 1928, with the support of the Klan, did Alabama finally eliminate convict
leasing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the last state to
do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Schools remained
chronically underfunded, however, and the same literacy tests and poll taxes
that prevent almost all African Americans from voting also limited white
electoral participation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
public schools were the only possible path for upward mobility.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Klan
hoped, with some success, to force all Americans into the public school system
and also hoped, with some success, to control the curriculum. White
supremacists and the political activists from the far right of the political
spectrum can no longer hope to accomplish that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor indeed do they, as did many of their predecessors, send
their own children to public schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whether today’s wealthy constitute an oligarchy is an open question, but
the wealthiest Americans send their children to private schools and sponsor the
privatization of public schools as an ideal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus Betsy DeVos will play an important role in making
education policy for the next several years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If white
supremacists have turned against a public school system they can no longer
control, the schools remain an important locus for political power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They continue to shape citizens and
provide many young Americans with whatever skills and human capital they can
acquire as they seek to find employment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Another way to look at the most recent election is to realize that
although unions in the private sector have been largely eliminated those in the
public sector remain potent economic and political actors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 1920s many lower level civil
servants were attracted to the Ku Klux Klan but that has ceased to be true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today public employees are divided into
two main groups: those who deal with security and those who deal with human
services.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are about 1.3
million police in the US and about 3.1 million teachers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Police unions appear to have endorsed
Trump and teacher’s unions supported Clinton.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Transforming the public schools has an ideological purpose
but it also will have political consequences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unions that are no longer primarily white and no longer have
primarily white constituencies no longer benefit from the support of
organizations, mainstream or extreme, that further white supremacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Privatizing schools will decrease
organized support for public schools by teachers as well as among parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strong support for the police will have
the opposite effect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Although
Americans at large and some supporters came to distrust the Klan as its leaders
grew wealthy and engaged in egregious acts of self-aggrandizement one of the
most important causes of the collapse of the Klan was the 1925 abduction of
Madge Oberholtzer by Indiana Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a horrific incident that was once
widely known but is now largely forgotten Stephenson kidnapped Oberholtzer and
held her at his mansion where he raped her repeatedly. Stephenson released her
after her attempt to escape him by committing suicide failed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stephenson returned Oberholtzer, bruised
and bloodied, to her mother’s house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Her death several weeks later was attributed to a combination of
infected deep bites by Stephenson and kidney failure from the suicide
attempt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stephenson was convicted
of rape and second degree murder.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephenson’s
conviction led tens of thousands of men to leave the Klan and, after being
denied a parole, he provided evidence that led to the conviction of Indiana
officials, including the governor, Ed Jackson, on bribery charges.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Within two years the Klan, which in
1924 had nearly a quarter of a million members, ceased to exist as an organized
force in Indiana.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The leaders
of the second Klan came to believe they could act with impunity, but the Madge
Oberholtzer’s death and the subsequent revelations showed their limits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Donald Trump is not D.C. Stephenson and
it remains to be seen if his administration will show similar venality to Jackson’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like the Klan, however, he has ridden a
cresting wave of populist white supremacy, religious discrimination,
anti-immigrant politics into office claiming to be the opponent of a financial
oligarchy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trump’s use of social
media to incite violence that he then claims to oppose resembles the Klancraft
of the 1920s which was seriously concerned about the dissemination of their
message and dealing with the public media.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan is an insignificant organization today but its
ideas, appeals, and base of support appears to live on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether its weaknesses will prove to be
Trump’s as well remains to be seen.</span></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-8806202657026215982016-05-23T14:35:00.000-07:002016-05-23T15:16:19.666-07:00Democratization's First Failure: The American South After 1865<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<b>This is the second of two entries against American exceptionalism. The first dealt with the period of the revolutionary war of independence. This one addresses the occupation of the South after the Civil War and the failure to create a democratic capitalist system there. </b><br />
<br />
Americans, including academics, have an immense appetite for books, stories and
films about the<br />
people, processes, and details of the Revolution and the Civil War.
American academics have a nearly equally immense appetite for books and articles about democratization, but more
recently their tastes have changed to include studies of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and
repression. Neither citizens at large nor academics, however, have much of a taste for the period in which
American history comprises grim accounts of authoritarianism, terror, dictatorship and the violent
overthrow of elected governments—the period between 1876 and 1956. <br />
<br />
American academics do occasionally research and write about those years but
they prefer to focus on what are, generally, more uplifting stories. These include the
expansion of American industry, the political integration of millions of Southern and Eastern
European immigrants, the development of the welfare state, and the increasingly important role of the US
as a global power. What negative aspects there are to the role of urban political machines, the
unequal distribution of wealth in the Gilded Age, and the inability (or unwillingness) of the US to
bring democracy to the real or metaphorical islands where US troops were dispatched from the Philippines to
Central America or the Caribbean form a necessary counterpoint to the ineluctably progressive
character of the American experience. <br />
<br />
Inherent in these stories—whether told in the academic or the popular press—is
the belief that America is one country with one people. Its territorial boundaries expand
and its population becomes increasingly diverse but, as our national motto has it, we are, out of many,
one. Walt Whitman is our national poet because he celebrates our protean ability to combine multitude of
individuals. To the extent that we may be slightly skeptical of how
exceptional we are, we sometimes note the role that ideas of race have played
in the history of the American state and American society. Because African
slavery in Americas was nearly coextensive with white settlement, we have come
to see African Americans as people against whom there has been discrimination
but who are historically part and parcel of the American people and American
history. <br />
<br />
There are sound reasons for looking at American history this way, but we can
learn something else about the history of our country and the world by looking
at things slightly differently: as the centuries-long account of attempting, with varying degrees of success, the
integration of two very different countries—one with liberal democratic and market institutions riven
by class conflict and one with an authoritarian political system and a command economy and a caste
society—into one and of attempting, often with very little success, to democratize one of them. Seen in this light and shorn of the idea that the conflict over race is simply
a matter of individual prejudice (although that too exists) similarities between
post-colonial states in the Middle East, Asia and Africa with the United States become more apparent. <br />
<br />
For anyone interested in whether an occupying army can accomplish democratization or the ways in which a
dispossessed elite regains authority or simply how much political capital US governments are willing to
expend in the pursuit of democratization, the years between 1865 and 1960 in the American South provide
a wealth of insight. In April 1865 the Federal government won the war it had prosecuted for four
years against an insurgent government, the Confederate States of America. Unlike many
rebellious movements the CSA was a fully formed state. It had an army,
governing institutions and offices, diplomatic representatives, and a legal system. It claimed and, except when
militarily defeated by the Union army, largely succeeded in maintaining a monopoly of legitimate violence in the
territory it claimed. Had the Union not occupied the south, including its successive capitals, there
is no reason to believe that it would have been anything other than a functioning state in the global
system of states. <br />
<br />
It is generally understood today that the war was fought over the issue of
slavery but what this means is often unclear. The war was not fought over racial discrimination, but
over whether the state would recognize and defend property rights in human beings. More exactly it was
fought to determine whether a political system in which slavery provided an
elite with crucial economic power would continue to exist in North America where it had already been abolished in the two neighboring polities of Canada
and Mexico. The Emancipation Proclamation was a tool through which the Union
destroyed the economy of the CSA. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to
the US constitution in 1865 outlawing slavery made the re-creation of the Old
South’s political economy impossible. <br />
<br />
Over the next twenty years several Republican presidents and congressional
majorities wrestled with the problem we now call democratization.
They thought of it as a problem of how to construct republican
government. In a world of monarchies and empires, political theorists
still thought more about republics than democracies as the alternative
to autocratic rule. Equally pressing was that the wording of the US
constitution permitted the Congress to ensure that the various states had
republican not democratic governments.<br />
<br />
The fourteenth Amendment to the constitution and the civil rights act of 1866
were initial attempts to create political (but not social) equality between black and white
citizens. In the mid-19th century several states of the Deep South had
black majorities and thus political equality necessarily transferred power in
any fair and free election. Former slaves were solidly Republican voters
but the candidates they supported were usually white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some were from the South and others were
immigrants from the North.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
testimony to the continued power of the political vocabulary of southern
reaction that the nomenclature to describe these whites, “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”,
has survived into the 21<sup>st</sup> century.<br />
<br />
To a degree perhaps unprecedented in human history, the
racism that structures relationships between black and white Americans is the
outcome of conscious human decision-making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unlike the relationships between Shi’i and Sunni Muslims or Armenians
and Turks or Koreans and Japanese, there simply are no historical categories
that correspond to white and black as Americans understand them before
1620.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither the progenitors of
Europeans or Africans inhabited the continents that were to be named after the
obscure Italian navigator Vespucci.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
the children of Europe came largely of their own volition, the children of
Africa were brought in chains and suffering and the relationship between the
two developed in relatively well-documented historical time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
With the exception of the American Indian peoples, neither
the US constitution, ordinary politics, nor American scholarship is in the
least at ease with the idea that ours is a multi-ethnic or pluri-national country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was really no time when Black and white
in America lived happily together in a paradise riven by colonial
machinations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet precisely because
this is so it is easier to re-imagine the historical processes of American
economic and political history creating two distinct nations and facing,
however imperfectly, the necessity of transforming them into one.<br />
<br />
It is common today to look with some disdain on movements
and thinkers in American history who seriously considered that black and white
Americans were separate peoples.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Merely
to state it in those terms seems to provide the segregationists and
slave-owners with a kind of victory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such a refusal ignores that Abraham Lincoln looked favorably on the idea
that freed slaves would be best returned to Africa. Many whites and a number of
black in the nineteenth century supported colonization of West Africa and the
creation of the state of Liberia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
easy to condescend to Marcus Garvey and his Back to Africa movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With his hats and his bluster and the
ultimate collapse of his movement in corruption he is no longer an inspiring
figure, but there was a moment when hundreds of thousands of African Americans
considered him a beacon of hope in a violent and impoverished time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Garvey, like many earlier figures who
promoting the return of African Americans to Africa, seems to have thought of
them as a people that only required a territory of their own to become truly a
nation.<br />
<br />
The one theoretical claim that African Americans might be a
distinct nation within the US is even more suspect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Harry Haywood, a long-forgotten Black
Communist, wrote <i>Negro Liberation</i> precisely to propose that the
inhabitants of the Black Belt deserved recognition as a separate nation with a
separate territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Uncomfortable as we
may be today with the concept of reparations, it is far easier to consider
reparations than the idea of a sovereign or semi-sovereign entity on the
territory of the United States with an African-American elite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writing within the framework of Stalin’s
definition of nationhood, Haywood proposed to his comrades that the Negro
people were a nation because they shared language, history, economic relations,
and culture. Haywood realized that the Negro people shared many of these
characteristics with whites. There is nothing anomalous in Haywood’s argument
if we recognize the Irish, Welsh or Scots as nationalities distinct from the
English despite sharing with their former overlords these same presumably
primal characteristics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
distinguishes those nations from each other would be either their claim to
antiquity—an existence prior to conquest—or a “national project” in modern
times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Haywood understood that an
African-American people were created by conquest and slavery and thus could not
pre-date it, but his work remains of interest if we can see in Garvey, Malcolm
X, and other leaders the enunciation of a national project. American academics
no longer believe that nations are created by shared structural characteristics
and thus Haywood’s argument has long been forgotten.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
Seen in these lights, the post-Reconstruction period of
American history looks more like the forerunner of later American attempts (and
conspicuous failures) to impose democracy on divided societies and less like
the halting progress of triumphant liberalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Confederacy looks more like an alien society whose autonomous
existence whether within the United States or as an independent entity posed an
existential threat to the liberal, industrial, market-oriented Federal republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
The defeat and occupation of the CSA posed dilemmas for
victors and vanquished alike.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Radical Republicans were all too aware that they might have won the war only to
lose the peace while the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>former political
and economic elite of the conquered territory sought desperately to prevent the
transformation of their loss of status and influence into complete irrelevance
and replacement by a new mixed elite of blacks and whites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
Writing in 1935, WEB DuBois in <i>Black Reconstruction</i>
described a “singular schism in the South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The white planter endeavored to keep the Negro at work for his own
profit on terms that amounted to slavery and which were hardly distinguishable
from it…Meanwhile the poor white did not want the Negro put to profitable
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wanted the Negro beneath the
feet of the white worker.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>DuBois
further described the unease of the victors: “Back of all the enthusiasm and
fervor of victory in the North came a wave of reflection that represented the
sober after-thought of the nation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
harked back to a time when not one person in ten believed in Negroes, or in
emancipation, or in any attempt to conquer the South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This feeling began to arise before the war
closed, and after it ended it rose higher and higher into something like
dismay.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
DuBois viewed the task of Reconstruction as the
revolutionary remaking of the Southern economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His analysis was as cool as his prose was ardent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He summed up the penultimate chapter of <i>Black
Reconstruction</i> with the words “How the civil war in the South began
again—indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of
Ages by hate, hurt, and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet
lives and fights.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As DuBois recognized,
“it is always difficult to stop war, and doubly difficult to stop a civil
war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inevitably, when men have long been
trained to violence and murder, the habit projects itself into civil life after
peace, and there is crime and disorder and social upheaval, as we who live in
the backwash of World War [I] know too well…When to all this you add a servile
and disadvantaged race, who represent the cause of war and who afterwards are
left near naked to their enemies, war may go on more secretly, more
spasmodically, and yet as truly as before the peace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was the case in the South after Lee’s
surrender.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
DuBois recognized military dictatorship (his description) as
the necessary instrument to transform the South and that the failure of the
revolutionary project of Reconstruction (again, his description) to create a
liberal, market-oriented South brought in its wake an even more potent
counter-revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Americans, DuBois
noted, “apparently expected that this social upheaval was going to be
accomplished with peace, honesty, and efficiency, and that the planters were
going to quietly surrender the right to live on the labor of black folk, after
two hundred and fifty years of habitual exploitation.”<br />
<br />
DuBois’s Marxist-inflected analysis is predicated on the
belief that force and violence necessarily accompany profound social and
political transformations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His account
therefore highlighted the use of violence to forestall the revolutionary
implications of Reconstruction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Political science today is less concerned with violence than was DuBois
and this is especially true, as DuBois suggested, of the study of American
politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>DuBois himself, as do many
analysts, described the Ku Klux Klan as a major contributor to the violence
that overthrew Reconstruction and that sealed the victory of
counter-revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Klan, however,
was a national organization and had largely been dismantled by 1872 thanks to
vigorous Federal prosecution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decade
before DuBois wrote <i>Black Reconstruction</i> a new incarnation of the Klan
emerged and the organization was therefore once again on the minds of American
progressives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless too great a
focus on the Ku Klux Klan places too little emphasis on the degree to which
local elites deployed violence not simply against individuals but against even
the institutions of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Repeated
and sometimes successful attempts by terrorists and unofficial militias to
overthrow local governments by force were a pervasive feature of life in the
South between 1866 and 1900.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
The power of DuBois’s analysis is clarified by a closer look
at the violence that pervaded the South from 1866 until 1900.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Ku Klux Klan was one, but only one,
organizational expression of widespread white resistance to equality for
African Americans in the former CSA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Radical Republicans and the multi-volume House and Senate investigative
reports on the activities of the Klan published in 1872 recognized that
opposition to democracy in the South transcended the Klan. The majority report
noted that Southern whites would accept no reconstruction “so long as it embraced
the liberation, the civil and political elevation, of the negro [sic].”<br />
<br />
Disrupting the Klan entailed mass arrests and in one case
(South Carolina) the suspension of the right of <i>habeas corpus</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the Klan itself had been broken by
aggressive Federal military intervention the decentralized and partly
spontaneous activity of terrorist groups and local white militias grew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The use of violence to attack constituted and
frequently democratically elected governments throughout the South continued
until at least the end of the nineteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was well beyond 1876, conventionally
understood as the end of Reconstruction. Even halting and temporary
democratization required the use of the full power of the occupation to
forestall counter-democratic coercion.<br />
<br />
Violence occurred early in New Orleans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1866 a planter-dominated elected
legislature voted to restore the pre-Civil War constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The governor, a planter named James Madison
Wells, vetoed the legislation and called a Constitutional Convention to meet in
New Orleans, then the seat of government of Louisiana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mayor John Monroe, a leader of a secret
society, armed the police and local citizens to attack the convention when it
opened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What amounted to a pogrom
occurred on May 30, 1866 in which between 38 and 48 people were killed and more
than a hundred wounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>General Philip
Sheridan, who President Grant had appointed as the governor of the Southwest
Military District, returned from Texas and called it a massacre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had it not been for the presence of Federal
troops and their willingness to intervene Reconstruction in New Orleans would
have been ended before it began.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Convention that Sheridan enabled finally sat in 1868 and adopted a constitution
that guaranteed political rights to the black population and that repealed a
repressive labor code although it limited suffrage to men.<br />
<br />
Sheridan, for whom a square in Washington DC is named, is
not a particularly appealing figure to many modern eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He led the Army of Shenandoah which
duplicated Sherman’s more famous March to the Sea in its devastation of the
Confederate civil economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He fought
similar campaigns against the Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa as well as the Ute
War, the Red River War, and the Great Sioux War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He responded with vigor in New Orleans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He summarily dismissed Governor Wells, Mayor
Monroe, and stripped much of the white population of their voting rights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was himself dismissed by President Andrew
Johnson who accused him of being a tyrant.<br />
<br />
To accomplish the democratic reconstruction of Louisiana and
the rest of the South would require more than one constitutional
convention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Grant County armed
militias faced each other during a particularly tumultuous and tense conflict
over local elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In April 1873, in
the wake of a highly contentious electoral process in which a Republican and
Democrat both claimed victory, black and white militias fought a battle for
control of the county courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Armed whites, led by former Confederate
officers, overpowered a black militia led by former Union officers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to horses and guns the white
militia also had a four pound cannon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
the end of the fighting, between 100 and 275 black men, women, and children
were dead; many had been executed with shots to the back of the head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Colfax massacre (as it was then known)
became a national scandal but its repercussions were primarily to confirm the
efficacy of violence by white militias. In 1950 the state of Louisiana placed a
roadside sign at the site of the Colfax massacre justifying it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
It is thus not surprising that the following year in New
Orleans white militias again attempted to use violence to decide the issue of
political power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was the Battle of
Liberty Place when, in 1874, the White League acting as the “Louisiana State
Militia” attacked a meeting of a disputed legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some 5000 members of the League defeated 3500
police and state militiamen and took control of the legislative building for three
days until they were driven out by Federal troops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1891, in the wake of the formal
disenfranchisement of the state’s black population, the New Orleans city
council erected a monument to commemorate the 1874 events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The monument was placed in a prominent
location on Canal Street and, although it was moved in 1993, it remained on
public view until 2015.<br />
<br />
The withdrawal of Federal troops after the compromise of the
1876 presidential election sealed the end of Reconstruction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The conflict over the political rights of
black people continued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In North
Carolina political violence culminated in 1898 in what has been described as
the only successful coup d’etat in American history: the legally elected
government of a major American city was overthrown by an armed insurrection.
Until 1898 Wilmington had been a black majority city but in the wake of
disputed election a secret society of white supremacists organized a group of
armed men, including the “Wilmington Light Infantry” to attack black-owned
businesses including the newspaper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These men, properly described as a mob, then forced the white Republican
mayor and other members of the city council to resign and installed a new
one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By 1898, unlike 1868 and 1873-4,
there were no Federal troops to reverse the use of violence to overthrow an
elected government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Black residents fled
and Wilmington became a white-majority city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In modern terms we might describe this as a form of ethnic cleansing as
well as a coup. What we call the “Great Migration” of African-Americans out of
the South in the twentieth century was a slower process by which refugees
sought safety and new beginnings and in which the demographic character of the
South was changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1868 nearly 60% of
the residents of Mississippi were black; today a little less than 40% are.<br />
<br />
The insurgents who successfully installed a white
supremacist government were widely recognized and known by their clothing: red
shirts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the late 19<sup>th</sup>
century red shirts had a different meaning than today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Garibaldi’s troops wore them in Italy and
they were widely associated with the militias of nationalist movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout Europe and Latin America the
wearing of red shirts was understood to reveal the patriotic sentiments and
willingness to use force associated with rising nationalism.<br />
<br />
There is every reason to believe that we should see
Reconstruction more nearly in the light of contemporary nationalisms,
state-building, and the suppression of the political rights of minorities than
simply as a failed or premature struggle to extend the virtues of American
liberal individualism against prejudice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A declining old white Southern elite and a rising new one struggled to
subjugate a minority to their control and, in the process, sought to ensure
their control over their fellow members of the majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were willing to employ significant
violence in the form of terrorism and insurrection as well as all the legal
methods at their disposal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They saw
themselves as re-creating the nation whose loss they feared military defeat
would bring about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Citizens of the US,
having defeated their enemy, lacked the staying power to transform the society
they had conquered as DuBois argued. After a decade they gave up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so the honorable citizens of the South,
the religious fundamentalists, the former soldiers of the vanquished regime,
and even those who had been educated in the values of US liberalism in its
finest schools such as Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, collaborated in the
creation of a repressive and authoritarian regime that lasted more than 100
years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-18004285021198856762016-04-20T17:08:00.003-07:002016-04-20T17:08:42.985-07:00Giulio Regeni: The Police, The Citizens, and the Foreigner<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The murder of Giulio Regeni threw
unexpected and unwelcome light on the Egyptian government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a single story proposed by senior
government figures to explain how the young Italian researcher came to be
tortured to death has proved the least bit convincing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither an automobile collision or a night of
rough sex leave a victim whose body shows evidence of having suffered electric
shock to the genitals, cigarette burns, and a broken neck.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most recent explanation proferred by the
government is that he was kidnapped by a gang specializing in the abduction and
robbery of foreigners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The police say
they killed all the members of the gang in a shoot-out but were able to obtain
Regeni’s identification papers (which the gang conveniently retained) as well as
his cash (which they equally conveniently neglected to spend).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For now everything is speculative but the marks of torture on
his body and the obstinacy with which the Egyptian government has resisted the
entreaties of Regeni’s family and the Italian government for a joint
investigation strongly suggest he was killed by Egyptian security agents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One of the most puzzling aspects of
Regeni’s murder is understanding why the Egyptian government would have wanted him
dead or even why they would have tortured him. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
commonly held theory in Cairo and beyond is based on the suspicion of Egyptian
security agencies that foreigners are agitators. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus they believe that the uprising of 2011
was the result of external interference rather than popular initiative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They therefore saw Regeni not as a researcher
but as an activist and he was deliberately retained after he attended a
gathering of independent trade union activists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Regeni, in this reading of events, was not unlike the American and
German resident employees of organizations that funded civil society
associations who were formally accused of being foreign agents in 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this were the belief of high government
officials then it would have been easy to deal with Regeni: either by revoking
his visa or an unofficial warning that he would be indicted if he did not leave
the country promptly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Another theory is that he was simply unlucky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He took the subway from a stop near a meeting
with union activists to Tahrir Square to visit a friend on January 25, the
anniversary of the start of the 2011 uprising. He never arrived. The government
had put a massive police presence in place as well as undertaking widespread
arrests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regeni, in this scenario, was
an accidental victim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this were the
case, however, it is hard to fathom both why he was not let go and why the
government has had such trouble finding the guilty police agent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To appease public anger the government had no
trouble arresting and trying Mustafa Feto, a police officer who shot a Mohammad
Adel, cab driver in the lower-class neighborhood of Darb al-Ahmar, after an
altercation over a fare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not quite two
months passed before Feto was sentenced to life in prison.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if it proved impossible to discover who
had killed Regeni it would seem to be as easy to appease the anger of the
Italian government by bringing a sacrificial police lamb to trial as by the
deaths of five suspected criminals.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Seen in this light Regeni’s fate resembles that of Charles
Horman and Frank Teruggi, young Americans who were killed in Chile in the days
after the Pinochet regime came to power by overthrowing President Salvador
Allende.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Horman and Teruggi, however,
were not picked up on the streets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
were arrested by the authorities in their homes and executed along with Chilean
opponents of the junta when its hold on power was still uncertain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most chillingly we now know for certain that
US officials knew of and may have encouraged their arrests because they also
saw these young men as enemies of the Chilean military and US policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is certainly not true of Italian
military or diplomatic officials in Egypt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>How, then it might well be asked, do
such obscure and enigmatic events throw light on the nature of the current
situation in Egypt?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One answer to that
question is to suggest a slightly different scenario, elements of which
certainly have circulated in Cairo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
suggestion is not for the purpose of telling the true story of what happened
but of illustrating the institutional balance of forces within the current
regime. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In regard to Regeni we are truly
situated in the world of Akira Kurosawa’s famous film “Rashomon.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The deeper truth of the movie is not that there can be different accounts of a single event but that, for this is
how Kurosawa deliberately made the movie, we cannot construct out of those
different narratives a single coherent "true" account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We may never know what really happened to Regeni but it nevertheless
illuminates the complexity and fragility of contemporary Egypt. If we accept
that the Egyptian government and particularly its security agencies fear that
foreigners are outside agitators and that Regeni was stopped and taken more or
less at random and taken into custody what does that tell us?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Authoritarian regimes are invariably
anxious about conspiracies whose origins they impute to foreign
machinations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Insofar as dictators claim
to represent an inherently united class, nation, race <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or religion the existence of opposition can
only arise from the temptations posed by outsiders who threaten the moral
integrity of the community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is easy
to ridicule such fears as intellectually feeble excuses for repression and the
settling of political scores.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is less
easy to see that paranoia and xenophobia can be crippling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, however, giving the police in such
regimes far too much credit to believe that they have independent and
infallible ways to determine who the regime’s enemies are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They rely on many sources of
information:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>paid informers, complaints,
and denunciations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To say that these
sources are reliable or objective would be ridiculous. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Informers inform for their own reasons which
may have little to do with the objective truth of the information they provide
to authorities. Using the government’s anxiety and enmity as a tool to rid
oneself of enemies real or imagined is probably as old as government itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Immediately after the coup in 2013,
Egyptians turned on each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Accusations of membership in the banned Muslim Brotherhood or in
terrorist cells mushroomed in a society in which conspiracy theories had been
nurtured by government officials for decades. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government arrested well-known leaders of
the Muslim Brothers for political reasons, but tens of thousands of other
Egyptians were arrested by local authorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some of these arrests and subsequent trials became notorious due to the
summary death sentences imposed on defendants in mass trials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other arrests and convictions of well-known
activists have merited intermittent treatment in the international press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All these accounts of arrests and trials suggest that Egypt
has a unified government that knows what it is doing: limiting the political
activity of the opposition, frightening the population at large, reinforcing
the power of the dictatorship by targeting a variety of regime opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What it is doing may be wrong, unpalatable
and destructive, but at least the government has a clear authoritarian vision
of subduing the population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The public
trial of Al-Jazeera correspondents and the arrest of Egyptian reporters are all
designed to curtail access to information.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The pitiful spectacle of Esraa al-Taweel, a young woman on crutches weeping
at a hearing reinforced the sense of weakness and impotence of the movement to
which she belonged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The killing of
Shaimaa al-Sabbagh at a demonstration where she sought to lay flowers on the
ground as well as the jailing of Mohammad Soltan, the son of a Muslim
Brotherhood leader and an American citizen, or the deaths of countless others
were all designed to re-build the wall of fear that surrounded Egyptians since
the days of Nasser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is no doubt that the Egyptian government is willing to
use overwhelming and lethal force against its perceived enemies. In early July
2013 dozens of demonstrators were killed in front of the Republican Guard
headquarters in Cairo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Upwards of a thousand people were killed when
the government dispersed demonstration/encampments at Rabaa Square in Cairo and
Nahdet Misr Square in Giza.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
government has also prosecuted foreigners such as Peter Greste, an Australian employee
of Al-Jazeera news in the wake of the 2013 coup, for reporting without a
license and aiding a terrorist organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet each of these events have contradictory elements. What
if, instead of an all-seeing government we are actually witnessing a blind
Moloch? Greste was held for more than a year along with co-defendants Mohammad
Fahmy (a Canadian-Egyptian) and Baher Mohammad (an Egyptian).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>International pressure mounted heightening
the embarrassment of the Egyptian government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The courts refused to end the trial until finding the defendants
guilty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the end the Egyptian
government promulgated a law allowing President Sisi to deport foreigners such
as Greste accused or convicted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
face-saving allowed Greste to leave the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fahmy and Mohammad were pardoned by Sisi
shortly after their convictions. Soltan had been sentenced to life in prison
but renounced his Egyptian citizenship and was later deported to the United
States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The policeman who shot al-Sabbagh
was later sentenced to 15 years in prison for assault (which suggests he will
serve about one third of the sentence).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In short, the Sisi government not infrequently finds itself
in embroiled in embarrassing situations or acts that provoke significant domestic
anger or foreign scorn that it can neither contain nor repress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most dramatic such event was the claim by
the government in 2014 that it had discovered a cure for hepatitis C, a disease
of epidemic proportions in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
bogus cure amounted to little more than metallic dowsing rods that swindlers in
Iraq have also claimed can detect explosive devices under cars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government has since silently retired
both the apparatus and its inventor while moving to provide Egyptians with an
effective medication developed in the US and hoping its mis-steps would be
forgotten.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Regeni’s murder, however, will not be quickly forgotten nor
can it be easily fobbed off with excuses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The inability of the Egyptian government to respond adequately to the
demands of the Italian government, however, point to the contradictory nature
of the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regeni’s murder has
provoked anger and fear but it has also produced some bewilderment. Therefore,
what events of the past two months suggest is a government struggling for control
and troubled as much by conflict within the ruling coalition as between that
coalition and society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Assuming for the sake of argument
that the Egyptian police believed Regeni was himself organizing political
opposition to the regime, how would they have come to that belief? The police
would have already given Regeni clearance for his research since all foreign
academics submit such requests to obtain visas. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had they believed initially he was intending
to agitate rather than research it is unlikely he would have received a visa. More
plausibly someone among the people he studied was submitting reports to the
police.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When demonstrators entered the
offices of the State Security Police in Cairo in March 2011, it became apparent
just how detailed (and frequently inconsequential when viewed objectively) the
level of reporting was and how many records were kept on many citizens. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is no reason to believe that such reports in police
states are any more accurate than accounts of miraculous cures or membership in
banned organizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>False reports are
submitted for many reasons: personal dislike, revenge, a desire to please
superiors, simple malice, or even misunderstanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had good reason, when I was doing research
on trade union history in Egypt in the 1980s, to believe that the government
was receiving copies of my correspondence and that elderly union leaders were
followed to (and probably from) interviews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The arrest and detention for over a year of Aya Hijazi, founder of the
society Beladi that sought to provide aid to Cairene street children, seems to
rely on false reports of trafficking and sexual abuse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hijazi, an American citizen, has no known
connection to Egyptian political groups of any kind and none of the allegations
has held up under external investigation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Even in liberal societies such secret police reports are
difficult to refute because they are hidden under a veil of secrecy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Egypt today and yesterday there is essentially
no way to gain access to such reports and certainly no way to correct them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Regeni was picked up on leaving the Cairo
metro in a sweep by police officers who initially had no idea who he was, his
file might have contained false or misleading accounts of his activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If he was picked by police who already knew
his identity, they might have been guided by the same kind of reports.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regeni however would not necessarily have had
any idea why he was questioned about suspicious or illegal activity and would
have had no answers for an increasingly brutal and inexplicable
interrogation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even readers of
translated Egyptian fiction such as Karnak Café by the late Nobel Prize winner Naguib
Mahfouz will be aware of the brutality of such interrogations and also of the
casual way with the accuracy of the accusations interrogators had.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We may never know what exactly happened to Regeni in the days
during which he was tortured to death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even with the prodding of the Italian government, Egyptian authorities
refused to release information about Regeni’s cellphone calls in his last hours
of freedom or the video footage that might have been available from Metro
cameras.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Italian investigators claim
that their Egyptian counterparts are stalling the investigation, which of
course raises more suspicions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Unlike deportations or the quick arrest and conviction of a
known perpetrator the government has been unable to put Regeni’s death behind
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The belief that the government
purposely arrested Regeni and now seeks to hide the fact gains credence with
the fudged explanations and foot-dragging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>More recently it has been proposed that no matter what happened to
Regeni, President Sisi fears the police.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He will, it has been asserted, require the police to protect him should
another round of massive demonstrations threaten to sweep him from power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The weakness of this account of the Regeni affair is that rarely,
if ever, have the Egyptian police safeguarded an incumbent executive from mass
demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For nearly a century
when kings and presidents have faced massive upheaval it was the armed
forces—not the police—that intervened to protect authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1919 the British required armed columns
and martial law to put down a revolutionary uprising; in 1952 martial law was
again required after the burning of Cairo; in 1977 troops returned order after
the government lost control of the streets during protests about the rising
cost of food; in 1986 it was police units themselves rebelled and were put down
by the Armed Forces; and in 2011 the police vanished leaving the army to take
up positions in Cairo and Alexandria and ultimately to take direct control of
the government.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By the time mass demonstrations
engulf Egypt the police will be helpless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>No matter how imperfect, corrupt and brutal, however, the police do
manage to keep order in ways that the armed forces cannot in ordinary
circumstances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The withdrawal of the
police, their refusal at many points in the first three years of the uprising
to enforce the law, encouraged criminality and simply increased disorganization
on the streets in the first years of the uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The proliferation of street vendors, the
illegal sale of land and construction, the occasional gunfights as criminals
fought, as well as the proliferation of demonstrations were all the result of
decreased police presence or the unwillingness of the police to enforce
rules.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The freedom to take to the
streets or the ability to buy cheap goods on the sidewalk are not equivalent to
violent criminal behavior or the theft of real estate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the military took power in 2013 they
promised to restore order and begin to solve the economic and social problems
of the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this they need the
police.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And yet the police have already
threatened the new regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are
routine accounts of conflicts, including the use of weapons, between police
officers and army officers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are,
of course, isolated and individual confrontations but they suggest deep
conflicts between the two security services about status and authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Policemen have also engaged in demonstrations
against the government’s salary policy in blatant violation of the law against
unauthorized demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The government needs the police because the armed forces can
seize power but they cannot police the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The police suffered a historic disaster in 2011 but now they have
recovered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus even a military
government that is on the defensive and embarrassed by the activities of the
police cannot afford to look too deeply into what they do and how they do it because
it cannot govern without them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
not to suggest that the President, his government and the military high command
are innocent victims of a police conspiracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is to say that they have attempted to rule a large, largely urban,
and diverse country with tools that belong to a different generation and a
different country—the Egypt of the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century—and that their
grip on even those tools is weak. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
most important tool of a police state, the police, are now operating with
little or no oversight or self-restraint. Two months ago a policeman murdered a
taxicab driver in a dispute over a fare; days ago another policeman killed a
vendor in a dispute over the price of a glass of tea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As my co-author, Hind Ahmed Zaki, and I argued in 2012 the
uprising of 2011 made the issue of respect for the state and the legal system
central concerns in <a href="https://www.academia.edu/15109934/After_the_Revolution_Sovereign_Respect_and_the_Rule_of_Law_in_Egypt">Egypt.</a>
Our fear that the courts might begin to lose legitimacy has unfortunately been
realized, but our greater fear was that the Egyptian state would be tempted to
restore its authority (“haibat al-dawlah”) by force and that this would
undermine the state and the very idea of the rule of law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We did not expect that police violence of an
almost random nature would come to pass, but its effects may be devastating. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The 2011 uprising was in significant measure due to concern
about police brutality and Regeni’s murder in 2016, on the anniversary of the
events of 2011, showed just how significant the problem of reforming and
controlling the security forces remains. The image of Khaled Said’s broken face
shocked members of the urban middle class who could see themselves in it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is every reason to believe that the
image of Giulio Regeni would be, as his mother maintains, an equally powerful
testament to torture and brutality on the part of the police. It has become
common to say that Egypt today is more repressive than under Mubarak, but the
events of the last six months suggest an even more disturbing possibility: the
police are escaping from, or have already escaped from, control by Egypt’s
political leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If President Sisi,
his government, and the armed forces cannot bring themselves to bring the
police under control it may indeed be that they fear them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They do not fear them for what might happen
on the day after an uprising but because as Egyptians come to see them as
simply a violent and corrupt gang, any hope of reversing the economic and
political collapse of the last half decade will be utterly lost. </span></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-21199056432892948412016-03-22T16:56:00.003-07:002016-03-22T17:03:18.738-07:00US History As A Lens for Seeing the Middle East: Part 1, the Revolutionary War and ISIS<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This
is the first of two posts in nisralnasr discussing US history as a source for
understanding events in the Middle East.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This one concerns the Revolutionary War; the next one will address
Reconstruction and After.</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></i></b>The history
and politics of the US have long been presumed, not least by Americans
themselves, to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sui generis</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until recently it was widely understood that
American law might have much to teach other legal traditions but little to
learn from them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American political
institutions do not, we have almost all been taught, prosper in other soils and
we ourselves have no reason to adopt the practices from abroad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is not much point then to comparing
American experiences and those of other countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That this is self-evidently so is made real
in the practice of my discipline where American politics and comparative
politics are seen as two distinct sub-disciplines.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>American
history and politics remain what was once called Whig history: a narrative of perennial
improvement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No matter what sordid and
terrifying features of the past are unearthed, the narrative remains Whiggish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more we learn about the horrors of the
past the more certain we become of how far and how irreversibly we have come. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another particular feature of how we prefer
to understand our own history, consonant with Whig assumptions, is that we are
the authors of our fate—collectively and individually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Americans have made American history, we want
to believe, without any external assistance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whether this is a common belief for a liberal republic or for an
imperial power deserves study, but as we seek to understand the rest of the
world through the lens of our own history we should take care not to believe
our own myths too strenuously.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In a
recent, widely read discussion of the Islamic State the American-born and
educated French scholar <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/why-isis-has-the-potential-to-be-a-world-altering-revolution">Scott
Atran</a> argued that US history can help us appreciate its revolutionary
potential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Citing a study of
contemporary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jihadi</i>s and the Viet
Cong, Atran asserts “what matters in revolutionary success is commitment to
cause and comrades.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Atran connects
this study of contemporary fighters to those who fought in the Continental Army
with George Washington.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Atran recalls
the winter of 1777-8 when Washington withdrew with his army to Valley Forge,
not far from Philadelphia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Haggard
remnants” of that army, Atran reminds us, were on the verge of leaving Valley
Forge when Washington gave a speech, an “inspired appeal” as Atran describes
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After hearing Washington’s stirring
appeal the troops “fused together in the harsh winter…henceforth able to
withstand any adversity.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Atran is
arguing that revolutionary action is the fusion of a deep sense of sacred
justice with personal solidarities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>IS
cadre, in this argument, is the fusion of a belief in a sacred mission shared
by committed activists tested in conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whatever the objective status of their beliefs revolutionaries
understand their goals to be sacred and their links to be those of personal
devotion to each other as well as their ideal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>National liberation, the Islamic caliphate, or the dictatorship of the
proletariat can presumably all provide such goals and be championed by comrades
of such devotion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This essentially voluntarist view
of revolution has deep roots in American social thought although it was
probably not shared by most of the men who founded the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can find it among others for whom
transforming a movement into a state was never an option or simply never
succeeded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If you will it” as Theodor Herzl
told his followers in the Zionist movement, “it is no dream.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saul Alinsky, the premier community organizer,
once said “We must believe that it is darkest before the dawn of a beautiful
new world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We will see it when we
believe it.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or, in the words of
Jefferson Davis, first president of the Confederate States of America, “<i><span style="font-style: normal;">Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent
the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a
virtuous people</span></i>.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"</i> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Human beliefs matter, but believing
that the sheer power of belief is all that really matters beggars belief. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the US successful business executives, like
the movement leaders cited above, fervently believe that their fervent
commitment to their product and their own well-being propelled them beyond
their peers and competitors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Businessmen, no less than civil rights leaders, have dreams but we
rarely take them as models when we talk politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not simply because they are businessmen but
because so many of them fail.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
As the leaders of the American Revolution
well understood, neither Valley Forge nor George Washington’s speeches were the
key to victory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Contemporaries and most
modern historians recognized two very different undertakings in 1777 as crucial
to the success of the revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Neither involved Valley Forge or George Washington and one was, at least
briefly, a direct threat to Washington’s leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As most of Washington’s contemporaries were
well aware, he was in Valley Forge because the British had successfully captured
Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>British troops had earlier taken control of
New York and not long thereafter they successfully besieged Charleston.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, while Washington waited out the
winter in Valley Forge, the British had seized control of three of the most
important cities on the North American continent and in the entire British
colonial empire including the capitol of the revolt.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The revolution was rescued by
foreign support, not emotional discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In September and October 1777, General Horatio Gates and the elements of
the Continental Army under his control won the battles of Saratoga, decisively
defeating General John Burgoyne near the upstate New York town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gates’s defeat of Burgoyne effectively ended
any possibility of British control of the Hudson Valley or of regaining control
of Boston. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">It also very briefly provided a challenge to Washington's command. </span>News did not travel fast in
the late 18<sup>th</sup> century but when accounts of Saratoga reached Paris
two months later, King Louis XVI promptly decided his government could enter negotiations
with the American envoy Benjamin Franklin to assist the revolutionary cause.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Louis was no revolutionary, but he was
willing to work with American insurgents out of fear that the British
consolidation of a transoceanic empire at French expense would leave France in
a permanently weakened situation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>France
had lost its primary North American and South Asian possessions at the end of
the Seven Years’ War in 1763.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To engage
the French, Britain was forced to draw down its land forces in North America
and re-direct its fleet away from the American coast. Once this occurred the
revolutionary colonists were able to fight British forces on a more nearly
equal footing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet even what most
Americans think of as the final defeat of Britain, the surrender of Lord
Cornwallis at Yorktown, was the result of a victory by the French fleet over
the British in the Chesapeake Bay and a joint Franco-American ground force.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It is thus not surprising that
Saratoga and the decision of the French monarch are the crucial events for understanding
the success of the American Revolution, not Valley Forge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The success of the American Revolution, like
that of others, depended far more significantly on international succor and
support than it did on the intense commitment of the revolutionaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The supposition that revolutions
succeed because revolutionary heroes refuse to accept defeat has a long
history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, indomitable will as the
basis of victory and its absence as the cause of defeat is far more common an
idea among reactionary radicals than among conventional leftists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Far more common among the latter is the
belief that social change including revolution is the result of institutional
and social structures than the untrammeled desire of the revolutionaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has also long been a staple of critics of
liberal societies whose members and leaders are generally thought to be
insufficiently dedicated to the rights and liberties whose importance they
proclaim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arguing that the success of
the opponents of liberals is due to the strength of their commitment is
frequently used to buttress a claim that a more tough-minded approach to
protecting society from the depredations of its enemies is necessary.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Islamic
State has not succeeded because of the devotion of its members although
commitment to the cause has probably brought people who otherwise might have
been engaged elsewhere to the border areas of Syria and Iraq that it
controls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has succeeded, to the
extent that it has, because more powerful states regionally and internationally
have not been able to agree on whether or how to eliminate it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That seems to have begun changing recently—Russia,
the US, Turkey and Iran have increasingly come to practical arrangements that
will make it more and more difficult for the Islamic State to function.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the process they have also come to
arrangements to resolve their disagreements about other actors in the region as
well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These include Bashar al-Asad, the
Ba’thi regime in Syria, and a multitude of anti-regime political and military
forces including the Kurdish ones.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Here,
however, it is possible to see another way in which the American experience
usefully illuminates events in Syria and Iraq.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If it is true that insurgents and revolutionaries cannot succeed without
international help, it is equally true that external states cannot simply
generate whatever forces they would most prefer in a given conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is every reason to believe that Louis
and his ministers would have preferred different American allies than the ones
they had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the end, intervening to
help the insurgents in North America as part of a global strategy aimed at
Great Britain required the French government to work with whatever leaders had
survived on the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-6248966951866500442015-07-16T10:53:00.001-07:002015-07-20T12:28:52.954-07:00Sinai: War in a Distant Province<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The July 1
battle in which the Egyptian Armed Forces regained control of a small border
town from the self-proclaimed Sinai Province of the Islamic State (formerly
known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis or Supporters of Jerusalem) has heightened fear,
anger, and above all self-congratulation among both the government’s supporters
and its critics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Days after still
unknown assailants had assassinated the country’s Attorney General by means of
a car bomb, IS fighters attacked a series of checkpoints in the northern Sinai
peninsula and appeared briefly to have taken control of Shaykh Zuwayed near the
border with Gaza and Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The attack
occurred more or less on the anniversary of massive demonstrations (June 30)
and subsequent coup (July 3) in 2013 when former President Mohammad Morsi was
removed from office.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Most
commentary, and especially in English, has focused on the incapacity of the
Egyptian armed forces to prevent such attacks and the threat to the Egyptian
state of an IS insurgency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rapidity
with which IS took control of important cities in Syria (notably Raqqa) and
Iraq (Tikrit, Falluja, and Mosul) as well as areas of Libya and Yemen suggest
that much of Sinai and perhaps portions of the Egyptian heartland could fall
easily into its grasp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument of
many analysts is straightforward: increasing levels of repression by the
Egyptian dictatorship radicalize the population and drive Egyptians
increasingly to accept the use of violence to overthrow an unpopular regime and
IS stands ready to provide the violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In this argument that repression occurs in the context of the massive
uprising of 2011 and the democratic elections of 2012 makes more Egyptians
likely to find the regime intolerable and to sympathize with or participate in
armed revolt against it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The logic
of the argument is impeccable but as with so many arguments about Egypt and the
Arab world over the past four years it turns politics into a morality tale
whose authors are rewarded with victory. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is more
useful and far more interesting to place the fighting in northern Sinai in the
context of the last 35 years of Egyptian history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seen thus, the very real limits of the IS
threat to the Egyptian state and the likely continued degradation of the
Egyptian political scene as the government coercively responds to the military
challenge it faces becomes more apparent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As Egyptians become inured to a coarser and more violent political life,
it seems unlikely they will be able to free themselves from it for at least a
generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>IS is a
locally dangerous opponent and it may be true that the Egyptian Army lost more
men in the first week of July 2015 in Sinai than at any time since the 1973 war
with Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However in July 2015 the
Egyptian dead were about 1.5 % those who died in October 1973; and other
attacks in the past several years have taken dozens of lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The violence in Sinai is real and frightening
but so far it is well within the capacity of the Egyptian armed forces to
repress.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
To fully appreciate the meaning of
the events in Sinai we need to look elsewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We can begin with the period between 1979 and 1981: the years in which
Egypt, during the presidency of Anwar Sadat, regained control of the Sinai from
Israel and during which Egypt also faced its first (and arguably most
threatening) Islamist insurgency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
two processes are intricately linked, not least by the assassination of Sadat
in 1981.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Although the Egyptian state
presents the 1973 war as a military victory, Israel won and in the process not
only regained control of the Sinai peninsula that it had first seized in the
1967 war but also a portion of the west bank of the Suez Canal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was widely believed at the time that it
would not be long before yet another Arab-Israeli war would be fought. Instead
a peace process returned Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty that
removed Egypt from the Arab military front facing Israel and demilitarized much
of northern Sinai.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Egypt regained control of Sinai
through lengthy and domestically contentious negotiations coinciding with a
period of economic stress best remembered for two days of demonstrations and
rioting in 1977 when the government lost control of the streets in downtown
Cairo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To limit political opposition to
the treaty and to counter popular discontent rooted in economic distress, Sadat
ordered the arrest of some 1500 people in the late summer of 1980.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Islamic activists engaged in what we would
now call a Salafi-jihadi current assassinated Sadat and including members of the
self-named “Islamic Group.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sadat’s assassination while he
presided over a parade celebrating the October war as a victory is well
remembered globally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its shadow has
obscured another side of the events of October 1981: the attempt to overthrow
the regime by force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the days after
Sadat’s assassination, Islamist militants launched an insurrection in the
southern Egyptian city of Asyut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Something like 60 police were killed in the fighting and ultimately the
government regained control of the city by sending in Army paratroop units.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Asyut is one of the largest cities in Upper
Egypt and has long been an important government and economic center for the
region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian government has, on
occasion, found it difficult socially or politically to dominate many urban and
rural areas but Asyut is the one time in recent memory when it lost control of
a major city for several days due to an armed uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That events in Asyut had no echoes in the
rest of the country was, for some Islamist activists, a clear indication that
armed uprisings were doomed as a means to confront the regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sadat’s actual assassins were executed
but other members of the Islamic Group, notably the cousins Abbud and Tariq
al-Zumor, were given lengthy prison sentences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They remained in jail even after they had served the judicial sentences
imposed on them because the Egyptian government believed they posed a
continuing threat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sadat made significant progress in
realizing the goals of the Camp David treaty before his murder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As befits a treaty aimed at ending a series
of increasingly costly and destructive wars between states, Camp David provided
strong reassurances that neither party could easily launch a surprise war
again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It did this primarily by limiting
troop deployments on each side of the Sinai border between Israel, the
Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip (then still under direct Israeli
occupation), and Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Egypt
had regained sovereignty over the entire peninsula, Sadat had agreed that it
would station no members of the armed forces in a zone stretching from Sheikh
Zuwayed on the north coast to Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only lightly armed civil police would patrol
“Zone C.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In years since 1981 development in
the Sinai has centered mainly on the tourism industry in the south.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>South Sinai with about 160,000 people is
lightly populated but it has world-class beaches, scuba diving, and
hotels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the few issues that
divided the Israeli and Egyptian governments after the signing of the treaty
was the determination of the exact boundary demarcating the countries at
Taba.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A court decision awarded a small
slice of land and two hotels to Egypt, one of which is today the Taba Hilton. In
the first decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> century there were attacks on tourist
facilities in South but these were decidedly aimed at destroying the traffic
rather than in creating a “liberated zone” such as IS has in Syria and Iraq.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tourism
has not done well in the years since 2011; revenues have shrunk from over $14
billon to under $ 5 billion a year. <span style="color: #92d050;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
North Sinai, never the object of
much investment by Egyptian governments, has suffered an even more catastrophic
economic collapse than the south.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although North Sinai is also lightly populated,
with 420,000 people it is much larger than the south.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The largest city, El-Arish, with about
164,000 people, has roughly as many people as all of South Sinai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sheikh Zuwayed has about 60,000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>El-Arish is the largest city in Sinai
proper, but it is not the largest city in the region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Almost as large is Rafah which has 150,000
inhabitants thirty miles away on the Palestinian side of the border.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not far beyond Rafah is Khan Yunis with more
than a third of a million people and 18 miles further north is Gaza City with another
half million.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Much has been written about the
tunnels under the Egyptian-Palestinian border.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They have supplied Gazans with cement, medications, and food (most of
which is ordinary and some of which is luxurious).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have been used for weapons (which became
cheap and available after the collapse of the Libyan regime) and drugs such as
tramadol (an opiate medication).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
have been viewed as engines of growth, survival and incubators for
entrepreneurship as well as security threats and lifelines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Less frequently has the estimated $700
million to $1 billion that passed through them been evaluated as vital to the
economy of Egyptian North Sinai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An
impoverished area with little industry, however, would inevitably orient its
economy toward the largest market in the region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>North Sinai may be part of Egypt politically
but eastern North Sinai is necessarily connected to the Gazan economy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In addition to goods, the North
Sinai economy includes traffic in human beings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By some estimates tens of thousands of Eritrean and other African
citizens have attempted to illegally enter Israel through the Sinai border
crossings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although it is impossible to
accurately measure the number of people involved, international human rights
organizations have described large numbers of people pressed into servitude,
tortured, and held for tens of thousands of dollars in ransoms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As is clear from the American Southwest,
lengthy borders in desolate regions are difficult to police even for a strong
state; where the state has withdrawn it is effectively impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Northern Sinai is also the route of
a pipeline that until 2012 was the major export artery for Egyptian natural gas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A main line connects the central Egyptian
network to El-Arish on the northern Sinai coast where it splits into two parts:
one, underwater, connects with Ashkelon in Israel; the other, significantly
larger, connects to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The gas connection with Israel was highly controversial and the
pipeline, which provides little direct economic advantage to North Sinai, has
been bombed more than 25 times since the 2011 uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Increased demand for gas in Egypt prompted
the government to end the contract with Israel in 2012 and reduce supplies to
the Arab countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian
government has recently decided to allow the import of natural gas via a
reverse flow from Israel through the same pipeline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Before returning to connect the
strands of the argument so far, it is worth pondering what would happen if Gaza
could trade freely with its Israeli and Egyptian neighbors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gaza City alone has roughly the population of
the four largest nearby non-Palestinian cities combined: Ashkelon, Ashdod, and
Beer Sheva in Israel and El-Arish in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The 1.8 million people of the Gaza Strip (or Gaza province of Palestine
if you prefer) are the largest concentration of human beings in the Sinai and
southern Israel region and probably the largest supply of labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
North Sinai is a gateway for Gaza
as long as its 1.8 million people can neither import directly through their own
port or trade with Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The northern towns of Shaykh Zuwayed,
El-Arish, and ultimately Rafah (on the Egyptian side) have provided the otherwise
absent gateway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian governments
from Mubarak through Muslim Brother president Morsi to now-president El-Sisi
have limited legal economic exchange with Gaza and frequently closed the
official border crossings.<span style="color: #00b0f0;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>Trade has thus required transport
through tunnels, ie, as a form of criminal activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a trade that initially the lightly
armed police were not equipped to deter and were sometimes paid to ignore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi’s government placed more pressure on
this trade but governments since his ouster have been even more assiduous in
shutting it down.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Returning
where we left off: as the 2011 uprising in Cairo and other major cities grew
and the police forces collapsed, the maintenance of public order devolved to
the Egyptian Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This required
pulling troops into central Egypt, especially the cities,<span style="color: #00b0f0;"> </span>and left the borders unguarded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Supreme Council of Armed Forces did
negotiate a very early agreement with the Israeli government to send troops in
South Sinai partly to prevent attacks that would have damaged the tourist
industry but North Sinai receded even further from effective government control.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unlike other
equally impoverished areas of Egypt, North Sinai in the wake of the 2011
uprising did have one important economic sector: illegal trade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was precisely its illegality that made it
rewarding. Illegal trade (in the north) and tourism (in the south) are important
drivers of the economy and politics in these two areas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Foreign
mass tourism in Egypt is a post-Sadat phenomenon and it has provided regime
opponents with a soft target. The most famous and still the most murderous
incident is the 1997 attack on Hatshepsut’s Temple in Upper Egypt in which 68
people (including 6 attackers) died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
attack was carried out by members of the Islamic Group who opposed a truce some
of their leaders had arranged with the Mubarak government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 2004, 2005 and 2006 hotels and tourist
attractions in Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, and Dahab in South Sinai were attacked
and more than 150 people killed in total. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Salafi
groups claimed responsibility for the attacks in South Sinai although the
Egyptian state and many external observers see them as the work of North Sinai
Bedouin who hoped to affect the tourism industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One aspect of the attacks that differentiates
them from 1997, is that they all occurred on holidays associated with the
Egyptian state or Egyptian society broadly speaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 2004 Taba attack occurred on October 7 (a
day after the anniversary of the start of the 1973 war and Sadat’s
assassination) and the Sharm attack occurred on the anniversary of the 1952
revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 2006 attack in Dahab
occurred on Sham El-Nessim (the only holiday celebrated by both Christians and
Muslims) that occurs in spring and whose origins are pre-Islamic and
pre-Christian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These attacks thus struck
at the economic roots of the state as well as its cultural and social claims to
legitimacy. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is not
surprising that within weeks of the beginning of the 2011 uprising some North
Sinai residents had also attacked the gas pipeline. In May 2011 unknown
attackers used a rocket propelled grenade to attack the tomb of the eponymous
Sheik Zuwayed during a period in which attacks on Sufi shrines created mounting
tensions in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These attacks also
made it clear that not all the arms that traveled through the region had been
sent to Gaza: rocket propelled grenades, high explosives, and automatic weapons
were widely available. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In mid-summer of
2011, in addition to the earlier attacks on the gas pipeline and the shrine,
the police station in El-Arish was attacked and 6 policemen killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In November 2012 an RPG was used to attack a
cement factory in El-Arish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Although
the army and the Egyptian media have recently alleged these weapons arrive in
Egypt from Gaza, it earlier recognized that their primary source was
Libya.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After the collapse of the regime
there weapons became widely available for export.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Controlling the border with Gaza is probably
more important as a way of draining financial resources from the state’s
opponents in northern Sinai and also preventing them from having a safe haven
from the Egyptian army.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By August
2011, regaining control over the border area had become a priority for the
Egyptian Armed Forces after a series of cross-border attacks from southern
Sinai into Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who was responsible
for these attacks remains unclear but they did provoke the first serious
exchange of gunfire between Israeli and Egyptian troops in decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Five Egyptian soldiers were killed when
Israeli soldiers crossed the border pursuing the attackers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coupled with the earlier attacks on the gas
pipeline, the police station, and the threat to the tourism industry Sinai
became more prominent to the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Few if any Egyptians were sympathetic to Israel’s security needs but
equally few wanted the decision about whether renewed war would break out to
pass into the hands of North Sinai Bedouin and guerrillas. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A year
later, on August 5, 2012, armed men again attacked an Egyptian military
outpost, killing 16 soldiers, stealing armored vehicles and attempting to enter
Israel where they were killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
days after the attack, then President Morsi asked General Muhamed Tantawi to
resign as Defense Minister and replaced him with Abdel Fattah Sisi who later
mounted the coup that overthrew Morsi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In mid-May
2013, as the Egyptian political crisis that ended with the coup deepened, seven
Egyptian soldiers were kidnapped.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
were freed but not before a video in which they appealed for help was shown on
the web.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their freedom came after negotiations
between tribal leaders and the kidnappers during which the Armed Forces
appeared to be irrelevant and powerless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In late
October 2014 armed men launched yet another attack on army checkpoints in
northern Sinai with car bombs, explosives and automatic weapons in which 27
soldiers died and 26 more were injured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
was the largest guerrilla attack on the armed forces in the history of north
Sinai to date although this, along with the incidents mentioned above, are only
a few of the stream of violence occurring in the area.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Egyptian
Army, like most militaries, has few tools other than overwhelming force with
which to re-establish control over North Sinai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Opening the border with Gaza would have antagonized Israel and empowered
the Hamas government but it would not have solved the economic problems of
North Sinai; it more probably would have exacerbated them as the smuggling
trade diminished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course neither did
directly attacking the smuggling trade endear the military government to the
inhabitants of North Sinai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specific
investments in North Sinai would take years to result in significant economic
growth and the overall Egyptian economy was shrinking any way as foreign and
domestic investment stalled and then declined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even had the central government been willing to pay fees to allow gas
exports to transit the national territory, there was no politically appropriate
way to allocate them to local inhabitants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Armed
elements in North Sinai have proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State and
asserted that they are the nucleus of a “Sinai Province.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How exactly does a region whose insurgents
are, even if loosely, connected to smuggling goods and trafficking people, fit
with the creation of a state-building enterprise whose core is in eastern Syria
and western Iraq?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And how does it relate
to a project whose leaders claim it to be based on “strict” Islam?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One obvious
connection is that the Islamic State has emerged in areas where structures of
governance have been destroyed by war and where existing elites have been
politically marginalized. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>IS itself is
not an armed insurgency against an existing government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not organized in the wake of a popular
uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It exists where the old state
ceased to exist and few if any structures of governance are in place. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Iraq the American invasion and occupation effectively
destroyed the old Iraqi state and the army.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The reconstruction of institutions of governance in the Kurdish north
and the Arab south left the Sunni Arab center largely adrift.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A prolonged and exceptionally destructive
civil war in Syria abetted by external actors accomplished an even more severe
result there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both places armed Sunni
militias competed for influence and control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The details of how the Islamic State defeated its rivals are unclear but
in the absence of a functioning army able to defend the national territory
those are unimportant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The existing
militias (which in Syria include the Lebanese Hizbollah and the remains of the
former Syrian Armed Forces) can defend themselves and their territories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Islamic State has been unable to move
into ethnically or religiously different areas and its opponents have shown
little willingness or ability to defeat it on its home ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Islamic State itself survives, as the
late scholar of state-building Charles Tilly would have recognized, by engaging
in racketeering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It operates a
“protection racket” against competing militias and enforces its own power with
displays of ruthlessness on a par with those of the Zetas and other drug
cartels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Islamic State has clearly,
as its name implies, created state or state-like institutions but it continues
to require external aid (in the form of recruits and finance), external trade
(in oil and looted goods) as well as internal political acquiescence if not
support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This brings
us to the events at Shaykh Zuwayed in mid-2015.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On May 16 shortly after deposed President Muhammad Morsi was sentenced
to death, three judges in north Sinai were murdered in a drive-by shooting of
the mini-van carrying them from their homes to court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
execution the following day of six men convicted of membership in a terrorist
cell provoked some domestic outrage and international concern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Far
less attention was paid to events in north Sinai itself where<span style="background: yellow; color: #00b0f0; mso-highlight: yellow;">,</span> according
to the daily Al-Misry al-Yawm, the army and police “eliminated seven takfiri
jihadists.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The newspaper described the
killings as revenge for the deaths of the jurists. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Government spokesmen began to walk back the
claim that the Armed Forces and the police are involved in a vendetta rather
than enforcing the law, but the immediate perception of the headline writers
may be quite accurate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something similar
happened after the October 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Headlines in the daily Al-Masry Al-Youm proclaimed in large type “No
Mourning Before Retaliation” which may have reflected sentiments in the Armed
Forces but was not itself reported as official policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Unofficially retired generals, who
had taken up posts as security advisers and experts, such as Sameh Saif
al-Yazal, Hamdi Bekheit, and Gamal Abu Zikri called for clearing the population
from the area so that the army could eliminate its opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since
the fall of 2014 the Egyptian government has followed this policy and created a
buffer zone up to a kilometer wide on its border with Gaza, razing hundreds of
residences in the process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The coordinated attack on several army
checkpoints indicated that the Sinai Province fighters have the capacity to
engage in such operations against stationary and lightly held positions. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reports about casualties vary and the Egyptian
government has been careful to limit much news of the operation but it is
generally agreed that dozens of people—soldiers, insurgents and civilians—died.
Unlike the Syrian or Iraqi armies, the Egyptian Armed Forces are extremely
well-armed due to years of aid from the United States and they have retained
their operational capacity and institutional chain of command.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is therefore neither surprising nor the
cause for particularly great congratulations that, using armored vehicles and
jets, they rapidly overwhelmed the fighters of the “Sinai Province.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is it surprising that the army’s
operation took civilian lives as well as that of the IS combattants.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Less
obvious<span style="color: #00b0f0;"> </span>is how events in Sinai play out on
the broader stage of Egyptian politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The fear of many foreign (and some but fewer domestic Egyptian) analysts
is that Sinai is the beginning of a larger Islamist insurgency against the
nominally civilian but essentially military dictatorship that now rules
Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reasoning is, as noted above,
straightforward and certainly has merit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The military ousted the democratically elected president of Egypt,
Muhammad Morsi and outlawed the party he represented that was itself the
political expression of the Muslim Brotherhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The MB is now outlawed, its members are being arrested, tortured, and
(most recently) killed out of hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consequently it will (and some of its younger members already have) turn
to violence against the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given
that the MB had mass support, a membership of perhaps a million Egyptians, and
that Morsi won millions of votes an insurrection that it leads will be more
powerful than even the ones led by other (Salafi) Islamists in 1980 or the
early 1990s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fighters of the “Sinai
province” are one pole around which a larger insurrection might ultimately
coalesce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is a
powerful scenario but it deploys an overly simple psychology to underpin a
policy argument based on an understandable normative antagonism to
dictatorship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Existing states, whether
democracies or dictatorships, rarely lose to insurgencies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt may be an exception but it is
unlikely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian state retains
significant international support—from a superficially unlikely coalition that
includes the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—while Egyptian insurgents
(whether former members of the MB or the “Sinai Province”) have little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is rare for insurgencies to win when they
have little or no external support and while the central government retains
international allies who provide it with arms and financial support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If the MB
is indeed moving from confrontation to violence, several of its presumed
harder-line Salafi allies have been conspicuously absent from joining it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The move toward violence by younger members
of the MB may be accompanied by increasing use of Salafi-Jihadi rhetoric but
neither the Salafi Nour party nor the Islamic Group have yet broken with the
regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor, despite significant
criticism of the government, have some of their better-known sympathizers such
as the daily newspaper Al-Misriyyun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
may be the last legacy of the Sadat era and a final irony of the way in which
contemporary politics has developed.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the year
after the uprising of January 25, 2011 the Armed Forces freed hundreds of
members of the Islamic Group and other Salafi trends in the same part of the
political spectrum<span style="color: #92d050;"> </span>who had been imprisoned
by both Sadat and former President Mubarak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whatever political calculations the generals made, at the time it was
presented primarily as accepting court orders mandating the release of
prisoners who had served full sentences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Holding them in indefinite preventive detention was not, the courts had
said in previously ignored orders, in accord with the law or the
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These men, including the
Zumor cousins who had been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Sadat,
re-emerged into political life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
have been associated with both the Nour party and others with the Building and
Development party, linked to the Islamic Group.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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The experience of many of these
leaders with armed conflict against the Egyptian state was bitter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had begun with the uprising in Asyut and
continued sporadically until it developed into a medium insurrection in the
early 1990s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This period culminated with
an attack on a Pharaonic temple and prominent tourist destination in the Upper
Egyptian city of Luxor in 1997 where 62 tourists were killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This attempt to destroy the tourist industry eliminated
what remaining the popular support the Islamic Group had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thousands of Egyptian police, soldiers,
political activists and ordinary citizens died and those leaders appear, for
now at any rate, to have little desire to resume the bitter conflict that they
survived and lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether this is a
counsel of prudence or commitment to public order we cannot know but they
continue their peaceful (if often politically controversial and extreme)
political activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They write articles
for newspapers, give interviews, and organize their supporters for what they
hope will be parliamentary elections in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They also claim to desire an Islamic state
but evidently not the Islamic State on offer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Sinai
Province of the Islamic State will no doubt continue to trouble the border
region of northern Sinai.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until some
agreement is made between the government in Cairo, Hamas in Gaza, and Israel it
will be difficult to catch the Islamic State between the anvil of the border
and the hammer of the Egyptian Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But that agreement will, tacitly or openly, probably come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until that time the Sinai Province may manage
to survive in a region where the Egyptian state is structurally weakened by its
international commitments, its absence of local support and alienation caused
by its violence and political mis-steps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Two decades
ago the Egyptian state fought one war with Islamists in Upper Egypt where they
had far more local support in a relatively large population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>IS in its incarnation as the Sinai Province
has less support in a far more marginal area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is not likely to be the place from which a successful assault on the
Egyptian state is launched nor will it easily become, like the IS provinces in
Syria and Iraq, a “liberated zone.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
IS and perhaps other opposition groups have been able to use car bombs in Cairo
and Suez is not necessarily indicative of widening support for a popular
insurgency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the contrary, as Russian
revolutionaries realized a century ago terrorist violence can legitimate the
state for many citizens and demobilize a popular movement. Whatever else they
have done, President Sisi and the generals have worked tirelessly over the past
two years to demobilize Egyptian civil society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is instructive in this regard that IS may have paid more attention to
the anniversary of the coup than did the government it brought to power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That Egyptian have become used to much higher
levels of open political violence than at almost any other time in recent
history, however, is a sad reality.</div>
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The lasting threat to the Sisi
government lies elsewhere, among core elements of Egyptian society and the
state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These will include general
officers in the Armed Forces if they come to believe that they have lost
control of the way coercion is deployed in society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Loss of control occurs as the forces of order
come to think of their task as the work of vendetta not the provision of safety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then there will be those with important
economic interests who come to feel threatened by policies that have ceased to
work and who want a larger say in how government is run as well as a growing sense
of fatigue with a military regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That,
however, is likely to be a long time in coming.</div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-42229161186590015592015-02-23T12:13:00.002-08:002015-02-23T12:13:44.961-08:00Sacrificing Humans<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In recent months, to general
horror, the Islamic State (in Iraq and Syria) has carried out many beheadings
and one immolation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, too, have
others loosely or closely affiliated with it, most recently of 21 Egyptian
Christians in Libya.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These events
have provoked significant debate and widespread condemnation on many
levels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some have argued that
there is nothing Islamic in these actions despite the claim by the perpetrators
that theirs is the Islamic State.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Others have argued that whether these acts are Islamic or not they are
far from unique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American pilots,
we are reminded, burned Vietnamese soldiers and civilians to death with napalm
while white Americans tortured and immolated African-Americans by the thousands
in the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unsurprisingly comparing
the Islamic State to the post-Reconstruction Confederacy is rhetorically satisfying
but not at all illuminating. How, the implicit argument proceeds, can you
criticize people for doing what your own forebears did in the not very distant
past? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A comparison that could
provide insight is transformed into a mechanism of demoralization. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question that is worth asking is
precisely why should the leaders of the self-proclaimed Islamic State choose
this particular method of execution?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>People can be killed by gunfire or exposure and the Islamic State has
used both.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why employ a method
that, like the butchery of animals, requires so intimate a connection between
executioner and victim?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like
lynching, it deploys practices and language that resonate positively and
negatively with a larger population and creates powerful emotional bonds among
both those who perform the acts and those who observe.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Pilots on bombing
raids famously have no connection to those they kill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gunfire can be close but it is usually mechanical and quick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lynching, like the recent executions,
required a particularly close physical connection between the murderer and the
victim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was not a
technological necessity but a requirement for creating boundaries of fear and
loathing within and between communities.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The arguments swirling
around the terrifying executions carried out by members of the Islamic State
re-enact the conundrum of Christianity and lynching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both now and in the past many Christians vigorously asserted
that there was nothing remotely Christian in lynching. And yet accounts of
lynching are clear: those who undertook it claimed they were acting in accord
with the needs of a Christian community and lynching’s most widely recognized
practice was a distorted version of Christianity’s central image: a man hanging
from a tree. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There have been many
explanations and excuses for lynching. Theodore Bilbo, who served Mississippi
as both governor and US Senator, advocated lynching as the spontaneous justice
of the white Anglo-Saxon men for the supposed misdeeds of African Americans. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Toward the end of the 20<sup>th</sup>
century it became common in academic writing to explain lynching as a form of
terror undertaken largely for rational reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With the abolition of slavery and the necessity of ensuring
that African American labor remained cheap, lynching provided an inexpensive
method of terrifying African Americans into economic submission.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lynching was a crude but
effective way to ensure the social control necessary for the production of
agricultural commodities by unskilled labor in the American South just as
whipping, branding, and other forms of torture had in the antebellum period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An economic
explanation is entirely plausible for much of the violence in the American
south between 1865 and 1955, but it leaves unexamined the specific form that the
violence took.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lynching was
accomplished with impunity but often with little publicity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A significant fraction however was the highly
publicized activity of an entire community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These lynchings were far from spontaneous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were carried out in a particularly
orderly, even if emotionally highly-charged, fashion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In 1998 the Harvard
sociologist Orlando Patterson published a provocative analysis of lynching in a
book titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rituals of Blood</i>. Patterson
recounts and accepts earlier explanations of lynching as a form of social
control highly responsive to the <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>social, economic and
demographic features of the American South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drawing on earlier work that classified four types of
lynching (small-scale terrorism, private grievances, semi-legal posses, and
community-wide mobs), Patterson proposed that 35-40 percent were what he termed
sacrificial killings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
understand the meaning and cultural import of these lynchings, he argues, it is
necessary to see them as forms of human sacrifice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a practice that drew heavily on themes of Christian
devotion and was highly resonant within the Christian society in which it
occurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reviewing the
anthropological literature on human sacrifice, Patterson notes that it has been
among humanity’s most sacred rituals and that it played a crucial role in consolidating
a compact of fellowship among the sacrificers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He proposes six defining characteristics of human sacrifice:
highly ritualized drama, performance in a sacred place, fire, the tethering of
the victim, the demonization (or sacralization) of the victim, the disposal of
the body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patterson’s
characteristics are drawn from the anthropological literature but they also
respond to the particular features of American lynching in which victims were
typically hanged, then burned, and in which pieces of flesh and photographs
were often deployed as mementos or in the literal meaning of the word,
souvenirs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The decapitations carried
out by the Islamic State are indeed quite similar to the kind of lynching
Patterson refers to as sacrificial killing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The immolation of Muadh Kasasbeh more completely mirrors
Patterson’s paradigm, but it also allows us to see that crucial elements of
contemporary human sacrifice are the creation of a particular set of ritual
elements performed in a ritual space sanctified by previous sacrifices, for
victims who are allegedly both evil and impure.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As in the post-Civil
War South, the Islamic State uses murder for many purposes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One such use is summary justice. There
are accounts and even videos of numbers of captive Iraqi or Syrian soldiers,
police, or simply men of military age being murdered by gunshots to the head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are also accounts elsewhere of communal
summary justice that strongly resembles lynching. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On June 15, 2013 writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misry
al-Yawm, Islam Diyab reported that there had been 25 cases of accused criminals
being executed primarily in villages in the previous six months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These unfortunate men (whose guilt is
undetermined) were beaten to death and their bodies exhibited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever agonies they suffered in the
final hours or minutes of their lives, however, were unrecorded and
unceremonious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unconscionable as these murders were,
they were not carefully staged or professionally filmed.</div>
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The killing of foreign aid workers,
reporters, and now 21 Egyptian Christians as well as a Jordanian air force
officer is different precisely in the creation of a clear ritual which removes
the victim from everyday secular life and forces him to enter the realm of
sacrificial space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a
brief period in which the victim, invariably clothed in an orange jump suit, is
made to walk with his captors from a point of origin to where he will be killed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once there the executioner makes a
short statement proclaiming the reason for the killing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reason is not the criminal behavior by
the captive but an event in which he did not participate for which his death is
either retribution or expiation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With the exception of Kasasbeh the executioner then uses a
knife to cut the victim’s throat and there is a final scene of the head lying
on or next to the torso of the body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Frequently the execution party shouts “God is Great” as the head is
severed. Nothing about these events is random.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The prisoner never appears to display any emotion at
all—neither crying, screaming, or even attempting to escape from the blade. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recent news accounts of Kasasbeh’s death
indicate he was drugged but it is by no means clear if this is common.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These beheadings have
been compared to those of Saudi Arabia but they are clearly different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A filmed account of an execution in
Saudi Arabia shows a woman beseeching the executioner not to kill her as she
vainly thrashes on the ground and tries to escape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That execution itself takes place in what appears to be a
parking lot although many occur in city squares.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grisly, terrifying and inhumane as the execution is,
it is clearly not a ritual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
a messy and banal murder of a frightened woman who proclaims her
innocence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The filming itself,
like all images of executions in Saudi Arabia, was made surreptitiously and
like other public executions in Saudi Arabia the location assumes no sanctity
even if human blood is shed there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whatever the Saudi executions are meant to be, they are not intended to
create the heightened state in victim, executioner or observer of the rituals
being created by the Islamic State.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nor is any record made to exhibit the power of the state.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These IS executions
are performed for the camera.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
executioner proclaims the rationale behind the event and places the ultimate
blame for the deaths on the presumed enemies of Islam—the United States, Britain,
Japan, Jordan, and most recently the Roman Church. Sometimes the victim makes a
confessional statement which is, again, not a confession of criminal behavior
but an indictment of a home government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such statements may be echoes of previous statements in which the
political authorities are accused of various moral failings, including a
refusal to rescue the soon-to-be-killed victim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The rituals
surrounding the murders have developed over time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Yuval Neria and his co-authors pointed out in a 2005
article in the journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Religion</i> (“The
Al Qaeda 9/11 instructions: study in the construction of religious martyrdom”),
the murders committed by the hijackers on 9/11 were conceived as acts of
slaughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the decapitation
of Daniel Pearl such acts have become more stylized, formally developed and
intended as public ritual. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A state
that claims religious authority is carrying them out.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Here at least we can
see one aspect of these ritual murders that differs significantly from lynching
given the religious background of the murderers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patterson notes that trees play a significant role because
Jesus was sacrificed on a wooden stake or cross.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For American Christians therefore rituals engaging wood were
culturally relevant and meaningful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Although the Qur’an mentions crucifixion as a punishment for certain
crimes, the practice has little contemporary resonance in Islamic thought or
practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What does have
enormous religious significance for Muslims and Jews alike, however, is ritual
slaughter as a form of sacrifice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For Muslims and Jews (unlike Christians), flesh is only acceptable as
food if the animal has been slaughtered in an appropriate way: by rapidly
slitting the throat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is this
particular form of slaughter that makes an animal ritually available for
consumption. There are other rules: the head is not severed until the animal is
dead; generally the animal should not see the knife; and the animal should not
be aware that it is about to die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Lynching was an obscene parody of the sacrifice that Christians believe
lies at the heart of their religion; the decapitations by the Islamic State are
also a parody of the daily slaughter of animals for human consumption. Does it also
address something at the heart of the religion as well?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The “binding of Isaac”
is well-known to Jews and Christians from the Torah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same story appears more briefly in the Qur’an where it
may also refer to Ishmael rather than Isaac.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The crucial point is that Abraham is initially commanded to
slaughter his son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Abraham agrees
but ultimately is relieved by God of this task after which human sacrifice
ceases to be a religious practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The rituals surrounding the slaughter of animals for food retain a link,
by analogy, to older practices of animal sacrifice. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Arabic verb (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dhabaha</i>)
deployed in the Qur’an is still used for butchering of animals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Why, if this form of
execution is a form of human sacrifice, has it become so popular with people
who ostensibly (as was the case with American whites in the south) do not
believe in it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These events have
been described as advertisements that seek to attract more recruits to the
Islamic State as well as attempts to terrorize the local population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both of these may well be true, but
there are, it seems to me, other aspects as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, these executions have certainly terrorized foreign
aid workers and reporters who now give areas of Syria and Iraq a wide
berth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Second, and far more important,
they strengthen the sense of community of those who participate in them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Patterson argued that human sacrifice,
like enslavement, is something done to outsiders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Slaughtering people quite literally transforms them into
animals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By deliberately slitting
the throats of their victims, the agents of the Islamic State are transforming
them into objects void of moral standing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The murders themselves transgress established Islamic (and Jewish) norms
of animal slaughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
require the butcher to instantly sever the arteries so that the victim feels no
pain and has no awareness of imminent death. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike the national community or the
community of Muslims or of humanity, the community of the Islamic State is not
defined by common human form, good works, language, or even nominally shared
religion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is defined only
by loyalty to the state and its own ideology.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Like lynchings or indeed any form
of highly ritualized killings they transform observers into participants who
have engaged in behavior that is at once highly charged emotionally and widely
understood elsewhere as criminal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There is, it appears, no way to go backward for those who have
undertaken such rituals which are, like lynchings in the American South,
terrifying parodies of sacred behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That the concepts animating this behavior appear, to outsiders, as
something of a pastiche or mash-up of historical events, religious texts, and
apocalyptic cinema does not make them any less useful as tools for
obedience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the contrary, those
who have adopted such practices and the beliefs that legitimate them have cut
off any path back to the societies they have left behind.</div>
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Third, the making of the videos has
the effect of turning viewers into potential members of the community of ritual
killers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one in the video,
obviously, stands up to stop it and those who watch cannot should they wish to.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is therefore, for the moment
at least, a literally monstrous second coming of the Islamic state in which, as
William Butler Yeats wrote in a different context nearly 100 years ago, “the
best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a moment in which the
participants on the ground become members of a community bonded by the ritual
shedding of blood while the passivity of viewers reinforces feelings of fear,
anger and disorientation.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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NOTE: "Sacrificing Humans" is co-published by Nisralnasr and Jadaliyya. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-78441363956211536162014-12-18T11:06:00.001-08:002014-12-18T11:06:32.052-08:00 Prince Tancredi Falconieri Considers the Arab Spring<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"><br /></span></div>
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“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come <span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span>, bisogna che tutto cambi” </div>
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Most useful in understanding the
different outcomes of what appear to be similar processes in Tunisia and Egypt
are the words Tomasi Di Lampedusa places in the mouth of Prince Tancredi
Falconieri in the novel Il Gattopardi (The Leopard).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A challenge to an elite faced with ruin, they
form the epigraph to this essay<i>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
you want things to stay as they are, they have to change</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lampedusa’s novel is set in Sicily during the
unsettled conditions of the Risorgimento.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The problem confronting the old nobility is what to do in the face of
the new Italian nationalism and the revolutionary changes to the state and
society that Giuseppe Garibaldi hoped to impose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To preserve its influence and elite status
(that is, to ensure that nothing changes), the family must accept the new forms
of governance (that is, accept that everything has changed).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prince Tancredi’s observation suggests that
we think of the old elites, even in a revolutionary uprising, as active<s> </s>participants
who are neither passive nor innocent. </div>
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The recent legislative elections in
Tunisia provided an increasingly rare moment of optimism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Political analysts are especially happy with
Tunisia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has garnered high praise for
passing the “Huntington two-turnover” test that every other Arab country has failed:
the party that dominated the government immediately after the fall of the
authoritarian regime has now peacefully given way to its opposition. Tunisia’s
October legislative election therefore marks what political scientists call the
consolidation of democracy because it seems that all political actors accept
the verdict of the ballot box.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Explanations
of the divergent political outcomes in Tunisia, where an Islamist party peacefully
ceded what power it had gained, and Egypt, in which a similar party was
forcibly ousted, have subtly and forcefully been attributed to a multitude of
causes. Among the most commonly proposed reasons is that the revolutionary
youth never gained mass support or had a solid organization either to compete
with the Islamists in elections or push the revolution to its conclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But looking at Egypt and Tunisia together
tells us that’s wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The revolutionary
youth in both Egypt and Tunisia had little impact on the outcome either way
whereas the old elite had a very large impact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Democratization succeeded in Tunisia because the old elite was neither
excluded nor subjected to the threat of political or administrative
marginalization. </div>
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The underlying thread of many
analyses since December 2010 has been that democracy can be and perhaps should
be the result of a revolutionary rising. It is my belief that democracy, unlike
revolution, is a profoundly conservative as well as inclusive solution to the
problems of social change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Democracy’s success
thus more or less guarantees, for a protracted period of time, that there will
be few political solutions—whether in terms of moderate public policy or
dramatic institutional change—to economic inequality. </div>
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To understand why the Tunisian and
Egyptian uprisings have had different outcomes, I therefore propose to leave
aside the dominant narrative of secularism, Islamism, and the political
weakness of the youth in order to focus on a very different issue: what
happened to the old ruling elite outside the central core of the presidency in
the wake of the uprising. It is seductive to dwell on the more contentious and more
emotionally laden<s> </s>issues such as whether Muslims can be democrats or the
often incomprehensible constitutional wrangling. These lead us astray from the
more fundamental and essential role of the ruling elite, without whom no
country can make the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
<br />
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There are, as far as I can tell, two
different ways of talking about democratization, social upheaval and
dictatorship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One, largely confined to
the left, focuses on the tectonic plates of social cleavage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are the elements of the body politic:
workers, farmers, landowners, officials, and a handful of capitalists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second, far more popular within American
academic circles, largely reduces to the interplay of millions of individuals
who must find ways to resolve their differences whether over constituting the
institutions of governance, property rights, or political participation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Understanding the larger
sociological background of revolt as well as choices that confront generic
individuals are both worthwhile enterprises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What I propose here, though, is that we will gain more traction in
understanding the events of the last four years if we focus on a different set
of admittedly elite institutional actors: members of political parties,
government officials, and holders of significant economic resources.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The crucial question to be asked is whether
the political conflicts in the wake of a mass uprising and the collapse of a
regime provided a plausible existential threat to any particular group. <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than thinking of revolution vaguely as
a rapid and complete change, I prefer a definition proposed by Otto Kirchheimer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Does the new regime destroy the possibility
that the old regime and its members can return to power?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This saves us from the implicit mysticism of
structural-functionalism and its game-theoretical descendant in which
individuals carry all of society’s institutions in their own heads. It allows
us to focus on the crucial aspect of democracy:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>are all parties, including the ones ousted by the collapse of
authoritarianism, able to contest for governance? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of the many
contextual differences between Tunisia and Egypt we can note three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First the Egyptian courts had a much longer
history of systematic intervention in political disputes than did their
counterparts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, the Tunisian
military had never in the 20<sup>th</sup> century played a direct role in
political or government life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Third, the
level of mass mobilization in Egypt before the collapse of the authoritarian
regime was far wider and exhibited much higher levels of spontaneity than did
those in Tunisia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is another way of
saying that politics in Tunisia more directly displayed the underlying
capacities of institutions and organizations than did those in Egypt.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In both Tunisia and
Egypt the authoritarian regime centered on a particular figure who had been in
power for decades and around whom an increasingly small coterie of family and
close associates clustered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By 2010 wide
sections of the political elite in each country had been marginalized by a
narrow group at the very pinnacle of authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In each country the regime
maintained its grip on power partly through reliance on the police and partly
through the manipulation of a single party (the Constitutional Democratic Rally
in Tunisia and the National Democratic Party in Egypt).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In early 2010 there
was every reason to think that Egypt was more likely to experience a successful
transition to democracy than Tunisia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt
had a far more open press environment, more competitive elections, and had
experienced more turnover among government ministers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, in 2010 the Tunisian prime
minister, Mohammad Ghannouchi, was the same one who had been appointed more
than 20 years earlier by Ben Ali.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Atef
Ebeid, who President Mubarak had appointed as Prime Minister in 1999 (when
Ghannouchi assumed his office) to replace Kamal Ganzouri had departed after a
five year term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ahmad Nazif, Ebeid’s
successor, had only served seven years when he was replaced on January 30, 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt had had three prime ministers in the
two decades during which Tunisia had one.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The story of the
protests in Tunisia and the massive uprisings in Egypt is sufficiently well
known for me not to repeat it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In its
place it is worth looking more closely at other aspects of the subsequent
events in the two countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In some
ways they are remarkably similar but in other respects they differ
notably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An understandable desire by
many observers and analysts to conflate a revolutionary uprising with the
process of democratic transition has created a narrative that now lacks not
only many details but is, in some ways, a significant distortion of the
political trajectory of the two countries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As strikes and
demonstrations became more widespread in both countries, members of the
judiciary played an early role in shaping events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reformist judges appeared from the first days
of the uprising in Tahrir square while in Tunisia the country’s attorneys were
on strike by January 6.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Violence against
property in the protests led to the promulgation of a curfew in both Tunis and
Cairo and in both places the Armed Forces refused to fire on
demonstrators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Cairo, however, where
Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi was both supreme commander of the Armed Forces
and Minister of Defense, the army’s chain of command remained intact and
shielded from civilian interference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Tunis, President Ben Ali dismissed the commander of the Armed Forces Rachid
Ammar on January 13.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ammar was
re-instated the following day by long-serving Prime Minister Ghannouchi who Ben
Ali had deputized as president before he fled the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<h2 style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="color: windowtext; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The Tunisian Supreme Court first
appeared as an actor in the transition on January 15 when it declared that Ben
Ali was not incapacitated but had quit the presidency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consequently, Fouad Mebaza3, the speaker of
the Assembly, was installed as president rather than Ghannouchi, who then
remained as Prime Minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mebaza3, a
member of the RCD Central committee since 1988, served as the president of
Tunisia until December 13, 2011 when he was replaced by the human rights
activist and Ben Ali opponent, Moncef Marzouki.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Had the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court made a similar ruling when
Mubarak left office, it would have declared that either the speaker of the
Assembly, Fathi Sorour or Farouk Sultan, president of the court, was his
constitutional successor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both men were
as closely associated with Mubarak as Mebaza3 was to Ben Ali.</span></h2>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">By January 17, Prime
Minister Ghannouchi announced a new cabinet <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>which contained 12 members of the CDR
including former defense minister Ridha Grira, a graduate of the distinguished
French institute for training high-level civil servants, the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (a distinction he shares with Adly Mansour, the president of
the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court who served as President of the
Republic from the ouster of Mohammad Morsi in 2013 until the election of
Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi in 2014).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Initial attempts to
contain popular unrest that had only grown since Ben Ali fled were
unsuccessful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither Ghannouchi’s
resignation from the CDR nor the inclusion of trade union and opposition
political figures silenced protests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Within a day the trade union ministers had resigned and on January 27
Ghannouchi gave up and resigned as Prime Minister. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ghannouchi’s
replacement was not an outsider by any stretch of the imagination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the contrary, he was replaced by an even
more central figure from the old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The new Prime Minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, had served in several key
positions under the Republic’s founder, Habib Bourguiba.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Essebsi was defense minister from late 1969
until June 1970 and then served as Ambassador to France.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Tunisia, as in other former French
colonies, the ambassador to Paris is a position of exceptional importance for
economic, political and security issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Between 1981 and 1986 Essebsi was the country’s foreign minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After Ben Ali ousted Bourguiba, Essebsi
moved to the legislature where he was president of the Chamber of Deputies from
1990-1991.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Essebsi, who would be Prime
Minister in 2011 until he resigned to make way for Ennahda party leader, Hamadi
Jabali, on December 24 thus played a key role in determining the nature of the
democratic transition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before the
courts in Tunisia (as in Egypt) dissolved the former ruling party in March, the
Interior Ministry had already suspended it from official activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Essebsi thus presided over the liquidation
of the party in which he had spent most of his adult career and from which he
would draw many of the leaders for the new party he created for the 2014
legislative elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Essebsi and his
associates were quintessentially what Egyptians derided as “feloul” or the
remnants of the old regime.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is possible that Essebsi
only pursued this course under the pressure of demonstrations, but nevertheless
it was Essebsi and a number of politicians from the old regime as well as some
of their long-standing opponents who bore the responsibility for shaping a
democratic outcome in Tunisia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus,
speaking on November 10, 2011 at the African Media Leaders forum, Essebsi noted
that it was his government’s responsibility to ensure that the Tunisian
revolution did not devolve into a fratricidal conflict nor deviate from what he
called its virtuous path.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Among the
consequential choices his government made was the exclusion of members of the
CDR from participating in the elections for the constituent assembly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arguably even more important, however, was
the decision to encourage human rights activist Kamel Jendoubi to preside over
the commission charged with writing the relevant electoral law and carrying out
the election itself, ISIE.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jendoubi and
his fellow commissioners chose to employ a particular version of proportional
representation that provided Ennahda with the number of seats that corresponded
to its share of the vote but that also privileged smaller parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other electoral rules, including other
versions of proportional representation, would have translated Ennahda’s 38 %
share of the popular vote into a majority of seats rather than the plurality it
actually received.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ennahda thus, by
design, was unlikely to control the constituent assembly without receiving an
overwhelming majority of the popular vote.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ennahda had the votes
in the constituent assembly to impose a constitutional article banning members
of the old ruling party from engaging in politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, just such an article (116) was
drafted into the Tunisian constitution by a majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under the rules of the assembly, however, it
was rejected because it did not have the necessary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">super-majority</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The measure
failed to gain a super-majority in large part because of significant number of
Ennahda delegates abstained.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a
constitutional article would have been an insuperable barrier to the old
political elite regaining influence through electoral politics and would have
made the creation of Essebsi’s Nida’ Tounis, the largest party after the last
elections, impossible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most widely
cited argument for not excluding former members of the CDR was simply that
there is, in a democracy, no reason for stripping individuals of their political
rights unless they have been convicted of criminal activity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether Ennahda representatives were
convinced of this argument on its merits or simply took a more hard-nosed view
of the likely results of excluding their long-time opponents we do not know,
but their decision was consequential.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In Egypt events have
worked out quite differently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are,
of course, many contextual differences between Egypt and Tunisia but one
obvious and crucial difference was the inability or unwillingness of the Muslim
Brotherhood to find a way to compromise with members of the old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the contrary, the Muslim Brotherhood often
sought to marginalize and exclude as much of the NDP as possible. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
attempts to marginalize and exclude the NDP and its cadre as well as its
leadership were highly popular with a significant portion of the Egyptian
public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The top NDP leadership included
prominent businessmen, religious officials, and government officials all of
whom were widely derided as corrupt figures of an authoritarian regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Days before Husni
Mubarak resigned, on February 6, 2011 Vice President Omar Suleiman met with
members of the opposition including the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to
broker an agreement about the future of Egypt. These were the days in which
several groups of so-called “wise men”, including some of Egypt’s wealthiest
and most important businessmen as well as academic figures and former officials
engaged a public dialogue through public statements and occasional interviews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other opposition leaders including Muhammad
El-Baradei opposed the talks which were unpopular with the demonstrators in
Tahrir Square. The Obama administration backed the talks as a way out of the
impasse in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both President Obama
and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called for an orderly transition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some disarray in the American position
occurred when former US Ambassador Frank Wisner stated that Mubarak would have
to stay in office indefinitely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Press
reports indicated that Mubarak would have agreed not to run for a new term and
that some changes in the laws regarding freedom of expression would have been
made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first attempt to broker some kind of
agreement or transitional pact foundered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Subsequently there were occasional talks between leaders of the MB and
some of their political competitors and more than occasional claims that the MB
had worked out a deal with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces but nothing
of the kind ever happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Talks
routinely broke down; bargains once made were scuttled; and a heightened sense
of distrust permeated relationships between all the dominant actors during the
period after Mubarak left office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unlike in
Tunisia, it proved, for example, very difficult to win agreement on the nature
of the electoral process as well as substantively limiting the ability of the
Islamist movements to dominate the legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After initially promising to limit itself to contesting 25 % of the
seats, the MB finally decided to contest nearly everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF found it difficult to choose among a
variety of electoral schemes but ultimately chose a mixed system in which some
seats were contested by party list and others by individual candidacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parties were nevertheless allowed to contest
the individual seats although it was widely known that the Supreme
Constitutional Court, in several prior decisions, had ruled such contestation unconstitutional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Anger and
contempt for the political figures of the old regime were common through the
first year of the uprising in Egypt and the MB began to present themselves as a
party dedicated to reforming Egypt by continuing the revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Key to this objective was eliminating the
“feloul” or remnants of the old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This was surprising to many Egyptians because there was no reason to
believe that the MB planned to make significant or rapid changes to the
country’s economic or governmental structures which would have been the hallmark
of a revolutionary party as widely understood in Western as well as Egyptian
academic literature.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Circumspect
as the MB was, however, their reaction to the so-called Selmi document of late
2011 shows how different the situation in Egypt was from what obtained in
Tunisia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ali Al-Selmi, vice prime
minister, drafted a proposal that had the backing of SCAF and the government
which was then still dominated by liberal elements of the old regime and a
handful of its liberal opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
offered a set of supra-constitutional principles to guide the work of the
still-to-be chosen constituent assembly which had many substantive similarities
to earlier such statements issued by the Muslim Brotherhood, his own Wafd
party, and independent forces in March 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It only allowed the civilian government to consider the total budgetary
allocation to the Armed Forces and it gave SCAF the right to prior review of
any legislation affecting the army.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was opposition to ratifying the military’s hitherto unofficial
authority in the new constitution, but the subsequent constitution drafted a
year later by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly gave the Armed Forces
significantly more control over its own finances and the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
His proposal also included significant
restrictions on how the still to be chosen legislature could choose the
constituent assembly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, Selmi
proposed that elected legislators not be allowed to serve as members of the
constituent assembly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He also proposed a
corporatist plan through which the SCAF would appoint the bulk of the members
of the constituent assembly from the existing institutional framework of
Egyptian society in which unions, professional associations, and other groups
would choose their own representatives.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If implemented, his proposal placed
mild substantive constraints on what the assembly could write but it
egregiously violated one of the few obviously legitimate elements of the
transitional process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That an elected
legislature would choose the constituent assembly was one of a handful of
provisions that had been the object of the March 19 referendum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB called for massive demonstrations against
the Selmi proposals and hundreds of thousands of people mobilized against them
including sections of the left. Selmi himself became a lightning rod for
protest and mistrust because of his own connections to the old regime. Selmi
has a doctorate in economics and had served previously in Mubarak
cabinets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was a prominent member of
the Wafd, generally considered a secular pro-business party with a significant
Christian base of support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rejecting the
Selmi placed the MB firmly on the side of electoral legitimacy but it suggested
an at best limited tolerance for reaching substantive agreements with the
social, political or economic elite of the old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 86.1pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The Muslim
Brotherhood initiated demonstrations in Tahrir Square and were able to mobilize
significant support against the proposal on November 18, 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Police later attacked a sit-in by relatives
of the people killed in the initial uprising and protests continued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These included particularly violent
confrontations between the police and youth, many of whom were drawn from the
ranks of soccer fans and from poorer neighborhoods, which left 41 dead and
perhaps 1,000 wounded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Selmi
document was another victim and so was the government of Prime Minister Essam
Sharaf who resigned on November 21.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
was replaced by Kamal Ganzouri, who had served as prime minister under Hosny
Mubarak from 1996 to 1999.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>From the
left the Muhammad Mahmoud events were widely viewed at the time as evidence
that the Muslim Brotherhood was uninterested in pursuing the revolution to
establish a democratic order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Viewed in
the framework of Tunisian politics, however, they suggest a different interpretation:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the Muslim Brotherhood refused to reach an
agreement with members of the old regime about the new structure of the
state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mobilization of street
demonstrations and the willingness to accept the outcome of the violent confrontations
that it had neither solicited nor endorsed placed the Muslim Brotherhood on a
distinct path in the months to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This was the path of electoral politics, themselves a fundamental
process for representative democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was also, however, a path in which elections and demonstrations together could
be used to marginalize and diminish the role of other institutions of the state
as well as the political opponents of the electoral victors.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the
succeeding months a far more brutal and direct battle for power developed in
Egypt that took the country in a very different direction from Tunisia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Muslim Brotherhood coalition gained 45 %
of the seats in the new parliament and, in alliance with the Salafi “Islamist
bloc”, could control the new legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Among other measures it enacted a political ban on members of the old
ruling party which, like its Tunisian equivalent, had been dissolved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Supreme Constitutional Court struck down
this law as unconstitutional, using language similar to that deployed by
Tunisian legislators in rejecting Article 116.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Court also voided the elections to the lower house because the
electoral rules violated established court doctrine about the rights of
voters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This is not
the place to discuss in detail the long conflict between the Muslim
Brotherhood, the courts, and members of the old political class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is telling that the MB, despite its
commitment to the electoral process and its claims to the necessity of the
alternation of power, remained unwilling to allow the one set of political
activists most likely to challenge its dominance successfully to compete in an
organized fashion for power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in
this sense that the MB can legitimately claim to be a revolutionary force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB was certainly not an ideological party
committed to socialism, income redistribution, or secularism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For reasons that are too complex to address
here they were certainly committed to eliminating a significant fraction of the
old political class (the “feloul” or remnants of the old regime) and moved as
rapidly as they could to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No doubt
the stories of the Tunisian and Egyptian experiences of political conflict in
the wake of authoritarian collapse are more complex than the one I have told
here. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I plan to examine some of those
aspects, including the role of the army, elsewhere. The advantage of this
story, however, is that it takes our attention away from the problems of
secularism, post-secularism, moderation, radicalism and religion and places it
firmly back into the structure of conflict and accommodation between political
and institutional forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sometime before
his tragically premature death I had coffee one morning with Samir Soliman, the
respected Egyptian political scientist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the years since it has become common to argue that the failure of the
Egyptian revolution and Egyptian democracy can both be attributed to the
failure of the secular left to organize sufficient popular support to challenge
the Muslim Brotherhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seen in this
optic the tragedy of Egypt is the fault of the middle-class intellectuals who
played such conspicuous roles in front of the television cameras in the early
days of the uprising in 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Samir had
a different view of how democracy, if it was to work at all, would work in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only party that could conceivably
challenge the MB and alternate with it, he argued, was a conservative party. Committed
as he was personally to the politics of the left, he did not that day argue
that the liberal left would be a likely counterweight to the MB nor did he
mention from where such a party would draw its leaders or members.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In Tunisia
it is clear that a conservative-centrist party has emerged to challenge Ennahda
and its roots are heavily in the old regime although it also boasts other
supporters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Egypt for a variety of
reasons no alternate center-conservative party was built.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That would have necessarily been a party with
deep roots in the old NDP, the party many of whose members have re-emerged
since the coup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the absence of a
thorough-going revolutionary exclusion, they would, I think, have re-emerged
anyway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question is whether they did
so through elections or as part of an anti-electoral coalition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Attempting to exclude the economic and
political elites of the old regime may have seemed like both revolutionary and
democratic good sense to the Muslim Brothers and to many Islamists and leftists
between 2011 and 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Egyptian
revolutionaries (in the conventional left-wing sense) and the leaders of the MB
feared the re-emergence of the feloul as a political force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They correctly understood that a powerful
conservative party with significant support from Egypt’s business elite was not
a friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such a political grouping was
not inclined to support either the projects of economic and social equality
that animated the left or the projects of creating new state institutions that
the MB favored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB were committed to
elections. As the old elite increasingly re-asserted itself the MB responded by
attempting to marginalize both their institutional and electoral capacity. In
this they echoed the very old concern of revolutionaries in Europe and Latin
America that electoral democracy is not necessarily the friend of movements for
economic redistribution nor do they necessarily lend themselves to the creation
of strong protections for the political, civil, or social rights of the poor
and the weak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The idea that democracy is the last
station on the revolutionary road remains seductive and it informs a certain idealized
understanding of American history and the process of democratization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Representative democracy itself, however, is
less likely the successful conclusion of revolution and more likely the
premature end of its utopian hopes and dreams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Only if nothing changes, can everything change.</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-81848722406097914102014-08-20T12:38:00.000-07:002014-08-20T12:38:01.888-07:00Sisi Victorious (with apologies to the late Ossie Davis)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>SISI
VICTORIOUS</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
A year after the violent dispersion
of protesters at Rabaa and Nahda squares in Cairo Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi has reason to be pleased
with the state of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The early
mutters of disapproval in Washington have died down and even a recent report by
Human Rights Watch asserting that the government crackdown on supporters of
former President Muhammad Morsi comprised a series of crimes against humanity
will probably be ignored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> That Egypt today, with an authoritarian regime underwritten by the armed forces, is far less torn by conflict than Libya, Syria, or Iraq may be one reason for feeling self-satisfied. </span>Another, and one of the
most surprising reasons for such feelings, besides the usual cynicism of international
politics and foreign policy, is due to the remarkably accommodating policies of
Egypt’s neighbor to the northeast, Israel.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While
the most common optic used to view events in the region remains that of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has also become increasingly fashionable to
think in terms of a struggle for influence between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
(aided by its friends in the United Arab Emirates) and the Islamic Republic of
Iran (with an occasional assist from Qatar).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Through these lenses Egypt is no longer an independent player in the
Arab world but merely a dependent supplicant for favor in a conflict between
far more powerful forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this may
be true to some degree, it ignores how rapidly Egyptian diplomacy has used the
assets—meager as they may be—at its disposal to reverse the negative
impact of the criminal violence through which the current regime came to power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether this is due to remarkable skill or
dumb luck remains to be seen, but the new government has done a superb job of
taking advantage of opportunities.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not
the least of those assets has been Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To say this is to admit an unconventional view of the current situation
in the region.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dominant approach is
to say that Egypt is the ally or even the cat’s paw of Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Israelis, after all, rely on Egyptian
weakness to carry out their assault on Gaza and Israel is the dominant military
and economic power in the eastern Mediterranean. Many believe that Egyptians
(and thus any democratically elected Egyptian government) really want nothing
more than for their army and their economy to come to the aid of the beleaguered
Palestinians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Exactly why, after even
the Morsi government closed down tunnels to Gaza and maintained the blockade<span style="color: #0070c0;">,</span> anyone should unquestioningly believe this is
something of a mystery. It is true that the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Morsi
was a leading member, had a fraternal relationship with Hamas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is equally true that the Freedom and
Justice party leaders vociferously campaigned at rallies on their intentions to liberate Jerusalem. As all the little communist parties of the world learned to their sorrow
during the years of Stalin’s Comintern, the interests of big brother take
precedence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi and his allies may
have talked a good game of fighting Zionism but in the end they turned out to be
mainly interested in the victory of Islamism in one country.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Sisi government (which includes the transitional period) is far less enamored
of the Palestinian cause and Hamas than was the Muslim Brotherhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new government, faced with continuing
unrest in the Sinai Peninsula and ongoing armed attacks on border guards,
police and army units, sees the entire region as a security threat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gaza is, in this view, a source of and a
refuge for armed elements that the new government sees as threatening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That Hamas militants paraded through the
streets of Gaza before the recent fighting while holding weapons and making the
raised four-finger sign of Rabaa could not have been pleasing to President Sisi
and his government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Egypt’s
new generals, it has been widely observed, have little combat experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike former Defense Minister Tantawi they
never fought the Israeli Defense Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If they have never been victorious in battle neither have they suffered
defeat at the hands of the IDF.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor does
the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu appear to harbor any ill will
toward an Egyptian military that stolidly guards its own borders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the contrary, ministers and pundits
alike committed to the Netanyahu government see political Islam
(whether in Iran or the Arab world) as the most dangerous strategic threat they
face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In their rhetoric, and perhaps in
their own strategic calculus, the Muslim world is a seething cauldron of rage
about to pour down on the Jewish state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Against
this possibility the Egyptian military are a bulwark. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It is
thus not so surprising that Israeli diplomats and American organizations
strongly connected to Israel urged the Obama Administration not to cut aid to
Egypt in the wake of the coup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One way
to look at this is that the new regime in Egypt had been rewarded for truckling
to Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another way—at least as
honest a description—would be that the Israeli government carried water for the
Egyptians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To repeat: the Israeli
government judged its interests best served by aiding the strategic interests
of the Egyptian regime in exchange for no formal promises or assurances.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Israeli
intelligence about Gaza is known to be relatively impoverished. Unsurprisingly,
Israel is better informed about the more open society in the West Bank than
what many describe as the open air prison of Gaza.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite the fantasies of Jeremy Bentham and
Michel Foucault, prisons are not easy places to observe nor does the Hobbesian
world of incarceration lend itself <span style="color: #0070c0;"><span style="color: black;">to</span> </span>stable
patterns of alliance or preference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
Israeli officials rely to any degree on Egyptian colleagues for intelligence
about Gaza, they would not be the first occupying power to risk being systematically
misled by those from whom they seek information.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Israel’s
assault on Gaza and weakening of Hamas has gone well for President Sisi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Israelis and Islamist Palestinians have
wounded each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hamas has been
materially weakened and Israel has, in the eyes of important sections of the
developed world, forfeited much of its moral and political capital.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt, a country which for a year had labored
under the threat that the US or the European states would diminish both
economic and diplomatic support has now become once again a crucial
interlocutor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, as President
Obama’s attention is drawn increasingly to Syria and Iraq as well
as Ukraine, Egypt is a welcome partner. Cairo becomes the venue and the
primary agent in facilitating talks between the two warring parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever possibility there was that the Obama
administration would further cut aid to Egypt has vanished in the plumes of
Hamas’s rockets and the explosions of Israeli ordnance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
the home front the picture facing the Egyptian government is less rosy, but it
is not quite as dismal as Sisi’s opponents suggest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A year after the government violently
dispersed the demonstrations at Rabaa and Nahda squares, it has managed to
write and implement a new constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
the new constitution was approved by 98% of the voters and President Sisi
elected by 96% has not embarrassed the new government nor does it seem to be an
element of popular discontent for now.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
government faces far more severe problems than the validity of its mandate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has so far proven incapable of resolving
many of the issues that President Morsi unsuccessfully confronted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the process it has become clear that the
profound challenges that faced the Morsi government were not manufactured by
the deep state, foreign interests, or anything other than the present structure
of the Egyptian economy and politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
has been significant commentary about Egyptian food imports and the dire
consequences of bread shortages in a country where bread is a necessary dietary
staple.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, among the most
pressing problems in Egypt is that of electricity supply.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The persistent outages that occurred before
the coup have become longer and more frequent over the last year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Initially there was a respite as power
consumption dropped below production for a brief period but the general trend
has been negative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government plans
to resolve the issue in the short term by increasing coal imports but these
will necessarily increase the drain on foreign currency reserves. A cleaner
alternative would be natural gas. Although Egypt has very large reserves of
natural gas, it faces increasing shortages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The government has diverted more of the gas from exports (including
small but very controversial shipments to Israel) to domestic consumption but
has been unable to increase production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The major stumbling block is the unwillingness of the government to
increase the price for foreign partners as well as the government’s inability
to pay its previous energy debts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A possible
resort to increasing imports of liquefied natural gas may briefly alleviate the
physical shortfall but at the cost of further drain of foreign reserves and
foregone investment in production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Long-term
problems include high unemployment and continued weakness in production and
investment as well as the diminished activity in the tourist sector. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Egyptians like to think of the
tourist attractions in their country as unique this is something of a
mistake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is true that no other country
has pyramids so large or Pharaonic monuments so grand, but the Pyramid of the
Sun in Teotihuacan is also unique. Having visited Luxor once globetrotters are
as likely to want to see Angkor Wat as make a return visit to the temples on
the Nile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other Egyptian tourist
attractions—sandy beaches, clear blue water, exotic scenes for scuba
diving—must compete with similar accommodations in Thailand, Mexico, Brazil,
and even socialist Cuba’s white sands of Varadero. Tourism is a source of hard
currency and Egypt’s historical attractions are uniquely important in human history but the global tourist market is
highly competitive. The number of tourists coming to Egypt dropped from 14
million in 2010 to around 9 million last year. That other destinations can be
visited without fear of disruption or political unrest makes them even more
desirable today.<span style="color: #00b050;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One bright spot is remittances, which according
to the central bank, flow on the order of $22 billion annually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In academic discussions of the Egyptian
economy remittances are often referred to as a form of “rent” probably because,
like royalties on oil production or Suez Canal transit fees, they are paid in
hard currency. They are better thought of as as a form of export of human
capital.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The higher returns abroad to
the joint investment between individual Egyptians and the state in education
are partially returned to Egyptian society through this mechanism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is insufficiently appreciated is that
the particular form inter-Arab economic relations have taken in the past five
decades makes it possible for this economic arbitrage to function
effectively from the vantage of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ordinarily migrants take their education with them as well as their
entrepreneurial talents when they settle abroad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians
cannot, for the most part, do this because although they can often enter other
Arab countries in search of employment they cannot easily become citizens in
their new homes and must return to Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Arab world would look would look very different today if millions of
Egyptians had permanently left the country over the past three decades and
become citizens in Gulf countries or Libya. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>President
Sisi has also announced a plan to dig a second Suez canal and widen the
existing channel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This would allow more
ships to transit and increase revenues to the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Increasing the capacity of the Suez Canal is
certainly a better investment than building a second Nile in the Western Desert
parallel to the existing one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether
the government can accomplish this in the year that President Sisi set for the
project is dubious and even the Suez Canal is no longer a certain source of
rents or hard currency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, unlike in
decades past, Suez and Panama--in opposite hemispheres--can compete for the shipping trade between China
and Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With Suez tolls for some
ships set at more than a million dollars for the round trip, the journey around
Africa or through a widened channel in Panama have become competitive for
some shippers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
numbers make the economic situation appear impossibly grim. There are also many
accounts detailing the stranglehold the army is said to have over the economy
with estimates of military enterprises accounting for between 5% and 40% of the
whole.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is something of a mystery in
this case why Egypt does not experience the complete collapse pundits have been
predicting regularly for the last three years. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remittances and the financial support of the
Gulf monarchies certainly make a difference. The state budget is nevertheless
under pressure and there is little reason to believe that the Armed Forces,
despite the engineering degrees held by many of its officers, will be able to
chart a successful course out of the current mess.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
Sisi and the generals may be able to rely on at least for a while is the
informal economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Estimates of the size
of the informal economy—defined as those enterprises that pay no taxes and
which have no legally recognized property rights—range from between thirty to
forty percent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is every reason to
believe that the informal sector plays an important and possibly even nearly a
dominant role in urban housing markets and that informal systems of property
rights and adjudication procedures exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Living in the informal markets for labor and commodities is precarious
but on balance it is clear that millions of Egyptians manage to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no need to romanticize the difficult
lives of those for whom pennies (or more appropriately piasters) spell the
difference between ruin and relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
studies there are suggest that for some Egyptians, informal employment is a
first step in a ladder to a viable livelihood and for others (women and poorly
educated men for example) it may well be an inescapable trap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless for the moment it provides some
stability in an economy that is increasingly at risk. And it may well be that
Egyptians in the most precarious situations are the ones who most desire
stability, even at the cost of increased political repression. Sisi’s
supporters, who helped to drive President Morsi from office, are not drawn only
from the ranks of well off liberals any more than were the enemies of
Maximilien Robespierre during Thermidor of 1793.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He went to the guillotine with the assent and
even the enthusiasm of much of Paris as well as the French countryside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Robespierre’s downfall is linked in
modern imagination with the Terror it appears in retrospect to have been more
closely connected to how opposing elites deployed issues of more widespread
popular concern: rising prices, bread shortages, and the absence of fuel.</div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-49824747614751100102014-03-07T08:34:00.002-08:002014-03-07T08:48:45.082-08:00The Needle and the Gun<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
recent announcement by the Egyptian government that the Armed Forces have
discovered a device to detect and possibly cure hepatitis “C” and AIDS has been
met with disbelief, ridicule and occasional contempt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not met with a great deal of anger, but perhaps this
was because Egyptians were all too aware of the context within which the device
has been offered. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or perhaps after
three years of revolutionary upheaval many Egyptians are too exhausted. The
foreign media has echoed some of the ridicule but with rare exceptions has been
either willfully or blindly ignorant of the public health background of the
last two decades. Whether these events were an indication of malice, hypocrisy,
incompetence or simple lack of attention by the relevant authorities remains
uncertain.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Announced
at a mid-February 2014 press conference by Ibrahim Abdel Atti, a general by
courtesy, the device—named C-Fast—resembles a radio antenna connected to a
trigger mechanism. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is thus
supposed to be instantaneous (whence its name) and non-invasive. Abdel Atti
claims that he spent two decades developing the device, most recently with
support from the Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar
technology, he claimed, was at use in “complete cure” which ostensibly did what
its name implied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several Egyptian
scientists, including the president’s science adviser, have publicly announced
that the device itself is most likely a fake and that neither the device nor
the theory on which it was supposedly developed has any validity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
the underlying health issues were less serious the events of the past week
might have the quality of an arcane comedy or a peculiar vaudeville act. But there
is every reason for Egyptians to be worried about hepatitis C.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a severe liver disease whose full
effects may take decades to manifest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These include cancer of the liver and cirrhosis either of which is fatal
if untreated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most
common medications are uncertain and require a course of treatment lasting
months.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even after government
assistance, they may cost hundreds or thousands of dollars which puts them
beyond the reach of many of Egypt’s poor who may subsist on $2 a day.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
a story in the New York Times on February 26, 2014 coyly noted Egypt has “the
highest prevalence of hepatitis C.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The superlative here refers to the entire globe: the rate of infection
among Egyptians is the world’s highest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>According to a report issued by the US Centers for Disease Control but
largely authored by Egyptian specialists about 10 % of the Egyptian population,
or 6 million people in 2008, had chronic hepatitis c virus (HCV)
infection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt, with less
than a quarter the population of the United States has twice as many people
infected with the virus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another
telling comparison is that Egypt with less than 1% of the world’s population
has roughly 4% of the world’s cases of hepatitis C.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
general hepatitis C rates are higher in the countryside than the cities, among
men than women, and among those who are older.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same report indicates that between 2008 and 2011 the
Egyptian government treated about 190,000 Egyptians with one or two medications
that cure between 60 and 80% of cases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, about 40,000 Egyptians die every year due to liver cancer or
cirrhosis (not all of which is attributable to HCV) and it is the second
highest cause of death in the country after heart attacks. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is every reason for
Egyptians, especially the poor and the illiterate, to be concerned about
hepatitis C and to hope that someone can develop a quick and inexpensive
treatment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That many Egyptians
welcomed the claims about C-Fast is not surprising. There is no particular
reason that ordinary Egyptians should have very clear ideas about the best
science for the detection and cure of AIDS or hepatitis C.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever the vices of General Abdel
Atti’s device, it has the virtue of being harmless in itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is more than can be said of a drug
such as laetrile that was popular in the United States at least through the
1970s and is still occasionally touted as a cure for cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Laetrile, made from apricot pits, has
no impact on cancer but it does contain sufficient cyanide that patients taking
it have a real risk of being poisoned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
problem with a harmless treatment is that it induces a false sense of security
among patients who will nevertheless succumb to a deadly disease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not clear whether the peak
incidence of the disease occurred in the past several years but it will be a
severe public health problem for decades to come.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
the epidemic itself was in large part the effect of an earlier Ministry of
Health program designed to eliminate endemic schistosomiasis (also known as
bilharzia) was well known and recently reported in The Economist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Schistosomiasis also causes severe
liver disease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That campaign
itself was necessitated by earlier decisions by many Egyptian governments
(including those at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century when the country
was effectively under British control) to extend perennial irrigation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians suffered from schistosomiasis
thousands of years ago but perennial irrigation allowed a parasite that moves
from snails to humans and back again to routinely complete its life cycle and
infect large numbers of people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
From 1960 until around 1980 the
government injections of tartar emetic were used to control schistosomiasis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decision by the government to
employ re-usable glass syringes that were often not effectively sterilized
between uses spread the HCV epidemic even as it began to reduce the incidence
of schistosomiasis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the
mid-1980s an oral drug had begun to replace the earlier treatment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately by then HCV was endemic
and an unrelated hepatitis B virus had also begun to spread.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There are other sources for the
spread of HCV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The growing
incidence of adult diabetes has also led to a growing incidence of kidney
failure (more formally, end stage renal disease).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a consequence more Egyptians are undergoing dialysis
which, when the machines are not adequately sterilized, has become another
vector for the spread of HCV.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Egypt has more than 1,000 dialysis units
that provide care for patients with kidney disease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dialysis costs about $3200 a year for three treatments a
week (in the US the cost is about 50 times as great and would also be beyond
the reach of most who suffer from the disease if Medicare did not pick up the
bill). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is well beyond the
income of most Egyptians with ESRD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Needless to say 1,000 units is far from sufficient for a country with
millions who have ESRD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recent
estimates indicate that about 10% of Egyptians suffer from diabetes (about half
of which is undiagnosed) and perhaps twice that many suffer from hypertension
which is the other major precursor to ESRD.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Dialysis clinics are spread
throughout the country but are most easily available in the large cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus there is relatively large dialysis
center not far from Tahrir Square tucked into a small side street opposite an
art gallery and not far from automobile repair shops.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Giza, on the boundary between the upscale neighborhood of
Muhandiseen and impoverished area of Imbaba there are several clinics
specializing in kidney and liver disease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At the height of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, empty as the
streets of Cairo and Giza may have been, the clinics were filled with patients,
some from Upper Egypt and some from upper class Cairene families waiting to see
their physicians and watching the news reports on television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither kidney nor liver patients could
let revolution prevent their search for treatment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My only reason for being aware of this is that I spent most
of a day there on several occasions waiting for my own appointment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Treatment
of HCV has been expensive and until recently quite uncertain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In December 2013 the English-language
Ahram reported news of a trial in the US. These results were clearly well known
to officials of the Health Ministry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The US Food and Drug Administration has recently approved an orally delivered medication that is
extremely effective when used to treat the particular variation of HCV common
in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Wahid Doss, head of
the Egyptian National Liver Institute, was quoted in news reports (including
the Ahram report) about the results of a study in the United States that showed
Sofusbuvir in conjunction with Peginterferon and Ribavirin achieved a 97%
permanent clearance rate of the virus after 12 weeks of treatment. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>All
of this information and more was available to the Egyptian government and
Egyptian medical organizations and it was in the public record when the first
reports of C-Fast were made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the space of a week and a half the emptiness of the claims of Abdel Atti and
the C-Fast device had been revealed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On the positive side it is apparent that the repressive as the new
government may be and despite the danger of scientific quackery Egypt’s
scientific community remains active.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is easy to dismiss the value of expertise but for many Egyptians
today in many areas of society there is a far greater problem in not having
access to expert advice and care than in having too much of it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The size of the public health
tragedy that confronts the country and the very limited resources for dealing
with it are truly daunting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much
as been written of the macroeconomic challenges Egypt faces, the cost of fuel
and food subsidies, the continuing problems with electricity supply and
butane.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course there is
repressive response of the state to public political opposition.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The 2011 electoral program of the
Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party correctly noted the extent of
the hepatitis and diabetes epidemic facing the country but proposed no
immediate proposals to address it and no significant increase in funding
already existing institutions or policy initiatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The current government is clearly aware of the extent of the
crisis and of how it affects the lives of ordinary Egyptians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite information available from the
government’s own scientific advisers and the Egyptian professional medical
community, the government promoted a quack response.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had the C-Fast device not been critiqued, ridiculed and (one
can only hope) withdrawn, its use would have been worse than doing nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is sobering to realize that every month
almost as many Egyptians unnecessarily die due to the consequences of
government incapacity and inaction as were killed in the public squares in the
summer of 2013.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These deaths are
unintended and clearly cannot be considered the policy of the state. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No violation of rights is involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are nevertheless a significant
human tragedy for which negligence may be a reason but not really an excuse.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-26335648718385331972013-09-18T17:38:00.000-07:002013-09-18T20:19:05.370-07:00A Tale of Two Coups<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
keep a black and white photograph on the wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a grainy old black and white photo, poorly mounted and
inexpertly framed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very few people
who mount the stairs from the door to my living room recognize the faces in the
picture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually they ignore it
completely but sometimes their attention is drawn by the large hammer and
sickle in the center foreground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It has been years since any visitors recognized that the unsmiling,
somber figure just above and behind the Communist emblem is the former
President of Chile, Salvador Allende.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> He is, appropriately perhaps, surrounded by
members of the Popular Unity government and yet appears to be abstracted and
isolated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only the Minister of
Labor, Luis Figueroa, is looking directly at Allende who lay dead in Chile’s
presidential palace, La Moneda, a week after the photograph was taken. General Augusto Pinochet had seized power in a military coup and the Chilean Air Force had bombed Chile's own government center.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RJKut1BlkwE/UjpsuoFgb_I/AAAAAAAAAEE/9fGQ4Sztfqc/s1600/Scan+132610001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RJKut1BlkwE/UjpsuoFgb_I/AAAAAAAAAEE/9fGQ4Sztfqc/s320/Scan+132610001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
obvious reasons the coup against President Mohammad Morsi has been compared to the
coup against Allende.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Emotionally
the picture is compelling:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>democratically elected presidents forced out of office by generals who
profoundly hated their politics and who then pursued increasingly violent campaigns
against the remaining civilian opposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the world of American academic politics the comparison is
especially powerful because it suggests that the anti-communism that drove
policies a generation ago and now seems shameful and regrettable is surfacing
again as “Islamophobia” or an irrational hatred of Islam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saving democracy, a lost cause in 1973, is now possible and a
moral imperative as the events of the past are replayed in a different part of
the world with a different cast of characters.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
would be useless to enter an academic hissing match about whether the
characters really are playing the appropriate roles:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian General Abdelfattah Sisi as Pinochet and Morsi as
Allende.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The argument as it
stands is rooted in the moral sentiments of observers, but a closer look
at the comparison can be useful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
reveals the substantial differences between the use of the electoral process
for economic change and political democratization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also reveals how military interventions may have very
different ways of deploying violence, even overwhelmingly high levels of
violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it reveals the degree to which,
regardless of the extent or experience of constitutional rule, armies are
likely intervene when levels of political polarization reach the point at which
civil conflict threatens.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>At
the most superficial level the comparison obviously succeeds and equally obviously
fails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two presidents,
democratically elected, were both ousted by a military establishment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One, Allende, was engaged within a
political system that had been a functioning constitutional democracy for at
least 40 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sought to fashion
a transition to socialism and more particularly to enhance the role of the
state in the economy and to make the distribution of goods and services more
equitable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi’s election in an
open contest occurred a year after the collapse of a 60-year old authoritarian
regime under the influence of an immense revolutionary upheaval.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He appears to have been laying the foundation
for an Islamic state the contours and content of which remain somewhat vague.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende was secular, socialist and
considered himself a democrat; Morsi was an Islamist, committed to private
property, and also considered himself a democrat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>From
the viewpoint of American social scientists and policy makers the differences may
not matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both men were engaged
in “transformative politics” against entrenched interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both had been chosen by the appropriate
mechanisms to hold the country’s highest executive office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both were overthrown by the military
bureaucracies acting on their own and in their own interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither army had fought a foreign enemy
in decades and neither general had any experience in combat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Calling Al-Sisi Pinochet, like calling
Pinochet Hitler, is sufficiently satisfying not to require further
reflection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What happens though if we look at
the comparison as something less like a slogan and more like an analysis?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can begin to see more clearly the
outlines of Morsi’s catastrophic political failure and we may begin to
understand some of its roots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
may also begin to see, unpleasant as it may be, more clearly into the ways in
which the Egyptian military intends to use force.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Like Mohammad Morsi, Salvador
Allende running as the candidate of the Popoular Unity Coalition won the
presidency with a slender lead. Although Morsi received just under 25 % of the
vote in the first round, he was elected by about 52 % in a run-off. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike Morsi, however, Allende only won
a plurality, 36.2 % of the 3 million votes cast; conservative Jorge Alessandri
won 34.9 % of the votes and Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic has 27.8 %.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike Egypt, Chile then had no
run-off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With no majority
candidate, the names of the top two candidates went to the legislature which
itself was dominated by Allende’s opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The legislature
had historically chosen the candidate with the most votes, and to placate his
opposition Allende signed a formal “Statute of Constitutional Guarantees.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In the end, Christian Democratic
congressmen voted for Allende rather than abstain or return Alessandri who had
been president from 1958-1964 to the office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende obtained the presidency with a considerably weaker
electoral mandate than Mohammad Morsi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He knew it, his opponents knew it, and the Chilean population knew it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende’s Socialist party did gain the
Interior (as in Egypt the ministry that controls the police unlike the US where the Interior Department controls the national parks) and Defense
ministries but despite nominal civilian control over the Armed Forces it proved
impossible to prevent a coup.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jose
Toha, Allende’s first Minister of the Interior, was suspended by Congress for tolerating
the emergence of left-wing militias He was then named Minister of Defense by
Allende but was ultimately forced from that portfolio as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clodomiro Almeyda, a left-wing
Socialist, replaced him until he was himself succeeded by General Carlos
Prats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Unlike Egypt in 2012, Chile had a well-established
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had been written
in 1925 and the timing of elections made it almost impossible for a single
party to control the executive and legislative branches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No exception occurred in 1970 for the UP
coalition had 20 senators (of 50) in the upper house and 60 (out of 150) in the
lower house. Unlike Morsi whose own coalition had 235 of 508 seats in the lower
house and 105 of 180 elected seats in the upper house, Allende never had a
friendly legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before the
Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved the lower house, Morsi had a
working plurality in the Egyptian parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After the dissolution of the lower house and the passage of
the new constitution in December 2012 Morsi was a president with a majority in
the rump upper house that constituted the legislature (and to which he had, by
right, appointed 90 of the total of 270 members).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The hostility of the courts and the
legislature was directly rooted in Allende’s socialist agenda challenging the
inviolability of private property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His insistence on completing the nationalization of the large mining
properties (already begun as “Chileanization” under Eduardo Frei, his Christian
Democratic predecessor) as well as other sectors of the economy brought him
into conflict with the judiciary and the legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His equally great insistence on distributing many of the
fruits of the nationalization through programs such as provision of milk to all
children was seen by many as a threat: whether by degrading the efficiency of
the economy or deploying the strategy of the “rentier state” (a phrase that had
barely been invented at the time) to enhance his party’s control over the
powers of government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The relationship of the Armed
Forces to the executive and more generally to the constitutional order is less
easily comparable than other aspects of the two presidents’ tenure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende’s civilian ministers of defense
and the interior never really controlled the armed forces or the police
respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, when
Allende was elected the Chilean Armed Forces had not intervened against a
civilian government in more than 40 years and it was common to argue that Chile
had an unbroken chain of constitutional governments going back to the late
nineteenth century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No coup was possible
in Chile until violence within the military itself had brought new leadership
to the Army. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This process began
when a group of dissident officers and former officers, with the aid of the US
Central Intelligence Agency, murdered Army Chief of Staff General Ren<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">é</span>
Schneider in October 1970 shortly before Allende’s inauguration. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until 1973, the Army had been guided by the so-called
“Schneider doctrine” expressing the general’s belief in the need for a complete
separation of political and military power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Schneider’s successor, General Carlos Prats, accepted the
doctrine and even put down an attempted coup on June 29, 1973, the so-called
Tanquetazo. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prats was forced out
of the Army weeks before the coup and in 1974 was murdered in exile by the
Chilean secret services.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his
place, Allende appointed the little known and colorless Augusto Pinochet as
chief of staff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not
surprising that before 1970 scholars ranked the Chilean Armed forces as one of
the least likely to make a coup and that until the very end few Chileans or
foreigners had reason to believe that any move by the army would result in a
dictatorship that would last nearly two decades.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Egyptian Armed Forces have a
very different relationship to the government and since 1952 have been
intimately connected to the sinews of the state if they did not in fact
constitute them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until the election
of Mohammad Morsi all Egyptian presidents had come from one or another branch
of the Armed Forces; generals and former generals served as provincial
governors, government ministers, and at the head of state-owned economic
enterprises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The armed forces have
been an autonomous administration within the larger state and the 2012
constitution formalized that relationship by requiring that the Minister of
Defense be a general rather than a civilian and by removing the Army’s budget
from significant legislative oversight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For the first time in Egyptian history the army hierarchy itself came to
power in a coup against former President Hosny Mubarak in February 2011 and
assumed the country’s executive and legislative authority until at least
mid-2012 when it relinquished both authorities to elected civilians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In August 2012 Morsi retired the two key military leaders who
had ousted Mubarak, Mohammad Tantawi and Sami Anan, and chose Abdelfattah
Al-Sisi as the new Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It is no secret that since 1954 Egyptian
governments and the Armed Forces have tried many times to destroy the Muslim
Brothers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi thus faced an
officers’ corps with no particular commitment to constitutional government and
with a deep distaste for his politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Despite much wishful thinking by observers outside the army, it has also
shown no inclination to split in the face of popular unrest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is difficult to know whether Morsi
truly thought he had neutralized the Armed Forces but if he did it was, given
their previous 60 years, a colossal mis-reading of the situation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What of the political context of
the periods during which Allende and Morsi held office?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is where the similarities may be
greatest but where crucial differences also become most apparent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lacking control of the legislature and
attempting to change the structure of property rights in favor of tenants,
workers, and the impoverished, Allende and the UP resorted to rule by decree
and refused to implement countervailing court orders based on the existing
laws.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende thus found himself
increasingly in conflict with the judiciary and the Supreme Court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although the Chilean Supreme Court is
far less powerful than its Egyptian counterpart, the justices engaged in a public
dispute with Allende including an exchange of letters accusing him of
undermining the rule of law. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Congress had been in the hands of his opposition since 1970
and the 1973 elections did not materially change the political balance of
forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mass demonstrations against
Allende to influence a legislature already hostile to him were unnecessary. On
August 22, 1973 a majority of the lower house voted to ask the military to
intervene and overthrow the Allende government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The UP’s attempt to re-shape the
Chilean economy had important repercussions especially in a country that had
long suffered from high levels of inflation and rigidly separate labor markets
and whose balance of payments depended on the export of a single
commodity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decline of copper
prices diminished the government’s income during Allende’s presidency and the
ensuing lack of foreign currency made imports, including food, scarce and
expensive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Workers in the formal
sector, especially mining and processing, had won some significant wage
increases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Price-fixing and
rationing, especially the role of the Price and Supply Boards, worsened the
situation rather than ameliorating it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in turn helped to re-create
inflationary pressure that reached at least 140% a year in 1972 whereas
measured Egyptian inflation appears to be on the order of 12 %. Much is made of
the depreciation of the Egyptian (from about 5 to the US dollar in 2010 to
somewhat over 7 today,), a drop of about 30%.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the equivalent period of Allende’s presidency the escudo
dropped from 20 to the dollar to 3000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unhappy as Egyptians have been with the worsening economic situation
over the past year it is hard to imagine how the country would have reacted to
the vaporization of the currency that Chile experienced which would have
rendered the central bank’s foreign reserves worthless long before they were
spent.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Nationalizations included firms
driven out of business by worsening economic problems and this made investors
increasingly skittish. Consequently the population suffered from increasing
shortages of consumer goods and rising prices that affected the poor as well as
the wealthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strikes and lock-outs
also affected production and a strike by truck-owners, many of whom were
impoverished, with both political and economic goals dislocated commerce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende’s opponents viewed the
repression of the truckers’ strike (deemed economic sabotage by the UP government)
as a violation of his pledge to respect the constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One crucial difference between the
strikes during the Allende period and widespread strikes in Egypt over the last
two and a half years is that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood used
its regulatory authority to win the support of striking workers against owners
or to extend the role of state ownership or control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The strikes by
associations known as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gremios</i> were
for economic ends but they also had an anti-trade union edge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unsurprisingly the Chilean trade union
movement (CUT) strongly supported Allende, opposed the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gremios</i>, and in turn received significant support from the UP
government.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In Egypt the nature of the
revolutionary upsurge itself affected several key industries, notably tourism
an important employment sector and a source of foreign currency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt is often called a rentier state
but unlike Chile in the 1970s it has several streams of foreign income.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remittances and Suez Canal receipts are
other important sources of foreign currency although Canal passages declined
somewhat in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt ceased being an oil exporter in
2007.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Foreign exchange is crucial
for a country that imports about half the wheat it consumes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were longstanding shortages
of butane gas (crucial for cooking and heating among lower income groups),
gasoline (crucial for transport), diesel and electricity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From late 2011 on there were frequently
long lines at gas stations, rolling blackouts, and insufficient diesel for a
variety of urban and agricultural production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Egyptian trade union movement has long been under the
control of the state but has been challenged by wildcat strikes and independent
union movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its independent
leadership resisted any alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and its formal
organization is in disarray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
the degree that voting in the industrial cities of the Delta over the past
three years is any indication it would be difficult to say that there is any
coherent majority organizationally or politically with the industrial
workforce.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Allende, certainly a secular
politician if not necessarily a liberal, faced significant opposition from devout
Catholics and the church hierarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In March 1973, the UP government announced plans to reform the
educational system (K-12), the so-called National Unified School curriculum
(ENU). Perhaps the biggest problem for Allende was that the ENU called for
educating students in the values of “socialist humanism” which the Church found
offensive and which provoked sufficiently significant opposition to force
Allende to temporize (but not withdraw) the proposal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi was obviously not committed to a secular program
in education or anywhere else nor was he committed to overhauling the Egyptian
educational system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and the
Muslim Brotherhood evoked opposition from the mainstream religious
establishment represented by the Mufti of the Republic or the Shaykh of
Al-Azhar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Internationally, however, the two
leaders faced different situations with the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>US policy makers increasingly wanted to
see Allende ousted both because they feared the emergence of a socialist
government on the Latin American continent and because the Hickenlooper
Amendment formally committed the US to oppose governments that nationalized
foreign property with insufficient compensation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be wrong to say that the US supported Morsi as such
but the US appears to have been committed to Morsi’s presidency as a step
toward democratization and initially sought, albeit halfheartedly, for his
return as the legitimate holder of the office. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
To sum up, by the weeks before the
respective coups Morsi and Allende faced widespread public opposition that may
have accounted for a majority of the population. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This opposition had also taken the form of street fighting
and the increasing possibility of violent confrontations. They also both faced
significant opposition from significant state institutions, notably the
judiciary and the military.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
both faced a rapidly deteriorating economic situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Allende’s
opposition had two primary roots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One lay in opposition to his project for socialist transformation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The US, Chilean private enterprise,
landowners, the Catholic Church, sections of the Armed Forces, and
multinational firms all opposed the policies that aimed at a Chilean transition
to socialism for reasons of material interest, ideology, or principle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition there was significant
opposition to the Allende government because of the economic and social
disruption the projected socialist transformation caused.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende and the UP may have expected to
win over Chile’s working class and the poor as the socialist transformation
went forward, but the real process of implementing the outlines of socialism
alienated many Chileans. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Before
addressing the nature of the opposition to Morsi it is worth noticing that his
project, unlike Allende’s, was vague at best and contradictory at worst.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The US government and many specialists
have analyzed the events of the last two years as a process of
democratization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was this,
however, the way that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Freedom and
Justice Party looked at events?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi
and MB/FJP appear to have been of two minds about the process in which they
were engaged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has never been clear if they saw
themselves as a party committed to democratic transition or to the
revolutionary re-structuring of the state and politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The clearest way to understand the
difference is to look at how the Morsi government sought to deal with the
so-called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feloul</i> or remnants of the
old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi tried by decree
to deny political rights to members, especially from the leadership, of the
dissolved National Democratic party. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When this failed by order of the Supreme Court it was
written into the new constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is easy enough to understand why a revolutionary party wants to proscribe
leaders of the old order, but it is less easy to see why a democratizing party
wishes to do so especially when the existing law limits the political rights of
anyone convicted of criminal acts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Acute as the political polarization in Chile was it never occurred to
the UP, despite its formal commitment to revolutionary social and economic
change, to strip the members of opposition parties of the right to run for
office.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Morsi
also clearly faced at least two distinct strands of opposition. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were those who opposed him on
principle or and those who feared him but before the late fall of 2012 neither
expressed the kind of implacable hatred that characterized Allende’s
opposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the contrary, a
significant number of his opponents conceded his electoral legitimacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly the Christian communities
were uncomfortable with Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood from the beginning as were
trade union leaders who refused as early as 2011 the idea of an MB-oriented
union movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was also
opposed by sections of the Armed Forces and probably most of the police.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Religious minorities and trade unions,
however, play a much smaller role in Egypt than in Chile and the police and
armed forces had, by early 2012 lost popular support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, as the economy began to deteriorate through 2012
and into 2013 and as street violence became more pronounced opposition to Morsi
clearly grew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Official Islam in
the guise of the Azhar, which like the Catholic hierarchy in Chile commands
broad respect, became increasingly hostile as did broader sections of the
population, the press, and local communities and groups of soccer fans (whose
networks and institutions have played a significant role in mobilizing
Egyptians over the past year).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
Egypt, unlike Chile where disagreement with Allende was expressed by an elected
legislature, popular discontent with the Morsi presidency manifested itself in
a petition campaign and massive demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian constitutions since 1923 have guaranteed the
people the right to assemble peacefully.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Western liberals in the wake of the coup seem to have decided that the
Egyptian people were wrong to demonstrate or at least to demonstrate in such
large numbers while making demands that not only contravened a constitutional
whose ink had barely dried but which invited the Armed Forces to intervene
again in the political process. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not a question germane to this
discussion but clearly the generals in both countries acted on their own
judgment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It expects too much, I
think, to believe that masses of people will use their rights not only to
express their beliefs but with the kind of unrealistically sophisticated
prudential or moral judgment required by theoreticians of rationality or moral
philosophy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Comparing
Egypt and Chile in the wake of their respective coups brings us to what
political scientists like to call a “puzzle.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To grasp the nature of this puzzle it is necessary first to
do something few people want to do:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>accept the not all violence is the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It can be deployed in different ways for different
ends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thousands of people were
killed both in Egypt and in Chile after the coups but the nature of the
violence and, at least in the short term, its political implications are
different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to say that
one is acceptable or excusable. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is simply to recognize that there is a profound difference in how the major
institutions associated with organized violence, the army and police, have
deployed it and the political implications of its use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is important if any
form of constitutional democracy is to be restored to Egypt.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
have insisted on what distinguishes Chile from Egypt in order to make a
fundamental point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Chile the
Armed Forces took power during a period of severe economic and political
upheaval from a weakened president who had never had a clear electoral mandate or
much institutional support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Internal
and external agents re-shaped the Chilean Armed Forces by violence and argument
to make them the instrument for a coup, thereby vitiating Chile’s significant
history of constitutional democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Egyptian Armed Forces have
taken power twice in the past three years as the country has experienced the
initial phases of economic and political breakdown.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They did so most recently from a president with an electoral
mandate and a friendly legislature, but they also did so as an Army that was no
stranger to intervening in the affairs of government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no need to re-shape the Army itself in order for
it to remove a fragile constitutional government but the second time around the
Armed Forces have so far chosen, unlike 2011 and unlike in Chile, not to rule
directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>General Abdelfattah
al-Sisi may be the big man in the government but he is not the president and
the decisions of the government are at least formally made by the government
rather than by a junta acting as the government (as was also the case during
the period in which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ruled Egypt in
2011-12).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
we look at the way in which the two armies deployed violence there is one
important difference:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in Chile
violence was used to overturn established institutions of constitutional
democracy and to uproot the entire set of political parties from the center
Christian Democrats to the extreme left MIR.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Acts of violence included mass arrests, summary executions
(“disappearances”), the proscription of parties, the dissolution of parliament
(where Allende’s opponents had a majority), and the prohibition of
demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pinochet, in
short, not only repressed Allende and his allies but his enemies as well.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In Egypt Morsi was already under
the control (“protection”) of the Armed Forces when the coup occurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The coup itself, in the midst of massive
anti-Morsi demonstrations, was (unlike Pinochet’s attack on La Moneda)
peaceful. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The military and the
police have used overwhelming and arguably criminal violence to disperse the
large sit-ins supporting Morsi (early July and again in August) and killed more
than a thousand people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most, but
not all, of the top leadership of the Muslim Brothers organization is under
arrest but the organization itself has not yet been dissolved although the
government is taking steps in that direction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The armed forces dissolved the legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have not so far attacked many of Morsi’s
political allies or his enemies. The Salafi parties have, for example,
continued to function as does the Freedom and Justice party which has chosen
new leadership and continues to call for and lead demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without minimizing the terrible violence
used to disperse the demonstrations in Cairo or apologizing for it, it is
nevertheless true that a significant fraction of the Islamist section of the
political spectrum continues to function.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This was simply not true of the equivalent parties and leaders in Chile
in 1973.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
is puzzling is why the violence of the armed forces in these two situations is,
at least initially, so different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Why did the Pinochet regime deploy violence against wide sections of
Chilean society including the centrist political elite when it was clear that a
majority of Chileans and that elite, through their votes and political
affiliations, rejected the Allende presidency?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is every reason to think that a majority of the
legislature and the Supreme Court would have agreed on a decision by the Armed
Forces to hold new elections and that a candidate from the Christian Democrats
or the Conservatives would have won (as they had the two free elections before
1970).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why have the Egyptian
Armed Forces not deployed such violence against wide sections of Egyptian
society and the political elite given that Morsi (unlike Allende) had won a
majority in the presidential election and that his party had a majority in the
legislature?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why have, in
contradistinction to Chile, parties more radical than the MB (the Salafi Nour
party in particular) been allowed to remain in existence and why have some
members of the Freedom and Justice party (the political arm of the MB) been
allowed to remain free, and why have (for the moment at least) human rights groups
been allowed to function?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not long
ago Ziad Bahaa al-Din, the Deputy Prime Minister for the economy, proposed a
truce between the government and the FJP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>None of Pinochet’s ministers proposed such a truce with the UP and had
any of them done so they would have been immediately retired if not imprisoned
or perhaps executed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Additionally
why is the new government so intent on re-writing the constitution rather than
simply ruling by decree as the Pinochet government did for seven years?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
answer might be that the Egyptian Armed Forces are kinder and gentler than the
Chilean Armed Forces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The repeated
use of violence against massed protesters makes this unlikely although it does
not answer the question of why there was no immediate move to attack the
sit-ins. The Egyptian high command may be more interested in creating a
civilian government than was Pinochet because they may prefer a role in which
their power derives as much from balancing between contending parties as from
the use of violence. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another
possibility is that the Egyptian generals are more cunning than their Latin
American counterparts in the 1970s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Where generals in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile wiped out elected
governments and ruled directly, the Egyptian generals understand the need for
an intermediary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether
they are inherently so or simply learned during the experience of direct rule
by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces they have a more complex strategy
which relieves them of the need to deploy the high levels of constant force
deploy in Chile.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It may also be that the Egyptian
Armed Forces simply lack the capacity for the level of repression Chile
experienced. The Egyptian Armed Forces are proportionately smaller than their
Chilean equivalent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pinochet
commanded about 65,000 men for a population of not quite ten million; Sisi’s
Egypt has nine times the population but only seven times as large an army.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike Pinochet, Sisi’s armed forces
are necessarily deployed in a border area (Sinai) as well as in the population
centers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, General Sisi may
not have the necessary force at his disposal to engage in the level of
repression that characterized the Pinochet regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or perhaps, as is frequently asserted, the Egyptian armed
forces are simply incompetent as is the state apparatus more generally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an army that has not fought a war since 1973 (although
the Chilean Armed Forces had not fought a war since in the 69 years preceding
the coup) and has extensive domestic interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fighting more frequent wars does not seem, however, to
be in the interests of the Egyptian people nor is it clear that more frequent
wars would be a key to more democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Generally speaking the reverse is true: war has been the pathway through
which dictatorship was consolidated in the French, Russian, and Iranian
revolutions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sisi, unlike Pinochet, also faces
significant American opposition to the new government. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The US government today views some
Islamist movements as potential partners in the project of democratization
where the US government of 40 years ago viewed communists and socialists alike
as revolutionary enemies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
shift in US strategy under President Obama, echoed in part by Republican
Senators McCain and Graham during a visit to Egypt in early August, may have an
impact comparable over time to the US preference for military leaders as
modernizers in the 1950s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is at least one other, more surprising
possibility:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the more unsettled
revolutionary nature of the situation in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wiping out the threat of socialism or even social reform in
Chile required more than simply decapitating the one party whose candidate had
become president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It required a
much broader assault on the organized social forces that supported him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Egypt there was no similar coalition
of parties and organizations whose program was both clear and yet transcended
the presence of a single party at the center of government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consequently in Egypt the Armed only wishes
to uproot one party but not necessarily to destroy institutions of governance with
which it has itself has long been intimately associated. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Unlike Morsi and his presidential
election, neither Allende nor his coalition was inexperienced in Chilean
electoral politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had first
run for the presidency in 1952 and won 5.5 % of the vote; in 1958, running
against Alessandri, he was in second place with 28 % of the vote; in 1964,
against Eduardo Frei he had amassed nearly 39 %.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had been a minister in a Popular Front government in 1938
and an elected senator since the 1940s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He was not only a founder of the Chilean Socialist party, on whose
ticket he ran, but one of the authors of the politics of an electoral (Chilean)
path to socialism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The revolution
in Chile was, unlike Cuba or Nicaragua, electoral politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Egypt, by contrast, Morsi’s electoral
victory was the fortuitous result of a revolutionary upheaval in which millions
of people took to the streets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It was neither the expected result
of a long-term electoral strategy within a constitutional and democratic order
nor was it the result of an armed struggle against the old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This verges on the problem of
revolution which also outside the scope of this discussion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suffice it to say that if by revolution
we mean the entry of masses of people into action in unexpected ways that break
down the old ways of organizing politics then Egypt has been in revolution for
the last three years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If by
revolution we mean the creation of a new order, preferably in some Utopian
mold, then Egypt has certainly not.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The problem is less that the MB
were unprepared to govern as that they seem to have had no very clear idea of
what they wanted to govern for:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>was it the revolutionary re-structuring of the political order and the
seizure of power or was it the consolidation of democracy?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did they want to dismantle and re-make
the existing institutions of governance or did they simply want to share in the
spoils?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To what degree were they interested in punishing and
excluding the old regime and to what degree were they interested in including
its supporters? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Chile’s politics were far more
organized than Egypt’s but they were not accompanied by the kind of massive
spontaneous upwelling of support that has characterized Egypt in the past two
years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several Allende policies
were extensions Frei government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Allende’s
policies neither extended nor weakened his electoral base significantly, but they
did expand the power and influence of the institutions and organizations in his
electoral coalition, especially the Communists, the Socialists, the MIR, and
the Chilean trade union movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They also attracted some support in other organizations and mobilized a
few new social groups, especially in the countryside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Paradoxically
in the absence of Allende himself there was every possibility that not only the
left parties but the centrist parties would attempt to pursue the policies of
the UP after this ouster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The use
of violence against even those, such as the legislature and its Christian
Democrat majority, was testimony to the military’s desire for a clean slate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no reason to believe the
Egyptian Armed Forces want a clean slate or desire to pursue their own Utopian
fantasy as dictated by Chicago-trained economists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It is only an apparent paradox that
the Egyptian military has used more violence but in a far more focused fashion
than their Chilean counterparts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Uncertain of their own goals, the Muslim Brothers rode the wave of a
massive uprising.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were
therefore propelled by it to as great a degree as they were able to shape
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dispersing the demonstrations
at successive locations in Cairo (the Republican Guards Club, Raba’a
al-Adawiya, and Nahdah Squares) and arresting most (but not all) of the MB
leadership has thus dislocated the adversaries of the Armed Forces’ preferred
order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no need, for the
moment, to extend the overt repression to other organizations or
institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, there is
every reason to avoid anything that might evoke renewed spontaneous
demonstrations.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There are two other important
differences between Chile and Egypt: the relative independence of the Egyptian
judiciary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this
independence may depend in part of corruption and nepotism, it is also real in
the sense that the judiciary has guarded as best it could its own institutional
and social field from the other institutions of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In comparison to the Chilean
judiciary the Egyptian courts have a history of using their authority against
the legislative and executive branches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rush to re-write a constitution can be best
explained if the judiciary is itself a partner, through the Supreme Court, in
the re-making of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
courts do not need to be exemplars of justice or paragons of Weberian rationality
to pursue their own institutional ends and thereby limit, even if only to a
degree, the authority of the army and the executive.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The other profound difference is
the emergence of at least one area of opposition to the coup based not only on
geography but religion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Upper
Egypt has emerged as an area in which the control by the central government has
become highly contested and on occasion disappeared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This loss of control is connected to the mobilization
of both anti-Christian and anti-regime sentiments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This too is unlike Chile where the MIR, the Communists and
the Socialists were never able to create zones in which the power of the
government ceased to exist for days or weeks at a time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even had they created “liberated zones”
in the terminology of the day those would not have been based on any claim of
religious (or ethnic) community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The success of this form of mobilization especially in communities such
as Dalga where several churches and a monastery were looted and destroyed,
Christians killed, and where Christians were reportedly required to pay ransom
as well as the sectarian-tinged murder of members of the Social Democratic
party in Asyut are a dark underside to the claims of supporters of President
Morsi that they only desire the return of constitutional governance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rightly or wrongly, it is precisely
this kind of unrestrained social violence that many of Morsi’s opponents feared
would occur if his presidency continued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The remaining question is what
happens next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in Chile in 1973
there will be those who wish to oppose the armed forces and what Karl Marx
would have called the party of order with violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Attacks on police stations and the attempt to
assassinate the Interior Minister are examples.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Chile, as in most places, these actions—even if they
accomplish their immediate goals—are almost never successful as forms of
political organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout
a long history in which they have been variously called exemplary acts, focos,
terrorism, or armed struggle they have almost invariably demobilized mass
movements, given the state an excuse for further violence, and ended in
disaster and tragedy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt may,
of course, be an exception but it is not very likely. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The MB and its political allies
will also face some difficult political choices and it is worth reflecting on the
experience of Chile, different as it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the wake of the coup, it took a long time for Pinochet’s opponents to
develop a workable and coherent strategy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the end it was a decision that recognized that the Allende experience
would never be revived nor would the 1925 constitution and that the only path
forward was the construction of a new Chilean democracy rather than a
revolutionary re-structuring of society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For Chile’s left-wing socialists,
the MIR and the communists this was a bitter defeat and they have never
recovered anything like the place in Chile’s political life that they held on
September 10, 1973. The communists have essentially disappeared from Chile’s
political life as has the left-wing of the Socialist party once embodied in
leaders such as Clodomiro Almeyda and the Revolution Left Movement (MIR) is
also only a shadow of its former self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It would once have been self-evident that the Marxist left in Chile,
like the Muslim Brotherhood today in Egypt, could not be eliminated from public
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was, many would have
said, too deeply implanted in the society and too deeply rooted in the unions
and working class communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This turned out not to be the case but what is also true is that there
were other avenues for unions, working class communities, and political leaders
to struggle for social justice and the immediate demands connected to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB may turn out not to be the only
way to imagine a link between Islam and politics and their brand of Islamism may
turn out, like Communism, to be a real but historically delimited political
movement.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, was
elected president of Chile in 2006 and served until 2010.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was the daughter of Air Force
Brigadier Alberto Bachelet (another military opponent of the coup) who died
after being tortured by the Pinochet regime in 1974.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she was not the first president elected after the fall
of the Pinochet regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was
Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democratic member of the legislature in 1973 who
had voted on the resolution asking the Armed Forces to step in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Aylwin came to regret his stance and
his candidacy was backed by Ricardo Lagos, leader of the Socialists and of the
Democratic Alliance, and himself later president. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lagos emergence as the leader of the Chilean Socialist party
was also testimony to how much the party had changed since the years when
Allende, Almeyda, and Toha had been its leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lagos, an international civil servant with a degree in
political science from Duke University, is known for his work on unemployment
policies rather than his desire to expropriate the means of production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is most famous for the “Lagos
finger” when he pointed at Pinochet in a television debate and called him a
liar and torturer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But he did not
bring Pinochet to justice and he served in Aylwin’s cabinet.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For Egyptians of all political
persuasions, this may be the most bitter political reality of any comparison of
Pinochet’s Chile with events in their own country today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the wake of Mubarak’s downfall there
was a long debate about how slowly the wheels of production were turning and
how impatient Egyptians had become.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Unfortunately the wheels of justice will not turn any more quickly along
the road to democracy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-91804687778800155602013-08-06T12:55:00.000-07:002013-08-06T12:55:13.040-07:00Constituting Generals<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the lengthy, acrimonious and not always enlightening debate about the decision
of the Egyptian Armed Forces to oust former President Mohammad Morsi it has been
widely been asserted that—whether what they did was politically wise—the Egyptian
generals acted unconstitutionally and immorally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They both broke their oaths and they abrogated the
constitutional order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The major point of contention is whether
in so doing they made a coup or carried out the revolutionary will of the people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces may, based on the
relevant portions of the 2012 constitution they negotiated with the Muslim
Brothers (as well as the representatives of other political groups) in 2012,
have a different idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without
addressing the longterm impact of the military intervention and ouster of
President Morsi it is worth thinking about the terms of the political agreement
embodied in that constitution.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If constitutions are documents that
set out the institutional division of power and authority within a state, they
also reflect compromises made between those various institutions and people at
the foundational moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
reflect, sometimes more obviously and sometimes less so, current concepts of
efficacy and authority as well as the relative influence of various interests
and institutions. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As such they
spell out the institutions on which governance is based and the ways in which
those institutions can, initially, expect to interact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They reflect the anxieties as well as
the hopes of those who write them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Such anxieties are reflected in the language dividing power and in the
ways in which various holders of authority are bound to uphold it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Scholars
assert that the origins of the modern Egyptian state lie in the construction of
the army by Muhammad Ali in the early 19<sup>th</sup> century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the end of the 19<sup>th</sup>
century, however, the Armed Forces had been defeated by the British and
transformed into an instrument many of whose officers were British.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The power of the army was profoundly
weakened, socially and culturally, with the diminution of Egyptian sovereignty
in the period between 1882 and 1954.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>During those years electoral partisanship, agricultural and commercial
wealth, and the authority of the Throne were the major axes of Egyptian political
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those decades, chronicled
especially well by Naguib Mahfouz in many of his novels, astute and wealthy
scions of powerful and wealthy families attended universities in Cairo, London
or Paris and returned home to positions of influence. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The British controlled the Army and
intervened directly in national political life from time to time through it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who were incapable of or
uninterested in studying law, medicine, or literature went to the Military
Academy which, until 1936, had largely been the preserve of the older
Turco-Circassian elite.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Armed Forces returned to the center of the country’s political life in 1952
when graduates of the group of Egyptian middle and lower class cadets who had
entered in 1936 overthrew the King and eliminated the remaining British troop
presence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new rulers were heirs,
albeit to an attenuated degree, to the traditions of revolutionary France in
which national conscription represents the nation in arms and provides the
officer corps with the material to recreate the conscience of a nation. They
wrote the Armed Forces directly into the constitution and created an enduring
tradition by words, economic reforms, and the staffing of much of the country’s
government with army officers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To
understand the role of the Armed Forces in the 2012 constitution and in
constitutional life over the past half century, it is best to begin with the
police.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new Egyptian
constitution, as befits a centralized state, invokes both institutions that
deal with force, but in significantly different ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Employing Nivien Saleh’s translation we can see that Article
199 defines the police (“shurta”) as a disciplinarian civilian organization
which preserves order and carries out law and decrees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The police are, in principle if
not always in practice, subordinate to the laws and statutes of the
country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have no special
independent role to play and they are, uniquely in the constitution, called
upon to be faithful or allegiant to the constitution (in Arabic their “wala?” is
to the constitution and the law).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
this the police differ from the Armed Forces, for this particular language is
not to be found in the description of the army on which no such allegiance is
enjoined.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
army is constituted Article 194, the second of a series of articles dealing
with national security.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The armed
forces are the property (“mulk”) of the people and can only be constituted by
the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its task, however,
unlike that of the police is not subordinated to law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces are tasked to to protect the country and
preserve its security as well as the security of its territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither the constitution nor the law
figure into their role as defined by the constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They undertake their tasks under the
National Defense Council. Article 193, establishing the NDC (which, it will be
recalled has existed since 1956), provides it with an expansive
definition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The NDC can not only
discuss but authorize strategies for ensuring the security of the country,
deals with crises in “all their forms” and adopts the necessary measures for their
containment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its responsibility to
identify and thwart threats to national security both internally and externally
and on what the text identifies as both official and “popular” (“sha3bi”)
levels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The NDC is thus an
autonomous executive agency as well as a coordinating mechanism for the Armed
Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
NDC, it is true, is presided over by the President of the Republic and its
membership includes the heads of the legislative branches as well as ministers,
but the bulk of its members are from the police and Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The constitution is silent on whether
only the President of the Republic can convoke it nor on whether his presence
is necessary for it to meet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
might then be described as a formally constituted military council with broad
executive powers that it defines itself on which the President of the Republic,
two legislative leaders, and two civilian ministers form a distinct minority.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Earlier
analyses of the constitutional role of the armed forces focused on the high
degree of institutional independence the army had obtained in regard to
legislation and the budget.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>President Morsi was, as so frequently repeated, the first freely elected
civilian head of state in Egyptian history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The euphoria surrounding his dismissal of Generals Tantawi
and Anan seemed to confirm his supremacy over the Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The constitutional language making him
the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces led analysts to ignore the similar
language that had been central to Egyptian constitutions since 1956 (in which
the National Defense Council was first constituted) and to ignore the language
defining the Army’s role in Egyptian political and constitutional life which
were a distinctive contribution of the new constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new constitution, in other words,
expanded the formal role of the Army even as events on the ground appeared to
restrict it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Confronted
with an increasingly polarized political space in June 2013, the Armed Forces
could plausibly maintain, to themselves and to a wider circle of Egyptians as
well, that the country was faced with a disaster or crisis in some form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This would invoke Article 193.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be implausible to claim that
the Armed Forces had either a constitutional duty to remove an elected
president from office, but there is no reason to think that General Abdelfattah
Sisi saw himself as departing either from his constitutionally prescribed role
or the Army’s longstanding view of itself by his attempts to insist that the leading
political figures negotiate a solution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Egyptian armed forces, like those of many countries including France
throughout the 19<sup>th</sup> and into the 20<sup>th</sup> century, see
themselves as the guarantors of national sovereignty and the integrity of the
state rather than of the constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Constitutions, in much of the world, come and go; nations and states
continue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The United States is not
unique but it is uncommon in the degree to which the constitution, rather than
an army, a monarch, or the institutions of the state taken as a whole, are
perceived as central to national identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
the Armed Forces that General Sisi heads, could legitimately see itself as
having a transcendent political role, what of Sisi’s responsibilities as
Minister of Defense and the oath he swore?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There appears to be some confusion about the nature of the
constitutionally defined oath that Egyptian officials take.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sisi, like other ministers (as well as
legislators and the President) took an oath of office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ministerial oath does not
however require the taker to preserve the constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ministers swear only to preserve the
republican system and thus presumably abstain from re-creating a monarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They also pledge to defend the people’s
interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In regard to the constitution,
however, they only swear to respect it (“yahtarim”).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Legal scholars and students of language no doubt have
much to tell us about what a word whose root lies in the keeping of something
as sacred and apart (haram) may be but as far as I can tell the word has no
special meaning in Egyptian constitutional law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pledging to respect the constitution means simply to abide
by it, but not necessarily to defend or protect it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As should now be clear the Egyptian constitution does use
those words in other contexts but only the police—either the Armed Forces nor
government ministers—are told to be loyal to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American officials similarly placed pledge to preserve, protect
and defend the constitution, but not either the American state or the American
people. So too to Indian officials swear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And in neither in India nor the United States do the Armed Forces have
any constitutionally defined role.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So
General Abdelfattah Sisi, whether acting prudently or outrageously, may have
had no reason to believe that he was breaking his oath or acting outside of his
constitutional obligation in the weeks around June 30.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the contrary he may have felt that
he was acting not only in the confines of Egyptian political practice over the past
six decades but that, by giving ample warning of a possible coup, he was acting
with significant forbearance and in accord with the arrangements that had been
negotiated between the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brotherhood during the
transitional period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because we
have so little idea of the actual negotiations around the writing of the 2012
constitution, we cannot know if the Muslim Brotherhood understood just how
important the articles under which the Armed Forces were constituted were.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Judging by reports of President Morsi’s
continuing belief that he had a unilateral right to determine what the Armed
Forces would do, it is possible that neither he nor his comrades understood
very well what they were signing on to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the rush to ratify the constitution in the waning hours of November
2012 perhaps they neither read it very carefully nor understood its terms very
well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is clear going
forward is that truly subordinating the military to civilian control will be a
long and arduous process and that it may not finally be achieved as long as
civilian politicians believe they can contain it with appropriate
constitutional language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It may
only have come when the Armed Forces are, at long last, no longer inscribed in
an Egyptian constitution.</div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-42452799183686235032013-07-10T17:13:00.000-07:002013-07-10T20:22:06.991-07:00Where the Nile Flows Into the Rubicon<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Never in recent history have
officials, commentators and even political activists spent so much time parsing
the meaning of a handful of words, notably “coup”, “revolution”, and “democratic
legitimacy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quality of
magical thinking inherent in much of the discussion is striking but nowhere
more so than when Western commentators whose clear and long-standing disdain
and derision for the now-deposed regime of Muhammad Morsi and Muslim Brothers
was abruptly transformed into equally dismissive assertions that unless an
elected leadership could remain in office until the end of its term in office
Egyptians had once again proved their lack of both ability and desire for
democracy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Millions of people in the streets
demanding the Morsi resign was assimilated by many to mob rule and it was not
uncommon to hear that if equally large numbers later came out against his
successor then an unfortunate precedent was set in which the Armed Forces could
again act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Better, therefore, to
wait.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the world of thought
experiments performed by political philosophers it is completely correct.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was equally true proposed as a
counter-argument when Zakariya Abdel Aziz, former head of the Judges’ Club,
declared in late January 2011 that the masses of people in the street had
effectively abrogated the constitution. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea, however, that millions of people are easily
roused to demonstrations and that, once so roused, they should be ignored seems
incompatible with the notion of democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The question then is not so much should the Armed Forces
have intervened but how should President Morsi have responded?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Much
recent foreign commentary presumes that, sufficiently chastised by the
commentator, the Egyptian people will come to their senses and pursue policies
that ensure the ultimate success of stable democratic development. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This approach has not worked well in
the People’s Republics of Berkeley or Cambridge nor in the Duchy of the
Beltway; it is unlikely, with one exception, to have the least impact on
Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one exception, of
course, is if the outrage moves from the pages of the daily press to whatever
documents President Obama signs to name the recent events in Egypt a coup and
thereby deny military aid to the Egyptian Armed Forces and perhaps to delay or
deny its request for economic aid from the International Monetary Fund.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is unlikely because Obama possesses
a sharp sense of realism and rapidly scales back his policies to meet an
opposition well beyond the half-way point.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Having
moved for a second time to overthrow a head of state whose legitimacy was
unquestioned internationally while domestically challenged the Egyptian army
and General Sissi have taken a step from which there is no turning back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whatever else happened when the 2012
constitution was put into place, it established in theory that President Morsi was not
only the head of state but also the supreme commander of the armed forces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">The constitution tactfully avoided discussing who was in charge should the Supreme Commander (the president of the republic) and the Commander in Chief (the Defense Minister and a general) disagree. No longer. </span>When Julius Caesar led the Thirteenth
Legion across the Rubicon he had committed a capital offence, as did the
soldiers who obeyed him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
Republican Rome only elected officials could command armies on Italian soil;
thereafter only success mattered for there would be no other accounting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether General Sissi’s agreement with
President Morsi last fall was a tactical retreat or a real truce can, along
with the discussions of coups and legitimacy, be left to future
historians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither of Egypt’s two
living and deposed presidents can be allowed to return to power if those who
pulled them down have any hopes for their own futures.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
army coup that forced former President Mubarak out of office had widespread
support and any who opposed it, the feloul (remnants of the old regime), were
too disorganized and politically weakened to return to power and exact
retribution from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The coup that has forced President
Morsi out of office may have the support of a significant portion and perhaps
even a majority of the Egyptian population, but it has occurred in a very
different political environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Opponents, centered around the Muslim Brotherhood, however, are far from
disorganized even if they are momentarily bereft of much of their top
leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>President Morsi’s
supporters believe they were stripped of legitimate authority and have every
right to regain it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Muslim
Brotherhood would be ill-advised to trust the Armed Forces in their present
composition again with either their president or their political order and
those feelings of distrust have presumably been strengthened by the shooting
deaths of more than 50 people in front of the Rabi’a al-Adawiyah mosque.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The precise sequence of events on the
morning of July 8 may elude us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They are certainly relevant should anyone bring criminal charges and
they will also be relevant more generally for human rights advocates who will
correctly place responsibility on the government for its handling of
demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But such precision
will not be important as the competing narratives of the Egyptian revolution that
belong to different political camps continue to develop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are, in these developing
narratives, no accidents and no bad decisions; there are only actors whose
actions reflect their inner moral motivations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not asking that we spare a tear for the Armed Forces
but only recognize what the generals themselves must recognize:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there is no way back, no way to
compromise with ex-president Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certain dates mark irrevocable turning
points:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>February 25, 1954 when
Nasser ousted Naguib from the Revolutionary Command Council was one, February
11, 2011 was another and July 8, 2013 marks still another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces are a powerful
institutional presence in Egypt as are the courts, and the Muslim
Brothers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Even if most Egyptians have never
studied political science, they do understand that their choices are already
limited by the available institutional options as well as by agendas set by
politically powerful, and frequently intransigent, actors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Both
of Egypt’s two recent ex-presidents, faced with massive opposition in the
streets, seem to have taken pride that they could be described as stubborn; neither
seems to have thought, until the generals were at the door to usher them out,
that the time to craft a new way to govern had come and gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the partisans of both continue to
believe that although their preferred president had indeed made mistakes, he
did not deserve to be driven from office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He had, after all, performed adequately and students who do passable
work do not deserve, at the end of the day, to be failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parenthetically I note that we hear
similar complaints from the Obama administration and its friends:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American policy and US Ambassador to
Egypt Anne Patterson have made mistakes but it is not really their fault that
the policy has proven to be both unworkable and so profoundly misunderstood by
Egyptians as to have provoked their hostility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is an open question whether it is possible, in the current circumstances, for
anyone to think clearly about Egyptian politics as anything other than a
morality play in which people are ultimately rewarded or punished for their
intentions and their actions by God, the dialectic of history, or the principle
of karma. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is also some
question about whether Western scholars whose reputations were centered on
claims about the essential political values of the objects of their research
can now look clearly at events that have (at best) cast profound doubt on their
conclusions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as an
earlier generation of American academics, in particular, were convinced that
the Armed Forces in Egypt were the agents of unfolding modernization so too
have their recent successors been certain that the Muslim Brothers, in a variety
of national guises, would be the agents of democracy and the destroyers of
authoritarianism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is no particular reason for now to believe that the Egyptian Armed
Forces are the modernizers envisaged by American academics in the 1960s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is there reason to believe that the
Muslim Brotherhood is the carrier of democratization through an Islamic state
as envisaged in the 1990s and early 2000s. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course the governments after 1952, invariably led by Army
officers, pursued industrialization policies for strategic reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, too, the Muslim Brotherhood
leadership pursued open elections for their own strategic reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither the Army nor the MB are or were
particularly committed to the wider principles that academics like to read into
these policy choices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>While
it may be that Husni Mubarak and Muhammad Morsi shared some psychological
features, it is equally likely that the structure of contemporary Egyptian
politics makes it easy for office holders to indulge their refusal, if not to
cooperate, at least to recognize the legitimacy as well as efficacy of their
political constraints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both men,
faced with widespread and intense opposition, chose to resist rather than to
respond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Military hierarchy shaped Mubarak, the
last of three military officers to preside over republican Egypt. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over decades, his political base
narrowed and became increasingly fragile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The civilian hierarchy of the Muslim Brotherhood shaped Morsi’s adult
political education and it took only months for his political base to narrow
and for wider and wider opposition to shatter it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In each case the armed forces stepped in forestalling
the failure of the state in the face of mass mobilization.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is no reason to believe that the underlying concerns and motivations of various
institutions and their leaderships have changed in the past few years but they
may, as have many Egyptians, learned that the politics of revolutionary
upheaval is an unforgiving environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have never believed that the army generals particularly want to rule
Egypt on their own; what they do want is a political cohort that can provide
stability and sufficient economic growth to allow the maintenance of
stability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This the Muslim
Brothers proved to be incapable of providing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether this was due to their incompetence or to powerful
opposition was less relevant to the army than the simple fact of their failure
and the unexpectedly massive opposition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Had the petition campaign
demanding Morsi’s resignation indeed been as inconsequential as it appeared to
the leaders of the MB (and most observers) when it began, there is no
particular reason to believe the Armed Forces would have moved.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Egyptian
society is increasingly polarized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians tell very different stories about the revolution until this point
and they see the events of the last week in completely different ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such disagreements about the moral
narrative of change are characteristic of revolution and they persist for
generations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this sense Egypt as well as its army has crossed the Rubicon:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>it will be a very long time before the Egyptian revolution is an object
of academic study rather than a source of emotionally resonant political allegiance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Much as I appreciate the call for dialogue between the competing camps, it will be a while before their discussions are anything other than the trading of irreconcilable and irascible monologues. </span>Even today there is no rue Robespierre
in Paris and no Kerensky Street in Moscow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Whether the two camps are equally
large is less important now than that they can no longer agree on a common
political project or political policies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The two camps are not secular and religious nor are they political Islam
and moderates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They might, more
charitably, be called adherents of majoritarian revolution and revolutionary
pluralism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB is now a cadre
party dedicated to the conquest of power and the transformation of society in
accord with their vision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
similarly organized parties elsewhere and at other times were dedicated to
socialist utopias it is easy to dismiss the MB’s rhetoric of revolution as
pretension or smokescreen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the
current leaders have their own vision of a just society as well as of the
mainsprings of political action; their understanding of politics has allowed
them to persevere and also, at moments, crucially to misunderstand what was
happening around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their
opponents, not united by much other than a distaste for the MB and (an
important point) a desire to create political structures in which
non-majoritarian parties can thrive, would prefer a plural political
order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have been, at least in
the past few months, more realistically attuned to what is happening around
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus, both the Salafi Nour
party and the Social Democratic party realistically understood how unpopular
Morsi had become and that the Armed Forces were no longer willing to wait.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They agree about very little (if
anything) substantively but they have both been willing to participate in a
coalition to re-constitute a government and perhaps re-found the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
At this point in Egypt’s political
and constitutional history it may be that stubbornness is not an admirable
quality in a president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has
less to do with the personal characteristics of those who offer themselves up
for the office and more with the structures of power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps Egypt needs a president who is in reality (and not
merely formally) independent of the ruling party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only such a president can change the prime minister or call
for new elections when millions of people take to the streets to protest its
policies. Egypt clearly needs some mechanism to recognize protests of such
magnitude and respond to them short of creating widespread social violence and
a constitutional crisis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 2012
constitution was written to resolve the problems of the Mubarak regime in which
presidents could too easily dissolve parliament and subject governing parties
to their will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB was
determined to write a constitution in which a strong party could dominate both
the presidency and the legislature. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately it seems to have magnified the problems of the
new order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And much of the
confusion of outside commentators has come from their inability to see the
difference.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-84347368846523186792013-06-30T21:48:00.000-07:002013-06-30T21:48:12.235-07:00The Political Consequences of Mr. Morsi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
week before demonstrations planned for June 30 demanding that Egyptian
President Muhammad Morsi step down and new elections be held has been one of
unsettling violence and an increasing sense of foreboding that the political
situation is spinning out of control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is clearer to many what Egypt is not (Turkey, Brazil, Tunisia,
Eastern Europe) than what it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> With millions of Egyptians taking to the streets on June 30, 2013 to demand the Morsi step down Egypt has entered into a new period of revolutionary upheaval.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
events of the last two weeks have, moreover, provided some answers to some
long-standing questions of the past two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The protests that ousted former President Mubarak were not
solely (or even primarily) the work of Islamists hiding under a thin veneer of
westernized secular youth; the Muslim Brothers, despite a wide membership and
impressive internal capacity for mobilization far from the uncontested
representative of a heterogeneous but predominantly Muslim society; fractured
and occasionally clueless as the opposition may be, millions of Egyptians, in
the large cities and provincial towns, will nevertheless mobilize in the
streets along with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh, and, it
still makes sense to call events in Egypt a revolution even if they diverge
significantly from the canonical (and largely academic) definitions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lightly amended for our modern taste,
Lenin writing in 1913 declared that a revolutionary crisis occurred when the
elite could no longer rule in the old way and the masses no longer desired to
live in the old way.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Unfortunately a two and a half hour
speech by the president on June 26 outlining his analysis of the situation and
the accomplishments of his first year in office only worsened the polarization.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi criticized publishers,
political figures and at least one judge by name as well as asserting that the
opposition was, in some measure, treasonous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite a claim that “the media” broadcast rumors, adversity
and hate speech, he was not, he said, “accusing everyone in the media.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many Egyptians may, however, have heard
a soft echo of the old repressive Nasserist slogan: no voice higher than the
voice of the revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi indulged
in other populist rhetoric, claiming (for example) that lines and shortages at
gas stations were due to petty corruption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As with any good elected politician he also blamed most
problems on the old regime while occasionally taking credit for its successes,
notably the imposition of a minimum wage of 600 Egyptian pounds which has been
in effect since January 2012 (six months before his election).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some parts, such as the idea that 32 families control the
Egyptian economy, seem to have no particular relationship to reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least one other part was plaintively
all too correct: Morsi was right to voice his distress at the “icy relations”
between the people and the government but his analysis that it was all due to
the fear of the Islamic boogieman must have sounded hollow to large numbers of
people who consider themselves Muslims and whose educations owe nothing to the
boogieman of Orientalism.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The speech itself may have only
deepened an already existing credibility gap between the government and the
bulk of the population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several
times in the last weeks, for example, ministers claimed that there was no
shortage of gasoline; or that diesel (called “solar” in Egypt) was available;
and that electricity outages would soon cease.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such routine assurances flew in the face of the daily
experience of millions of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
MB has frequently betrayed its promises to its political allies and rivals, but
these are not really the stuff of mass protest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ten million people who returned 235 members of the MB in
the 2011 parliamentary elections were not disturbed that it had earlier
promised to contest fewer seats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was clear by the time of the presidential run-off a year ago that the
country was deeply divided but there is no reason to believe the vote for
former General and Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq was driven by concern that the
MB had promised months earlier not to field a candidate for president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are legitimate concerns for
activists but they have not brought millions of people out into the streets.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
it was not clear enough from the presidential run-off that the country has
profoundly divided, it has been far more so since last November when President
Morsi issued a constitutional declaration that sought to shield his
administration from challenge in the courts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That was when the first massive demonstrations against Morsi
and the earliest slogans calling for an end to what was labeled as the
“government of the Guide” (referring to the role of the Supreme Guide of the
Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi’) circulated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since then Morsi himself has increasingly become
the target of the opposition. Gone are the jokes about Morsi as the spare tire. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Morsi’s
major accomplishments, being the first elected civilian president of Egypt and
the man who could claim to have gotten the Armed Forces out of political life,
have not been followed up with equally rapid changes in the economic or
political environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the
contrary, for those with an interest (either intellectual or practical) in
politics the last six months have been less than inspiring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi’s government, led by Prime
Minister Hisham Qandil, was barely able to pass legislation enabling Islamic
bonds (sukuk) due to the opposition of the Azhar whose enhanced role the MB had
written into the new constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Azhar and other,
Islamist, opponents claimed the legislation would allow strategic national assets
to become the private property of foreigners. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The government has also been
sharply attacked by a variety of figures for its recent decision to create a
special investment area in the Canal Zone which, it was alleged, would dilute sovereignty
for the benefit of foreign investors. This may have seemed an implausible
concern. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is an especially
important issue in the Canal Zone cities (Suez, Ismailiya, Port Said) that have
been centers of revolt since January 2011. It <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>also evokes powerful fears in a country one of whose major
assets, the Suez Canal, was owned by foreigners (among which the British
government) until 1956.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Educated
Egyptians of Morsi’s generation are likely to recall the novelist Gamal al-Ghitani’s
1970s fantasy , “Recollection of What Happened in Egypt”,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in which foreigners threaten to buy up
all of Egypt and evict the Egyptians as a cautionary tale if not a likely
probability.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
That the MB had trouble passing
legislation is surprising because it only needed a majority in the rump Shoura
Council (Upper House) where it holds nearly 45% of the seats in its own
name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is, for now, no lower
house because it was dissolved by the Supreme Constitutional Court last year;
the new constitution specifically grandfathered the Shoura Council as the
country’s legislature until new elections are held.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
More immediate domestic problems
however are rising unemployment, shortages of gasoline and diesel, electricity
outages, and continuing problems with the function of the country’s
infrastructure, including public transit and the national rail network.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To some degree these are legacies
of decades of misdirected investment; to some degree they have been exacerbated
by the revolution itself; and to some degree they have been worsened by
decisions (or more frequently the absence of decisions) by the present
government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi’s speech
at once recognized and tried to deflect a widespread sense of the government’s incapacity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These, however, that affect all
Egyptians every day directly and indirectly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the government recognizes as a problem with “traffic”
translates into increased commute times that affect not only upper-middle class
people who drive their own cars but working class women forced out of paid
employment because commuting time makes it impossible to hold paid employment
and attend to family expectations.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There might be more widespread
willingness to give the government more space if it had not opened up a yawning
credibility gap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Along with the
obvious shortages of good and services, the government has produced more than
its quota of excuses and denials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ministers have proclaimed the electricity problem solved and an end to
outages that then become more extensive although they never seem to occur in
the neighborhoods where the ministers themselves live. The government claims
there are ample supplies of gasoline, butane and diesel despite long lines and
rising prices on the black market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These were the problems President Morsi, perhaps unwisely, promised to address
if not to solve within the first hundred days of his administration.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The inability of the government to
restore public safety and the perception of rising levels of violence has also
tended to undermine the government’s credibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a widespread belief that muggings, robberies, and
armed assaults are more frequent than in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There have been something like a dozen authenticated
lynchings over the last two years and in several instances the bodies of
supposed criminals who were beaten to death were exposed to public view on the
ground or hung from utility poles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For the last several years as well
religious violence appears to have increased with several attacks on churches
and street battles between Christians and Muslims.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last week religious violence moved in a new direction when a
mob estimated at more than a thousand attacked a Shi’i sheikh, Hassan Shehata,
in a Cairene suburb and beat him to death along with three of his
followers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shehata, originally an
Azhari-trained Egyptian Sunni, had worked in the neighborhood decades earlier
before his conversion and he may have had enemies as well as friends and
supporters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He evidently fell
victim to a heightened antagonism to Shi’i Islam increasingly evident in some
Salafi circles (including some members of the MB) over the decade which was
itself heightened by a specific campaign led against him over the past few
weeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who led the attack
evidently spread rumors that their Shi’i fellow-citizens were engaged in
wife-swapping and ritually cursing several of the earliest followers of the
prophet Muhammad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Investigations
afterward have shown that the police were at the very least criminally
negligent as they were evidently stationed less than a hundred meters from the
site where the crowd gathered to beat the men and firebomb the house they were
in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
As has been true elsewhere over the
last several years the response of Egyptians to this terrible act of violence
was far from what the perpetrators may have expected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While there were some attempts to explain it away or defend
it there were widespread condemnations of the killings, including one from the
Azhar which has itself been engaged in opposing what it alleges is the danger
of Shi’i infiltration into Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shehata’s
murder was a singular event but its roots lie in the increased demonization of
Shi’i thought and practice that lie largely within the Salafi movement and
which have, over the past several years, engaged in attacks on Sufi shrines as
well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The police may well have been
afraid to intervene once the crowd had gathered but their absence contributes
to a sense that Morsi (who issued a condemnation of the murders 24 hours after
they occurred) says one thing while his supporters act in a very different way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the MB once had a credibility gap
with the outside world for saying one thing in Arabic and another in English it
now has a sharper credibility gap with sections of the Egyptian people to whom
its leaders seem to say one thing on the stage and whose followers may practice
entirely differently with a completely different rhetoric in the streets. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Morsi has not been much more
successful in international affairs than domestically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most dramatic and most recent
problem was the decision by the Ethiopian government to build a dam on the Blue
Nile, one of the major tributaries of Egypt’s own Nile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as the Mubarak government was
taken by surprise when the governments of the Upper Nile basin decided to
abrogate the treaty governing present favorable division of the Nile waters (a
legacy of British rule) the Morsi government professed surprise at the decision
to build a dam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has long been
clear that the countries of central Africa would at some point need access to
Nile water but successive Egyptian governments have ignored the problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Faced with a public relations crisis
(since the dam itself will not be filled for year it is not an immediately
pressing issue in terms of actual water), the government allowed a public
discussion in which the ideas of invading Ethiopia, creating chaos, and other
unrealistic possibilities were floated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If members of the opposition who participated in proposing some such
proposals were embarrassed the entire affair left another sense that the
government itself is insufficiently concerned with acting on the country’s
vital interests before rather than after they have been critically affected.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>After
the adoption of the new constitution in December 2012, the MB was on the brink
of consolidating its new order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The older and frankly ineffectual politicians of the opposition were in
disarray.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The emergence of the
Tamarrod (revolt) petition campaign at first was a completely marginal
enterprise, its leaders not only young and unknown but largely different from
those young activists who were associated with the 2011 demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No
doubt there will be many more descriptions and analyses of the Tamarrod
campaign but I want to focus on two aspects that I think deserve
attention.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first is that the
campaign itself emerged in the context of statements from members of the MB and
their associated Freedom and Justice party taunting the opposition for its
inability to organize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were
not alone in this as a significant number of foreign commentators picked up the
same theme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea of a petition
campaign demanding that Morsi step down and early presidential elections be
held appeared at first as simply another sign of the inability of the
opposition to the MB to organize and of their equally great inability to accept
the verdict of a democratic vote that had made him president.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
are, it seems to me, two important but distinct ways that over the last century
Egyptians have organized what analysts (especially American analysts who have
been somewhat obsessive about this) call social movements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is an exchange model in which
political entrepreneurs provide welfare goods and receive political support in
return.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has been a staple for
how the MB and many of its daughter organizations have been built.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was also a model deployed, with less success, by Egyptian
communists in the 1940s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other
model I can only think of as a civic mobilization model and its greatest
success in Egypt was the 1918 “tawkilat” campaign of the Wafd in which hundreds
thousands of Egyptians (among whom the illiterate) signed or sealed petitions
giving the Wafd their power of attorney to negotiate with the British.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are not peculiar to Egypt and in
the US we are familiar with the exchange model through the history of the
integration (especially) of immigrant populations into politics through the
agency of political machines and also with the mobilization model through the
civil rights movements in which millions of disenfranchised African American
won the vote in the South.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
petition campaign turned out to be a popular way for people to express
opposition to the Morsi government and as such it served its purpose as an
organizing tool.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has provided
millions of people with the possibility of peacefully demanding an end to the
current situation both through the provision of signatures and through what has
become certainly the largest and widest set of demonstrations in absolute terms
in Egyptian history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is considerable discussion among foreign commentators and Egyptians about the
responsibility that now devolves on the opposition and much less on the
responsibility that devolves on the ruling party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to emphasize the role of the ruling party rather than
Morsi because the mechanism that most critics of the opposition (for example
Walter Meade writing on his website and Leslie Chang writing in The New Yorker)
is that parliamentary elections now and presidential elections in three years
are the democratic solution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thinking
back over the past four decades of the history of the western democracies
suggests that leaders are not so infrequently forced out of office by
demonstrations albeit not directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The catalyst is usually that the demonstrations foretell a loss at an
upcoming election that the leader or his (or her) party find unacceptable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was certainly the case with
Margaret Thatcher whose policies, after a decade in power, had become not only
increasingly unpopular but electorally dangerous.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Clearly
just as President Morsi has proven to be unwilling to separate himself from the
MB leadership, the legislative delegation of the MB/FJP in either house has so
far proven unwilling to separate itself either from him or the organization’s
leadership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have all shown a
remarkable party discipline more similar to that of the Communists of the 20<sup>th</sup>
century than to its Social Democrats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In one sense this is a remarkable achievement but it
invariably carries the cost of electoral and political rigidity and ultimately
failure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yet
the question remains exactly why, if the opposition is so weak and divided and
if the MB/FJP are so committed to democracy they don’t themselves call for new
elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Snap parliamentary
elections would have been one way to settle the dispute before now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They would have placed the opposition
(and Tamarrod) in an uncomfortable position of either accepting elections they
might lose or refusing to participate in the democratic process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And indeed until recently the MB as
well as the White House and many American commentators have argued in just such
a vein. Parliamentary elections should have been held several months ago
according to the timetable established in the new constitution but they have
not.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Of
course fear of losing elections is a very good reason to postpone them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How is it possible for the MB to
postpone the elections while at the same time casting the blame on the
opposition? The opposition, after all, has effectively no legislative power because
the MB-dominated legislature that writes the necessary laws for implementing
elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The now somewhat tired
and almost forgotten story is that the new constitution gave the Supreme
Constitutional Court the task of prior review of the election laws and in the
process denied them subsequent review.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This was to prevent the court from dissolving parliaments as it had done
both under Mubarak and in the post-revolutionary period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Shoura council passed an election law which it sent to the SCC which it deemed
unconstitutional for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with electoral
procedures. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Shoura council
lightly amended the law and then the SCC took the occasion to claim that it
could engage in continuing prior review.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It then rejected the new law and the Shoura council has not since
attempted another try.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A party
eager for elections and relatively certain of its chances could have easily
complied with the SCC requirements (this is not the place to go into the
specifics of electoral mechanics).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By not writing such a law the MB can take advantage of a different
section of the new constitution: the one that mandates that the present Shoura
council is the legislature until whenever new elections are held.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For now, the MB can argue that it would
like to hold elections but the opposition is threatening to boycott and besides
is using its power, in the SCC, to block the necessary legislation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has neatly deflected the issue away
from itself. As a consequence President Morsi and a rump parliament can rule for some indefinite period of time and cloak themselves in the legitimacy of electoral victory that seems so important to the Obama administration and its advisers.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
remains another problem with the new constitution which I will touch on only
briefly in conclusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not
clear that a solution to the current political crisis in the streets can be
found that will not provoke an equally profound constitutional crisis as long
as Morsi remains president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
new constitution was written with several unspoken assumptions that I will also
not address at the moment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under
the new constitution, however, if the president and the Lower House represent
very different political programs living together will be very difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Partly this is because the president
and the prime minister have distinct but interlocking responsibilities; partly
this is because it is more difficult to name a new prime minister in the
absence of a clear parliamentary majority but it is also extremely dangerous
for the president to dissolve a deadlocked parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether the current situation will lead
to such a conflict is unclear but those who think that there is an easy answer
to the political difficulties Egypt faces without Morsi’s resignation are
fooling themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-23798769194740093012013-04-02T14:28:00.000-07:002013-04-02T14:35:20.593-07:00Two Saints and a Sinner<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
name Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim does not, for most people, evoke any particular
memories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would hardly surprise
me if a few friends thought I had meant to type Ahmad Lutfi Al-Sayyid, the
renowned and sometimes reviled leader of the Egyptian Constitutional party of
nearly eighty years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet
there he was, Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim, on January 25, 2011 staring somberly out
from the front page of the daily Al-Misry al-Yawm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was, the paper reported, accused of being the leader of a
group of about 20 members of the Palestinian based Islamic Army who had set
off a bomb that took the lives of 24 people at the Qiddisayn (or Two Saints) Church
in Alexandria on January 1, 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He was famous for an instant and the story of his fame and subsequent
complete disappearance tells us something important and unexpected about the
extraordinary events of the Egyptian revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it provides a way to understand the wave of commentary
that has already begun about what has changed and what has not after two years
of revolution as well as to indicate how difficult are the problems Egyptians
face as they seek to create new governing institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
January 24 the two main privately owned liberal newspapers, Al-Shorouq and
Al-Masry al-Yawm, ran front-page stories detailing government reports that it
had solved the case of the explosion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Habib al-Adly, Al-Masry al-Yawm, then Minister of the Interior, had
revealed that decisive evidence proved the IA was behind the explosion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is hard to judge the Adly’s
statement because neither the decisive nature of the evidence was revealed nor
was Ibrahim himself brought forward.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As of January 24, the press reports make it seem as if the literature
graduate from Alexandria was in custody and confessing the details of the crime</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The next day the revolution began
and the stories about the bombing of the church and those who might have been
responsible end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the
revolution was certainly bigger news, its occurrence was not the only reason
the press ceased its coverage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rather the then public prosecutor, Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, prohibited
publication of details of the ongoing investigation of the crime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This, Mahmoud explained in a statement,
was necessary because the law obliged criminal inquiries remain secret so as
not to impede any ongoing investigation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The statement itself had been communicated to Anas Fiqqi who was then
the Minister of Information so that he could prevent further reports from appearing
in the “visual or spoken media as well as in the national press, the partisan
(daily and weekly) press, whether local or foreign as well as any other
publications.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words
there was to be no further discussion anywhere of any aspect of the
investigation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
indeed there has not been any further discussion about the Two Saints Church,
Ahmad Lutif Ibrahim, or Sayyid Bilal, a young Alexandrian Salafi who was taken
into custody on January 5 and whose body, with marks of torture, was returned to
his family for burial on January 6, 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Although some (primarily left-wing) activists consider Bilal a martyr of
the revolution, and although four police officers were convicted of his murder
in absentia, he too has largely vanished from public view. Not even the Salafi
currents recognize his existence or memorialize his death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Consequently more than two years
later, we know nothing about who was responsible for the criminal act of
January 1. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today Habib al-Adly is in
jail and Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud has been dismissed as public prosecutor; the entire
political order for which they both labored no longer exists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Muhammad Morsy, a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, rather than Husny Mubarak, is president; Egypt has a new
constitution; elections for a new parliament are in limbo but there is no possibility
that the former National Democratic party will dominate it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hundreds of people were killed by the
police during the popular uprising that overthrew Mubarak and hundreds more
have been killed in the months since he left office by the police and the Armed
Forces. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And there have been violent
confrontations between Muslims and Copts at several churches as well as in
villages around the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There are other disastrous
continuities as well: train crashes, police brutality, and widespread poverty. The
revolution’s defenders and critics frequently invoke the continuity of 30 years
(or sometimes 60) to explain or explain away contemporary disasters such as train
wrecks that take dozens of lives or unfathomable political or legal defeats
such as courts that do not convict the guilty merely because of an absence of
evidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Strange it is that in
all of these instances the distant past remains obstinately part and parcel of
the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But an event that
occurred less than three weeks before the revolution exists now in an alternate
temporal universe for which neither the revolution nor the current government
nor the institutions of the state have any responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
So why bring up this particular bit
of history that has now become ancient even if it is entirely recent? The
victims of the Alexandria bombing were not political activists; they were
celebrating Christmas in a church; had they simply returned safely home after
that Mass perhaps they would have joined the revolution three weeks later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps not. Unlike the dozens of
people, many of whom were Christian, who were crushed to death by military
vehicles in front of the television broadcasting headquarters those who died in
the church are not, by anyone’s account, martyrs of the revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are simply the victims of criminal
violence and criminal conspiracy but, given a widespread belief that violence
is worse in both quantity and quality now than under Mubarak perhaps it is
best, as the Egyptian expression goes, to allow what is past to expire.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
yet, what happened that night in Alexandria casts vivid illumination on some
aspects of the revolution’s first two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
When President Morsy determined to
oust Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud from his post last fall, his stated reason was that Mahmoud
had failed to achieve successful prosecutions of either the police officials
implicated killing revolutionary martyrs or against alleged corruption in the
old regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsy and his party
have, in other words, no problem pursuing prosecutions of their political enemies,
but they seem decidedly less interested in righting other wrongs of the old
regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In late March 2013, the Cairo
Appeals Court ruled that Morsy had unconstitutionally and wrongly dismissed
Mahmoud and ordered his re-instatement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This ruling will now be taken to the Court of Cassation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are obviously plausible legal
arguments, but many Egyptians will perceive this as part of an ongoing conflict
between the executive and judicial branches of government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The court has not so far released the
text of its reasoning but it appears to have been based in part on the question
of whether the president can nominate a public prosecutor without the
participation of the judiciary. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Mahmoud was certainly a creature of
the old regime. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So too is the
entire judiciary and prosecutorial staff which was angered by Morsy’s decision
to resort to a constitutional declaration in order to remove him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>President Morsy and the Muslim
Brotherhood would claim that Mahmoud was unwilling to prosecute his associates
in the old order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their opponents
argue Mahmoud’s failures were necessarily the result of the maintenance of the
rule of law in Egypt in place of the installation of a politically motivated
form of revolutionary justice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
many reasons—some good and some bad—there was simply not enough evidence for
convictions under existing Egyptian law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One way to judge between these competing narratives then is that Morsy
sacked Abdel-Meguid for his failure to achieve a result not available under
Egyptian law rather than for his failure to prosecute or even fully investigate
a shocking act of criminal violence that had occurred earlier in his tenure.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Neither
Mahmoud nor his replacement, Talaat Ibrahim, who was ostensibly appointed to
bring a more concerted pursuit of justice to the office, re-opened the case of
the Two Saints Church.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet recall
for a moment the atmosphere of the time: the shock, dismay, and outrage at a
criminal act of sectarian murder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That there would continue to be attacks, sometimes murderously violent,
on Christians was widely believed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>About a year earlier, after all, there had been a drive-by shooting at a
Christmas mass in Nag’ Hammadi. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Azhar Ulama Front, now occasionally described as a conservative organization of
religious scholars, had issued a call for a boycott of Christian businesses and
prominent figures, such as the attorney and 2012 presidential candidate, Salim
al-Awa, had claimed that Christians were stockpiling weapons in church
basements.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Religious violence therefore seemed
as plausible as a future encompassing revolution on the Tunisian model. Bombing
a church had ratcheted up the violence and the inevitable rumors swirled:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it was Islamist extremists, it was one
branch or another of the state secret services, it was Christians
themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story that Habib
Al-Adly told was designed, like most stories the government had told for
decades, to pacify the public and assure everyone that Egyptians were not to
blame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only
foreigners—Palestinians, Israelis, or the agents of other powers—were capable
of such acts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians, as
government after government has hastened to reassure them, are not responsible
for any of the bad things that happen in the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
cannot even speculate; one can only wonder what we would learn if the existing
files were opened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The least
likely outcomes are that Israelis or Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim and his Palestinian
associates were the criminals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps we would learn that the evidence pointed in the direction of
Salafi groups, including those whose members have been elected to
parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or perhaps the
security forces were involved, whether as active agents or passive
facilitators. Perhaps the government knew who had committed the crime but
lacked evidence or worried that the truth was politically too inconvenient. Perhaps
we would simply learn that the files, such as they are, are largely empty and that
the government had no clues and no intention of discovering who committed the
crime.. This last possibility seems most likely of all when we recall that it
was the very day of the announcement that the revolutionary tide began to scour
the country.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Had
Charles Dickens chosen to write about Cairo rather than Paris his words would
ring equally true:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it has been the
best of times and the worst of times. The past years have seen dramatic
mobilizations by unlikely and frequently powerless groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through the spring of 2011 Copts
demonstrated not simply for their rights but for the right for a more public
presence in the neighborhood known as Maspero.. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In October 2011 members of the Egyptian armed forces attacked
Coptic demonstrators in front of the Maspero television station by driving
armored personnel carriers into their midst.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An ugly scene was made worse when news announcers urged
honorable citizens to descend into the streets and engage in vigilante justice
against thugs who had killed and wounded members of the armed forces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there were no thugs and no soldiers
had died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, a group of
soldiers had gone on a killing spree in which several dozen Christian
demonstrators were crushed to death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In December, the Deputy Guide of
the MB and the man in whose stead Morsy ran for President, Khairat Shater
announced that his organization and a group of Salafi societies had come to an
important agreement and issued a joint statement. The joint statement issued at
a nationally-televised press conference asserted that Muslims should not wish
their Christian neighbors Merry Christmas. There is no comparison between the
refusal to return a greeting and criminal homicide nor did the agreement become
the official policy of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was, however, the first time in modern Egyptian history that
politicians associated with a governing majority have publicly associated
themselves with such a policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
one had to wonder why a prominent political figure who might have been
president (and might still be prime minister) should have found this a crucial
task to undertake while the country was enduring spasms of violence and a
decaying economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is an
enduring and disquieting uncertainty about a political party that recognizes
the constitutional possibility that a Christian could be president of Egypt
while openly and steadfastly asserting that its members would never vote for
one. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Most
stories of the revolution’s prehistory begin with trade union unrest in the
Delta in the first decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, the protests against
the Israeli invasion of Gaza, or with the demonstration effect of events in
Tunis in December 2010.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Important
those instances of mass mobilization were but the atmosphere of the weeks
before January 25 was filled with shadows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The focus on the industrial cities often includes an
implicit claim that class unity trumps religious division, but the history of
the 20<sup>th</sup> century is not very reassuring on that count.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The revulsion that many Egyptians felt about
the bombing of the Two Saints before January 28, 2011 should not be discounted
as a contributory factor to the widely discussed and frequently praised accounts
of Muslim-Christian solidarity during the celebrated 18 days. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Recalling
the bombing of the Two Saints church as the prelude to January 25 is thus
necessarily an exercise in outlining the limits not only of the Egyptian
uprising so far but also the limits of the parties that have emerged as the
dominant political forces in its wake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Religious
community and prejudice point us in one important direction but also tend to
obscure other, equally important and even connected, aspects of what has changed
over the past two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps
Ahmad Lutfi Ibrahim was the person behind the bombing, although it seems
unlikely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More plausible is that,
as had become in common in the political life of Egypt over the past 60 years,
the government chose to blame criminal behavior on someone, perhaps even a
fictitious someone, who was not an Egyptian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptians, Egyptian governments have argued for a very long
time, are not responsible for criminal acts of prejudice, for terrorism, or for
politically motivated wrong-doing that damage national unity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those actions are, the public has been
told time and again, the work of foreign hands, outside agents, or third
parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Real Egyptians have no
interest in breaking the unity of the nation and consequently they cannot the
agents of such activity.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Recently
Ttere has been a marked decline in attempts by either the government or private
persons to claim that their opponents are foreign agents or elements acting in
their interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not
because political discourse has become kinder and gentler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has become notably more intense and
it is certainly not limited to debates about policy differences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Striking, however, is how infrequently
anyone levies the once-common charge that opponents are not Egyptian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus when the television satirist
Bassem Youssef was called in for questioning on March 30, 2013 he was accused
of maligning President Morsi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anyone watching his show (which includes several leaders of the Salafi
trend) realizes how rooted in domestic perceptions of political idiocy it
is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Political opponents now may be
characterized as venal, stupid, immoral or even criminal but they are
ineluctably Egyptian.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is too
early to say if this is a station on the way to a discourse that is both more
civil and more probing or simply to distinct communities that refuse to listen
to each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is a
significant change.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
explosion in front of the Two Saints was a purely criminal act.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Americans it inevitably recalls the
1963 bombing of the 16<sup>th</sup> Street Baptist Church in Montgomery,
Alabama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like that crime, it was
not an isolated event; it had a context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It occurred, as I briefly alluded above, in a stream of assaults on
Christians and their institutions over a longer time and a wider space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frequently these assaults involved sections
of a local Muslim majority pressing demands or expressing fears against
Christians:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>claims that Christians
were illegally building churches or imprisoning converts to Islam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, they invoked a claim
that a minority was itself engaged in possibly criminal behavior that local
government was either unwilling or unable to prevent. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some, like the well-known judge Tariq
al-Bishri, limited themselves to that point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others took the argument a step further to insist on the
necessity of self-help in the absence of government action.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
resort to self-help is always seductive and dangerous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seductive because it appears to be a
community empowering itself against those who despoil it; dangerous precisely
because, despite the language of revolutionary or religious justice with which
it is sometimes imbued, it is so frequently and easily directed against the
marginal, the powerless, and the impoverished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frequently first employed against an identifiable and less
powerful minority, such violence can be and is deployed against others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These forms of violence are, of course,
illegal but governments, in some instances, have high degrees of toleration for
them and Egypt is no exception on both counts.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Successive
Egyptian governments, perhaps especially in the wake of 2011, have been
unwilling to react strongly against such incidents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not infrequently, as in an incident when a Christian man’s
ear was cut off or when a church was burned down or a community driven by force
from their homes and shops, the government has intervened at best in a tardy
fashion and never with criminal sanctions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has preferred reconciliation committees in which the
weaker party generally foregoes significant compensation and agrees not to
participate in criminal prosecution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
have been lynchings recently in which members of local communities killed
alleged criminals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ostensible
reasons range from the murder of a young child to attempted theft of a tok-tok
(motorcycle-rickshaw).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those
who were lynched were tortured to death:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>they were kicked, hit, knifed and ultimately literally hung from
lamp-posts (in at least one case upside-down).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am ignorant of whether this violates specific
provisions of Egyptian penal law, but it certainly violates the rights of
citizens enunciated articles 35, 36 and 77 of the recently adopted
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The news accounts are sketchy and
occasionally suggest participants may have thought they were acting under cover
of enacting a Quranic punishment against socially destructive criminal behavior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The free use by some Islamist
activists over the past year of the language of the Quranic penalties against
highway robbery (the so-called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hadd
al-hirabah</i>) may have had some influence, but much more important is the
likely conviction in communities that without a functioning police force overwhelming
chaos and criminality threaten. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Was their choice of who to find
guilty any better than Habib al-Adly’s on January 24? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the absence of mechanisms deploying
either the forensic capacities of the regular police or the even more stringent
evidentiary requirements of the Qur’an or classical Islamic jurisprudence we
are not in a position now or even to know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When even the
Minister of Justice, Ahmad Makki, referred to the lynchings as signaling the
death of the state he was repeating a profound fear of many Egyptians
today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given the profound economic
problems and the continuing violence confronting the government and the
Egyptian people, finding the guilty parties behind the bombing of the Two
Saints church is not now high on anyone’s agenda.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bombing also raises too many questions about
the fissures of religion, politics, and government authority to be anywhere
except in the temporal limbo I described earlier for the time being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, depending on how these questions
are resolved, there may come a time when a government decides once again to
examine what happened in Alexandria and to throw some additional light on the
events of the past several years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Those who thought reform of Egypt’s
justice system on January 2, 2011 was crucial have been proven right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It needs some new people at the top as
well as a sense of commitment to making Egyptians safe from criminal violence
regardless of their political or religious beliefs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reflecting on
the Alexandria bombing in the light of recent events one thing that seems clear
is that while one aspect of the present conflict centers on whether Talaat
Ibrahim or Abdel Meguid Mahmoud ought to be confirmed as public prosecutor
neither avenue represents a step out of the impasse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is needed is a different public prosecutor with a
different sense of mission—perhaps even to recognize, probe and bind up the
wounds of the past rather than to ignore them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-36581090926689104142013-03-01T13:29:00.000-08:002013-03-01T13:29:32.335-08:00A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Democratic Transition<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is a paradigm nobody talks about much any more in regard to Egypt: the democratic
transition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem with the
idea of democratic transition, dearly beloved by both the Obama Administration,
most of my colleagues in political science, and the Muslim Brotherhood was that
it presumed the institutions of the state would be passed, intact, from the old
regime to the new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through
elections, constitutions, and the circulation of new elites popular sovereignty
and democratic practice would re-invigorate the barren institutions of the old
order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where necessary, new ones
would be created.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What,
we are impelled to ask, went wrong in Egypt?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What made it, one analyst is reported to have said, the
stupidest transition ever or the revolution that never was?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or did the fault lie not in our Egypt
but our selves?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not least in our
inability to recognize that the complicated and confusing period, lasting a
decade or more, between the first observation of revolutionary upheaval and its
conclusion, is both more important and more uncertain than we feel comfortable
with.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
want to begin at the point where theories of failed revolution and failed
democratic transition diverge:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the
institutions of the old order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Theorists of failed revolution tell us that too many Egypt’s old
institutions and old elites survived the 2011 upheaval:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the Armed Forces, the judiciary, the
bureaucracy, and the old elites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Theorists of failed transition might seem to believe that not enough of
the old institutions survived but on closer inspection they have a different
concern:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>given free elections and
the doctrine of popular sovereignty not enough Egyptians seem to have taken the
outcome of elections with sufficient seriousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specifically the winners of the parliamentary and
presidential elections, the Muslim Brothers, have not been accorded the
legitimacy of a freely and popularly elected government.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
is puzzling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Free and fair
elections are the tonic of transition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All theorists of transition
recognize that free elections are not “enough” as they put it to ensure
democracy but free elections, by definition, they are the way in which the
people express their will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once
elections have been held it is up to the new government to do its work and for
the people to wait a decent interval before judging its performance at the
ballot box rather than through ongoing and defiant street demonstrations and
conflict.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is even more
puzzling because it is a little difficult to argue that this has something to
do with Islam since the Islamist parties won and they have no problem with
asserting the doctrines of popular sovereignty and electoral legitimacy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
dominant concern in Egypt today is the high, and increasing, level of
polarization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems to be
common in the US and Europe to describe this a conflict between the country’s
minority urban secular middle-class and its religious (Islamic) majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That Egypt has become increasingly
polarized is apparent but it is doubtful that the polarization that paralyzes
the country is between the secular middle-class and the rest of Egypt. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of the violence in the
streets today is occurring outside of Cairo in the Canal Zone and the
provincial cities of the Delta, places not known for their large, secular
middle-classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The violence is often specifically
between the Muslim Brotherhood, its direct supporters and its occasional allies
on specific issues, and the restive lower middle and working classes in these
cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Socially we can speak of
polarization on many dimensions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
is a marked rural/urban dimension to what we see; there is also a clear aspect
of educational attainment; in terms of religion there is also an obvious
Christian/Muslim dimension, but within the Muslim community there may also be
an antagonism based on how the Brotherhood understands Islam in the modern
world (of which more below).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Lastly there is a rather widespread dissatisfaction with what many
Egyptians perceive as the Brotherhood’s own internal lack of transparency and
democracy and aggrandizing organizational ambitions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These, in turn, provide both local and national elites with
the basis through which they have opposed the Brotherhood but over which they
have very little direct influence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is possible to use electoral maps to see a geographic dimension to this
increased polarization. Egypt has had two constitutional referenda,
parliamentary elections (and run-offs) for two chambers, as well as a
presidential election and runoff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The elections are not strictly speaking comparable but what we see is a
decline over time in turnout, relative support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and
an increasing polarization centered on the Delta.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specifically three quite different provinces—Gharbiyya,
Cairo, and Minoufia—have emerged as localized centers of opposition to the
Brotherhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All three of these
provinces, which voted no in the December 2012 constitutional referendum had
voted yes in the March 2011 referendum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They also voted against Morsi in both the initial and runoff stages of
the presidential election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Gharbiyya is the province in which the textile center of Mahallah is
located whose 2006 strikes are often referred to as the origin of the collapse
of the Mubarak regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tanta,
however, also a textile center is even more strongly opposed to the MB; what
may differentiate the two is the presence of the headquarters of an important
Sufi order, the Badawiyya, which is located there and to which there is an
annual pilgrimage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cairo is the
most urban of the governorates and, of course, has the largest concentration of
the socalled secular middle class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Minufia is quite unlike both Cairo and Gharbiyya and the best anyone can
come up with to explain its behavior is that it was the home of both Sadat and
Mubarak, but this seems like weak tea.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Given
recent events it might now be possible to add the Canal cities of Suez, Pt.
Said, and Ismailiya to the list of anti-MB strongholds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are some specific grievances in
each of these three cities of which the most well-known stems from the deaths
of 79 people at the Port Said soccer stadium on February 1, 2012 during a match
between the local team, Al-Masri, and the Cairene Ahli team.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The death sentences handed down to 21
defendants in Port Said on January 26, 2013 led to demonstrations and riots in
Port Said and demonstrations in support of the verdicts in Cairo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The next day, itself the anniversary of
the uprising that toppled Mubarak, massive riots broke out in Pt. Said and the
other Canal cities as well as Alexandria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In response President Morsi declared a state of emergency and curfew
which the demonstrators promptly and publicly broke by announcing street
demonstrations to begin at the same hour as the curfew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The army refused to enforce the curfew
with force and Morsi was left to slowly withdraw it and then allow it fade
away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
of the peculiarities then of the last two years is that the authority of the
executive and the legislative branches of government<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have, for the time being, diminished while the authority of
judicial branch and the Armed Forces (especially in the months since it
relinquished power to President Morsi in August 2012) has increased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Armed Forces have become more
independent, constitutionally and even practically, from the executive branch
than at any other time in recent history and the judiciary has intervened in
politics with remarkable independence over the past two years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes, as when they dissolved
Mubarak’s National Democratic party, the courts gained universal praise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At other times, as when the Supreme
Constitutional Court proclaimed the first post-Mubarak parliament elected in
violation of the constitution, less so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The courts in Egypt, as
elsewhere, are a counter-majoritarian institution; their role may seem to be
hard to explain in the context of the Arab world generally where such an
independent court system that asserts such broad powers of review is
anomalous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, in fact,
anomalous within the context of the French jurisprudential system from which
Egypt’s judicial system springs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Briefly what we are seeing is the result of two trends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is the culmination of at least a
hundred years of judicial culture in Egypt based on asserting the necessity of
the rule of law as a way for the ordinary courts to control the executive and
asserting claims of constitutional interpretive power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other is the reality that, of the
three branches of government, the courts have been the one to which ordinary
Egyptians have resorted most frequently and with most success over the past 100
years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The courts can be
arbitrary, corrupt, and unresponsive but they have proven to be more useful
than the other branches.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is I think for this reason that there has been, in the years since 2011, so
little popular response to calls for the establishment of revolutionary
tribunals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian experience
with exceptional tribunals, whether revolutionary or military, has not been
positive.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Looking
forward then we can see two institutional forces with significant legitimacy:
the Armed Forces and the courts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
we can see two institutions, paradoxically based on liberal notions of
legitimacy—an elected presidency and legislature—which are having the most
trouble establishing broad acceptance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One problem for the president is that he tries to wield the power of his
office in ways consonant with a regime that is dead (the old republic) or with
a regime that has not yet been born.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Let us
recall his attempts to deploy the power of the presidency in the interregnum
between the old constitution and the new one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF had dissolved the lower house after the Supreme Court
ruled it had been elected unconstitutionally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On assuming the presidency Morsi tried to issue his own
constitutional declaration ordering the lower house back into session.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The courts, the SCAF, and significant
portion of public opinion rebuffed his attempt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have already noted that his recent attempt to create
a state of emergency in the Canal provinces failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In November he issued a constitutional declaration that
allowed him to replace the Public Prosecutor and also shielded the work of the
committee writing the constitution from judicial oversight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Massive demonstrations, including
attacks on the Presidential palace, forced Morsi to rescind the declaration
although not its effects and the committee wrapped up its work in record time
so that a referendum could be held thereby putting the threat of judicial
review behind it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So,
going forward politics in Egypt appears to be bounded by four forces:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the judiciary, the army, the elected
legislature and presidency likely controlled by the MB, and the mass public
protest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mass public protests,
rare between 1952 and 2011, have often had the effect of forcing the executive
to back down on policies and the last two years, in which they have become common,
are no exception.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately
these protests have, over the past year, increasingly turned into street
battles between the MB and their opponents, especially in the provincial
towns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even casual viewers of
Egyptian television recognize that the Canal cities and other towns of the
interior are now the scenes of pitched battles in which people—clearly not the
secular westernized intelligentsia—are determined to attack and destroy the
MB’s local offices and headquarters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The most obvious example occurred in early December 2012 when the
national headquarters of the MB in Muqattam (Cairo) was torched.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Generally the police do nothing as they
do nothing in most street fighting unless they themselves have been attacked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there are also indications in many
provincial cities that MB militias and those based partly on soccer clubs now
engage in routine street battles with each other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
may come as a surprise then to realize that the Morsi government has been able
to carry out some of its responsibilities even if it has chosen to do so in
ways that maximize the influence of MB’s political wing, the FJP, in
politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government has
recently managed to pass a law allowing it to issue Islamic bonds over the opposition,
not of the secular liberals who play almost no role in the Shura Council (the
upper house) but over the opposition of the Azhar and the Salafi parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government has been able to
negotiate with the International Monetary Fund and the absence of an agreement
has more to do with the IMF’s concern about Egypt’s unstable politics than with
the incapacity of the government to reach an agreement with the international
body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government does not, it
is clear, have much control over the police but the opposition leadership does
not have much control over the demonstrators.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the opposition leadership often appears weak and divided
it is equally clear that its base, especially in the industrial cities, is
unwilling to tie its future to the National Salvation Front.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, the broad outlines of
power are far from settled in the country.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>New
parliamentary elections will be held beginning in April.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The opposition has, for the moment,
decided to boycott the elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not to participate is to allow the MB and other Islamists to dominate
the parliament completely which, given the new constitution, will allow them
fairly wide power over society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whether that will come with the ability to solve the country’s pressing
economic problems and increasing polarization is far from clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously the MB hope to ride out the
storm but if they do there is every reason to believe that their preference
will be to impose.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
indeed neither they nor any other government will have much time given the
rapid decline of Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves, the evident lack of
competitiveness in the export of manufacturing or agricultural products, and
the country’s declining tourism (itself in part subject to competitive
pressures since the primary tourist destination is the country’s beaches not its
Pyramids).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Egypt
is by no means a country engaged in a democratic transition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a country in the midst of a
revolution. For better or worse, however, unlike the classic revolutionary
situations Egypt has a functioning and still respected court system (not true
of France, Russia or China) and a functioning Armed Forces which will intervene
to prevent the collapse of the state but not much more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Egypt is
also a country whose urban population has been mobilized as never before and
which has stayed ready to take to the streets long after most people had
written that possibility off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
is primarily the pressure of the streets that have pushed the political
situation forward, but at some point the political leadership of the country
must take up its real responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egypt is now in a situation
reminiscent of what, in 1975, Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji
Watanuki called the crisis of democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What they meant was that the levels of mass mobilization had undermined traditional
(that is, previously existing) relations of authority within the state, the
religious institutions, and elsewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The masses were too eager to participate and thus, through an excess of
democratic aspirations and activity, threatened democracy itself at least as
Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (and the Trilateral Commission) understood it.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decline of authority, or
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">haibat al-dawlah</i> as the Arabic
equivalent employed in Egypt today has it, was a moral as well as a political
crisis in the minds of these three distinguished conservative
intellectuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They could hardly
imagine how such a chaotic situation would end well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world of
the advanced industrial societies differs today from the one that existed in
the first two-thirds of the twentieth century and probably also from the one
that the authors of the report might have preferred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The revolutionary democratic impulse that they feared
was contained for many reasons, not least of which was the adjustment of
institutions and elites to new ways of governing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To paraphrase
Lenin, revolutionary situations occur when elites can no longer govern in the
old way and large numbers of people want to live in some as yet unspecified new
way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What might
this mean for Egypt?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the MB
this may mean that winning elections is no longer anywhere near sufficient as a
goal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To succeed they will need to
find a different way of governing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Today’s polarizing conflicts in Egypt are far from limited to differences
between the MB and a secular, middle class (or Facebook) opposition. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is possible that, for example, many
of the young people who showed up to dance the “Harlem Shake” in front of the
Muslim Brothers’ national headquarters were engaged in middle class mockery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If that were the opposition with which
the MB had to contend they would be in a very different situation than they
find themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dock workers
who have several times shut down the port at Ain Sokhna <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(most recently in mid-February 2013)
were interested neither in embarrassing the MB nor in line dancing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor are industrialists like Magdi Tolba
dancing for joy:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the weakened
pound is causing nearly as many problems as it solves for textile exporters
like him. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The National
Salvation Front faces its own problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Frequently derided as feckless and irresponsible, they have the opposite
problem of the MB: a political coalition that is sufficiently broad and whose
institutional connection to its possible electoral base is sufficiently tenuous
that they cannot find a way to compete coherently in the electoral process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether the boycott
strips the elections of legitimacy or locks the opposition into the political
wilderness remains to be seen. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Even a
large electoral majority in parliamentary elections may not, for the
foreseeable future, translate into viable governance as popular demands
continue to be expressed in ways that are both democratic and disruptive and as
the political leadership of the country finds it difficult to agree on a common
path forward.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-50231216506515378792012-11-02T10:38:00.005-07:002012-11-02T11:03:09.417-07:00Drafting a Constitution: Part II<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Constitutions
defi<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=10081791" name="_GoBack"></a>ne and set out relationships between the primary
institutions of the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
also suggest some of the compromises and agreements between powerful political
forces that have been necessary to create these institutions and it gives us
some hints about what the drafters think political life will look like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
On balance it looks as if, through
whatever compromises they have made, the drafters of the Egyptian constitution envisage
a civil state based on a very powerful executive authority rooted in but not
directly managed by an elected president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Educated professionals will play a dominant role in administration
and legislation. The new state will have obligations to the sixty percent of Egyptians
who are poor or illiterate but they will have no role in its institutions and
relatively little in its politics. The political elite will engage in
competitive elections over power and the military and the judiciary will
function with significant levels of autonomy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The military, however, will continue to be a
self-contained hierarchy whereas the judiciary will, more than in the past, be
institutionally divided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Coupled
with the role I discussed in <a href="http://nisralnasr.blogspot.com/2012/10/drafting-constitution-part-i-of-ii.html">an
earlier post on the constitution</a>, the constitution lays out what might be
called an Islamic <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rechtstaat</i></b>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The draft of the constitution does
not stand completely alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
clearly borrows quite a bit from the language of the 1971 constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps strangely for a constituent
assembly largely made up of supporters of political Islam it also appears to be
a family resemblance to the constitution of the French Fifth Republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What makes this peculiar is that many
of the drafters claim they want to replace statutory law borrowed from the
French civil code with Islamic sharia and yet the constitution nods clearly to
Paris.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Most surprising of all, however,
are the similarities between this draft and the 1923 constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could almost say this
document has created an elected constitutional monarch who presides over a
parliamentary system that unequally but directly apportions political power on
the basis of wealth and status.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed
the new constitution has abandoned the language of the 1971 constitution to
describe the legislative branches in favor of that of 1923.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus Egypt no longer will have a
People’s Assembly and a Consultative Assembly; it will henceforth have (as it
did in the past) a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The most important relationship the
constitution establishes is between the president and legislature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the beginning of the revolution, the
Muslim Brothers had expressed their support for a parliamentary system of
government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They began to back
away from that position fairly quickly and have suggested that what they want
is a mixed system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the
constitution envisages is relatively far from a mixed system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems to envisage something much
closer to the monarchical system that characterized what Afaf Marsot called
“Egypt’s liberal age.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because the
constitution retains an elected republican form of government it might be best
called a limited elected monarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The new constitution clearly limits
the power of the president relative to that of the 1956 and 1971 Egyptian
constitutions. Sometimes it does so by borrowing language directly from the
1923 constitution; sometimes it does so by reference to the constitution of the
French Fifth Republic. However, the limitation on the power of the presidency
is not achieved by a corresponding increase in the power of the lower house,
the Chamber of Deputies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
achieved by increasing the constitutional power of the Prime Minister even as
it increases the independence of that office from the parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The draft has created a strong
president whose goals are accomplished through an unelected Prime Minister
subject to a vote of confidence by an elected parliament.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
simplest way to grasp the underlying dynamics for Americans is to imagine that
President Obama could not directly choose his own cabinet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather he would choose a General
Secretary who would then choose the secretaries of the existing departments
(State, Treasury, Education and so forth) and the General Secretary rather than
the president would be responsible for the administration of government and
would also usually chair cabinet meetings. It would not be particularly
surprising to Americans to learn that Congressmen who joined the government
would resign their seats. The feature that would be unfamiliar would be that
although Congress could force the president to choose a new General Secretary
it could not solely for political reasons force the president from office.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
details are worth looking at a bit more closely if only to understand how the
drafters have deployed language from the constitution of the monarchy to
achieve their ends.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Article
48 of the 1923 constitution stated that the king exercised his authority
through his ministers and Article 155 of the current draft uses the same
language to describe how the president exercises his. This language about the
executive was absent from earlier Egyptian republican constitutions. Until now Egyptian
presidents, like those in France and the US, exercised their extensive powers
directly. The current draft reduces the range of presidential authority and (by
adopting the language of the 1923 constitution) attempts to place a barrier
between the president and the direct exercise of many of the powers of the
executive branch. In so doing, of course, it creates the possibility of a
potential clash between an elected president and parliament that could play out
in the selection of a prime minister. This suggests that the drafters, at least,
clearly envisage that the mechanisms they have put in place in the constitution
to supervise free and fair elections will work and that Egypt will, henceforth,
have real political pluralism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This present commitment is enhanced by Article 129, which
makes it difficult for the president to dissolve parliament routinely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately the one situation in
which the president is most likely to wish to dissolve parliament is not
covered by Article 129, as I discuss below, which likely vitiates its importance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Article 49 of the 1923 Constitution
gave the king the absolute right to choose and dismiss ministers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The present constitution also gives the
president the unlimited right to appoint the prime minister but, as noted
above, Article 129 makes it much more difficult for him to dismiss an appointed
minister who has acquired parliamentary support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
1923 constitution emerged from massive demonstrations that paralyzed the old
order no less than did those of early 2011. It was written by a much smaller committee
whose members certainly understood at least as well as those of the present one
issues of Islamic law, constitutional jurisprudence, and the historic
importance of their work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writing
as it did in the shadow of British military predominance, a profoundly
conservative landed elite anchored in the royal family, and a powerful
nationalist movement it wrote a document that distributed real but unequal
power across the country’s institutions. There was, in 1923, no requirement
that the ministers be chosen from the majority party but neither was there any
prohibition on parliamentary members serving as ministers. Article 65 gave
parliament the right (but not the duty) to issue a vote of non-confidence in
the ministry. It was then obliged to resign.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This draft appears to be the first
Egyptian constitution in which the president’s ministers (as in the French
Fifth Republic) cannot be sitting parliamentarians. Deputies who join the
government leave their seats. Parliament has significant influence over the
president but the relationship is ultimately one-sided. Under Article 145 the
president names the prime minister who then forms a government and presents its
and its program to parliament. If the lower house does not reject this by a
majority within thirty days then the government takes office. If the new
government is rejected the president is given a second chance. If his second
attempt is rejected, the president is then directed to form a government based
on parliament’s proposal. If this is not accomplished within thirty days then
the president dissolves parliament and new elections are held. Presumably the
president can simply delay rather than appointing a ministry he or she opposes
so as to call for new elections. This is the one situation in which the
president not only can, but also must, dissolve the government without
presenting either a justification or holding a referendum (as required in
Article 129); it therefore provides the president with tremendous power in
regard to a refractory sitting parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The president ultimately not only can, but also must
dissolve parliament; parliament can dislodge a prime minister but not a
president.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This provision is evidently
designed to avoid the possibility of “cohabitation” as occurred in France where
the president also appoints the prime minister who must then seek parliamentary
approval. On several occasions since the 1980s the president was from one party
and the majority in the chamber of deputies was from another. Thus a Socialist
president had to appoint right-wing ministries and once a right-wing president
was forced to accept a Socialist ministry. Because the Egyptian president,
unlike the French one, rules through his minister cohabitation might seem to be
more dangerous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The draft also limits the
president’s direct power in other ways. According to Article 149 the president
appoints and dismisses military officials (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">muazzafun askariyun</i></b>) and political
representatives (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mumaththalun siyasiyun</i></b>) but not civil servants (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">muazzafun
madaniyun</i></b>) who are, according to article 164, appointed and dismissed
by the prime minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is
clearly an attempt to re-establish the integrity of the civil service, but its
implementation will depend on the probity of future prime ministers as well as
additional legislation and ultimately litigation before the constitutional and
administrative courts. The meaning of “political representatives” is not
specified in the constitution and will probably require legislation and
adjudication to define. Judging by article 13 of the French constitution, which
contains similar language, it will include provincial governors, and diplomats.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Unlike the French president
(Article 9 of the French constitution), the Egyptian president is not supposed
to routinely preside over meetings of the council of ministers. He may call the
ministers into session for important occasions and he presides over meetings he
attends (Article 158). The Egyptian president neither signs nor issues the
decisions of the Council of Ministers (as does the French president) which
further emphasizes the degree to which the drafters, at least, envisage the
ministry as independent of the presidency as well as the parliament once
appointed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Egyptian president does give an
account, at the annual inaugural joint session of the two chambers of
parliament of the government’s general policy (Article 146). This largely
resembles the speech from the throne in the 1923 constitution (Article 42)
although the houses are not given the right of written reply they enjoyed in
1923. This address differs from the address (Article 145) that the Prime
Minister is to give of his program.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The president has a variety of
other powers, including the declaration of war and states of emergency subject
to the approval of the legislature as well as plebiscite in the case of the
latter. The president (and the legislature) may request amendments to the
constitution. The president issues legislation (but not administrative
regulations) and has the right to a veto.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Prime Minister has a more
significant role in many ways than the president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The government (as opposed to “the state”) is composed of
the Prime Minister, his deputies, the various ministers and their deputies and
it is the prime minister who oversees the work of the other ministers and who
is responsible for public security. The prime minister appoints and dismisses
civil servants (Article 164) and issues regulations necessary to enforce
legislation (Article 165), issue administrative and regulatory decrees as well
as develop draft laws and relevant budgets to be presented to the legislature
(Article 171).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Chamber of
Deputies must approve the budget initiated by the Prime Minister and may modify
it but may only increase expenditures if it finds additional resources (Article
117).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The legislature has rather limited
powers:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it can propose legislation
but for the most part responds to the executive. It must overcome a
presidential veto with majority votes in each chamber—not an unusual
requirement in strong presidential system.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If the Prime Minister controls the
government there is one area in which his power and that of the president are
limited: the military. The President is the supreme commander of the armed
force (Article 152) and clearly makes appointments within the military. However,
as outlined above it is the Prime Minister who appoints the Defense Minister
and the Defense Minister is the “general commander” of the armed forces. The
Defense Minister must, under Article 198, be a member of the officer’s corps
and the budget of the armed forces will be provided to the legislature as a
single number by a National Defense Council headed by the President but made up
primarily of military and intelligence officials (Article 197).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Articles
197 and 198 throw significant light on the ease with which President Mohamed Morsi
was able to place Generals Sami Enan and Mohamed Hussein Tantawi on retirement
in August and to end the period of direct military rule. Any fears within the
general staff that a return to civilian rule would imply significant civilian
oversight have been assuaged. A civilian president with no previous ties to the
army is now nominally in charge of the armed forces, but they have managed, for
the first time in Egyptian history, to constitutionally oblige the executive to
choose an officer as minister of defense and to limit legislative oversight of
their budget.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the uproar in
fall 2011 over the proposal by then Vice Prime Minister Ali al-Selmi erupted it
was in part because he proposed just such an article for the forthcoming
constitution. The armed forces, having given way, has effectively gained what
it sought then in terms of control over its own budget and a say in whether the
country goes to war (which it must be admitted no government would launch
against the express advice or wishes of its military commanders).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
With the exception of the armed
forces, the limits on legislative authority are largely in line with much
European practice over the last century. What is striking is the limitation on
who can serve in the legislature. One of the most contentious issues of the
last two years was the insistence in Nasserist constitutions that fifty percent
of parliamentarians be workers or farmers. These mandates were abused by
Egyptian governments from their inception to provide a convenient cover for
blatant manipulation. The present constitution has gone in the reverse
direction, in ways that depart dramatically from democratic theory and Egyptian
constitutional norms over much of the last century.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
A fundamental feature of modern
democracy is that the electorate constitutes, at least in theory, the pool for
elected officials. Obviously in most representative democracies, elected
officials are drawn from a relatively small subset of the electorate as a
whole: the poor and poorly educated are rarely elected and women and members of
minority communities are also under-represented.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fiction (or, more kindly, the ideal) that anyone in
society can serve in elected office is a basic principle of contemporary
democracies. Where there are express limitations on who can serve even if
everyone can vote, we are more skeptical about claims to democracy. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
To serve in the Chamber of Deputies
a candidate must be twenty-five years old and have completed primary education.
If we simply took published illiteracy rates as a proxy for primary education
(which they are likely to be because it is much easier for the government to
measure school completion rates than substantive literacy) it would suggest
that something like seventeen percent of the male population and thirty-five
percent of the female population is ineligible to serve in the Chamber of
Deputies. Reported initial enrolment rates in primary education are much higher,
but, of course, these students are too young to serve in the Chamber and I have
not found good recent information on measured levels of completion (although I
do suspect that they are what “literacy levels” actually are measuring).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Senate is a completely
different situation. With the exception of fiscal oversight, the Senate shares
legislative authority with the Chamber of Deputies. Its vote is also necessary
to overcome a presidential veto. In addition, should the Chamber be dissolved,
the Senate temporarily assumes its legislative functions. Its members serve a
six-year term, which gives it significant greater staying capacity than either
the president or the Chamber.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The president chooses twenty-five percent
of the 150 members of the Senate and the rest are elected (Article 130). This
is in line with the 1971 constitution in which the president chose one-third of
the Consultative Council’s 132 members. As with the People’s Assembly, the
Consultative Council was required to have half its members be workers and
farmers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The language of the constitution in
regard to the new Senate resurrects the language of the 1923 constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The president must choose members of
the Senate (Article 130) from among the country’s highest educational and
political elite: former ministers and their deputies, former legislative
leaders, scientists, religious figures, judges, retired military officers, and
high-level civil servants. In addition, former presidents (elected after 25 January
2011) are automatically life-members of the Senate on leaving the presidency. This
is remarkably similar to Article 78 of the 1923 constitution with one revealing
exception. In 1923, both appointed and elected Senators were drawn from a pool
with similar qualifications. In 1923, however, in addition to former officials
those who owned significant amounts of property (defined by its tax) were also
eligible. In 2013 elected Senators need not be drawn from the ranks of former officials
nor must they own property with a minimum taxable value, but they must have
completed higher (university) education. Where once physical capital was a
requirement for membership in one of the legislative chambers today it has
become intellectual capital but the restriction remains quite real.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It is not necessary to have a
romantic view of the poor and the illiterate to believe that these restrictions
are anti-democratic. Nor is it necessary to believe that Egypt should retain
the Nasserist prescriptions. Relatively few workers and farmers enter legislatures
anywhere; most legislators are attorneys by education. But it is profoundly
undemocratic to restrict the right of the poor and the illiterate to contest. When
Supreme Court Justice Tahany El-Gabali suggested unequal voting rights for the
educated and the illiterate in 2011 she was pilloried, but few people seem to
have noticed that the Constitutional Committee has made a very similar move. That
she was a woman and the committee is largely male may have something to do with
it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The last section of the draft I
address before concluding are the articles dealing with the judiciary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are two quite positive changes in the draft relative to
the 1971 constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, the
old section on state security courts has been removed. For now they no longer
exist and lack direct constitutional sanction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, military courts may now only try cases involving
military personnel and civilians may not be tried in military courts (Article
200 and Article 62).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the
major demands of the last two years has been to end civilian trials before
exceptional or military courts and these articles together would seem to be the
embodiment of that demand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
context of recent Egyptian history this is a very welcome development and it will
also provide an immediate test of how seriously the new government takes its
own constitutional obligations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Two sections of the draft deal with the
State Council and the Supreme Constitutional Court independently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The State Council is explicitly made
the sole court to decide administrative disputes, thus reinforcing its role as
the guardian of the European conception of the rule of law, usually referred to
as the “rechtsstaat” (Article 181). The Supreme Constitutional Court is given
the task of deciding the constitutionality of legislation and deciding cases
that involve disagreement between judicial bodies (Article 182).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The SCC retains its right to determine
constitutionality after laws have come into effect with one exception: it must
decide on the constitutionality of draft laws governing elections at any level
within 15 days of their being presented by the president or the Chamber of
Deputies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the court has made
its prior determination on draft electoral laws it loses the right to determine
constitutionality under Article 182 (Article 184).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The history of the SCC and Egyptian
election law is too complex to go into here, but the drafters have stripped the
SCC of its power to declare elections (and elected parliaments) invalid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the court did this during the
Mubarak era they were hailed as champions by the Muslim Brothers who now decry
them for invalidating the 2011 elections on the basis of the same
jurisprudence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nominations for
appointment to the court will also now be made by a much broader group of
jurists than previously which will give the president significantly greater
latitude in choosing members of the court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The obvious question to ask in
concluding is why a committee made up largely of Islamists who decry the role
of European law in Egypt directly or indirectly have chosen to write a
constitution that is modeled in part on the French constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That much of the language is borrowed
from a constitution written under British guns is even more peculiar. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
satisfying answer would take another essay but there are two general areas that
are worth considering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first
is simply that the present drafters, like those in 1923, face a profound and
contradictory challenge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They must
find a way to make an abstract commitment to equality and democratic
participation conform to their substantive preferences to maintain particular
kinds of inequality. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The absence
of a monarchy and the presence of a deeply-rooted (even if flawed) court system
makes the challenge of writing a constitution much more complicated than in the
past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under the 1923 constitution
Egyptians did not have either “the rule of law” or a rechtsstaat in the sense
that legal scholars (including Egyptian jurists) today or then understood the
term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Mixed Courts provided
foreigners with legal remedies for government abuse of power but Egyptian
citizens could not use them and the National Courts did not have similar
authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the creation of
the State Council in 1946 and the Supreme Court in 1971, Egyptians have
acquired the rule of law and it has become a deeply rooted part of their
relationship to the state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
many of the drafters are themselves prominent jurists and because the rule of
law has now become a part of the Egyptian political landscape, this
constitution must deal with its existence and the significant jurisprudence it
has created over the last six decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The constitution appears to be an attempt to create new channels of
contact and legal discourse through institutional innovation and the
introduction of potentially constraining Islamic language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It certainly does not transform the
ulama into powerful political actors but it will give significant support to
political parties and movements whose discourse couched in terms of Islam has
hitherto stood outside the framework of the rule of law in Egypt.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The 1923 constitution was written
by the generation associated with the Nahda, a movement that proclaimed its
role to be the revival of Arab culture, religion and politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Muslim Brothers have claimed an
affiliation with the Nahda. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What they and the Salafi parties share
with many of the elites of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century (including the
British) is a sense of their tutelary mission over a morally deficient society.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is clear not only from their
political language but from much of the draft itself which takes care to
position the state as the defender of those who require help because they are
easily victimized (such as widows, orphans, and the disabled). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The constitution from which they have
borrowed so heavily provides a method for maintaining inequality through
the institutions of a tutelary regime in which moral authority is presented as
the basis for political power.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
A draft constitution claiming to
defend the rights of the disabled and to reinforce the role of the Arab-Islamic
heritage appears to be one that the most celebrated intellectual of the Nahda
in Egypt, Taha Hussein, would have disapproved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-75177815813842912862012-10-24T18:55:00.001-07:002012-10-24T19:02:44.237-07:00Drafting a Constitution: Part I of II<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Constitutions,
like revolutions, have an aura.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
like to think they are written in a refined atmosphere of principle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing of the mundane and shabby
pursuit of power attends them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Frequently
as the years roll away from the moment they are drafted it is not only possible
but indeed necessary to view them in such a light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately
real constitutions, especially those that work, must command sufficient assent
to function and that requires unpleasant political compromise about the messy
details of power at a given time and place along with principles that will last
for an age if not necessarily for all time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Americans have a tendency to forget that the same
constitution that forbade Congress to limit freedom of expression also required
states and individuals to deliver fugitive slaves to their masters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took a civil war to make a
constitution we can more comfortably read today in place of the one that was
originally written.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So,
too, the draft of the Egyptian constitution is the product of a committee
representing many points of view.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
with any document produced by a committee, the new document is not fully
coherent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No part of it is quite
as bad as that third clause of the second section of the fourth article of the
US constitution. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then
nobody is actually living in the 18<sup>th</sup> century anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not a document likely to cause
a civil war but it may prove not to be more successful than most
constitutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constitution
writing, after all, is hard to do:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>over a couple of centuries Bolivia has had 17; France has had 16.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Because
the Egyptian constitution is a long and complex document whose many articles
will have significant repercussions on public life I have found it impossible
to write one entry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What I plan
therefore is to write several entries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This, the first, will address some of the problems attendant on how the
draft has chosen to address the issue, obviously dear to many of the drafters,
of making Islamic law and values more centrally located in the Egyptian
government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My concern here is not
with how Islam and government <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">might</i></b> be connected in the abstract
but with some of the particular ways, institutional and legal, that the writers
of the current draft have chosen to address them and what their implications
could be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
draft constitution is based on a communitarian view of politics in which national
decision-making is vested primarily in the executive. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will write in another entry about the
presidential system the draft envisages. The main role of the state is to
protect a particular understanding of society as a moral community that the president
and the legislature have very broad latitude to define.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the most basic underpinning of
this vision in the constitution is of a moral community founded in Islam, the
document itself (like the Sadat constitution but unlike that of 1923 constitution)
occasionally espouses narrower and occasionally broader views of the
community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition to the
three branches of government the draft also foresees the creation of several
other autonomous bodies whose relationship to governance is only vaguely
defined and whose legal implications for the state could become extraordinarily
complex.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
relationship of the Egyptian state and the Egyptian people to Islam is spread
across many different articles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
most controversial of these is Article 68 mandating the Egyptian state to establish
women’s equality with men insofar as this does not conflict with the rulings of
Islamic law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although it is clear
that this article would profoundly affect divorce and inheritance rights of
Muslim women, its full impact will be clearer after a discussion of the other
articles.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Article 1 of the constitution
defines the Egyptian people as part of both the Arab and the Islamic communities
(ummas).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is one of many sections of the
constitution that define a relationship between the Egyptian people as a whole,
not all of whom are Muslim, Islamic community and the foundational discourse of
that community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No previous
Egyptian constitution has gone to such lengths to enunciate such a definition
and it may prove to be a cause for regret for many people, including the
Islamist political figures engaged in drafting this document. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Constitutions create rights and
they also create discursive frameworks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The 1971 constitution defined the Egyptian people as part of the Arab
people but indicated they did not form a single political body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This language is considerably more
ambiguous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It confers neither
citizenship nor the right to a political role on non-Egyptians but it also
clearly does, as later articles suggest, open a formal role for non-citizens
that many Egyptians would find troubling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At some point it will also raise the question of what role non-Muslims
could play in the interpretation of Islamic shariah.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
To the degree that a community is
defined by its commitment to a legal discourse (that is, that an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">umma</i> is defined by its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shariah</i>) the first article creates
ambiguity about the relationship of the Egyptian state to the various communities
it might represent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This obviously
creates a problem for Christians who are certainly Egyptians under the
constitution but who would not be considered part of the Islamic umma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The drafters may, like some
intellectuals in the Islamic current, see Egyptian Christians sharing a culture
saturated with Islam but this is not the language of the article itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem, as I have noted previously, is that to make
Islamic law foundational for Egyptian law and to make all Egyptians equal in
rights and responsibilities (as this document does) is to pose the question of
whether all Egyptians are equally capable of invoking or deploying the language
of Islamic shariah in arguments about law and policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many ways, this constitution poses the question more
sharply than ever before in recent history and also attempts to foreclose who
can engage in its resolution.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Article 3 provides that the principles
of Jewish, Christian and Islamic shariahs will govern the personal status laws,
religious affairs and leadership choices of those communities
respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since there is no
longer a Jewish community in Egypt, this really refers only to Christians and
Muslims both of whom will be governed by principles drawn from their own
religion in personal areas of life but who will also be governed by Islamic
foundational principles elsewhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This, of course, is what poses so sharply the question of who can discuss
what the foundational principles are and how they are to be interpreted.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Article 2 makes Islam the religion
of the state and the principles of Islamic shariah the basis of Egypt’s laws. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This disputed article reproduces
the language of the 1971 constitution as amended in 1980.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Article 2 does not stand alone,
however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It must read in
conjunction with Article 4 that makes the Azhar (Egypt’s pre-eminent Islamic
religious center) an independent Islamic institution with an undetermined
mission in regard to the global Islamic community for which the state provides
material and financial support.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The manner of choosing the Shaykh al-Azhar will be determined by law but
once chosen he cannot be removed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In any matter regarding Islamic shariah the opinion of the Council of
Higher Ulama (as a body rather than through the medium of the Shaykh al-Azhar)
must be taken into account but is not determinative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Taken together these two articles move the Azhar and its
most prominent scholars (ulama) more directly into a constitutional and
political role than has been the case for decades if not centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is no constitutional
provision, incidentally, that the Shaykh or members of the Higher Council be
Egyptian so it is possible to imagine a day when someone who is not a citizen,
but is a member of the community that includes Egyptians, can voice an
authoritative opinion on Egyptian law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Muslim Brothers and the leaders of the various Salafi movements have
demanded increased independence and autonomy for the Azhar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In many ways this article is a response
to that demand but it remains to be seen how independent of the state the Azhar
will become.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, the most prominent Shi’i authority in Iraq, was born in Iran; Mahmoud
Shahroudi, the head of Iran’s judiciary, was born in Iraq.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Recent decisions by the Supreme
Constitutional Court limited the scope of specific rulings from within the
corpus of Islamic jurisprudence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
language of this constitution appears to be designed to expand that scope.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The general phrase “principles of
Islamic law” provided earlier governments with significant latitude. The
meaning of the phrase “principles of Islamic shariah” is more fully developed
in the concluding sections of the constitution, in Article 221.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rather vague language from the
earlier constitution is there given a fuller definition: it includes
demonstrations, decisions and legal rules (often referred to as fiqh) of the
four Sunni schools of law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The expansion of the field from
which principles can be obtained coupled with the restriction of the domain of
what is to be considered Islamic in Egypt (which now excludes elements that
could be characterized as Shi’i) will enhance the role of the Azhar and its
religious officials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again,
substantively it is hard to know in advance if this will make for worse
policies but it will certainly make for a more complicated legal system, a more
problematic process of writing laws, and ultimately to the increased
politicization and bureaucratization of the religious hierarchy which will now
have many more points of contact with the political and administrative systems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, it is hard to know whether the
drafters believed themselves to be writing anodyne texts, but this language
reinforces a still small but nevertheless increasing paranoia in some circles
of Egyptian society about Shi’i Islam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the government of the country is to be run in accord with Islamic
principles those principles are themselves increasingly narrowly defined in the
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Egypt
is repeatedly defined as a democratic country which itself is described by shura,
multi-party competition and the peaceful alternation of power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shura, generally taken to mean
consultation, appears three times in the Qur’an.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has come to be a term used in Islamist discourse as an
equivalent to democracy but its general use as a constitutional term is
undefined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
Egypt is to be part of the community of Muslims the constitution also asserts
that besides Islam there are distinctly Egyptian values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The constitution thus describes the
country as a moral community to which the state and society have a
constitutional obligation: defense of its basic (but largely undefined) values<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Article 10).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These include the defense of the unity of Egypt as a
culture, civilization and language area and of its core or basic values in
regard to the family, which the constitution defines as the basic element of
society (Article 9).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The schools
acquire in this constitution an obligation to teach religion and morals as well
as to employ Arabic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While no one
can seriously argue that schools should be devoid of ethics or that the use of
national language is not a good idea, it seems useful to wonder if the constitutional
mandate in Article 52, to teach religion in the schools and ethics in the
universities, is required.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also
seems useful to wonder what will happen to schools which, by teaching in
languages other than Arabic, might be deemed to violate the constitutional
rights of the students.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in
other parts of the constitution, it is not so much that those who have drafted
this language necessarily desire such an outcome but the unexpected ways in
which constitutional texts are litigated.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
constitution guarantees freedom of belief but it only guarantees the right to
construct houses of worship to Jews, Christians and Muslims (the so-called
Heavenly Religions, Article 37).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Although Article 39 guarantees Egyptians the right to express their
thoughts and ideas, Article 38 explicitly forbids expression that is injurious
to prophets or messengers of God generally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the first time that an Egyptian constitution has
itself forbidden expression (until now only statutory law has done so).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even those who believe that
Egyptians ought to place more stringent limits on freedom of expression than
does American law might want to consider the danger of having such limitations
placed in the constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
extremely contentious issue has been Article 68 which requires the state to
advocate for women’s equality as long as it does not contravene explicit
judgments of Islam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This language
is more far-reaching than in the 1971 constitution. Women’s rights advocates
have correctly noted that the word judgments (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ahkam</i> in Arabic) is more far-reaching and more restrictive than
“principles” mentioned in Article 2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Article 2, coupled with Article 221 certainly provides a very wide range
of objections to equality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
point here is not whether Islam inherently treats women equally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is that this language provides more points
to dispute future statutory language that would further women’s rights in a
decidedly unequal society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given
the role proposed for the Azhar it is also not clear to what extent “Islamic
judgments” refer to the vast range of past statements and to what extent they
would be prospective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
the language of the constitutional article is designed to limit women’s
equality is fairly clear (regardless of what one thinks of the relevant rulings,
principles, or arguments). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deploying
the language of Islam here provides a way, otherwise unavailable within the
constitution, to limit a commitment to the equality of citizens. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are other limits on the
equal treatment of citizens but they are constructed in very different ways.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What is also clear is that the use
of the language of Islam and its principles has so far impeded but not fully
prevented women from gaining rights in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> The mobilization and political activities of activists (primarily but not entirely women) has affected Egypt, Egyptian law, and the Azhari elite.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a
slender reed but it is notable that, for example, twenty years ago the then Shaykh
al-Azhar believed that Islamic law necessitated female circumcision (or genital
mutilation).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the last decade
more recent occupants of that position have come to state that such procedures
are not required and that outlawing them is acceptable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
drafters are clearly undertaking to bring the Azhar and the Islamic religious
establishment (but not the Christian establishment) more generally into the
process of law-making and adjudication.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Whether this will prove to be a very good thing for the Azhar itself and
the religious establishment as well as for Egypt and its moral fiber is a
completely different question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is unclear what will happen to the Azhar as its Shaykh and higher ulama are
drawn into everyday legislative decisions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Clearly no decisions about family law or the status of women
can be made without eliciting an explicit opinion from the Azhar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Opinions on women’s issues or others as
well (which may or may not be formal fatwas) will no longer have the quality of
individual judgment but will become institutional statements in larger
political and administrative conflicts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those who have found the Azhar politicized in the recent past will soon
discover that it becomes even more so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the Shaykh of the Azhar is indeed to be elected by the higher ulama
from within their own ranks then it will probably return to the highly
politicized environment that dominated in the 1930s and 1940s when the King,
the conservative parties, and the Wafd all attempted to control the position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bitter battles between Shaykhs
Maraghi, Zawahiri, and Abd al-Raziq for control of the Azhar left deep scars on
the institution and on the politics of the country.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Other
sections of the constitution are likely to impact the state in regard to
Islamic law and history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Article
18 requires the state to protect not only private and communal property but also
“waqf.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Article 24 requires the
state to revive the institution of “waqf khairi” and to encourage it and
mandates the promulgation of statutory language for this purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Article 214 creates a “Supreme Waqf
Institution” to oversee the organization of private and public waqfs.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Waqf
refers to a kind of trust or endowment of property in Islamic law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian jurists in the 1930s and
1940s, notably Abderrazzak Sanhouri (the author of the civil code of 1948) had
long sought to extinguish the institution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1952 the Free Officers’ government abolished private
waqfs and nationalized public ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Reviving waqf may seem like a move to enhance the role of charitable
giving or it may appear to the constitution’s authors to be a step in the
direction of creating a self-directed Islamic society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Charitable institutions are certainly
good things, but there are questions of whether the constitution is the
appropriate mechanism to institute a particular set of public policies that
will require significant statutory innovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is especially so because the writing of the new
statutory language will necessarily require the opinion of the Azhari ulama as
will the staffing of this body.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
independent institution for safeguarding the Egyptian heritage (turath) would
appear to raise similar issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Again, the creation of institutions to safeguard Egypt’s long, rich and
deep cultural heritage that includes pre-historic, Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and
many varied Islamic aspects is reasonable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many already exist and perhaps there is a need for more, but
what is less obvious is why this should be a constitutional mandate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nor is it clear that the debate and
statutes creating such an institution will do anything other than exacerbate
existing conflicts precisely because they are now constitutionalized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given the importance placed by earlier
articles on safeguarding Egyptian culture or basic values these initiatives
seem likely to create new resources for contentions over the nature of the
Egyptian state and its relationship to society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
draft of the Egyptian constitution makes very real and important changes in the
institutional and political structures of the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because most of those writing the new
document are part of the Islamist trend in Egyptian politics they have sought
to make Islam, as they understand it, more central to the governing
institutions of the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
have done this by strengthening certain existing institutions, creating new
ones, insisting on some statutory innovations, and further defining previously
less clearly defined constitutional language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is obviously the work of secular politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Muslim Brothers and the Salafis
both believe that they will have significant influence over the choice of the
Shaykh of the Azhar and the members of its ruling council as they also believe
they will have influence over the composition of the new institutions mandated
in the constitution.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
is open to question is how good an idea it is for Egypt to create new layers of
administration and new resources for a relatively limited portion of the
population in a document that is as profoundly committed to the executive power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is much to be said for Egyptians
generally and Egyptian Muslims to debate openly about the nature of the ethical
concerns and the principles that should animate legislation and regulation in
their society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No doubt such a
debate would be animated largely by language from within the tradition of
Muslim religious thought. Whether this particular constitutional language
accomplishes that is an open question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To me it seems doubtful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One might think that there would be other forms of discussion as well in
a country which has played such a long role in the history of human society and
in which a large Christian minority continues to live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The draft does not completely foreclose such discussions but it certainly is very far from encouraging them.</div>
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Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-72040949363863388232012-09-25T13:18:00.001-07:002012-09-25T13:19:37.473-07:00The End of Innocence<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
have we learned from “The Innocence of Muslims”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As so often, too much and too little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ve learned that Muslims get enraged
when Muhammad is ridiculed, but they don’t get too enraged even though their
rage is justified.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just not so
much by the ridicule of the Prophet of Islam as by the terrible economic and
political conditions in which they live or possibly by American policies of
bombing, one-sidedly supporting Israel, or using drones to kill suspected
terrorists. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or possibly Western
Islamophobia. It's a little hard to follow everything we've learned.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We’ve
also learned that the movie is highly offensive, semi-pornographic, and has
very poor production values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Also that, until two weeks ago, the total number of people who had ever
seen it numbered less than 100.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Oh, and that it wasn’t made by Israeli or American Jews but by five
American and Egyptian Christians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One
thing we haven’t heard very much about, at least in the US and Europe, is the
context within which the attack on the US Embassy occurred.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or its possible implications for the
future of political life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And with
good reason:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if we heard more about
the context and the implications we’d also have to dispense with “the Muslims”,
“the Arabs”, and “the West” and focus a bit more sharply on particular people,
groups, and interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
surprisingly enough despite decades of intense discussion about Orientalism,
essentialism, and the need for specificity as soon as there’s violence, the
default mode is airy generalities and broad simplifications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m going to write about Egypt, not
Libya.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some day I’ll explain why
this limitation is an important theoretical position, but this isn’t the day.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So,
how exactly did it come to pass that a movie of whose very existence the world
was innocent until three weeks ago became the cause of an attack on the US
Embassy in Egypt (as well as more tragic events in Libya which—as I said—I’m not
in a position to discuss)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike
Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses”, this wasn’t the arrival of a
widely anticipated piece of artistic expression and unlike the Danish cartoons
it didn’t appear in broad daylight, unbidden perhaps, on the doorstep or at the
local tobacconist’s shop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, you
really had to go out of your way to search for this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Far out of your way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Google is of course very helpful and if you do search for “Muhammad” and
“child molester” it will return something like 85,000 items but it probably
wouldn’t have returned this film before two weeks ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So
who appears to have gone out of their way?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An Egyptian Islamist preacher, Khalid Abdallah who brought
it up on his television channel “al-Nas” is one. Abdallah hails from the far
reaches of the Salafi world which expresses more than the common prejudice
against Christians that many Egyptian Muslims share without thinking about it
very much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Abdallah’s world
Christians, a minority of about 10 percent in Egypt, are a threat to the Muslim
majority:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if not kept in their
place they will uproot Islam itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Abdallah was not alone in exploiting the existence of the previously
unknown trailer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Within days other
television shaykhs had joined in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Wagdi Ghoneim devoted an hour to the film which is available on You-Tube
after its connection to a handful of Egyptian and American Christians had
become clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beginning with an
invocation to “the pigs of the Coptic diaspora” his intervention rapidly
descended further downhill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Another religious personality, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
Ghoneim, as for most Egyptians, the revolution has been at once liberating and
threatening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s liberating
because it gave them the possibility of voicing their thoughts without anywhere
near as much censorship as in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But it’s also threatening <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>because other people also now have the same possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And one of the areas that Egyptians
have been thinking about a lot and will be thinking about more in the days to
come is very broadly described as the role of Islam and politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very specifically how will the new
constitution define the role of Islam in relation to law, what institutions (if
any) will it endow with the right of defining Islam for the state, and what
kinds of policies will governments adopt as they must implement what will also
be a constitutional provision mandating the equality of Egyptians regardless of
religion (among other enumerated categories)?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
this brings us back to Ghoneim’s fears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Since January 2011 Egypt’s Christians have been remarkably
assertive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many individuals either
ignored or broke with their own church hierarchy to demonstrate in the early
days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In May there were some
large, sustained and public demonstrations by Christians in Maspero, a
neighborhood just to the north of Tahrir Square demanding equality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In October, an armored personnel
carrier deployed to break up a protest in that same locale crushed a young
activist and a Christian, Mina Daniel, to death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many younger Muslim activists who had known Daniel from the
demonstrations in Tahrir were not only appalled but were adamant that he, as
much as Khaled Said, was a martyr of the revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Significant media coverage, moreover, attended a meeting
between the mother of Khaled Said and of Mina Daniel that was arranged after
his death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Innocent (that word
again!) as such a claim might seem, it is extremely contentious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For people like Ghoneim, it threatens
their control over the meaning of a very basic and highly charged concept.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Daniel, Said, and other victims of
repression were all martyrs—without regard to their faith—then the word assumes
a markedly secular and political meaning rather than a religious one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There have also been some
terrifying and spectacular acts of violence against Christian communities since
January 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most recent one
occurred at the beginning of August in the village of Dahshur when a fight
between a Christian tailor and one of his Muslim clients escalated into
communal violence and the entire Christian community fled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not clear exactly what the impact of these acts of mass
violence is on the larger Egyptian political landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For many (including President
Morsi whose comments on the events echoed what former President Hosny Mubarak
said about earlier outbreaks of violence in the past) they are simply
individual conflicts that spiral out of control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For others they reflect the powerful emotions of the poor,
the illiterate, and the rural or semi-rural population.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But for some people (Muslims as well as
Christians) they are disturbing on their own account and for what they show about
the inability of the Egyptian government to promote or even understand what
real equality of citizenship will mean.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They have also drawn the attention of the outside world in a powerful
and unpleasant way to one aspect of contemporary Egyptian reality that its
leaders would prefer to avoid.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Also
in the background of the conflict over “The Innocence of Muslims” is an ongoing
debate in Egypt about movies, movie stars, and the arts more generally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in the US, politicians associated with religious and
conservative causes view the film industry and the arts generally as a socially
and politically liberal elite. Just as the demonstrations over the trailer were
beginning, Shaykh Amgad Ghanim published an article in which he denounced
artists as people who think of themselves as above the law and who face no
restraint or censorship whatsoever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This will, of course,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>come
as a shock to authors, directors, and others whose works have been prevented
from appearing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This would include the late Nobel-prize
winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz whose “Children of Gebelawi” was serialized in
1959 but then banned from publication in book form (although an imported
Lebanese printing was sold). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Artists, including authors and
film-makers, are themselves concerned that a government dominated by the Muslim
Brothers will be more inclined to censor or otherwise restrict creative
activity than the late-stage Mubarak regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A recent unsatisfactory meeting between President Morsi and
a group of artists did not assuage feelings on either side and their have been
some pointed attacks on movie-makers recently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These include an earlier campaign against Basma, a popular
actress associated with the left whose maternal grandfather, Youssef Darwish,
was a well-known communist leader and a Jewish convert to Islam and who
recently married the professor and liberal politician, Amr Hamzawi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The popular comedic actor, Adel Imam,
was charged with insulting religion although ultimately vindicated on appeal
and there is currently a series of attacks on Ilham Shahine, a popular
actress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because both Shahine and
Imam supported Mubarak against the protests in early 2011 they face significant
political criticism but the legal proceedings against Imam and the assaults on
Shahine’s reputation are of a very different character.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Even if we were to accept, as I
shall shortly argue we should not, that all Muslim Egyptians were enraged to
the point of violence not by the film but by mere knowledge that it existed,
why should Abdellah and Ghoneim have spent so much time bringing the matter to
their attention now?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The answer, I think, lies in
another extremely contentious issue that is about to be brought up for public
debate and decision:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the language
of the new constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
committee of 100, of whom a majority politically are from the MB and various
Salafi political but which includes judges, legal scholars and a handful of
well-known political figures, is about to present the draft of a new
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new constitution
will define the powers of the various branches of government, the rights of
citizens, and the principles of governance of the second republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Salafi and MB delegates are
committed to writing their particular (and not completely identical) visions of
Islam into the constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
While drafts of various portions of
the new constitution have been leaked on occasion, the committee has refrained
either from publicizing its working document or the discussions that its
members are having with each other or with members of the public they invite to
various sub-committee meetings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus, no one now knows what the language of the new document will be nor
does the committee have any idea what a broad range of Egyptians might think
about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the committee
intends obviously is to present the Egyptian people with a document that can be
briefly discussed (perhaps for 6 weeks) but which will then be voted up or down
in a referendum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a consequence
the constitution itself will not emerge from a national public dialogue but in
all likelihood will simply be accepted as given.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Although it is common to think that
the major concern of the Islamists is the language of the second article of the
old constitution, making the principles of Islamic sharia the source of
legislation, their understanding of Islam, the nature of governance, and the
relationship between society and the state affects many articles of the new
constitution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One such issue is
the legitimacy of religious pluralism in Egypt beyond Sunni Islam, Christianity
and a nod in the direction of Judaism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is quite possible that the new constitution will eliminate the
possibility of public sites for worship for Bahai’s, Shi’i Muslims, and any who
are not monotheists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A related
issue is whether the new constitution will more clearly define the personal
status of Egyptians (marriage, divorce, inheritance) as a matter of religious
law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another issue is whether the
new constitution will assert the primacy of family obligations for women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Another important issue will be
freedom of speech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Insulting the
president is, for example, a crime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>President Morsi recently and to widespread acclaim eliminated preventive
detention in this area but he did not de-criminalize it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anyone convicted of insulting the
president can still be imprisoned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Egyptian law also criminalizes a variety of other forms of expression,
including several vaguely defined acts such as “maligning religion” and
“inciting religious disorder” (which need not include violence).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These laws are not equally applied so
that Khaled Abdellah’s destruction of a Bible in front of the US Embassy did
not provoke the same legal (or political or social) response as would the
destruction of a Quran.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
Abdellah has recently been charged with the crime of religious defamation may
at least have the virtue of proposing equality of treatment but it still leaves
open how restrictive the constitutional and statutory language about speech
will be.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
It is hard to avoid noticing that
the protests have had a significant impact on Egypt itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The draft language of the constitution
leaked in mid-August had considerably stronger limitations on censorship and
restriction of publication than the drafts that appeared in mid-September after
the protests.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
But these laws themselves, which
are enabled by self-limiting language of the relevant constitutional
provisions, are also political tools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One could argue endlessly their relationship to the Islamic sharia of
the past, but their connection to political censorship in the present and the
use of the legal system to threaten opponents of the Islamist current are more
clear.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The Islamist movements have often
claimed that Islam is under threat in Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One way they have sought to reinforce their vision of Islam
in society is empowering the Azhar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Islamist movements, including the MB and the Salafis, have proposed
freeing the Azhar from state control, and allowing its senior religious
professors to elect the head of the vast religious and educational
establishment that is also “the Azhar.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This has gone hand in hand with proposals floating around since 2007 to
make the religious leaders of the Azhar equivalent, at least symbolically if
not practically, to the Supreme Constitutional Court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB, for many reasons, has begun to back away from this
proposal but the Salafi movements (who also impact a significant section of the
MB leaders and members) have not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Basically
they believe they could either win or at least powerfully affect such
elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Lastly, of course, because the
language of the new constitution is so clearly associated with the political
influence of the MB and the Salafi parties, they will be as anxious to win an
endorsement as overwhelming as the 77% they achieved in the March 2011
constitutional referendum or the large majority of seats they won in the
parliamentary elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One thing
they will want to avoid is the slim (51%) margin of victory that brought Morsi
himself to the presidency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Electoral politics clearly requires
compromise and coalition but it also requires rallying the base.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And one lesson of the last two years in
Egypt is that among the hottest of buttons is the claim that Islam is under
threat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A significant portion of
the “yes” vote in the March 2011 referendum was based on the claim that a “no”
vote would allow the secularists, atheists and Christians to eliminate Article
2 and, along with it, the role of Islam in public life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar claims were certainly made in
the parliamentary elections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During
the presidential election it was harder to deploy this argument because it
risked alienating other voters who Morsi needed to court.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the “The Innocence of Muslims”
provided the possibility of deploying the discourse of anger and fear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For all these reasons and more it
is a mistake to see the protests around the US Embassy as the untrammeled and
spontaneous emanation of mass anger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
This becomes more clear when, most
surprising of all the MB and their political party, the FJP, backed off two
weeks ago at the possibility of broadening and deepening the demonstrations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At one point it looked as if they were
going to call for a massive Friday march (a “millioniyya”) but in the end they
didn’t. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And indeed with their
unwillingness to underwrite institutionally the protests they—unlike the
massive marches of February 2011—subsided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some observers believe this was evidence of the moderation
of the MB; others perhaps that President Barack Obama’s stern warning to
President Morsi as well as his comment that Egypt was no longer an ally, at
least made for a responsible decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Morsi is subject to many pressures and both of these explanations may
get at a part of the truth. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I want to propose a slightly
different possibility, however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are a set of politically influential preachers such as Abdallah
and Ghoneim who cannot influence Egyptian politics through their role in
parties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have discovered, as
have ideological leaders elsewhere in the world, that their influence is
manifest by mobilizing even small numbers of activists for direct
confrontation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This may involve
physical violence but it may also be primarily symbolic violence (blockades of
abortion clinics in the US come immediately to mind).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Some political leaders welcome this
kind of support but others realize that it limits their own freedom of action
in the formal political realm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What I want to suggest is that the MB/FJP and President Morsi realized a
massive demonstration against the film and the American embassy would probably
escape their control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would
have allowed a vocal and undisciplined group of activists on the institutional fringes
of politics to dominate the public discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And that, in turn, would make it difficult both to deal with
the US but also to bring home whatever compromises over the constitution the
committee writing it has made.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
constitution will include an article mandating the equality of all Egyptians
with regard to religion and it appears that it will allow Christians greater
freedom to build houses of worship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Passing the political initiative to Ghoneim, Abdellah, and others like
them is not going to make that easier.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sober reflection may also have
suggested to the MB that allowing riots to shape the direction of politics will
not be in their long-term interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Students of Indian politics, such as my former colleague Paul Brass,
have noted that riots there are not spontaneous affairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can be murderously destructive and
politically divisive but when they happen it is because an entire apparatus to
deploy them has been activated by government officials or political
leaders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian social and
political life is likely to be difficult enough without encouraging the growth
of regularly constituted mechanisms for rioting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The events in the wake of film were suggestive that there
are those who would be pleased to establish such mechanisms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That a group of distinctively
Salafi-bearded police officers showed up in uniform to demonstrate at the
embassy against the film was indicative of how these kinds of protests can further
undermine the already-eroded institutions of public order.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
If I have insisted on the
relatively small number of demonstrators at the US Embassy, it is not to
diminish the degree to which most Egyptians and especially Egyptian Muslims
were angered by the film trailer, whether they saw it or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film was designed to be offensive
by people who have a fairly clear idea of what Muslims would find
offensive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Yet, if most Egyptians found the
film offensive, it is worth noting how many other protests occurred at the same
time that had nothing to do with the film and whose leaders appeared to have
very little inclination to join it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Students at Nile University, on the outskirts of Greater Cairo, were also
protesting during that week. Baton-wielding police broke up their protest,
unlike the one at the US Embassy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Transport workers in Cairo were on strike and in Asyut demonstrators cut
the train line to Cairo for five hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There were, in short, a multitude of other strikes, protests and
demonstrations at the same time as the fracas at the US Embassy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The point about other protests is
not that the events at the Embassy didn’t matter or that it was a side-show
while the real politics of economic interest or local conflict were
overshadowed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Quite the
contrary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Egypt today, and for
a very long time to come, there is intense conflict over the national political
agenda, over the nature of public discourse, and to define the basic
institutions of the state. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
These are all challenges that
President Morsi, his party, and his movement must face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The generals of the armed forces who he
shouldered aside must be pleased that they no longer do.</div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-91046319910067381412012-08-17T16:40:00.000-07:002012-08-17T16:40:40.741-07:00The Morsi "coup": Coup d'etat, coup de grace or coup de theatre?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi’s
surprised his country and the world by sacking the two top military leaders who
had effectively ruled since the resignation of former president Hosny Mubarak
in February 2011. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the same time
he announced their replacements, annulled the amended constitutional
declaration the same generals had issued less than two months ago to limit his
authority, and took for himself the powers they had granted themselves in March
2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi, frequently derided
during and after the presidential election, as a weak leader is now more
frequently described as the leader of a “counter-coup” who has established
himself as the undisputed leader of a new Islamist authoritarianism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no doubt that Morsi is now the
undisputed ruler of Egypt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
since the pharaohs has any Egyptian ruler had so much power. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least in theory.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Before
addressing the complicated and opaque politics of Morsi’s decision it is worth
spending a bit of time on Morsi’s own situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi was nominated for the presidency by the Freedom and
Justice party when it became clear that its preferred candidate, Khairat
Shater, would be ineligible to run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Morsi had long been in Shater’s shadow and, despite his doctoral degree
from the University of Southern California and his appointment at Cal State
Northridge, has usually been presented in the media as an unimaginative
drudge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps he is, but
political history is littered with “spare tires” such as Morsi who by a train
of accidents came to power and turned out to be surprisingly more effective
than the more qualified person whose place they were holding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lyndon Johnson accomplished more
for social equity and civil rights than John F. Kennedy ever would or could
have; Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky at nearly every turn; and Anwar Sadat was
widely derided in the days after Nasser’s death as an ineffective place-holder
who would be easily managed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
it is a mistake to underestimate Morsi’s abilities and equally wrong to
overestimate him and the Muslim Brothers, it may be an even larger mistake to
underestimate the effect of being president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt being president magically turns political leaders
into pragmatic liberals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the
contrary I suspect it magnifies whatever sense they have of their own importance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Days after assuming office Morsi
indicated he wanted to pray at the Azhar mosque.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Six months or six years ago he would, at best, have been an
inconspicuous figure in the back of the hall, but in June he was whisked with a
special presidential security entourage to pray in the front row with senior
Azhari shaykhs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt he would
have had the Saudi Embassy’s email address on his computer when he was a
professor at Northridge; now he is the guest of King Abdullah at a summit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No doubt, Professor Morsi remains (in
his heart) a good Brother and a devout Muslim, but President Morsi does not
seem to have invited either Brother Shater or Supreme Guide Badi’ to the
presidential palace for strategy discussions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From here on
out if he disagrees with them or anyone else I’m sure there will be an ample
supply of sycophants to tell him exactly how smart he is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of them, in fact, appears to have
been re-appointed editor of a state-owned newspaper after spending a time in
professional purgatory for having been as effusive about Mubarak as he has
recently become about Morsi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None
of this is Morsi’s choice, but neither politicians nor professors are known for
their modesty.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>At
the time of his election Morsi created a website (in English as well as Arabic)
called the Morsi Meter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s been
ticking since he took the oath of office and it lists 64 promises he planned to
keep by the end of his first 100 days in office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The promises are all good government promises designed to
affect ordinary Egyptians’ access to food, fuel, transportation, security, and
cleanliness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As of today, 47 days
after his inauguration, he has by his own estimate unambiguously achieved one
goal:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>raising public awareness
about the need for public cleanliness and why it’s sinful to throw garbage in
the street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Until
last weekend it was easy to make fun of the Morsi Meter and the meager
accomplishments his government could claim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was doubly
so given that the goals he proposed were themselves quite modest in a country
experiencing ongoing shortages of diesel fuel, electricity, butane gas and
cylinders as well as paid employment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A recent widely circulated cartoon, for example,
showed a donkey hauling Metro cars because the Cairo underground has had
trouble operating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amusing as that
image may be, in a tragic incident last week a young mother was killed when she
exited a stalled train underground and was killed while walking to a nearby
station.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
late July Morsi was a weak and beleaguered president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF had issued a supplementary constitution before he was
elected president that severely limited his power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition, SCAF had dismissed the Muslim Brother dominated
parliament in the wake of a decision by the Supreme Constitutional Court that
it had been elected unconstitutionally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Morsi had attempted, through a presidential decree, to recall parliament
to session but was rebuffed in this attempt by the Supreme Court and SCAF.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A riot in Dahshur, a town to the south
and west of Cairo famous for the “Bent Pyramid”, had ended when the terrified
Coptic community left en masse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
the police were unable to prevent the outbreak of violence there (and indeed in
most of Egypt’s impoverished communities no matter what the causes or
consequences) coupled with Morsi’s belittling of the sectarian dimensions of
the conflict provided a sense of a president adrift.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a growing sense that the state was increasingly
debilitated since the armed forces could not respond to criminal incidents or
local unrest and the government lacked the authority or the will to
intervene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
August 8 attack on an Egyptian border outpost in the Sinai by militants who
killed 16 soldiers and were themselves killed as they attempted to drive commandeered
vehicles into Israel did not immediately seem to be the key to unlocking the
frozen domestic situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi
and Field Marshall Tantawi visited the area and Morsi condemned the attack as
did the Hamas leaders in Gaza who are ideologically and politically close to
the Muslim Brothers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the Nile
Valley and the Delta have experienced a security deficit since the revolution,
Sinai may be said to have slipped largely away from routine government
control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under Mubarak Northern
Sinai was left to its own devices while the south saw a kind of uneven
development of tourism which left many local people adrift.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With the withdrawal of troops after the
initial days of the revolution and the collapse of the police the north has
become unstable as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the
revolution, religious sites have been destroyed, soldiers have been attacked,
tourists have been kidnapped and the pipeline carrying natural gas to Israel
and Jordan has been blown up dozens of times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Morsi
called a meeting of the National Defense Council which he chaired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We don’t know just what happened at
that meeting between Morsi and the members of the SCAF, but one report that
Sami Enan would be appointed Minister of Defense appears in hindsight to have
been wildly inaccurate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi must
have already had some sense of disagreements between Tantawi, Anan, Roweini on
the one hand and Abd al-Fattah Sisi and Sidky Subhi but they may also have
emerged more clearly in these meetings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Morsi later removed the governor of North Sinai and the head of General
Intelligence General Murad Muwafi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Muwafi claimed to have had prior knowledge of the attack but did not
move decisively to prevent it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Following
Muwafi’s removal, Tantawi planned a funeral for the slain border guards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi refused, at more or less the last
minute to attend the funeral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At
the time he claimed his presence would disrupt it but in the days since his
supporters have reported a different version.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have improbably claimed that SCAF had planned to
assassinate Morsi had he attended the funeral so as to overthrow the elected
government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This information they
say was passed on to them from sources in military intelligence close to the
MB.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether that information first
passed before the eyes of the present Defense Minister who then headed that
service we cannot say.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
these claims reflect, not unlike similar ones voiced by at least one leader of
the MB that Israeli intelligence was behind the raids, is more likely the high
level of suspicion the MB leadership had of the military.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite having won a remarkable
parliamentary victory the MB still see themselves as a beleaguered and
threatened minority. Morsi’s peculiar behavior in Tahrir Square at his public
inauguration when he opened his jacket to show that he was not wearing a
bullet-proof vest is another example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Egyptians
sometimes speak of the events of the last week as the end of the 1952 regime,
but it might be more accurate to say it is the end of the 1954 regime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>True enough the Free Officers came to
power in 1952, but it was not until 1954 that the younger officers ousted
General Mohammed Naguib and barred the door to any return to parliamentary
government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their attack on the MB
intensified after an assassination attempt (one in which real bullets were
fired) on Nasser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
last week provided an almost perfect narrative complement to the events of
1954.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A rumored assassination
attempt against an elected president in the wake of a failure by the military
to protect the country’s borders provides the fitting end to the regime brought
to power by a failed assassination attempt of a young army officer who came to
power in the wake of the failure of the old monarchy to safeguard the country’s
international interests.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
problem with the perfect storybook ending is that most of the structure of the
old regime remains in place and that what has changed most recently is the
transformation of the jerry-rigged institutional structure created for the
post-Mubarak transition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Sherif
Younis has reminded us recently in a lengthy study of Nasserism the 1952 regime
issued from a military coup accomplished by the Free Officers’ Movement made up
of a tiny minority of primarily junior officers acting illegally and
unofficially; on taking power they formed the Revolutionary Command Council
which did rule; in July 1956 the RCC dissolved itself as Nasser assumed the
presidency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dictatorship that
Nasser established was real and recruitment to its top positions came through
the military and well into the Mubarak era the Ministry of Defense and Military
Intelligence were the keys to regime stability and survival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Governance was not, however, in the
hands of the army as a hierarchical establishment and succession to the
presidency invariably came through nominally civilian mechanisms (both Sadat
and Mubarak were incumbent vice-presidents when their predecessor died).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike the last 18 months
the formal high command of the army between 1952 and 1956 did not routinely
meet, make decisions, and issue communiqués.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Invoking SCAF to be used as a
mechanism through which the army’s general staff could rule the country was an innovative
anomaly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We still have no idea
exactly how the decision was made and we have assumed, because it placed
authority in the hands of the highest-ranking officers that, it was an
instrument of the army hierarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This may well be true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
the example of 1952 and the conflict between Nasser and Naguib suggests a
possibility worth at least considering:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>that the most senior officers had significantly less authority than they
may have believed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF nevertheless, unlike the Free
Officers Movement issued from and represented the Armed Forces as a
hierarchical institution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We know
remarkably little about their thinking, however.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Judging by a widely circulated
paper General Sedky Sobhy wrote when he was a student at the US Army War
College, his generation may have a more academically inspired vision of the
world and one more attuned to the exigencies of the international relations
than was the case with either Tantawy or Nasser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The paper is primarily a recitation of commonplaces since
Sobhy is paid to run a large hierarchical military organization not to write
sparkling geopolitical commentary for the delectation of elite academics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What matters is not the absence of
original thought but what particular banalities seem to animate Sobhy’s world
view. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recent commentary has
focused exclusively on his critique of the US relationship with Israel. What it
reveals about Sobhy’s views on democratization are more important: “Although
increased democratization of Arab regimes [among which, writing in 2005, he
included mentioned Saudi Arabia and Egypt] must be handled carefully so that in
and of itself it does result in the undesirable state of political and social
instability….the initiation and implementation of democratic processes in the
Middle East Arab countries must still be based on the premise of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">strong central governments</i> [italics in
original].” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sobhy never defines
what a democracy (or successful democratic project in the post-modern inflected
language of social science he seems to prefer) would look like.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does not seem much of a stretch,
given his examples, to think that it is mainly a question of routine and
relatively fair elections through which a powerful governing majority is
legitimated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Sobhy’s paper reveals the same concerns
commonly voiced by SCAF (and occasionally ridiculed) during the last 18 months:
the danger that foreign interests, or hidden hands as they were frequently
called, would use the transition process to weaken the central state and even
fragment the Egyptian territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
Sobhy one important measure of the effectiveness of the central state is the
presence of radical or violent Islamists operating freely on its territory
(rather than, say, the levels of participation in government or the level of
economic growth which might be more important for analysts from non-military
institutions).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The new defense minister is
Abdelfattah Al-Sissi from whom we have no convenient recently written position
papers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Variously described as a
“closet” Muslim Brother and a well-known figure in Washington, Al-Sissi evokes much
the same response as did Omar Suleiman who he succeeded as head of military
intelligence in the early days of the revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the man who presumably knows everyone’s secrets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He may also, as has been true of many
intelligence chiefs, have been aware of the promise and danger of
democratization as an electoral process set out in Sobhy’s paper: the value of
electoral legitimacy set against the danger of a loss of central
authority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Seen in this context, Morsi’s
decisions a week ago may be placed in a somewhat different context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A significant number of slightly junior
officers may have felt that the task of SCAF had largely been completed and
that it was time to end the increasingly cumbersome and anomalous situation
that had emerged in February 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The events in Sinai could easily be read (as they probably are in Tel
Aviv and Washington as well) as symptomatic of the loss of control over the
national territory by the central state as the government and the army
struggled over the nature of power and political institutions in the Second
Republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What I am suggesting is in line
with those who see Morsi’s dismissal of Tantawi and Enan as a decision made
with (and probably by) SCAF itself or at least a significant set of officers
within it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ease with which
Tantawi and Enan accepted their dismissal, the absence of any significant measures
(such as an armed guard) to ensure that they would comply with Morsi’s order,
and the orderly nature of the changes in the composition of the general staff
all suggest that the Armed Forces not only acquiesced in but largely welcomed
this change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Two possible solutions were to
transform the improvisation we call SCAF into open military rule or to cede
power to an elected civilian government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tantawi and Anan may have
been willing to continue the SCAF process but almost no one else, including
evidently a significant fraction of the senior officer corps, wanted to and it
was clearly well outside the historical norm of Egyptian experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>SCAF introduced some remarkable
innovations that, at least formally, went well beyond anything in earlier
Egyptian practice: placing permanent legislative authority in the hands of the
executive as well as giving the executive the power to write extensive
constitutional texts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
absence of a regularly constituted public authority these powers had to fall to
someone and when SCAF let them go they clearly had to go to Morsi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Morsi’s presidency has therefore
gained its power from what I take to be the decision by the generals to place
order and the integrity of the central state over the ephemeral pleasures of
continuing to affect the institutional and political make-up of the new
republic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The generals can now be
assured that a stable, legitimate and powerful constitutional order is soon to
be constitutionally founded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
was, I argued in early 2011, what the generals saw as their primary task,.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the same task that led them, in
the midst of massive demonstrations to seize power and it has largely been
accomplished, allowing them to give it up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That it has been accomplished with the MB/FJP assuming political
authority and without a liberal democracy being put into place is not likely to
be or to have been a major concern of theirs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What they cannot have failed to notice is that the freely
elected Morsi whose legitimacy presumably allowed him to displace two of their
senior commanders on his own has also immediately moved to increase the
salaries of the soldiers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Electoral democracy, Sobhi and Sissi have realized during their stay at
the US War College in Carlisle, is not necessarily a bad thing at all for
military budgets.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
What this means for the future is,
as everyone realizes, uncertain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The dominant view seems to be that the MB/FJP will now, through Morsi,
consolidate its hold over the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I would like to suggest the opposite: Morsi will now, through the MB/FJP
consolidate his own power and that of the existing institutions of the
state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
One remarkable thing that Morsi did
not do after ousting Tantawi and Enan and issuing a constitutional declaration
of his own was to re-convene parliament.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This would be an inexplicable oversight if he were acting as an agent of
the MB/FJP with unrestricted powers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rather than acquiring legislative power he could have restored the
elected legislative authority in which, as is well known, Islamists had an
overwhelming majority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps, in a bit of concern with legality, he decided to defer to the
Supreme Constitutional Court which has ruled the legislature unconstitutionally
elected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or perhaps, having just
taken on the Armed Forces and won he was intimidated by the justices of the SCC
who insisted that he take the oath of office before them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is another possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi acquired his legislative powers
from SCAF and, if I and others are correct, with the assistance of SCAF.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If SCAF was indeed concerned with the
strength of the central government which in Egypt has invariably been
associated with the executive (under the monarchy and during the First
Republic), they might have preferred not to bring a parliament back into
session.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially an elected
parliament widely seen during its brief tenure as divided, weak, and
incompetent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Morsi is certainly an Islamist and
he was long a member of the MB as well as the head of its political wing, the
FJP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is possible, however, the
SCAF speaking for the Armed Forces as an institution was willing to cede power
to Morsi and the presidency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
to the MB or the FJP and not to the parliamentary system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But to Morsi himself acting as the
elected president.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Morsi, who has
chosen to address the public frequently from mosques, is still an Islamist and the
Islamist project has nothing to fear from him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recruitment to high levels of government has probably gained
a new channel and a new social base:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>members of Islamist movements from the professional elites as well as
through the military.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, as I
will address in my next post, the role of the MB and the FJP as organizations
may not be so clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The MB/FJP may
very hold a larger majority in the next parliament in the last but they will do
so as the president’s party not as an independent political organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The current MB and FJP leadership may
yet some to regret his election and the Salafis whose disdain for hierarchical
organization may regret it even more.</div>
</div>
Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-82955509730825655332012-07-09T23:12:00.004-07:002012-07-12T07:47:06.190-07:00Political Conflict and Legal Maneuvering<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In
the wake of Mohammad Morsi’s assumption of the Egyptian presidency, Egyptian
politics suddenly became clear. It
was obvious the Muslim Brothers decisively took charge of Egyptian politics and
it was only a matter of time before they gained control over the Army. Except of course to the people to whom
it was equally obvious that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces took
control and it’s only a matter of time until Morsi and the Muslim Brothers are
out of power and back on the streets. And the MB and SCAF have made a deal. Or perhaps not. But what the events of the last couple
of days show is that after a year and a half of tumultuous politics in Egypt
nothing is really settled. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The January 25 uprising brought
into the open profound social and economic cleavages and conflicts and the
elections since have brought into the open some equally profound conflicts
between political organizations.
What the so-called transitional period, and especially the events of the
last two months have brought into the open, are the open institutional
conflicts which have yet to be resolved.
These institutional conflicts range from conflicts between the different
branches of government to conflicts between state organizations and between
institutions of governance and those in civil society. Most of the discussion about Egyptian
politics for the last year and a half has been about only the last of those
conflicts which encompasses but is not limited to the struggle for power
between the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brothers. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Egypt
is, as the sociologist Hania Sholkamy pointed out several weeks ago, a country
of institutions. This is so
obviously true that its importance tends, as she argued, to escape most
observers. Unlike Libya where the
Qaddafi regime spent 40 years diminishing if not eliminating them or Syria
where they are largely subordinate to the leader, Egypt has distinct, active,
and in many cases surprisingly effective institutions. The Egyptian Army is one such institution
as commentators pointed out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ad nauseam</i>
in February 2011 to explain why the Egyptian Armed Forces were supposedly so
much friendlier to democratic transition than their Syrian or Yemeni
counterparts. The Egyptian
presidency is another such institution. It is easy to forget that one of the remarkable features of
Egyptian governance over the last 60 years was the institutionalization of
presidential authoritarianism which long outlasted its founder, Gamal Abdel
Nasser who died 40 years ago. The
Azhar is another much older institution as is the state university system, for all
its many flaws including enormous size, over-great centralization, and
declining quality. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
There is a temptation, plausible if
resistible, to call the judiciary the crown jewel of Egyptian
institutions. Certainly the
Egyptian judiciary and especially its highest bodies (the SCC, the Supreme
Administrative Court and the Court of Cassation) have well trained personnel,
command significant respect, and play remarkably independent if occasionally
conflicting roles. The judiciary,
like the Azhar and the university system, have had moments of grandeur over the
last century and have on occasion been staffed by individuals of real, and even
universally acclaimed, brilliance as well as significant competence. They have also had moments of
profound mediocrity and personnel whose corrupt behavior, individual
idiosyncrasy, or simple subservience have been embarrassing and destructive.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The two primary contenders for
power at the moment, the military and the Muslim Brothers have each begun to
legitimate their authority by claiming to uphold the law rather than transform
it through revolutionary action.
SCAF, which seized power during the massive demonstrations of February
2011, has long claimed to be merely guiding Egypt toward a democratic
order. That its seizure of power
was unconstitutional, that it has written constitutional declarations at will,
and that it is a largely unconstrained power is a reality it prefers
to soften by claiming merely to protect legally constituted authority. The MB, a highly disciplined cadre
organization, whose leaders more than occasionally evince a devotion to
reforming society as the embodiment of the Egyptian conscience expressed
through devotion to shariah, have also preferred to deploy the language of
respect for law as well as order. For the MB, however, the source of law is, not surprisingly, popular sovereignty manifested in the electoral process that has brought them to the presidency and the legislature.</div>
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</div>
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The
problem with thinking of Egyptian politics as a two-party game is that there
are more than two actors. In the
last 18 months, for example, the judiciary has become more institutionally more
prominent in politics and the courts and the legal system have increasingly
become areas within which and about which intense political conflict
occurs. It may be stretching a
point to say that the judiciary have emerged as the real contenders and perhaps
also as winners over the last 18 months. It is certainly
no overstatement to say that, for now, the MB, SCAF, and many politically
influential individuals and parties seek to clothe themselves in the garments
of legality. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The most recent conflict over
legality and the role of the courts began in mid-June when the Supreme
Constitutional Court decided that the rules governing the election of
individuals to the national parliament last winter violated the constitution. Individual candidates constituted
one-third of the parliament and the court had no evident problem with members
elected by proportional representation.
In response to the ruling SCAF, acting in its capacity as the country’s
executive authority, dissolved the parliament and took back for itself the
legislative power that it had ceded when the legislature took office. In the 1990s the Mubarak
government had dissolved parliament and held new elections in response to
similar SCC rulings. Many
jurists and attorneys had expected such a ruling from the moment the electoral law was written in 2011 (including the famous
whistle-blowing judge, Noha al-Zeiny, whose revelations about electoral fraud
in 2005 in Damanhour were instrumental in court rulings at the time) but the
rapidity with which the court reached its decision was a surprise. The Islamist majority in the parliament
and the courts have been on a collision course for months, notably over the
issue of judicial review. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Dissolving the parliament where the
MB held effectively a majority of the seats eliminated their institutional
political base in government. It
did not eliminate their membership nor their broader electoral base. The dissolution occurred just as the
second round of voting in the presidential election was held. In the first round, the FJP had seen a marked diminution of the electoral support that provided its earlier overwhelming parliamentary success. Morsi narrowly won the presidency
with a campaign that promised, in 100 days, to solve 64 of Egypt’s basic
problems with food, traffic, energy and security. The calendar is moving but none of the problems identified
on his “Morsi-meter” website have been addressed. Instead of addressing routine problems of governance, he has
chosen to confront SCAF, the SCC, and at least half the country over
presidential authority and the distribution of power across government
institutions. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
judiciary and the executive are engaged at every level from the simplest to the
most complex. When the Freedom and
Justice party/MB candidate Muhammad Morsi narrowly won the presidency, Farouq
Sultan the SCC chief justice announced his victory. Sultan was a controversial appointment to the SCC because he
had spent much of his career in the military and state security courts. As head of the SCC he was also head of
the Presidential Election Commission.
He reached mandatory retirement last week and received an official
farewell from Morsi as president.
Because parliament had been dissolved, Morsi was required to take the
oath of office before Sultan and the SCC.
Morsi was extremely unwilling to take the oath before the court and at
one point, Justice Tahany El-Gebali, publicly branded refusal an act of
treason. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Morsi’s
powers as president were limited by a revised version of the Constitutional
Declaration issued June 18.
The limitations are real but Morsi retains significant authority as
president; not least of these is the power to revoke prior presidential decrees
as well as the power to appoint government ministers and presumably at some
point members of the SCC. He also
has the power to call parliament into session and dissolve it. It was a combination of these
authorities that Morsi invoked last week.
Acting as president he revoked the SCAF decree that had dissolved
parliament and acting in a different capacity as president he convened
parliament. Both of these acts are
within his authority and neither explicitly contravenes the SCC’s ruling on the
parliamentary election. When
performed together, however, the overall effect is a striking challenge to the
SCC, SCAF, and the rule of law.
And, as so often in the last 18 months, it is done explicitly when
Islamists and others have clashed, the Islamists have plausibly claimed to be
acting on behalf of the sovereign authority of the democratic majority.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Morsi’s decision to convoke the
parliament challenges the SCC for obvious reasons but the challenge to SCAF is
not merely the revocation of their prior edict. It also challenges their claim to have regained legislative
authority. And it implicitly
reverses any claim that the acts of the People’s Assembly and the Shoura
Council were invalid. The most
important of these acts was the choice of a constituent assembly to write a new
constitution.</div>
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</div>
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That
Egypt is politically divided and has become more so over the last 18 months is
no secret. More than 75 percent of
Egyptians voted to approve the constitutional amendments in March 2011 which
led the Muslim Brothers and Salafi political activists to claim the majority of
the country was squarely behind them.
Since that referendum the Salafis have gained political clout at the
expense of the Muslim Brothers and most recently the presidential candidate,
Mohammad Morsi, they jointly backed in a run-off won barely more than 51
percent of the vote against a former air force general and old regime Prime
Minister. </div>
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<br /></div>
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There
have been attempts to diminish the perception that political conflict is
widespread by claiming that former general Ahmed Shafiq, had only limited
support. Mapping the electoral
outcome, however, shows a very clear geographical core of about a third of the
country, extending from Cairo north nearly to the Mediterranean coast, in which
Shafiq won consistent majorities.
Morsi’s narrow victory came from the area to the south of Cairo, and a
belt of provinces around the Shafiq core.
Looking at the map produced by Eric Schewe linked below it is very clear
that the vote for Shafiq was neither geographically nor socially narrow.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ericschewe.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/egypt-presidential-election-2012-delta-map-small.jpg" target="_blank">Egypt elections map</a></div>
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</div>
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<br /></div>
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Besides
geography, this division of the country implies that the now-dissolved National
Democratic party, the governing party from its creation by President Anwar
Sadat in the 1970s until 2011, has survived the revolution. Whether its rebirth
is solely the result of its own efforts or has been aided by other forces, such
as the Wafd party, is hard to tell.
But the results do suggest that just as with the communist parties in
Eastern Europe (not to mention the Italian Christian Democrats, the Japanese
Liberal Democrats, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico) a party
that linked patronage and governance for several generations will not go
quietly extinct. It may take a
year or it make take a decade but short of more extreme legal repression
against the members they will return to compete for power sooner or later. Thirty years of political repression
obviously did not obliterate the Wafd, the party that dominated Egyptian
politics from 1919 until 1952. A
shadow of pre-Nasser self, it was still the largest non-Islamist party in the
now-dissolved parliament.</div>
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<br /></div>
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For
the first time in 60 years therefore Egypt has open and persistent political conflict
reflected geographically as well as institutionally and socially. Whether future elections are
based on individual candidacies or proportional representation they will
continue to be based on local constituencies and will therefore reflect the
geographical distribution of political difference. I will return to this point at the end but its political
implications are apparent: politics
will be local. </div>
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<br /></div>
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In
modern states the legislature is the representative branch in name and in
practice. The legislature reflects
more closely than the executive or the judiciary the opinions, prejudices, and even
the appearance of the citizens at large.
Legislators rarely enter office with the extensive education or
socialization that characterizes the judiciary and they are invariably more
connected to the demands and needs of constituents than any president or prime
minister. The head of state may
represent the people in foreign affairs but the legislature embodies popular
sovereignty. The MB has relied on
the language of democracy, revolution, and popular sovereignty to buttress its claims to authority. In the process its supporters have claimed that the SCC is a collection of corrupt remnants of the old regime. There is a heavy irony in this because it was an SCC ruling in the 1980s that forced the Mubarak government to allow individual candidates to run which was one way for the MB to elect parliamentarians before 2011.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The 2011 constitutional referendum
and declaration endowed the legislature to be elected with one primary
task: choosing a constituent
assembly to write a new constitution.
The language conferring this task placed it simply and absolutely in the
authority of the legislature. Islamist legislators (in this case the
MB and the Salafi parties) held an absolute majority and nominated themselves
as a majority for the assembly.
The bulk of the non-Islamist members of the Assembly withdrew and there
were significant protests.
The assembly majority had deployed its absolute prerogative to dominate
the writing of a new constitution to the dissatisfaction of many other
political forces and institutions:
the Azhar, the Church, the secular liberals, and ultimately the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The military, of course, had the
power to intervene and set aside the constituent assembly and perhaps the
generals discussed the possibility.
They could not have relished reversing so obviously their promise to
return political authority to an elected government in a document they
themselves had written and for which they had gained national approval. Their earlier attempts to shape the
constitution in the socalled “Selmi Document” presented by former Deputy Prime
Minister Ali El-Selmi had already been formally rejected by the MB backed up by
massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square.
Egypt appeared to be in a classical political confrontation
characteristic of revolutionary dual power. The legislature and its majority in early 2012 had chosen to
use its political power to impose its own sovereign vision on the country;
others resisted. In France in 1789
or Russia in 1917 the outcome of a similar confrontation was resolved in the
streets by popular mobilization whereas in Chile in 1973 it was resolved by the
use of massive force.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
In Egypt it was resolved in court. </div>
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<br /></div>
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In addition to the protests,
several suits had been filed challenging the composition of the constituent
assembly. On April 10 the
Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the constituent assembly had been
improperly chosen by the then-sitting parliament and ordered it suspended. This was a strange, if for many people
welcome, intrusion by the judiciary into the work of the legislative
branch. The Supreme
Administrative Court, modeled on the European system, differs from the Supreme
Constitutional Court. The SAC is
supposed to determine whether government officials abide by the laws that
define their authority.
Legislators are not usually considered government officials because they
are not appointed. The choice of
the constituent assembly was, in addition, a sovereign act of the legislature
and had been unconstrained by the constitution. It was therefore peculiar that the administrative courts
would intervene to overturn the one act the legislature had been elected to
perform and to use the argument that it had not followed the appropriate
procedure. Nevertheless, in issuing
that decision to SAC defused a possible crisis at least for a while that the
actors appeared unable to resolve on their own. The SAC has also issued its own
decisions including one in late June about whether the military police could
arrest citizens. The Minister of Justice
had decided they could; the SAC decided they could not. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The SCC has, in the latest
iteration of the constitution promulgated by SCAF a special role. In the event of conflict over any
provision of the constitution that troubles SCAF the SCC is empowered to
determine whether it should be adopted.
The SCC, in short, has now been given the role of “supra-constitutional”
authority about which there was so much conflict in the fall of 2011 and which
formed part of the debate over the Selmi document. Nathan Brown, a scholar at George Washington University has
written “Giving the constitutional court a binding veto over any constitutional
provision with only the vaguest guidance on the standards to use is simply a
constitutional obscenity.” In effect the SCC is now responsible for
writing the constitution although should the parliament return to session it
may contest this responsibility.
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Constitutional obscenity or not,
the decision by SCAF to give the SCC veto power over an as yet unwritten
constitution reveals the degree to which there is as yet no clear victor in the
ongoing conflict over power, and especially the power to determine the
institutional framework of the Second Republic. The power of the judiciary is partly a function of the
strength of the conflicts they are called to adjudicate. In periods when the executive—whether
the British imperial authorities or the government under Nasser and later
Sadat—comfortably dominated politics writing a constitution was
straightforward. Even the highly
undemocratic and rapidly repudiated Sidqi constitution of 1930 that stripped
away universal male suffrage was written with more certainly than the one
presently under negotiation.
Where, as in Tunisia, the constituent assembly itself has legitimacy it
can also write a constitution without external interference. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Unfortunately no Egyptian Dickens
has yet come forward to describe the legal system in the detail with which <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Bleak House</b> describes the British
Chancery Court. It is the SAC that
may ultimately be given the task of determining the consequences of the SCC’s
ruling on parliament. The ruling
itself will stand but how it is implemented may still be the subject of
litigation before the SAC. As I
write this SCAF has issued a vague statement subject to different
interpretations. SCAF continues to
present itself as the defender of the rule of law and that President Morsi has
positioned himself as a defender of popular sovereignty who has no intention of
interfering with the rule of law is telling.<br />
<br />
In a country whose most recent election showed it to
be nearly divided in two, the two primary antagonists seem to be planning on
provoking an intemperate but also unsuccessful attack on the rule of law from the other. So far this has had the appearance of an elaborate nearly ritual performance whose rules may be clear to the protagonists but which are confusing to the rest of us. It is probably a mistake to confuse what looks like choreography for collusion. It is also, I think, a mistake to conflate the institutional and ideological conflicts between jurists and the judiciary on the one hand and parliamentarians and politicians on the other with corruption, intolerance, or moral turpitude. There are sufficient ethical shortcomings and lack of political vision all around, but there are also profound institutional conflicts between counter-majoritarian judiciaries and legislators who soundly believe they represent the best prejudices of society. <br />
<br />
The electorate certainly and probably the larger population as well is both geographically divided and still uncertain of its political allegiances. A glance at Schewe's map referenced above suggests how sharp has been the turn against the MB in some areas even if the reasons for the turn remain obscure. The map also has an accidental but real resemblance to claims by SCAF and others earlier in the year that Egypt could be divided into four statelets. While that idea is absurd on its face, the existence of some very strong tendencies toward regional difference beyond the traditional division into north and south are likely to become more rather than less important. <br />
<br />
Constitutional scholars and the
judiciary appear to be split over the whether Morsi can re-convene parliament
and whether he has now (as some claim) violated his oath of office to uphold
the constitution. The answer will
be neither legal nor intellectual but it may yet turn out to be judicial. Or it may not be. When the Chilean military moved against
President Salvador Allende in 1973, it was ostensibly to defend the rule of
law.</div>
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</div>Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10081791.post-49631844268292183332012-06-21T01:17:00.002-07:002012-06-21T01:24:10.944-07:00Round Two: A Quick Look at the Presidential Run-Off<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Just
when the pace of events in Egypt appears to be slowing down, it speeds up
again. It’s been four days since the second round of the presidential election but the outcome has
not been officially announced and it’s already fading into the distant
past. As things stand it appears
that Muhammad Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and
Justice party, won the election with 52 percent of the votes cast. The official results have not yet been
announced by the Presidential Election Commission and there is concern about
what its announcement will be.
Some wags have predicted that it will announce that former Prime
Minister and Air Force General Ahmad Shafiq won with 90 percent of the vote.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
Muslim Brothers, among others, have published figures based on the vote tallies
at the governorate and district level where they were allowed to see the
results. So has the Ahram
newspaper which I have used for writing this entry. The Carter Center has
voiced reservations about the political context within which the election
occurred but less so about its mechanics:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
“These provisions helped to instil
confidence in the final results by ensuring that agents had verifiable
information regarding electoral results in their jurisdictions. In addition,
Carter Center witnesses reported improved access to District General
Committees, although domestic witnesses continued to face obstacles to
meaningful observation there. However, given the fact that there is no
outside access to the final aggregation of results, it is essential that the
PEC publish vote results broken down to the polling station level at the
earliest possible instance on their website. In meetings with The Carter
Center, the PEC has committed to do so within one week of the election.”</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Without
more, lower-level results than we have and adequate complementary demographic
statistics it is no more possible to understand what the presidential vote
means than it was with the parliamentary vote. We can guess about the transition from the first to the
second round with some level of confidence. Generally speaking it seems
plausible that Shafiq picked up Amr Moussa’s voters from the first round and
that Morsi picked up some combination of votes from Abu al-Futouh and Hamdeen
Sabbahi. About 10 % more people
voted in the run-off than in the first round but Morsi could not have picked up
both Abu al-Futouh’s voters and Sabbahi’s or he would have won more decisively
than he seems to have. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
For the moment the best I can think
of to do is to look at briefly at some of the districts where Shafiq and Morsi
won and compare those to the inaccurate impressions one has of the
districts. There were some
surprises. Without time to make an
adequate assessment of instant and popular analyses, my sense is that most
people think that, in general, Christians, the well-off, touristic areas, and
those who live in particular
strongholds of the old regime voted for Shafiq whereas the lower middle class,
the poor, and the devout Muslims voted for Mursi. This is itself
a reflection of a set of images long beloved in Egypt (and elsewhere) about the
relationship of class to nationalism refracted through voting patterns. The poor and the working class are most
committed to revolution and patriotism the argument goes. Unfortunately as generations of
communists and nationalists painfully discovered, it ain’t necessarily so.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shafiq
won a majority of the votes in Cairo (the city is the governorate) or 1.89
million out of 3.4 million cast.
As might be expected he did well in Shubra, Madinat Nasr, Ain Shams, and
the silk-stocking neighborhood of Qasr al-Nil. More surprisingly he also strongly carried the poorer
neighborhoods of Darb al-Ahmar, El-Zawiya el-Hamra, and Sayyida Zainab. El-Zawiya Al-Hamra returned parliamentary representatives
from the MB as did much of the rest of Cairo. So Shafiq’s victory in these districts is indicative of some
change. Economic distress is one
possibility but another is that other patterns of religious mobilization among
the Muslim population are beginning to occur which could include both Sufi
orders or simply political choices reflecting a stronger orientation to the
world of the Azhar (which did not institutionally support a candidate). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Morsi
did exceptionally well in the province of Fayoum with 593,000 votes out of
762,000 cast (just a note: I’ve rounded all the numbers to the nearest
thousand). Shafiq, on the the
other hand, did exceptionally well in Minufia where he gained 947,000 out of
1.32 million votes cast. Those who
savor the irony of fate (a popular Egyptian Facebook meme these days) might
notice that the only district in Minufia Morsi won was “Sadat.” This outcome may be due to some
character of the province (or what we might account for in the language of
heavier statistical artillery, fixed effects). It would be easy to make up a story about Minufia as a
conservative bulwark of old regime remnants or benighted peasants in which case
I suppose Fayoum would be where the revolutionary (or at least Islamist but
less plausibly more Muslim) peasants live. More likely there may be significant sociological or
economic differences between these two areas that would be worth
investigation. What is clear is
that rurality alone doesn’t seem to explain much.</div>
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Other
provinces suggest a very different kind of story, more like that of Cairo. In Giza the two candidates split the
vote, but Shafiq won Imbaba the lower-class district where religious violence
flared in May 2011 and which had been an “Islamic emirate” in the 1990s. The more upscale areas of Doqqi and
Agouza went for Shafiq while in the more rural districts of Kerdasa and Hawamdieh
Mursi won heavily. Atfih, another
site of violence against Christians, voted very strongly for Mursi. In Alexandria, Amiriyah’s two districts
overwhelmingly supported Morsi which could suggest either that inter-religious
strife plays a mobilizing role for electoral politics in Egypt or that areas
with a tendency for high levels of Islamist organization are also more likely
to experience religious conflict.
Or, if taken in concert with the results of Imbaba, it may suggest that
there are some important differences in religious conflict and its impact on
various areas. The conflict in
Imbaba may have appeared to local residents to have had its roots in outside
issues. It developed out of a
claim by a Muslim man not originally from the area that a church was holding
his wife, who converted from Christianity, a virtual prisoner. In Atfih and Amiriyah the conflicts
appear to have originally been rooted in local antagonisms including property
disputes.</div>
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Shafiq
did exceptionally well in the areas in and around the cities of Mansourah and
Mit Ghamr in Daqahliyah, but the most surprising results appear to be in
Gharbiya province. Shafiq crushed
Mursi in and around Tanta as well as in and around the famed working-class
textile center of Mahallah al-Kubra and in Kafr al-Zayyat. It is impossible to say how well Shafiq
did with working-class voters but he clearly did very well in urban areas
historically associated with strikes, Egypt’s left, and the industrial working
class. Comparisons with
earlier elections this year cannot be very meaningful because the voting
districts differ across elections.
For example, Gharbiya had two districts for the proportional
representation contests for the parliament whereas the presidential results are
reported on the basis the regular administrative divisions of the
province. It is nevertheless worth
noting that Mursi received fewer votes than the combined total of the FJP and
Salafi parties (totals are reported for both Nour and Construction and
Development) which together received more than 50 percent of the province’s
vote. Together these parties
received more than 650,000 votes in the parliamentary election in Gharbiya but
Morsi was credited with 583,000 votes in the presidential contest. The provisional
(but complete) returns for the presidential election in the province reported
by Al-Ahram give Shafiq 993,000 votes out of 1.58 million cast. These are clearly much larger than the
totals for the Wafd and Election Bloc which won seats with something like
100,000 votes across the two districts that made up the province. </div>
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This story was somewhat lightly
repeated in one other area with similar associations, Shubra al-Khayma in
Qalyubiya province on the northern outskirts of Cairo. The equally strong textile center and
old leftist stronghold of Kafr al-Dawar, on the other hand, gave 71,000 votes
out of 106,000 to Mursi and the markaz Kafr al-Dawar also voted heavily for
Mursi (103,000 votes out of 145,000 cast). </div>
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Much
of the meaning of the vote remains hidden from our view given the paucity of
information. But it is, I
think, apparent that the Egyptian electorate continues to change as it is
presented with different challenges rather than being a monolithic bloc as may
have appeared during the March 2011 referendum. It also suggests that the use of the term “felool”
(“remnants” of the old regime) will remain a powerful political tool. But it may not be a good idea to base
analysis of Egypt’s ongoing politics on the idea that the electoral base of
politicians such as Shafiq, obviously himself a remnant of the old regime, is
itself a stable, uniform, and minor feature of Egyptian political life. </div>
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</div>Ellishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12993502605173919663noreply@blogger.com1