Bam! The Army Takes It Up a Notch

Violence overtly directed against political protesters in Cairo reached a crescendo in mid-December 2011, and then abated.  Just as US policy makers were breathing a sigh of relief that their bet on a democratic Egypt had paid off, the generals pushed things up a notch.  Or three.  Just the bits that made the international press are hair-raisingly disturbing:  at least 74 deaths in one of the deadliest soccer disasters in history, raids on the offices of half a dozen organizations whose aim was supporting democratic transition, and the indictment of 43 people—Egyptians and others—on charges of using foreign funds to undermine the state and partition the country. 

Those who believe that Egypt’s military is under the control of the United States may want to take another look.  The ruling military council has challenged President Barack Obama and the Congress who are most likely to take it sitting down.  Perhaps even more important they have moved significantly to restrict the activities of Egyptian activists concerned with human rights, the rule of law, and civil society which have been the slogans beloved of US policy makers even when they did little to forward them.

Field Marshal Tantawi’s initial reaction—seconded by regime supporters—to the soccer disaster was that these events could have happened anywhere.  He saw it as a brawl between fans (Ultras) of the visiting Ahly team and the hometown Masri team in the industrial city of Port Said on February 2.  It was, in short, the kind of thing you should expect when the soccer hooligans who fought the police in downtown Cairo in late November and early December took to the road.  Left unspoken but certainly recognized in Washington and Jerusalem was that the Ultras were intimately involved in the assault on the Israeli embassy in September.  Egypt has had its share of soccer brawls but this, it must be repeated, was not simply a case of rowdy fans tearing up the town (which indeed has indeed happened in earlier matches between these teams); it had one of the highest death tolls of any soccer match disaster ever.  It was the kind of disaster more generally associated with collapsing stands and massive panic than with fights between rivals. That’s because, as long as the police play their expected role, it’s very difficult (although not wholly impossible) to generate large casualties through individual violence.

The violence may have begun with rivalry and taunting or it may have begun with the activities of hired thugs.  What seems to have made it really deadly were two contributing factors.  First, the police largely stood aside from beginning to end.  Evidently the customary pre-game searches weren’t undertaken.  And once the violence erupted the television footage of the events shows the police standing aside.  Indeed as members of the audience erupted on to the field and chased down the Ahly players you can see them running past a double phalanx of helmeted and shield bearing police in the direction of the dressing rooms.  And as the crowd panicked they ran into locked gates that prevented their exit and, of course, ensured that dozens of people would die in the crush.  As of now these are not merely press reports but have found their way into a parliamentary report and may rise to the level of criminal negligence.

The soccer disaster is now called a massacre.  It has been widely interpreted, by foreign observers, by many Egyptians and certainly by the Ultras, as a deliberate attempt to get revenge for their opposition to the regime on the streets.  It is also the kind of event for which political leaders would, in a democracy, be expected to take responsibility whether in the form of resignations or public apologies but Egypt’s present governors are no more inclined to either of those paths than previous ones.

Besides increased conflict with domestic opponents, the military council has also increased tension with its foreign partners, notably the US by raiding the offices of half a dozen organizations committed to building civil society and indicting 43 people.  Nineteen of those indicted are American of whom 6 are currently in Egypt and have been refused permission to leave.  One of the six, Sam LaHood, is the son of the US Secretary of Transportation.  The organizations include Freedom House as well as two foundations funded by the US Congress through the State Department (the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute) to support civil society and democratic transition around the world.  They have trained activists around the world but they have also been involved in funding research into a very sensitive area: voter fraud.  

The American press and punditocracy has been set back on its heels by the Egyptian army’s assault on the American foundations.  How, after all, can a client state that has received billions of dollars from the US since the days of Jimmy Carter turn on its patron? Leaving aside the foolish arrogance of the question, it is worth considering that the Egyptian general staff, like the rest of the world, follows the American media.  They are aware that Barack Obama is not anxious, especially in the period before an election, to engage in unnecessary conflict.  Even if they did not follow the debt limit debate, they have an ambassador who did.  They were also aware that the Republicans in Congress were already considering using aid as a means to pressure the new government especially in the wake of the assault on the Israeli embassy.  At some point in their military training they were undoubtedly introduced to the idea that the best defense is an offense and most of them were on active duty as young officers in 1967.  It is therefore not so surprising that they struck at the US before it could strike at them.  Neither the Congressional Republicans nor the Democratic president have, especially in the present regional environment, a desire to complicate relations with Egypt.  By a neat act of political jujitsu, moreover, the generals have made it clear that the Camp David treaty and the cold peace with Israel now work wholly to their advantage.  Leaders of the Muslim Brothers have suggested that if US aid to Egypt ends so will the treaty.  Whether that would really happen is not something either President Obama or Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been notably quiet about events in Egypt ever since the attack on his country’s embassy in September, want to discover.  After some initial bluster the Republicans have said little and even the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has been remarkably quiet about a military regime that in other circumstances they might describe as holding half a dozen American hostages.

Yezid Sayegh has argued that Egypt can do without the aid.  It is true Egypt today is also a very different country than the one that first received American aid.  In 1980, American aid of $1.5-2 billion loomed very large in an Egyptian economy whose GDP was about $22 billion.  In today’s Egypt where the GDP was in 2010 almost $250 billion, that aid is miniscule.  It is also negligible for the generals if they indeed, as now seems to be widely believed, control 40% of the economy.  In 1980, moreover, Egypt was extremely short of hard currency; today thanks in part to the widely despised neoliberal reforms the Egyptian pound is convertible. 

One of the puzzling aspects of the way the military authorities in Cairo have chosen to deploy coercion in months since the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak is how much they have used against marginal groups of protesters and how little they have used against protests that posed a significant threat to authority, public safety and the economy.  As many Egyptians have noted and as I will deal with in the next entry, the government is facing a serious challenge to both to its authority and to the coherence of its institutions from Alexandria to Asyut.  Many, but not all, of these challenges arise from assaults on Christians.  How seriously army commanders take the substance of these assaults is one question but they have clearly worked to undermine and entangle state officials in a web of anti-constitutional activity.

The arrests and closures of the NGOs have a clear target inside Egypt as well as outside it.  There is no reason to diminish the importance of persistent attempts by the generals to deploy xenophobia.  They have spoken of hidden hands and threats to divide the country since March 2011.  They have wrapped themselves in the mantle of sovereignty since the early days of their rule and when they refused to allow the official participation of foreign observers in the election.  What is new here is that the assault on foreign funding has a direct bearing on Egyptians and not simply those who worked for the NGOs.

In Egypt, as in Europe but unlike the US, judges both investigate cases and provide the initial trial of facts.  The press conference at which the investigating judges explained the indictments had a certain dramatic flair.  They reiterated that they were simply acting in accordance with existing Egyptian law and dealing with violations.  Cloaking themselves in the mantle of law and order, they implicitly placed the US (and Germany) in the position of either accepting the principle and the indictments or rejecting them and thus undermining the principles they have claimed to support.  It was a stance that American policy makers will find difficult to reject unless they wish to mount a wholesale attack on the fairness of the judicial system in the post-revolutionary era.  And since these trials will be in the civil courts, not the military courts, it is hard to see how US officials can reasonably oppose them in the wake of the revolution.

First, as many Egyptians have noted the military is more concerned with foreign funds that flow to secular human rights organizations than that flow into the coffers of the Salafis and Muslim Brothers.   I have no all-embracing answer but there are some possibilities that have not yet been explored elsewhere.

It is not well known that the NDI and IRI, in addition to funding workshops on political participation (which even members of the Salafi Nour party attended), had also begun to experiment in supporting research on voting fraud.  There have been some allegations of fraud in the recent elections (for example by the blogger Sandmonkey) although most accounts describe the election process as relatively fair and free of overt intervention.  Electoral fraud as well as outright repression have, however, provoked widespread anger in the last several decades and were clearly an important ingredient in popular unrest in the wake of an obviously fraudulent parliamentary election in 2010.  This is unlikely to be an area of research that Egypt’s political leaders are going to wish to see pursued.

Even more peculiar than the indictments of the American foundations, is the indictment of Andreas Jacobs, director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.  The Adenauer Foundation, as its name might imply, is a German organization of moderate aims.  Unlike the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, more closely identified with social democracy, the Adenauer Foundation is a child of German Christian Democracy and espouses scientific policy analysis.  Jacobs is a political scientist who has headed the Foundation’s Cairo office since 2007 and was planning on leaving soon.  He wrote, for example, a brief article for the German publication Qantara in December 2011 that suggested the revolution had not brought about significant structural change but by then such analyses were commonplace. 

The indictment of Jacobs is, however, a threat to Egyptians who participated in conferences he agreed to provide funding for.  Because he was seriously interested in the country’s intellectual life this would cut a wide swathe among intellectuals, writers, and public servants.  Whether they would be legally susceptible is less important in the current atmosphere than that they would be politically on the defensive.

            These events are troubling enough on their own but coupled with what amounts to the emergence of a social movement that thrives on attacking Christians and substituting “popular” justice for the court system, they are even more so.              

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Revolution: the first anniversary

The last few days have marked the first anniversary of the Egyptian revolution.  Even to speak of the events in Egypt over the past year as a revolution is to make a somewhat controversial statement.  Was it, many scholars, commentators, and activists have asked, a real revolution?  Already whole conferences have been held in which experts in many fields, and occasionally even on Egypt, have discussed whether Egypt is a case of revolution, transition (possibly democratic, possibly stalled, possibly incomplete), or simply an illusion.  Egypt is disquieting intellectually in a way neither Tunis, nor Libya, nor Yemen nor Syria seem to be.  The mass demonstrations in the streets, the departure of an autocrat, the immense political agitation self-consciously spoken not only in Arabic but in the languages and symbols of historic Europe seem warmly familiar.  The outcome, however, disconcerts many observers.  No palaces were seized, the peasants have not stormed the manors, which in any case no longer exist in the countryside; many personnel of the old regime—from its generals to its former prime ministers—either never left or have returned after years in the political wilderness.    The elections have brought to power a troubling cast of characters: bearded victors who are modern professionals but speak the language of religion rather than science.  In the American, Israeli and European press it has become common to wonder if religious obscurantism is a rising enemy in the Arab world that has been helped to power by the fecklessness of naïve academics who apologize for its violent excesses. 

            Part of the problem is that in Egypt, and events elsewhere in the Arab world, differ markedly from our canonical examples of revolution and democratic transition.  Social scientists have learned about revolutions from Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol and Jack Goldstone.  We have also learned about contentious citizens and social movements from Chuck Tilly, Sid Tarrow, and Neil Smelser.  And of course we have an entire repertoire of concepts to understand transitions thanks to Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan and Barbara Geddes.  Over the past year all of these have been deployed in a variety of arguments across the entire spectrum of political and analytical possibilities especially in regard to Egypt. 

            Words like revolution or democratic transition are conceptual categories. Used with precision, we are sure they are tools for comprehension.  Used incorrectly they mislead.  It matters, therefore, whether Egypt fits into the category of revolution, or democratic transition, or authoritarian stability. Perhaps Egypt is an example of a stalled partial democratic transition or perhaps as a certain portmanteau word had it, it is a “refolution” combining aspects of reform and revolution.  And yet Egyptian experience continues to escape from all of these categories and so the problem must lie in the Egyptians not in the categories.

            Egypt obviously does not fit into any concept of revolution derived from or connected to the work of Theda Skocpol:

Social revolutions in France, Russia, and China were launched, it has been argued here, by crises centered in the structures and situations of the states of the Old Regimes. Still, the actual occurrence of social revolutions in these three countries depended not only upon the emergence of revolutionary political crises, but also upon the conduciveness of the agrarian sociopolitical structures of the Old Regimes to peasant revolts.

Nor does it fit into what Alfred Stepan suggests is the received wisdom about democratic transition:

After the non-democratic regime experienced a combination of internal divisions and growing opposition, softliners from the non-democratic regime held important informal discussions with the moderate democratic opposition. Over time, a ‘game’ emerged in which the regime moderates and the opposition moderates both ‘used’ (and attempted to ‘constrain’) their own hardliners.

Unless, of course, one believes that Field Marshal Tantawi and the generals are the softliners of the Mubarak regime; the Muslim Brothers are the moderate democrats; and that the events of the last year represent the outcome of discussions between these two sides in the small hours of January 27 2011.  This is a possible picture but nobody, not even Stepan as far as I can tell, seems to think it’s an accurate portrayal of the events of the last year.  Given the violence that has left dozens of people dead and hundreds more wounded (from Christians who were run over by military vehicles in October to the shootings around Midan al-Tahrir in November and December) this looks to be a pretty rough “game.”

           

            In the past year it has also been suggested that the weakness of the revolutionaries is that they have had neither ideological unity nor a coherent organizational presence in Egyptian politics.  This is, and will long prove to be, a difficult question to address.  The canonical cases—whether of revolution or democratization—lead us to expect a path that moves rapidly toward a more secular state, property rights that ensure economic development, and a more active and hierarchical state.   We expect the revolutionary leadership to be self-consciously progressive by the tenets of the age:  Jacobins who have read Rousseau or Communists who have read Marx and Lenin.

           

It might be objected that these concepts, derived the study of other places and times, are not very applicable to Egyptian experience.  Bernard Lewis (the emeritus Princeton professor doted on by the right and despised by the left in academia today) has suggested that it is not very useful to apply the categories of European experience to an Islamic society.  Lewis argues that in the Muslim world popular social upheavals demand justice not freedom. Thus the canonical cases do not apply.  In one way Lewis is quite correct.  Justice was an important demand of the demonstrators a year ago.  But it was only one of three primary demands expressed in the slogan: “bread, freedom and social justice.”  This is remarkably similar to the well-known slogan of the French revolution (“freedom, equality, brotherhood”) although it replaces the demand for male solidarity with a demand for human well-being .  Lewis is, on this reading, unsurprisingly unmasked yet again as an Orientalist but the demonstration strikes me as futile if we use it to score verbal points rather than to understand the world around us.  We can leave aside the contrast between justice and freedom that Edward Said might have thought invidious to wonder about justice.  Perhaps we would learn more if we explored what Egyptians argue about when they discuss justice.  It is, after all, a concept widely discussed in American political philosophy since John Rawls resurrected it a generation ago in an influential study of the importance of fairness in organizing society.

American social science has been fairly consistent in asserting that neither the experience of revolution (its phenomenology) nor the relatively short period in which a transfer of power occurs is worth much study.  While there are significant differences between the concepts of revolution and transition, they do share one similarity in contemporary American social scientific thinking.  For both Skocpol and Stepan the role of massive public protest plays a rather small role in a process that (as Skocpol asserts) relatively rapidly transforms social and political structures and institution.   They appear to be primarily epiphenomenal to deeper structural causes whether class, institutional or as part of a bargaining game.

            Necessarily for the structural arguments (even of significantly different kinds) to work, the process of change cannot be an open-ended process. It must define a clear break and it should have a definitive moment at which the process begins and at which it ends.  It should also leave no particular mark on those who experience it, not even their rates of discounting the future which are set outside the game itself.  I have no particular problem with this as an analytic stance as long as we recall that it necessarily constructs the materials into a plausible case as it goes along.  It is not what philosophers would call a “natural kind.”  And in point of fact historians argue at length these days in their studies of revolution (as they no doubt will about democratic transitions) about what constitute the points of departure and termination as well as degrees of continuity and rupture between those points.  Skocpol, it is true, recognizes a kind of continuity of institutional administration and even of many aspects of economic and social life but she never pays much attention to how quickly or how incompletely the French revolution changed France.

            The past quarter of a century studies of the French revolution have suggested that it did not mark quite the kind of demarcation point in French society, economy, or governance between the world before and after 1789 that we often imagine.  The clearest demarcation, as the work of Francois Furet indicates, may be between those to whom it marked such a demarcation and those for whom it did not.  The old regime collapsed, and new political institutions and laws were created. It is certainly not possible to say that politically the revolution rapidly created stable new structures of governance or grievance let alone of property rights in the countryside.  The decisive political conquest of a republic by the French did not occur until 1870 with the creation of the Third Republic (which itself has been succeeded by two more). As Eugen Weber points out (admittedly with a significant dissent from Tilly) France itself did not begin to supersede its regions until well after the Third Republic was in place. Patterns of landownership and industry retained significant continuities from the early 18^th century until well into the 19^th.  Yet the experience and discourse of the Revolution had a decisive impact on French political thought that, as Furet also points out, lasted until well after the Second World War.  Attitudes toward the revolution remained a crucial dividing point for the politics of France until the last third of the 20^th century.  Americans will recognize something similar about the civil war.  It marked a significant break in American history in some ways and yet it would be plausible to argue that between 1890 and 1940 power and social practice retained very large elements of continuity with earlier experience in the American South. 

            What are the implications of this kind of argument for today’s Egypt?

            As we look at the events in Egypt over the last year what we must wonder is what would happen if we reversed our usual focus.  What would happen if, instead of beginning with the canonical understandings and cases, we began with events themselves?  What if, instead of focusing on the known outcomes over a very short period of time and then working back to “explain” them we began with what is more true of revolutionary uprisings: their emotional background and whatever sustains massive protest.  We could begin with a very simple question.  One very good explanation of the uprising in Cairo is based on the assertion of continuities between rising numbers of contentious protests before January 2011 and the demonstrations that drove Mubarak from office.  But what if this explanation hides as much as it reveals?  What if the events of January 25-28 mark a discontinuity with earlier protest instead?  What if what happened over that weekend was a break in recent Egyptian history?

And what if, on the other side, we assumed that the continuities that are apparent even as the mass protests subside are a normal part of revolutionary process rather than a hijacking?  What if we wondered less about the institutional destination to which the revolution is supposed to travel and more about the contestation between the travelers to appropriate the revolutionary narrative as it moves forward?  What if we assumed, for example, that Egypt will still have a powerfully bureaucratic state and a powerful president in five years but that Egyptians will also, for the first time, be publicly divided about the role of the army in their history?  If the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis have their way the most prominent religious figure in Egypt, the Shaykh of the Azhar, will be elected rather than chosen by the president of the republic.  What will happen to the prestige of the institution when it becomes a more obvious focus for open political conflict even if only within the confines of the institution itself?  Criticisms of the Azhar today that it bends to the demands of government may be replaced by criticisms that it bends to every passing breeze or to none at all.  Debates about religion and politics are likely to continue. Debates will also sharpen about whether 1919, 1952 or 2011 represent what the Egyptian revolutionary experience is “really” about.  What if Egyptian electoral politics become, for the first time in 60 years, a focus of practical political effort even if the Ministry of Interior remains a crucial mechanism for determining local spending patterns?   What would happen if, instead of trying to explain what caused something that we define as a single well-defined event—the revolution—we tried to fit it instead into a longer pattern of changing Egyptian intellectual, institutional and even economic patterns?  Would these be useful things to think about?  Would they help us to understand events as they unfold?

            We might notice a few other things worth thinking about over the longue durée.  We would notice, for example, that nearly a century after Shaykh Ali Abd al-Raziq was expelled from the Azhar for writing Islam and the Basis of Governance most Egyptian Muslims accept the idea that parliamentary democracy is the best way to organize the Egyptian state rather than an autocratic system.  What remains unresolved, and what Raziq himself did not address, is what role they assign to Christians in their democratic polity.  One especially burning question is whether they will seek to make Christians equal citizens through their membership in a religious community or as individuals of a liberal republic.  Most likely what happens will turn out to be best described by what is now the watchword or shibboleth of social scientific thinking: it will be termed a hybrid.

The Azhar that expelled Abd al-Raziq was not, however, a particularly unified body nor did it wholly fail to understand that changes were coming for it confided to another shaykh, Abd al-Wahhab Khallaf the task of studying some of the outlines of a new state even as it was condemning Abd al-Raziq.  Many of Khallaf’s proposals are now staples of the politics of both the Brotherhood and much of the Azhari elite.  Indeed by an irony of fate it might be said that the two most prominent representatives of official Islam, the Ahmad Tayyib, shaykh al-Azhar, and Ali Gomaa, the mufti of the Republic, are today significantly more liberal than most of the parliamentarians elected under the banners of political Islam.

Reading the electoral program of the Muslim Brothers is, at least occasionally, an exercise in nostalgia. They propose not only that Egypt pursue self-sufficiency in wheat (which it routinely no longer had before World War I) but that it become self-sufficient in cotton as the basis for a textile industry.  The latter demand mirrors proposals of the 1916 committee for industrialization of Egypt under the stewardship of Ismail Sidqi.  He was, I believe, the only prime minister in the world during the 20^th century to have dramatically reduced democratic participation when he stripped Egyptian illiterates of their votes.  It is sometimes said that the Muslim Brothers favor free market policies like those of Hosni Mubarak and the International Monetary Fund.  If so, then they are indeed a group engaged in a trip “back to the future” but their future lies not in 8^th century Arabia but in the semi-liberal free market rent-seeking economy of the 1930s.   It is unlikely that they will be more successful in capturing a significant share of the global textile industry from China than Egyptian governments of the 1930s were from the Japanese.  And it is unlikely as well that they can solve the problem of globalization by creating a closed Egyptian market.

            We might also notice some important discontinuities.  A return to plebiscitary presidential elections or completely falsified parliamentary contests seems unlikely. Politically contested parliamentary elections will likely continue even if (or perhaps especially if) the legislature has no more power than the French Assembly for the first three quarters of the 19^th century or the German Reichstag under Kaiser Wilhelm. It will be difficult to pigeon-hole such a government, but how much will it be worth to determine what is the appropriate “regime type” to assign to either the old situation (semi-plural authoritarianism?) or the new (plural semi-authoritarianism)? 

            A more important discontinuity is what appears to be, even in the worst case, a dramatic change in the structure of Egyptian politics.  It is common to view Egyptian politics between 1923 and 1952 as a three-cornered game between the Throne, the British, and the Parliament (dominated by the Wafd party).  Between the 1952 coup and 1954 two of the players vanished and the Throne was replaced by the Free Officers and then Gamal Abdel Nasser.  From 1954 until 2012 Egypt remained a one-cornered game. For now, and perhaps for quite a while, Egyptian politics will be a two-sided game in which the parliament (now dominated by the Muslim Brothers) and the presidency (now in the hands of SCAF and likely to remain under their watchful eye) contest.  Egypt in 2012 may not turn into another liberal experiment (even if the Muslim Brothers pursue some of the economic policies of early 20^th century nationalists), but it may yet give ordinary Egyptians more access to government institutions than they have had in 60 years.

            Egyptians are also beginning to agree to disagree.  Not always happily and not yet completely, but even in the calls for unity and single-handedness at least one well-worn slogan of the last 60 years has vanished with the demonstrations of the past year:  “no voice higher than the voice of the revolution.”  The use of extra-legal force (whether in the forms of private thuggery or casual repression by the military and police authorities) is worrisome and clearly aims to prevent some voices from being heard that cannot be silenced by appeals to law.  This can be seen in the uneven response to the “Liars” or “Kazibun” campaign in which young activists show videos in public spaces to convince Egyptians that the military authorities are neither truthful nor trustworthy.    I attended one in late December which was displaced by force by angry and nearly violent counter-demonstrators; others have evidently occurred without significant incident.   

            For the Muslim Brothers and perhaps for many who voted for them the events of the last year are miraculous.  For them the revolution has not been hijacked but has slowly moved into a channel as inevitable as any story we can tell about France or Russia.  The military council, on the other hand, as I hope to discuss in another blog may have a very different understanding of the past year as a bullet it barely dodged.  And, lastly, there are other political forces whose dreams were of a different order entirely and who are profoundly disappointed at an emerging understanding between the Brothers and the army leadership.  It would not be difficult to imagine the kind of violence I witnessed in December or that Egyptians have experienced in the past year with attacks on churches, demonstrators, or even in one case an Azhari shaykh. 

           

            What may matter most is that Egyptians are about to embark on a long political conflict about the nature of revolution with profound implications for the country’s future.  The debate about whether 1952 was a revolution or a coup is not really about semantics (like the regime type debate) but about the nature of mass participation in Egyptian politics.  The victors of 1952 attempted to diminish if not erase 1919 from the national consciousness.  Some of the slogans of 1919 have, directly or indirectly, returned to popular consciousness such as “Religion belongs to God but the nation belongs to all” (al-din l-illah wa’l watan l’il-gami^c ) .  Others have been created to contrast with them such as “civil state with an Islamic reference (dawlah madaniyah bi marga^ciyah diniyah). These will be more than academic debates; they will be visceral.

                       

           

Cairo: Elections and Other Issues

  

            I’m back in Cairo and when I asked a young friend recently what she thought would happen next in Egypt she gave me a wry smile and said she wasn’t even sure what was happening now.  Anybody who’s paying attention feels that way and anyone who doesn’t feel that way, which includes most of the pundits in the US and Europe, isn’t paying attention.  That lots of people with strong opinions about what’s going to happen, let alone what is happening, have very little insight or knowledge about this large and diverse country seems to be a basic fact of life.

            I’ve been reading the stories in the foreign media about how unexpected the victories of the Islamist parties are and how no one predicted that the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis would dominate the elections.  The Salafi success was indeed unexpected but inside Egypt I think for different reasons than outside in ways that are consequential for trying to understand what’s going on.

Accounts like that of Jeffrey Goldberg (no relation) recently in Bloomberg suggest that many Americans were spending far too much time with random contacts they met in cafes around Tahrir Square.  If Tahrir isn’t Egypt, then the Hurriyeh Café in nearby Midan Falaki where you can buy a beer and play pick-up games of backgammon with fluent English speaking liberals, isn’t even Tahrir. 

            More seriously, the very well-known and highly respected student of democratic transitions, Professor Alfred Stepan, visited Cairo frequently in the spring and made some guesses about the elections.  Stepan.  A professor at Columbia University, is a very smart man with considerable experience in writing about politics and democratic transitions and more relevant to the field of political science than I will ever be.  His work has been profoundly influential in how American academics and (to a lesser extent) policy makers think about transitions.  But when he confidently asserted during a trip to Egypt in March that the Muslim Brothers and Islamists would not take more than 30% of the votes (and seats) in a parliamentary election it was hard to avoid, at least in private, rolling my eyes. 

Goldberg and Stepan go it wrong, but when people say that, during the days of the massive demonstrations in Tahrir, no one predicted the dominance of the Muslim Brothers, they’re wrong.  I’m pretty sure I wrote about it at length back in March and April.  And I wasn’t alone:  almost every serious Egyptian political analyst understood this was the likely outcome of free elections.  My deep oracular powers of prediction and mystical connection to the currents of Egyptian politics were based primarily on simply reading what Egyptians were arguing about in op-ed pieces every day and talking to different people (including, I must admit, the occasional taxi-cab driver). 

           

What most Egyptians had expected was that the remnants of the old government party, the National Democrats, would share dominance of the new parliament with the MB.  So the elections in the past three weeks have brought about a double surprise:  the strong showing of the Salafis and the nearly total rejection of the remnants of the NDP by voters.  In retrospect it is clear that the attempts to exclude the NDP members from running was not only politically short-sighted and possibly dangerous in the longer-term to Egyptian democracy but also unnecessary.  (It was dangerous because it doesn’t seem like a good idea to establish the precedent that individuals can be denied political rights simply because of their former partisan membership; unnecessary because they turn out not to have been a danger).

Because it’s now clear the NDP had no existence as a party, the Salafis didn’t prosper by picking up its supporters.   Their voters, like those of most electoral parties, are something an impromptu coalition.  Some, especially in Upper Egypt, are probably extremely prejudiced about Christians and fearful of their demands for equality (which to be honest is pretty much what the call for a secular state is about).  Some may be attracted to the populist policies that several Salafist currents espouse which strongly resemble some of the left parties programs in terms of wages, subsidies, and government support of the poor in the name of social justice.  Others may see in the Salafis the “real” Islamic alternative to the Muslim Brothers who many now see as hopelessly opportunistic in their search for political power.  Without adequate studies we don’t know but these are some of the guesses I’ve heard.  What we also don’t know is how strongly different sections of the Salafi voters are attached to them.  The ideologically anti-Christian vote will stick with them but some of the others might vote for other parties if they become unhappy with the Salafi performance in the parliament or if the economy worsens. 

For better or worse, however, the fate of Egypt’s political future is clearly in the hands of the Muslim Brothers and SCAF.  One temptation for the MB will be to compromise with SCAF and insert themselves into the system in the place of the old NDP but as a functioning party.  Another will be to step back and let SCAF and some other set of leaders attempt to deal with what will undoubtedly be the difficult problem of re-igniting the economy over the next couple of years. Given that the Freedom and Justice party, now routinely described in the Egyptian press with the nearly Homeric epithet “political arm of the Muslim Brothers”, has a membership and a political appeal largely skewed to conservative professionals and urban residents, it is unlikely to make a sudden changes to the economic policies of the Mubarak era and it has announced its intention to honor Egypt’s treaties (that is, the Camp David accord with Israel) albeit to seek some alteration.  But it can achieve many of its ends by using its parliamentary role rather than necessarily dominating the government for now.

This morning’s news brings a report that the MB and SCAF have agreed to a division of spheres in which the MB will dominate parliament and the SCAF will control the presidency.  Whether this particular report is true, it is clear that the two major forces will have to come to some agreement about how, in practice, to work together.  The MB have whatever legitimacy comes from electoral dominance and SCAF has both raw coercive power (which it has shown repeatedly it will not shrink from using) and the appeal to many Egyptians who fear that continuation of the revolutionary process will lead to a complete collapse of public order and the economy.  There is a third force, of course.  Not the hidden hands both SCAF and the MB frequently invoke—whether Israeli, Qatari, or American.  The third force is the apparently still irrepressible spontaneous force of Egyptian society, sometimes manifested in Tahrir and sometimes elsewhere. 

It will not be easy for the MB and SCAF to reach a stable agreement.  I am not one of those who think they have been working hand in glove since February.  There are important differences especially over the division of power in the country.  SCAF cannot look at what has happened to the Turkish army and feel very secure about actually creating civilian control of the Ministry of Defense.  The MB leadership have spent enough time in the regime’s prisons to know that as long as the Ministries of Defense and Interior are not under their control they remain vulnerable.  The MB can bring hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets and the Army can bring out the tanks.  Whether either can actually command sufficient authority in the face of adversity to persevere in making the country work is a different matter entirely and here they both face the constant danger of that unpredictable third force.

It is quite possible that SCAF is more afraid than many suspect of spontaneous social unrest.  They may have watched it bring down the Mubarak regime with mixed emotions as it destroyed a clique they were willing to be rid of but that left the institutions of the state wholly at risk for weeks, culminating in a week when the entire Ministry of Interior including its most redoubtable fortresses fell before waves of popular unrest.  SCAF may have felt that the events of November and December were far more threatening than they appeared to be to those on the Tahrir side of the barricades.  They were able to contain mass discontent once but they may not be so sure they can do it again. 

Yet SCAF and the MB have many things in common.  They probably both share many of the widespread prejudices and preferences that are certainly widespread in society.  They are partisans of order and discipline. 

Christians have a place in their society and it is a distinctly subordinate place enforced by social pressures rather than legal measures.  Whatever orders were actually given at Maspero in October when dozens of Christian protesters were killed, it marked the willingness of the army to deploy violence against Egyptians with the support of other sections of the popular in a frightening way.  The events at Maspero deserve more attention but the generals must have been noticed a widespread unwillingness by many of the political parties, notably the MB, to declare those who died at Maspero martyrs of the revolution as has routinely been the case with others who fell to violence in demonstrations. Indeed they suggested in public that the demonstrators may have threatened army officers.  Neither the generals, the soldiers at Maspero, nor the Muslim Brothers have given much public attention to the lives they took that day.  Nor has the army ever identified the soldiers that it claimed were killed, presumably because there were none.

Women, in this view, also have a role in their society but their primary task, especially in their 20s and 30s, should to provide a wholesome family environment.   The disrobing and beating of a woman wearing a headscarf in Tahrir two weeks ago which was so widely recounted in the international press is suggestive.  So too the response within conservative political quarters here questioning why exactly she was in Tahrir. Of course it's not right to attack women nor to leave them struggling half-naked in the dust, but what exactly do they expect.  And besides it wasn't the soldiers who did it but unnamed and effectively invisible hidden hands.  And I don't know the exact Arabic equivalent for "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes" but the existence of video footage showing exactly what happened (as at Maspero) has been dismissed by the armed forces and their supporters.

SCAF and the MB remind me a bit of the so-called country club Republicans of two generations ago in the US.  It was almost impossible for them to imagine that those who did not share their religious, class, and (in the US where this matters) racial background had any important role to play in politics.  They believed in law and order and respect for government as well as the free enterprise system.  They may have been hypocrites and narrow-minded but they made up the backbone of conservative America.  Comparing them to the Muslim Brothers will no doubt seem harsh and a bit absurd to many Americans (and too obvious to others).  The country club Republicans and their Democratic opposite numbers thought of themselves as decent, moderate and rational.  They were sober and unprejudiced in their own minds.  They never blew up churches.  But in Birmingham in 1962 they made excuses for those who did because they claimed that the protesters, threatening as they were to the social order, essentially brought disaster on themselves.  This is not incompatible with a functioning electoral democracy but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Fires

            The destruction of the Institut d’Egypte by fire was a significant loss to history and historians.  I don’t mean to diminish the importance of this event but it was not, despite some comparisons, like the burning of the library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar or of Baghdad by Hulagu.  It was a significant collection with many unique materials but it was not the sole location in which a large number of intellectual works of crucial importance were held.  And like the destruction of the Alexandrian library by Caesar it appears to have been an accident rather than a concerted attempt to destroy Egypt’s history, its archives, or its connections to the outside world.

            Without excusing whoever tossed the Molotov cocktail that ended the library’s 200 year existence, anyone familiar with Cairo’s recent history of fires might draw a somewhat different (but not more reassuring) lesson. 

            Accidental fires are not infrequent and especially in Cairo.  I was almost the unfortunate witness to one when a doorman managed to light a butane gas cylinder on fire about 15 years ago while checking to see if it had a leak.  He lit a match to the area at the top of the container and nearly turned it into a bomb.  Electrical fires are also not uncommon.

            One of the most impressive recent fires in the area around Tahrir Square occurred on August 19 2008 when the Shoura Council building burned to the ground.  Along with it went records of 19^th century parliamentary debates that were held in its archives.  The fire itself was an accident and perhaps could have been contained but the fire department was unable to arrive at the building in a timely fashion.  Had the 19^th century building ever been equipped with a sprinkler system perhaps it could have survived until the errant fire fighters arrived.

            In the early morning of September 27 2008 another fire occurred.  This one was at the National Theater (in a different part of downtown) and it also burned to the ground.  Again the fire department did not arrive in a timely fashion and the equally charming 19^th century building in which many years ago I saw an Arabic translation of a Latin American play also had no sprinkler system. 

            In the intervening years it evidently never occurred to anyone in the government that it might be a good idea to install sprinkler systems in old buildings, especially old buildings filled with books, journals, and other combustible materials.  So when that fateful Molotov cocktail was thrown no sprinkler system was in place to avoid transforming what might have been a modest problem into a major disaster.

            The government is already at work planning to repair the building just as the army also repaired other buildings destroyed by arson over the past year: notably churches in Soul and Imbaba.  In fact the rapidity with which the army repairs things is a bit unnerving.  Even while demonstrators were being shot on the streets a couple of weeks ago the Supreme Council announced that they would be cared for at the expense of the state. 

            Two errant thoughts occur to me, one of which is quite practical and the other quite metaphorical.  After three major fires have robbed Cairo of some important architectural and historical resources perhaps it would be a good idea if someone paid attention to putting sprinkler systems into other buildings.  I don’t know if the National Archives or the National Library (both of which have some exceptionally rare and irreplaceable collections) have sprinkler systems but perhaps they should.  Second, it is hard not to read this as a metaphor for the collapse of the old regime.  It’s not clear that the kind of spark tossed into an unhappy society by demonstrators on Police Day a year ago had to be the basis for a conflagration that took down an entire regime.  But just as the old regime didn’t do sprinklers, it also didn’t do anything resembling alternation of power or recognition of popular unhappiness.  One can only hope the Second Republic now under construction by the Armed Forces, the Muslim Brothers, and others will do better but that remains to be seen.

           

Zombie Economics and the Egyptian Revolution

            Just a brief note since I don’t have access to my books and notes while I’m in Cairo.  I see that the meme that the Armed Forces control between 20 and 45% of the Egyptian economy is making its way around again.  While there is no doubt that the Armed Forces and SCAF have economic power and privileges to maintain  I’m very dubious about these figures.  And nobody wants to do the work of looking at it more careful so it just won't die.  When I return to Seattle I’ll see if I can find some actual numbers to plug into the argument, but I recently came to understand what people who use this figure are thinking.  If you think in terms of a ratio between army and the economy then there seems to be a confusion between the role of the state overall in the economy and the armed forces on the one hand and between industrial economy and the economy overall on the other.  Confusing the role of the armed forces with that of the state makes it seem proportionately larger than it is; confusing the latter two makes the economy seem smaller than it is (which again, makes the role of the army seem bigger). In other words we're looking at Army economy/Total Egyptian economy and coming up with something between 1/5 and 2/5 or 20-40%. 

            Let’s begin with one very simple definitional problem.  What do we mean by “the economy”?  I don’t mean any fancy postmodern issues.  I mean simply what do we count?  Are we looking at Gross Domestic Product or something like the total value of all economic exchanges in the country?  Are we looking at total capital formation or something like the value of all the productive capital in the country?  In the former case we’re concerned about returns to factors rather than the total value of productive factors but if the latter we’re interested in something like the replacement value of factors of production and especially land and capital goods.

            We can try, qualitatively, looking at both.  The Egyptian state owns a lot of capital.  Of course it owns all the capital that the Armed Forces own but it also owns a lot of property not owned by the Armed Forces.  It owns a very large canal linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean from which it receives significant returns.  It acquired this asset at zero cost in 1956 but has spent quite a bit on repairing  it (generally and after several destructive wars)  as well as making capital investments to enlarge it.  It also owns a very large dam in the extreme south of the country which may need replacement in about 100 years.  The state also has extensive and valuable infrastructural investments in canals, roads, government buildings, civil airports, as well as educational, health and policing systems.  It also owns valuable mineral resources in the form of producing assets for its oil and gas reserves.

            The Armed Forces have extensive investments in industry as well as other sunk capital costs which we can think of as essentially worthless (unproductive) investments economically although they are very reassuring to society at large.  The Armed Forces appear to own a significant number of trucks, cars, busses, tanks, armored personnel carriers, airplanes which are rarely deployed and which carry neither passengers nor freight but which are capable of destroying significant quantities of capital if necessary.  The last time these planes appear to have been used for anything other than training was during the February demonstrations when they briefly took to the skies.  The armed forces also own significant numbers of weapons, uniforms, and the capital installations necessary to keep all of these investments in good repair. 

            The armed forces have also made a significant number of direct investments in industrial production whose total value we do not know.  If the army owned all the capital that produced the country’s industrial output, it would be responsible for close to 40% of GDP.  But this is to assume there are no other state-owned enterprises and no privately-owned industrial enterprises.  If only half of industrial output is produced by other state firms and private firms then the Armed Forces could control about 20% of GDP.  But if this were the case then it would be doubtful that we could account for the importance of private-sector investment over the past decade.  Nor would we be able to account for the sectoral shifts toward communications and services (including tourism and finance) which have been important sectors for economic growth (although not necessarily for employment growth). 

            Some of these investments must be profitable especially because the cost of capital for the Armed Forces must be very low (if not zero) and their labor costs may also be very low if they are using conscripts, but there is no reason to believe they are vastly more profitable than other state enterprises.  Given that private industry competes with the firms owned by the Armed Forces in a variety of sectors (bottled water, agricultural products and so forth) which do not have a zero cost of capital it is unclear what we are looking at. 

            If we think in terms of capital formation, then it would be clear that (apart from its investments in industry) the armed forces have very large and very unprofitable investments.  Theirs are, like military expenditure everywhere, an important element in maintaining demand for civilian goods but do not themselves play a significant role in the economy.  In addition to the Suez Canal, the High Dam, the educational, health, and security services there is another sector that matters in terms of capital formation: the private sector.  Although industry was nationalized in the 1960s, land always remained in private hands.  It is very hard to believe that whatever the army owns amounts to something like value of all of Egypt’s agricultural land and urban real estate which (at least as an order of magnitude) is what the armed forces would have to own if they were to control 40% of the economy. 

            The officers of the armed forces do have privileges and the institution has acquired significant property in Egypt which gives it a stake in whatever arrangements are made for the economy in the future.  But this, it seems to me, neither explains nor excuses how they have chosen to determine the country’s political future nor the methods they have employed to do so.  The armed forces bear the moral and political responsibility for what they have chosen to do.  Economics are an implausible substitute for insisting that they bear that responsibility. 

Elections and the Path to the Second Egyptian Republic

            Massive street demonstrations marked the beginning of the end of the First Republic in Egypt and their continuation a week ago has brought the Second Republic more fully into view.  In the process the revolutionary upheaval that has transformed the politics of the country has continued to devastate the reputations of the individuals, institutions and organizations that crossed its path.   Five days of bitter street battles coupled with peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people mere dozens of meters away were the prelude to the first round of voting for a new parliament.  The first round began November 28, just a year after the Mubarak regime’s fraudulent elections for the assembly eliminated the Muslim Brothers from the body.  They ended November 29 and if the next two rounds have similar results they will provide the Muslim Brothers with at least 40% of the seats in the legislative body to be installed in 2012.  Salafi parties that are set to take 20% of the seats will join them. If they can work together, will form an absolute majority in a legislature whose electoral legitimacy may be uncontested but whose powers are far from clear.

            Observers outside Egypt persistently ask how the young, often liberal, and secular leaders of the early demonstrations have now been maneuvered aside.  That the Muslim Brotherhood’s present leadership has played its political hand well with the consistent goal of moving the country toward elections it believed it would dominate is uncontestable.  But it had a strong hand to begin with.  It is now a truism in the international as well as Egyptian media that the Brotherhood is the largest and best-organized association in the country and that its leaders express ideas that have significant resonance among many Egyptian Muslims.  What is less commonly appreciated is just how large the organization is and how relatively well disciplined, ideologically and organizationally, it has become.  Egyptian press accounts, based on leaks from the Brotherhood’s finance office, in the spring suggested that the Brotherhood had nearly 800,000 dues-paying members.   Whether an exaggeration or an understatement, this number probably represents the correct order of magnitude. It accords with accounts of membership in the organization in the late 1940s.   Since the country’s population was then a quarter of its present size, it may also indicate that the MB is relatively not quite as popular now as six decades ago when it more completely embodied its founder’s wishes to combine elements of a mystical order, a political party, and an activist association.

The widely heralded splits from the Brotherhood, which have yielded such disparate parties as the Wasat (which ran a common list with the Brotherhood’s party) and the Adl (which did not) have left the Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice party (FJP) more coherent and so far not weakened at all.  American specialists in the art of voter analysis who believed that the Brotherhood would not gain more than 20% of the seats in an election based on their showing in the 2005 parliamentary election were of course mistaken.  In fact, based on the results of the March referendum it was always more realistic to assume that, for now, less than 50% of the electorate would cast ballots for parties other than Freedom and Justice.

            What is more surprising is both that the Salafi parties did so well and politicians associated with the old regime, the so-called fulul or remnants, did poorly.   It had long been argued that the now-dissolved National Democratic party was made up of locally powerful and ambitious politicians and it was long feared in Egypt that unless they were legally barred from running that they would return to office in large numbers.  We have long known that they were not democratic but it is  apparent that they were also neither national nor even a party and very few of their number appear to have much of a chance of serving in the new parliament.   

            One way to think about the new parliament is that it will contain a dominant Islamist bloc stretching from the extreme Salafi Islamist right through the conservative core of the FJP/MB to the moderate centrist elements of that party.   Another way to think about it is that there will be a very large, possibly majoritarian, central coalition headed by the FJP with an exuberant array to its right and left each of which will command about 20% of the electorate and the seats.  The Salafis and the secular forces are not likely to cooperate very much and certainly with no relish, and for the moment they will not be able to do more than embarrass the FJP. Politics may nevertheless occasionally bring such strange partners as bearded Salafis and stylish silk-stocking liberals into the same political bed.

            Assuming that the remaining elections do not dramatically change events on the ground (and it may be a mistake to assume that the results in Mahalla, Tanta or even Giza will be necessarily better for the FJP than Alexandria, Asyut and the Fayoum), the Muslim Brothers will finally gain the prize so long denied to its current generation of leaders:  a share of governance.   Many of its current leaders moved from the politics of the student movement to the professional associations and now they are on the verge of assuming parliamentary authority.   Heady as this moment must be, it is a distinctly new challenge for political leaders who have not previously had to contend with the need to manage  sprawling government institutions for diverse and increasingly demanding constituencies. 

            One particular example is the ministry of social solidarity, a portfolio that FJP might covet.  Widespread gossip in Cairo suggests that this ministry, which controls the supply of subsidized bread to Egyptians, is locked in a fierce struggle with the bakers and variety of gangsters over the price and supply of flour and loaves.  It has been more than 20 years since Yahya Sadowski wrote of the corruption within the flour trade and the baking and distribution of subsidized bread.  There is no reason to believe that the FJP will be better placed to resist the blandishments and threats with which such corrupt enterprise is maintained than Egyptian ministers past.

            And yet the FJP may not only be forced to try its hand in that game; it may strongly desire to do so.  Egyptians have long characterized their government as comprising two distinct types of ministerial organizations: the social and the sovereign.  The sovereign ministries are those that concentrate coercive power:  interior (the police), defense (the armed forces), justice (the courts and prosecuting attorneys), foreign affairs, and of course the one ring that binds them all: the presidency of the republic.  The social ministries show a more benign face of governance and dispense goods, albeit frequently of low quality, to the population:  education, social welfare, labor, health and a plethora of development-oriented agencies within many industries whose names suggest they are engaged in investment.  They certainly employ workers and spend money.

            It is too early to be certain but there are reasons to believe that a party like the FJP many of whose members are doctors, lawyers, professors and teachers would be more desirous of controlling the social ministries which could directly shape popular conceptions through schools, that provide the public with goods, and that hire a significant number of skilled and semi-skilled employes.  These ministries are important and legitimate sources of patronage. 

        The sovereign ministries may be less attractive.  Controlling them would involve the FJP rapidly in a long and complex struggle to re-shape the national police and take responsibility for what are likely to be their outrages for a decade to come.  While the MB leadership has said that it agrees the Camp David treaty with Israel must be maintained, they may not relish the idea of a member who serves as Foreign Minister shaking hands or giving a friendly hug to his Israeli opposite number before the eager cameras of world’s assembled photographic corps.  Lastly the Army has made it clear that it does not want much civilian oversight of its budget and the FJP might prefer to leave that contentious issue also on the side.  No less than Ulysses, the FJP might prefer binding itself to the mast of the ship of state in inferior positions to remain deaf to the siren sound of sovereign power that could tempt it to self-destruction.           

            Between now and the formation of any government, there are three daunting challenges facing FJP and the parliamentary parties.  These will in the short term determine the outlines of the Second Republic.  First, the constitutional referendum of March asserted that the new parliament will choose the 100 members of the constituent assembly.  This is one of the six clauses of the Constitutional Declaration issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that has the legitimacy of a popular majority vote behind it.  The constant assertion and re-assertion of the legitimacy provided by that vote provided both the MB and SCAF with the basis for rejecting the claims of the liberal left to establish a civilian government of national salvation or indeed to write a constitution before holding elections.  In November SCAF issued another proclamation (which it has recently said might have been only a military suggestion) allowing the elected parliament the choice of only 20 members of the constituent assembly.  The parliament and the FJP will have to decide whether to fight or fold on this issue.  No matter what the outcome of these negotiations, deputies will have to create some mechanism of their own to decide who it will choose to sit in the new body.  Whether it will involve behind-the-scenes maneuvering, public hearings, or the constitution of a parliamentary committee, the Salafis, Brothers, and secularists will have to adopt some common procedure.  How successfully and rapidly they manage that task will affect their power as well as their reputation and that of the parliament they hope to empower.

            Second, the constitutional declaration also gave the new parliament the right to engage in legislative activity (of a vague and ill-defined nature) as soon as it is seated.  The two houses will have to determine if they wish to challenge SCAF on this issue as well, including their presumptive right to examine the state budget.  Few deputies may wish to challenge SCAF on these grounds, but as the uproar over the November “suggestion” shows, the activist public may not be very pleased if the parliament immediately backs down.  What the broader public might think we, of course, do not know but deputies from the Egyptian countryside and impoverished neighborhoods may have a clearer idea of how concerned their constituents are and whether that accords with the wishes of their party’s leadership.

            Third, no matter how and how many delegates the parliament chooses, the deputies will have to choose between those likely to write a constitution endorsing a strong executive of the kind Egypt has had since 1923 (the transition from monarchy to republic in 1952 by no means weakened the executive authority) or significantly strengthen the hand of parliament.  One crucial test already looming on the horizon is whether, for the first time in Egyptian history, it will be an assumption of ordinary politics and a constitutional requirement that the prime minister be a member of the largest party in parliament.  Especially if that party has a majority of seats.  This was a goal that persistently eluded the nationalist Wafd party between 1923 and 1952.

      And, of course, beyond that is the division of power between the president and parliament.  Presidential candidates such as Amr Moussa, who served as Foreign Minister under Hosny Mubarak, have made it clear they favor a very strong presidency and SCAF is likely to as well. While the time to make this decision stretches out over a year, the choice of who to seat in the constituent assembly will be an early bellwether of how this conflict will play out.

            The resolution of these issues will say much about whether parliament is to be a locus of decision-making in the country or the kind of rhetorical playground for the distribution of patronage that characterized the student governments in which the current leadership of the FJP served in the 1980s.

 Although I’ve never much admired Mao Tse-tung, I have always believed that he had a way with words.  “A revolution” he wrote in 1927, “is not a dinner party or writing an essay or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so courteous and so gentle….”  Mao wrote those words as the communist organization in urban China was being destroyed in the aftermath of a military coup and a battle with the Nationalist party led by Chiang Kai-Shek.  Mao, an adept of guerrilla war and leader of a faction of the party based in the countryside, was not sad to see his erstwhile competitors for revolutionary leadership crushed.  In Egypt the urban revolution, often seen as leaderless, has not been crushed and may not be conventionally crushable.  The unlikely street coalition of Ultras (soccer fans),  disaffected youth, the liberal left, swelled on occasion by the ranks of unemployed and semi-employed Muslim majority, has clearly not been engaged in embroidery or a dinner party.  There have been moments, in March for example, when Tahrir (which by synecdoche stands for the crowds that have gathered in most of the urban centers of Egypt) may have resembled a vast mawlid (religious festival) or almost literally Lenin’s “carnival of the oppressed.”  But in its own discourteous and unrefined way it has pushed the work of revolution constantly, if fitfully, forward. 

Not only are Mubarak and most of his cronies gone.  Reputations have been savaged and many prominent political figures cast aside as they seemed to stand athwart the revolution crying stop.  Ahmad Shafiq was forced out of the prime ministership when he appeared likely to become a lightning rod for protest in the early days of the revolution.  A former general, he is now widely if possibly unfairly identified by his fondness for pullover sweaters than for any achievements.  More recently Essam Sharaf, by all accounts a decent man, has achieved the dubious distinction of being the only Egyptian Prime Minister to have resigned from office in response to public protests over government policies.  He also thereby becomes the only Egyptian minister to have twice resigned (the first time was after a terrible train disaster in the Mubarak period when it become apparent that he could not fix a broken Transport ministry).  Supreme Court Justice Tahany el-Gabali saw her political reputation vaporize after some unfortunate (and probably unnecessary) comments on illiterate voting and the role of SCAF in politics.  And the reputation of SCAF itself in the wake of the gruesome deaths of protesters at Maspero nearby Tahrir Square in October and the recent round of fighting in November has also suffered.  SCAF’s success at managing the electoral process may improve its reputation briefly but the Egyptian military has always done very well at logistics of the kind needed to get ballots to the polling stations (or ammunition to the troops) and very poorly at tactical improvisation. 

There is a tendency, especially outside Egypt, to dismiss the demonstrators as erratic, leaderless and playing a negative role.  This is much truth to this, but as the demonstrators continue to assert it has another side as well.  What has weakened the transition to a stable institutional structure of democracy has also prevented SCAF from fully asserting its control with organizations and institutions that might have very willingly collaborated in the re-creation of the old order as long as they sat in the new places of honor.

As Mao both appreciated and resented, stable institutions including parliaments and well-organized electoral parties do have a tendency to resemble dinner parties more than street fighting or guerilla warfare. And there is no doubt that many Egyptian politicians as well as most American political scientists and policy makers are more than ready to return to the banquet table (without alcoholic toasts) and the writing of eight-legged essays about how the Arab Spring has turned to Arab winter.  And yet it is difficult to imagine how the work of creating a new institutional structure and a new political culture could move forward until the debris of the old republic had been more fully cleared out of the way than was the case until mid-November. 

            The Egyptian revolution has, to my mind at any rate, not yet run its course.  I will leave arguments about how to characterize the past year in Egypt to another day, but I do think Egypt experienced a revolutionary crisis that is not yet over.  Just what the Muslim Brothers think I don’t know but their caution at almost every major turning point in the street politics of the past year suggest that they fear the continued power of their old nemesis, the armed forces and the police. 

Tens of millions of Egyptians may be tired of revolutionary disorder and yearn for stability and a return of economic activity but tens of millions of Egyptians (not infrequently the same people) have demands and aspirations that they still expect the revolution to realize.  The MB and their parliamentary party, the FJP, represent a powerful force for stability and order.  But, if indeed the unruly force of the Egyptian revolution continues to manifest itself they may find their own reputation tarnished and their organizations marginalized.   The Salafis are eager to replace the Muslim Brothers as the true leaders of an Islamic and Islamizing revolution and we have a common, if inaccurate picture, of a revolutionary cycle moving from a more moderate to a more radical phase under the impulse of increasing demands from a disaffected underclass.  This is another historically inaccurate picture of the process of revolutionary change that I hope to address in a later blog or else in the book that will result from all of my electronic activity. 

As the revolution has tarnished and then cast aside successive leaders and continues to do so, another possibility also emerges.  If everyone has been taken off the pedestal and reduced to human dimensions and constructed out of the base ingredients of which people are made perhaps a very different political environment will develop: one where admittedly imperfect people with incomplete knowledge and conflicting interests make policies.   It will not be nirvana or the revolution or the Islamic state and it will leave many Egyptians still in search of justice and bread, but it may at least create a political space in which human dignity attains some respect.  This, I continue to recall, was one of the three primary demands of the early days of a revolution whose appearance was a surprise and that has shown more than once its capacity to overturn our expectations and hollow verities.