Writing in The Guardian, Gary Younge makes an excellent point about responses to the Egyptian revolution among Western leaders: “Egypt proved that our leaders see freedom as a question of strategy, not principle”.
I think Younge is right to circle in on the way that events in Egypt – and their coverage – had and have the potential to disrupt a significant number of ideological illusions. I’ve already mentioned in an earlier post John Quiggin’s excellent argument that a transition to democracy in Egypt would fatally undermine the claims that “Israel is the only democracy in the region” and the related claim that there is some sort of “Arab exception” to the democratisation thesis. Both these claims do a lot of heavy lifting in obscuring the actual power relations in the region, and the imperialist posture of the United States.
Younge correctly focuses on the underpinnings of such claims – the image of the Arabic populations as alternatively passively docile or actively threatening. Either way, both Arabic men and Arabic women are infantilised. It ought to be difficult to sustain such wrong headed views when we’ve all seen images such as these. The same should go for some of the ridiculous but constantly repeated stereotypes about the unicity and evils of Islamic views, not to mention some of the ideological bugbears of the last decade:
In the crude Manichean struggle between political Islam and democracy invented by a wrongheaded strand of western liberalism, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that marched for freedom while the self-appointed defenders of the Enlightenment prevaricated for tyranny.
You could hardly put it more pithily than that.
Tariq Ali writes that we are seeing the rebirth of political rationality in the Middle East. And crucial to this is not just a new form of articulating civic demands, but also an assumption of civic and national responsibility which is deeply threatening to any conception that “the West” can shape the region to its desires. Younge correctly notes that:
it became apparent that while the west has been deeply complicit in what has happened in the region, it was not even remotely in control of what would happen next. Indeed, it was barely relevant.
That irrelevance explains both the lack of resolve in the American government’s response, and the ideological incoherence I discussed in my last post.
Support of dictators such as Hosni Mubarak has always been a cornerstone of an imperialist strategy, originating in the US’ push to purge the region of the influence of the British and French in the 1950s, its concurrent anticommunist strategy, and later its imbrication with the Israeli regime. The corner stones are now crumbling, just as the imperial centre itself descends into incoherence.
Ideology is vitally important here, because in the sociology of forms of state domination, it’s identified – quite rightly – as key to holding together empires. Empires are quite distinct from nation states, projecting power as much by ideology as by force majeure. Hence the concept of “soft power” so often invoked in US foreign policy discourse is hardly a surprising one.
America is having to confront the problem of imperial decline. The increasing levels of violence and division in its politics, and the need to constantly reinforce the narrative of “American exceptionalism”, is quite telling. It tells a tale of a polity which is no longer able to bring reality into easy relation to belief, and thus the relation to truth is itself in crisis in American politics. So, too, the increase in nativism – as empires lose self-confidence, they start to define citizenship in terms of an ethnos rather than an ideal. Thus, the history of British immigration policy could be written in one vein as the shift from Empire to Commonwealth to (normatively English) Nation-State.
Make no mistake. As well as an undoubted victory for the citizens of Egypt, this revolution is a major ideological crisis for the US imperial-war state.
NB: The most recent LP thread on Egypt is here.
Elsewhere: The newest post at Left Flank, which has been publishing a lot of informed commentary on the Egyptian revolution.
Update: [by Kim] Some interesting links from Open Democracy:
I think you and others are giving too much credence to the events of the last few months being any kind of solid rebuke to US superpower status, Mark.
Yes, people power revolutions are triffic things, and twenty years ago they actually did bring down one superpower, but it’s Iraq that was/is the thing that defines the crisis of the new American century. Washington losing this particular ‘he-might-be-a-sonofabitch-but-at-least-he’s-ours’ will only impact their relationship with Israel (I don’t see how Cairo doesn’t go down the path of Turkey vis-à-vis the Palestinian conflict), it won’t ruin or hurt their global hegemony the way Iraq does.
Of course the fact so many now perceive global American power through the distorted lens of Israel/Palestine is another matter entirely. History appears to have gone all Internet troll-like in that respect.
Overall I think this is Indonesia Mark 2, not commo Eastern Europe redux.
So many words and yet no mention of Mubarek’s NDP having been a fully fledged member of the Socialist International; a sister party of the ALP….since 1989. Only chucked out 14 days ago, when the Socialist jig was up.
Oh dear. And Mubarak + NDP was all “a cornerstone of an imperialist strategy” all that time. Kinda says all you need to know about this particular article’s author and his grip on reality eh?
BTW. Anyone care to guess what Mamdou Habib may have learned about the NDP and ALP connection whilst being hosted in his homeland a few years back. Musta been dynamite for Gillard to have handed over the cash so quickly…and with a “confidentiality clause” attached, eh?
I’m suspecting that anything negative about Howard etc would not be being held so close to the chest. Wotcha all reckon?
Nickws, I’d agree that the events of 1989 and 1991 are not directly comparable. But I’d argue that the Iraqi morass is a definite indicator of the lack of ability of the US to make over the world by force – the fact that force was used is itself an indicator of decline; the ideological solidarity of the “free world” during the Cold War could not quite be recreated.
What we are seeing now is some of the petards about freedom and democracy invoked in the early 2000s doing a lot of hoisting. So Iraq, in a sense, is a precursor to Egypt in 2011.
@4. What morass in Iraq? Recently the Iraqi govt sent two planes to ferry it’s citizens home from Egypt.
The citizens did not choose to stay or to flee. They went home.
A month ago the Iraqi Soccer team was bundled out of the Asian Soccer Cup in the Group Stage. This was a “disaster” since they had been defending champions, yet they too flew home quite cheerfully. However in days gone by things were rather different….
from Wiki…..
“During the rule of the government of Saddam Hussein, Saddam’s son, Uday Hussein, was in charge of the Iraqi Olympic Committee and, by extension, the national football team. Under Uday’s leadership, motivational lectures to the team included threats to cut off players’ legs, while missed practices resulted in prison time and losses resulted in flogging with electric cable or baths in raw sewage, if penalites or an open goal was missed or own goals were scored then that person would have their feet whipped with thorns.”
This your kinda place, Mark??
Apologists for murderous nutters should really think twice before desctibing freedom-loving countries such as Iraq as “morasses”.
After all, a hell of a lot more Iraqis have died fighting for that freedom than the handful who likewise died in Egypt.
You are a disgrace.
Mark, I think you are undoubtedly correct in saying that the Egyptian democratic revolution – albeit yet to be realized – ” is a major ideological US imperial war-state”. It undermines the institutional rationale for war industries (other than being good capitalists) and the Islamophobia spread by sections of the media, as a corollary of the war of terror. Of course, bureaucratic self preservation as illustrated by the often competing sections of the US armed forces in terms of funding and relevance is probably universal.
I am reminded reading David’s Kilpatrick and Sanger’s article in the NYT describing the major players in the Egyptian uprising and purported insider account of the reaction within the White House, but somewhat glossing over the thirty year support by successive Administrations of the police state that the media has a major role in the propagation of ideology – and the rewriting of history.
“Make no mistake. As well as an undoubted victory for the citizens of Egypt, this revolution is a major ideological crisis for the US imperial-war state.”
Some evidence that the US imperial-war state is something more than a figment of a feverish imagination would be appreciated.
Gosh, this is like the febrile commenting days of 2003-6 at the height of Iraq War and Islamophobic frenzy. As sure a sign as any that there’s significant ideological dissonance going on!
Interesting that these two commenters fail to address themselves to anything that has actually been happening in Egypt while suggesting others are off on flights of fancy.
The reference to a soccer match, I must admit, is a bit of a puzzle.
Mark, I find this distinction an unusual and unconvincing one. It seems to me that both nation states and empires rule through a mixture of coercion and consent. In Australian society the state certainly uses “soft power”, but it is always backed by “hard power”, even if that is so banal that people don’t routinely notice it. The same is true on an international scale.
The main difference I can see is that there is no global state that rules over the system of nation states in the way that a state in an individual country rules over its population. Yet that only means that intra-state rivalry is more regulated through precedent written by winners of geopolitical competition rather than some apparently external body (China Mieville expands on this issue in his excellent book on international law, Between Equal Rights).
Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you’re saying here?
Well, yes. I thought my post was arguing about Iraq to a similar end, Mark. Iraq has killed American policy options. While Egypt has merely forced some contortions in US policy.
Bean Counter, your aggression towards those terrible pro-ALP, anti-OperationIraqiFreedom slackers in Egypt… Basically the craziness of this is very interesting, and needs further investigation. To what extent are the official Conservative political operations in the US government and MSM inclined to adopt bizarre, unworkable self-justification over Egypt? Is your Glenn Beck attitude representative of Australian Right opinion?
Questions, so many questions.
@5 US policy is very easy to understand. Expansionist war-mongers are to be “contained”.
Next is to encourage democracy within nations….but not if they will then use this to wage war against, or subvert, other nations. Or to attack the US.
The US will tolerate a Franco but not a Hitler. They will support a Pinochet but not an Allende (KGB agent paid millions by Yuri Andropov to expand Soviet influence). They will support a Pancho villa…but not when he solicited German money and launched raids into Texas/New Mexico in 1916.
Most obvious example. The US will tolerate even Al Quaeda training camps in Afghanista, and the Taliban in the saddle….but not if they then launch attacks on New York.
So. Mubarak was tolerated because he renounced aggressive war against Israel. This meant no nucear confrontation between the Soviets and the Jewish State…followed by WWIII.
When the Egyptians felt it was time for change…the US did not intervene. Maybe it’ll lead to democracy and no war. Pretty simple really.
Let’s hope a Muslim Brotherhood lead Egypt does not attack Israel…should it gain power. You do hope this too don’t you wmmbb?
@8 – surely the difference, Dr_Tad, is between ideological claims which are universalisable (ie America leads the world as a beacon of freedom and democracy and has an exceptional mission to spread its values) and those which are limited to the nation state: cf. for instance, the Croatian or Serbian nationalisms which emerged after the collapse of Yugoslavia (whereas Soviet ideology was certainly universal/imperial in fashion). Mark’s point, as I read it, is that this is now in crisis in terms of shoring up US hegemony in the international system, and in a related way, in crisis at home, where things tend to fall into a new posture of ethnic nationalism (cf. the current controversies over citizenship, immigration and birth, for instance).
It seems to me to be both a useful and real distinction.
A claim by the US that its own national interest lies in this or that happening in the Middle East is implicitly an admission of defeat; as there’s ipso facto no reason why Egyptians or Syrians or whoever should care.
Kim:
“Interesting that these two commenters fail to address themselves to anything that has actually been happening in Egypt while suggesting others are off on flights of fancy.”
I haven’t addressed it because I have no special insight into the matter. I also doubt many folk outside of Egypt have any special insight. Why should anyone feel the need to have an opinion on everything? For all I know Egypt might be on the cusp of liberal democracy or a grueling Burmese style military dictatorship. Or something else entirely.
But why divert attention away from the undergraduate Marxism encapsulated by the “US imperial-war state” remark?
I partially agree with Dr Tad.
There is nothing innately different between empires and nation states in the methods of control. However, the mixture of soft power and coercion are different.
What is different are the subjects of control. Governing elites in client states must be convinced to do the bidding of the metropole. I doubt that behind closed doors in their negotiations with Hosni Mubarak US decision makers tried very hard at all to convince Mubarak of their sincere pursuit of publicly announced foreign policiy agendas. There is a mismatch between the public rhetoric of the US and its private rhetoric.
Again, not only empires can exploit the disjunction between public rhetoric and private rhetoric. However, empires can be distinguished from middling stats by their having the means to enforce their private rhetoric. Middling powers like Australia do not.
Only very infrequently can empires afford to exert force majeure. Indeed the exercise of force majeure is correctly viewed as a failure, when the bluff of the imperial power has been called.
Pathways to control are usually more nuanced. Mubarak serves as an exemplar. The client regime does the bidding of the metropole in return for the means of perpetuating that control, and if all else fails an escape hatch and unfettered access to the Swiss bank account. Yet, the would-be client is a victim of his own historical ignorance. Only very infrequently does the puppet live to enjoy his ill-gotten gains either in his own country or in some place of luxurious exile. Every time a Thieu, a Lon Nol, a Batista, a Chiang Kai-shek, a Pahlavi, a Mubarak, goes on the run, the difficulty of finding replacements should increase. Yet is it clear that for imperial powers historical ignorance and stupidity are everlastingly renewable resources.
Katz @13 — I feel uneasy about your claim that
Force is sometimes used to go on the offensive & prove superiority. The US didn’t need to nuke Japan but they did to establish their absolute supremacy after WWII. Behind all forms of state power lies the threat (and proven reality) of coercive strength. I’m not sure that its use can be so categorically downplayed as an admission of failure — although of course lately for the US it has been so.
However, I do concur that the exact balance of coercion and consent varies, and in more ways than just the comparison between states’ domestic and international functions.
Kim @ 11 — If I understand what you’re saying, I think you downplay the “universal” character of ideological nationalism. The state tries to cohere across antagonistic class and other social divisions precisely through its use of national unity and its opposite (the intrusion of “the other”. Furthermore, in the case of powerful states with aggressive foreign policies (the US & Australia are obvious examples) the projection of a universalist imperial internationalism forms part of the ideological cement of domestic nationalism.
This, I would suggest, is why both the international and domestic legitimacy of the US state are in trouble at the same time (although the two crises develop at different tempos).
I recently wrote more about the links between the state system and domestic politics here.
I don’t know how much of a skeptic you are, Skeptical Leftist but I’d have thought “imperial war state” was a pragmatic description of a state which:
* maintains military bases and the capacity to project power across the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases
* has by far the largest military forces in the world and spends a very large proportion of its GDP thereon
* hosts a formidable defence and armaments industry
* is rarely not engaged in combat outside its territory.
@Dr_Tad, no I disagree. Australia doesn’t attempt to exercise power in the international system by virtue of some purported values which are particular to our nationalism – it only does so by virtue of claims to universality (“Western values”) which are closely linked to US leadership. Thus, with some gestures towards a liberal internationalism, in practice Australian international power has been dependent on alignment either with Britain or the US as successive imperial centres. Thus, Australia’s links with the US have more of the character of necessity than contingency. Hence why it’s such a fetish in the political system generally.
In short, Dr_Tad, I would suggest nationalism only has some sort of universalism in a weak sense that most states are or try to be nation-states, and that it was – for a while – seen as a normative criterion for state formation. But, inevitably, when it comes to the international system, nationalist claims are particularist – hence their downplaying in favour of ideological universalisms with “leaders” in the form of states such as the US and the USSR. The liberal form of universal nationalism Woodrow Wilson favoured kinda died of its own contradictions.
Dr Tad, I see we are in general agreement:
This is not a good distinction. The choice facing the US at this time, given the demand for unconditional surrender, was full-scale invasion or the untested nuclear option. I think it can be argued that horrible as it was nuking Japan was less violent that full-scale invasion. I’d prefer to avoid discussion of that tried-and-true derail topic by pointing out that US-Japan relations in 1945 don’t fit under our discussion of metropole/client state relations.
When the US dropped the bomb on Japan in 1945, the US was not yet an imperial power. Dropping the A-bomb was the last act in a war between two vying would-be hegemons. Japan first chose force majeure against the US to make good its claim to hegemonic status. Japan failed.
Typically, since WWII, the US has embroiled itself in attempting to tamp down movements of national liberation often spearheaded by Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties. And latterly has combatted Islamist revanchism perceived to threaten the State of Israel and/or access to ME oil and/or strategic points needed to achieve these ambitions.
All imperial powers face demands for Home Rule. Always bound up in calls for Home Rule is the issue of who would rule at home.
Traditional imperial powers were fixated on the question of Home Rule. Governing elites in Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium were deeply invested in the prestige of formal empire. The US is distinguishable from traditional imperialists in that the governing elites of the US are more interested in who would rule in polities incorporated in their informal empire.
Publicly, the US asserts some variant of the “Freedom Agenda”. In private, as I suggested above, the US presses for regimes believed to be willing to assist broader strategic objectives related to playing favourites (Israel) and perpetuating control over resources and strategic points.
Kim — Hmm. I see the universalist claims of Western states on the world stage (as leaders or parts of imperial blocs) as being central to domestic nationalist ideology and vice-versa. Think of Howard: “They hate us because of *our* values and way of life”. It is not just a statement of domestic national coherence but also the flipside of an aggressive pro-imperialist stance that seeks to universalise aspects of Western political and economic organisation as the best way of running subordinate societies.
Similarly, the US projects its national values as universal because of its position of imperial strength (not so successfully these days).
Furthermore, nationalism is in the abstract is also a type of universalism because of the understanding that a system of nation states is the universal method of dividing up the world.
I’m not sure why you find this controversial? Or maybe I am missing your point?
You may guess from this that I am politically hostile to nationalism as an ideology/strategy for the Left.
I was wondering if anyone else remembered or had noticed. I for one look forward to the Chrenkoffist Bad News From Egypt blog.
For a bit of light relief we can always turn to the Australian. In this case it’s the delightful Melanie Phillips castigating the left for our inconsistency.
For during the past seven years, Western liberals have fulminated without remission that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair were criminally out to lunch to pretend that democracy could ever come to Iraq through ousting a dictator.
Now the left are supporting the Egyptian revolution so we’re all “Neocons now”.
Soerry about that, I’ll try again.
For a bit of light relief we can always turn to the Australian. In this case it’s the delightful Melanie Phillips castigating the left for our inconsistency.
Now the left are supporting the Egyptian revolution so we’re all “Neocons now”.
I think people are over-reading the wider significance of events in Egypt.
For a start, I think you’re being way over-optimistic for Egypt. I’m glad Mubarak has gone, but there can be no lasting political revolution without a social and economic revolution, and such a revolution is:
- unlikely while the Egyptian army (representing the rich), the Israelis, the Saudis and the Americans all oppose one;
- in any case would be prolonged, painful and not necessarily have a happy ending.
Further, I think the US is indeed a declining empire, but events in Egypt are neither a cause nor a major symptom of that decline. I think in the decades ahead events in Asia and the Pacific (hopefully less dramatic) will count as both. Which is why we need to be rethinking our defence and security strategy from the ground up.
DD, I think a distinction can be made between the “wider” and the “deeper” significance of Egypt.
I agree with you that it is unlikely that Egypt will enjoy thoroughgoing egalitarianism or profound democratisation. In other words, this revolution won’t go very “deep”.
However, Egypt is the largest Arab nation. The potential influence of Egypt in the Arab world is profound. The example of Egypt turbocharges expectations and hopes first aroused in Tunisia. This influence may be called “wider” significance.
Moreover, there are interesting noises coming out of Iran. The example of Egypt may spread beyond the Arab world.
As for this neocon fantasy that Bush’s invasion of Iraq intended the collapse of the Mubarak tyranny, wouldn’t simply cutting of the $1.5b p.a. military aid have achieved that aim far more cheaply? Why would even an imbecile give arms to a regime he intended to remove? This neocon rewriting of history is just too ridiculous for words.
However, I do expect the Lastsuperpower folks to turn up with their own inimitable spin of this thesis any time now.
@Dr_Tad, actually, I don’t think we’re that far apart. I’d also not see nationalism as the optimal strategy for the left, but then, you really do have to consider the role of nationalism in Egypt. Sure, to some degree, there’s a pan-Arab dimension, but the rhetoric coming from a lot of participants seems very nationalistic to me.
Kim — sure the main impulse in Egypt to date has been national-democratic. Of that there is no doubt.
But the question is whether this crisis of Egyptian society can be resolved easily within such a framework. Therein lies the danger that an authoritarian outcome is the result if the Left is unable to win enough of the population to moving the revolutionary process in a specifically anti-capitalist direction (which also necessitates a destruction of the existing state; currently weakened but still firmly in place).
If the Left fails, then wider layers of the population may accept some kind of iron-fisted stability as the best option, or perhaps be attracted to an Islamist “solution” which will also retain capitalist relations as primary.
This process is only really at its starting point. The increasing activity of workers in a manner that is both economic and political, as well as being clearly independent of the state, suggests that to quench demands for economic and social justice (in addition to the formal but narrow political rights being promised by the state) will require a lot more than capitalist business as usual.
Nationalism (as distinct from anti-imperialism) will be a roadblock to such radical developments because it will seek to manage the interests of all classes, even when those interests are mutually contradictory, in the interests of the existing capitalist order in Egypt.
Kim,
Not all nationalisms are equal in that respect. I am an internationalist, but I would never equate the nationalism of the oppressed with the nationalism of an imperial state. Would you equate the nationalism of a West Papuan, for instance, with the nationalism of an American?
Egyptians feel that they have suffered a national humiliation by being made the number two client of the US in the Middle East, by selling subsidised gas to Israel while their military blocked the tunnels to Gaza etc. So inevitably nationalism has played a role in this revolt.
Also I think its impossible to disentangle Egytian nationalism from pan-Arabism, such is the legacy of Nasser.
The great dilemma facing the Neocons is finding a replacement for Mubarek who will help democratize Egypt but who will still operate sympathetically with Israel.
At the risk of feeding the trolls – for the record this is the letter from the socialist international expelling the Egyptian NDP:
http://www.socialistinternational.org/images/dynamicImages/files/Letter%20NDP.pdf
They were apparently admitted in 1989. The SI’s mealy-mouthed reasons for bringing them in look pretty silly now, but no more silly than successive foreign commentators who wanted to take Mubarakism seriously as a moderating force.
@27 – Fair points, Robert; just goes to show all this stuff is complex.
It’s all apropos of an important point that most shades of American opinion – ranging from the Tea Partiers right through to the left of the Dems – steadfastly ignore; a democratic Middle East would be virulently anti-Israeli, and almost as virulently anti-American.
That’s what generates the dilemma for the Yanks. They see that continued support for Arab autocracy is both immoral (yes, most Americans – even at the top – are nothing if not moral) and unsustainable, but the alternative genuinely endangers both their oil and their self-image. No wonder they don’t admit this fact, even to themselves.
I get the impression that the oppressive dictatorship of Mubarak was at the insistence of the Israelis rather than the Americans; so Egyptian democracy is a dilemma for the Yanks only because the Zionist lobby controls Yankee foreign policy.
Mark – I agree with the general gist of this post. But something in it’s amiss. This quote for example:
Is crude and Manichean itself. What ‘freedom’ does the Muslim brotherhood struggle for? The oldest freedom there is, that of self-determination. It’s elementary that in this region there is popular dissent from governments who tolerate Israel because vassal states of the USA. That is imperialist stooges. But the struggle of ‘Islamism’ (I truly hate all available terms) is not towards modern statehood but against it. The Muslim Brotherhood are not interested in democracy, they may however settle for it.
They are not behind the revolutions in Cairo and Tunisia.
I’m not entirely certain what this anti-Brit/French purge amounts to. The United States has never exercised such micromanagement. They inherited the British territory after WWII. They saw it to be in their interests to maintain a casual Imperium.
They have, as you say, opposed democracy as in the CIA’s removal of Mohammed Mossadegh under Eisenhower. But opposition to democracy isn’t the ideological standpoint of the US. They are asserting their interests which are twofold. 1. Oil; 2. Preventing their rivals, the Sovs, from gaining too much influence. It’s an old game that well pre-exists modern ideology by millennia.
Bean Counter @ 2,
Youre talking rubbish. Here’s why.
I am not impressed with fatuous comparisons between Iraq 2003 and Egypt 2011. Neither is Guy Rundle. His latest is behind the Great Crikey Subscriber firewall, alas, so I will only pass on three key pithy paragraphs:
Paul – Your citation doesn’t refute Bean Counter’s query. Those regimes marked ‘secular’ in the region, including Israel, all tend to have a sort of ‘socialist’ bent.
Your quote is simply an ideological assertion grounded in some kind of Trotskyite idealism, the sort that goes all glassy-eyed whenever a bunch of people gather anywhere with megaphones and do a lot of shouting in unison.
It remains to be seen whether the Egyptians and the Tunisians will actually change their system of government or simply install fresh heads in the oligarchy. There is a powerful entrenched and ancient class system in those parts and they won’t voluntarily give up all their privileges.
No. These revolutions are the direct result of the same conflict of interests that led to the French revolution, the Reform Act of 1834 and all the rest of it. These places are kleptocracies wherein the economy is owned by a handful of families and those outside can’t improve their lot without permission. And they never get it. It’s a revolt grounded in the middle-class, it’s a bourgeois revolution.
The source of the insurrection were social and economic illiberalism. The spark that set this fire off was a university graduate who, after being denied even the right to sell fruit to earn a crust, set himself on fire.
But of course it’s the capitalism that’s too blame: homophobia, imperialism, the repression of women – everyone knows that the facts speak for themselves. None of that occurred until mass production and unencumbered market economies came along.
I’m sorry but your quote with its cried of solidarity lacks credit somewhat.
Egyptian nationalism has always been a weakened and compromised force. This weakness can be traced back to the nature of the the Ottoman Empire, its gradual dismantlement, and the peculiar potency of pan-islamism. The scars of these events still mark current-day Egyptian politics.
The MB are more in favour of democracy than they are of nationalism in the political sense of that term.
The MB have a vision of pan-islamism that renders redundant current national boundaries.
The British occupation of that part of the Ottoman Empire called Egypt in 1882 and its eventual annexation of Egypt as a British colony in 1914 and elevation of a puppet Sultan beholden to the British (sound familiar?) disrupted Egypt’s place in any pan-islamic polity (which was being thoroughly disrupted by other means elsewhere in any case). But the yearning for such a thing never disappeared and has been on the rise for at least 40 years.
In short, the very entity of Egypt is a colonial imposition and therefore nationalism based on those particular borders must always be compromised so long as many Egyptians yearn for something grander.
“The increasing levels of violence and division in its politics, and the need to constantly reinforce the narrative of “American exceptionalism”, is quite telling”
It’s interesting to contrast the state of US politics on the ground now with the middle to late 60s. I think that the settlement over civil rights that came out of that period means that US domestic politics “in the streets” is a lot less violent and radical now than then. Yet at the same time the top of the political tree seems to be in a state of chaos with the right constantly inventing new reasons as to why the US is obliged to be the force majeure in the world (because the latest one is proven false) and the left seemly bewildered by the ferocity and relentlessness of attacks on it from the right. So the violence and division here is at the top, leading the vast majority of US citizens turn their backs and walk away.
Some of Katz’s insights here I’d say have been pretty perceptive. I’d add a few things, but maybe later. First things first.
People seem to be setting aside a few very basic things here that help illuminate the situation. The population of Egypt is roughly 80 million (all refs CIA World Factbook), in a country where much of the real estate is not easily habitable. The median age is around 24. About a third of population under the age of 14. The population lives pretty closely along the sides of what is essentially a giant 2-lane superwaterway in the middle of a desert. You ever see what Egypt looks like in that famous satellite photo of the Earth lit up at night? It looks like it could have been designed by El Lissitzky, like that nutty spaghetti-shaped city he designed once. Imagine what this does to what Steve Sailer calls “affordable family formation.” PPP/per capita is about $6k. GDP is less than a quarter trillion dollars — for 80 million people. (Compare Australia, also largely desert, and without the benefit of a convenient Mediterranean coastline, which has GDP of over a trillion $$ for only 20 million people.) Economically there’s an entrenched, crusted-on culture of corruption, and it didn’t start with Mubarak, and it wasn’t ‘made in USA’. Don’t know much about the state of their industry, but I suspect it’s mostly light, mid-level, not advanced. For instance, they buy (not produce) most of their high-end weaponry, don’t they.
Under such conditions, I don’t think “unrest” is much of a surprise no matter which guy with the epaulets is sitting in the presidential palace. I also think the road to prosperity should begin by looking squarely at the terrain it’s supposed to pass through.
The way for a country to get richer is, to actually get richer. In an environment like the one I just described, to speak of “social justice” in anything other than relative terms, is mostly to talk about musical chairs. To speak about “revolution” is, well, pretty much what it is most of the time.
From what I understand Egypt has a pretty well-educated middle class, but what they’re literally educated in, I don’t know. If their proportion of say lawyers to engineers is out of whack, then things are harder to change. If their proportion of social engineers is anything other than minimal, well say goodnight Gracie.
Naturally I wish the Egyptians well and I hope they’re on a pathway to peace, justice, liberty and prosperity. But mostly what they need first is an order that is realistically conducive to prosperity. (and by “realistically” I don’t mean just having a new under-the-table corrupt entente with interlopers etc.)
Paul Burns — any declaration that uses buzzwords like “long live the ___” (with exclamation points, no less!) ought to be viewed with both eyebrows arched to the ceiling.
Meantime I highly recommend The Futurist Manifesto, one of the most unintentionally funny books ever written.
JPZ I don’t accept your geographical determinism. By the same logic their should be poverty in Singapore – all those people crowded onto a tiny island without natural resources. There was clearly enough wealth in Egypt for Mubarak and the rest of the kelptocracy to acumulate vast fortunes (Mubrak himself reportedly being richer than Bill Gates).
Adrien #36: I don’t know where to start, you get so much so wrong. First there’s the supposed significance of Israel’s “socialist leaning”. I didn’t think anyone still fell for that old chestnut.
Then there’s the argument that Egypt’s kleptocracy is the cause of the revolution rather than the diktats ofthe IMF and the World Bank. Now iuts possible that these two horrible institutions haven’t inflicted their particular malicious neo-liberalism on Egypt to the same extent they have elsewhere, though they would surely approve of the massive privatisation that has been the policy of Mubarak (and one of the key mechanisms by which he has enriched himself. More generally, your argument is an attempt to explain the revolution purely in terms of domestic Egyptian politics. As if the Sadat and Mubarak regimes had not been created, fostered and funded by the US.
Then, finally there is the argument that this revolution was made by the “middle class”. How do you know that? There were millions on the street. We know there was a middle class element – intellectuals, twitter and so on. Middle class youth are, in particular, disaffected from the regime. But apart from the asinine obsesion of the press with the role of twitter (which in any case is being used to organise and support strikes – have a look at arabawy.org) where’s the evidence for your assertion?
In any case most “bourgeois revolutions” were not made by the bourgeosie. The “mob”, the Levellers, the Sans Cullottes historically the driving force. Marx, who coined the term, called them “bourgeois” because they placed the bourgeoisie in power.
Egypt may simply be a democratic revolution, it may go no further, though the implications of even limited “bourgeois democracy” in the Middle East make even that prospect interesting to say the least. That’s why the Israelis are shitting themselves.
Then, finally, there is the interesting argument that capitalism isn’t to blame because bad things happened in previous systems.
And finally there is your derision for:
I got all “glassy eyed” recently about a bunch of people “shouting in unison” – as did the organisations your sneering at. The people in question were on the streets of Egypt. Or perhaps, in your universe, they were all middle class and they were all tweeting in unison on their iphones.
Robert Bollard has saved me the trouble of replying.
PS. I don’t go on about it, but I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m a socialist.
Got lots of other strings to me bow as well.
Robert Bollard — it’s not determinism, it’s merely taking note. Singapore has many other differentiating factors in play; not everything is like everything else. Egypt I’m sure is in a more complex situation than what I described. But what I described is real, so it’s part of their world. By all means it’s not all there is to the situation; but like a man said, “of this, an and yet, and yet, and yet.”
Curious b/c I don’t know: what was population level, GDP and PPP under Nasser? Under the King?
“If their proportion of social engineers is anything other than minimal”
Er … how do you measure numbers of social engineers? Do they have some form of license? Is there some kind of peak body? Was that comment just a weak attempt at trolling? Oh dear it worked, and we all feel devalued … tell me j_p_z are you a giver or receiver?
Yes, Mark, this one’ going to be bigger than sliced leavened bread.
The Ides Of February:
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoon/display.cfm/95840
Thank God jpz and Adrien weren’t in Tahrir Square these last weeks. What downers they would have been.
Read a lovely piece about an American journo who flew into Cairo the day after the coup describing the way people were so particular about cleaning up and polishing the statutory and balustrades along the Nile’s bridges and the ground and environs of the entire square. He said, poignantly, he thought all this space seemed to be viewed now as sacred territory, so tenderly and lovingly was it cleaned by all sorts of people in preparation for the new tomorrow.
This is fascinating too.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/vp/41563758#41563758
I’d love to witness the regime puppets and the religious fanatics who have tormented the ME tossed into the rubbish bin of history.
But I fear that sentiment is an example of hope triumphing over expectation.
Regarding the kleptocracy angle (which is of course a serious matter), let’s look at it some more, and try and get a diagnostic perspective. I’m certainly not defending the regime, I just want to explore what all this may entail.
Doubtless some economist will come by in the next ten minutes and tell me what I’m about to try is methodologically invalid, maybe even inane, but humor me, it’s a blog not a dissertation, let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation just to try it.
Mubarak’s stolen fortune I hear is about $70 billion. Just to pick another number, to have a starting place, let’s say all his cronies and clients also stole 3 times that much all told. (I mean flat-out stole, removed value, not the people who just elbowed their way to the trough in otherwise productive activity, which is another type of corruption but not so damaging.)
It’s an arbitrary figure, but you reckon Mubarak had to be the biggest player, and his co-thieves were mostly littler fish grabbing what they could but they were numerous. Anyone with real-life estimates here?
But let’s run for now with $70 bil for Hosni and family, and another $210 bil for his sub-gangsters.
So that’s about $280 billion all told — a one-off theft in slow motion (viz. that’s the final sum, not p.a.) over the course of a 30-year misrule. Subtract about $50 billion in US payoffs over 30 years, that his corruption actually brought _into_ Egypt on the credit side, presuming the US wouldn’t have paid off an honest government.
So we’re left with a grand theft of around $230 billion — about the value of one year of annual Egyptian GDP, but expressed as a fraction of the 30 years’ total worth of Egyptian GDP throughout his reign.
Assuming the economy has been growing all along, (so, GDP less than $230 bil back in the 80s) let’s highball that theft’s proportional impact instead of lowballing it. So we’ll say Mubarak and Co. all told stole 1/20 of Egypt GDP, over 30 years during his reign, rather than the lower 1/30.
It’s still a crime and a colossal swindle, but is it realistically the root primary cause of an economy where many live on $2/day?
Now there are many more opportunity costs associated with dictatorship and corruption, and if you tally them all up you get a clearer picture of the total drag on Egypt’s prosperity. You could argue, fairly, that the common knowledge of such wide thievery caused a lot of shrugging fatalism to set in, which severely dampened growth.
(Also, maybe his cronies stole way, way more than the figure I plucked from thin air).
But you also can’t assume that, in a counterfactual world where US influence was nil, you would necessarily get a straight-arrow regime in its place.
Again, just a little thought experiment, part of the bigger question What are the things needed to secure Egypt a bright future?
Robert – I don’t know where to start, you get so much so wrong. First there’s the supposed significance of Israel’s “socialist leaning”. I didn’t think anyone still fell for that old chestnut.
Israel, like other nations in the region tended to socialism at inception. Like other nations in the region it has a market economy. To what extent any of these places gels with idealistic notions of socialism depends on the beholder’s eye. But socialist principles were at least nominally supported by among others the ruling party of Egypt.
Then there’s the argument that Egypt’s kleptocracy is the cause of the revolution rather than the diktats ofthe IMF and the World Bank.
I didn’t say that the dictates of the BWIs had nothing to do with Egypt’s malaise just that at the root is not these institutions but rather a set-up which is still fundamentally feudal.
Consider other countries which do not share Egypt’s special status geopolitically: Syria, for example. You have exactly the same dissatisfaction – why?
Now it’s possible that these two horrible institutions haven’t inflicted their particular malicious neo-liberalism on Egypt to the same extent they have elsewhere, though they would surely approve of the massive privatisation that has been the policy of Mubarak (and one of the key mechanisms by which he has enriched himself.
Indeed. It’s as if John Howard privatized Telstra by gifting himself with major shareholdings. It’s not a liberalization any more than it’s a democracy.
More generally, your argument is an attempt to explain the revolution purely in terms of domestic Egyptian politics. As if the Sadat and Mubarak regimes had not been created, fostered and funded by the US.
I lived in Egypt when Sadat was in charge. At the time it was moving away from the Russians and toward the Americans. It was Sadat’s initiative that Egypt made peace with Israel – I remember it well. It surprised everyone.
And the sweet deal that the Yanks gave him (Jimmy Carter: The World Heavyweight Champion of Unintended Consequences)
Then, finally there is the argument that this revolution was one of the results of the Camp David negotiations that followed.
I am hardly an uncritical supporter of the United States’ policies in the Middle East.
How do you know that?
I read. Books.
where’s the evidence for your assertion?
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
Then, finally, there is the interesting argument that capitalism isn’t to blame because bad things happened in previous systems.
It wasn’t an argument, more an bit of sarcasm. You can’t blame capitalism for every problem that mars life on this rock mate. It’s particularly disingenuous to blame capitalism for certain types of repression that have only lifted, um, under capitalism.
My derision isn’t for the people on the streets of Cairo. My derision is for people whose idea of a good time is the old rallymarch and whaddawewant shindig. It’s dullsville man. John Lennon was right.
“What are the things needed to secure Egypt a bright future?”
Lemme guess.
More American influence?
Comments from my acquaintance in Egypt. I posted some things from her before under the name “D”.
“As far as everybody knows, there was no leadership, no plan: on January 25, the national “Police Day” holiday decreed last year by Mubarak, a few thousand Egyptians came out to march in the streets, hand out flowers to the police and demand very limited “reforms”. Those who participated that first day, including those who are now the revolution’s most prominent and articulate spokespersons like Nawara Negm, expected it would be like every other time: around 20-50 lonely demonstrators surrounded by 500 state security soldiers. Some, like the dissident journalist Hamdy Qandil, showed up at noon and seeing how few people there were, felt overwhelmed by a sense of futility and headed home.
Even the government was praising the demonstrators, albeit in a very patronizing and condescending way. By late afternoon, however, the regime had had enough and police were using tear gas and sticks against demonstrators to disperse them.
That’s when something truly unprecedented and unpredictable, even inconceivable, occurred: instead of dispersing, by nightfall the demonstrations had grown larger and more determined and the demands became focused on one chant: “The people/want/the regime to fall”. I don’t think it’s possible to understand the significance of such a statement for someone who hasn’t lived in a police state where this is the reddest and most inviolable of red lines, and that it was said so loudly, so openly, by so many!
From that moment on, the demonstrators broke down all the seemingly impregnable mental barriers, one by one. The regime, in turn, unleashed its full fury against them: everything it could do, it did. Demonstrators were beaten, shot, tear-gassed, water-cannoned, kidnapped and tortured. Telephone communications were cut. The internet was shut off. Buildings were set on fire. Maximum-security prisons all over the country were opened and tens of thousands of hardened criminals invited to go on a rampage, to loot and destroy and terrorize.”
- D
So far she has been spot on about this, and has been saying that its been building for years. This is an interesting bunch of comments cos it suggests that there was something spontaneous going on and once it developed some momentum there was no going back.
Robert – Further. It’s probably unnecessarily inflammatory of me to label this a ‘bourgeois’ revolt. The Egyptian middle-class in the 21st century is not the same as the French middle-class of the late 18th. But I do think it’s inaccurate for Western ideologues of whatever stripe to project their progressive fantasies onto this situation. As far as I can tell the crowds in Cairo want a liberal democracy. That’s my point.
As to my feelings on the matter…
And finally from an Egyptian blogger:
FWIW the thing that really got to me (and inspired me to start blogging about it on Australia day morn) was seeing the chant D referred to in Tahrir that night (25th Jan). It was on youtube straight away.
I thought if they were staying the night and they stayed the course then Mubarak would fall and the regime with it. If they didn’t they’d die like Khaled Said – tortured to death by cops. That chant/mantra was powerful because of that desperation, you could feel it.
- Stopped typing this to watch the Foreign Correspondent thing on Egypt. Interesting to hear the young woman they are interviewing confirmed what i just wrote re the torturing to death.-
More from D:
“And this is the part that gets me: somehow, the harder the regime hit, the stronger the revolution (because that is what it turned into) became. No matter how ingenious and deadly the regime’s tools, even more ingenious and effective tools were rapidly mobilized to counteract them. Just to name one example: within minutes of Al Jazeera’s report that the Egyptian museum and shops were being looted, nearly 10,000 young people were surrounding the museum with their bodies to protect it, had caught the looters, tied them up and identified them as police. Across Egypt, young people had armed themselves with sticks and organized themselves into “people’s committees” to defend their streets and the buildings and shops. There was a remarkable uniformity in their methods: all were extremely polite, all blocked off entrances to each street and searched cars for weapons, and when they caught vandals or thieves, they tied them up and phoned the army to send someone to take them away.
…
In Suez, where the police crack-down was deadliest in the early stages, where electricity and water were cut and no journalists were allowed, somehow Al Jazeera managed to have a correspondent in place, armed with a satellite phone, who reported that the demonstrators were led by the revered 90-year old Hafez Salama, a war-hero who led the citizens’ resistance against Israel’s deadly siege of Suez in 1973, and Al Jazeera even managed to broadcast video footage of the fighting. There were intriguing reports that the demonstrators in Suez were in contact with their counterparts in Tunis, via satellite phones. When the government shut down Al Jazeera on the Nilesat and Hotbird and on all other satellites, Al Jazeera almost immediately began broadcasting through NBC Lebanon, a business channel and at least 10 others.
Furthermore, somehow throughout the chaos and terror and the massive propaganda campaign, it became gradually clear to all that the violence was being orchestrated by the regime against its own people and that it was the regime’s opponents who were heroically using peaceful means to fight for people’s rights. The moral line was drawn, between a conspiracy of vicious, corrupt old men desperate to hold on to power, backed by the world’s superpowers, and young men and women fighting with their bare hands to free their nation. The harder they hit, the weaker their hold on power became.
…
The people — collectively — established themselves as the sole source of legitimacy for any future government. The army took over, but while forced to admit that it has no right to rule — that this revolution was heroically fought and won by the civilians, for the civilians and that the army’s role is that of a servant and defender.
We’re not kidding ourselves: we know that the army’s top brass represents a remnant of the regime, that it is beholden to the same American and Israeli “patrons” that Mubarak served so faithfully, and that it will do everything possible to subvert and coopt the revolution in order to pour the same old wine in new bottles.
Yet, given everything we’ve seen and experienced since January 25, is it possible that those who carried out such a miraculous (no other word will do) transformation, who have demonstrated such ingenuity, resourcefulness, flexibility and determination (whoever they are) will now reveal themselves to be naive, weak, easily deceived and demoralized? Was this revolution planned and carried out by a secret core group of brilliant strategists, or is the genius simply a product of the “hive mind”? Is there a supernatural or divine element that needs to be acknowledged before the events can be understood? I have no idea.
The old men at the top certainly seem to think that they can still salvage something of the old regime, and probably the Americans and Israelis too, but when have they ever been right?
Mubarak is Egypt’s Berlin Wall. Its fall is exhilarating, but the revolution is far from done. Like I said before, keep watching.”
- D
She tells a great tale.
And to me the most amazing thing about all this is its spontaneous, open source nature. The thing on foreign correspondent – Salma in the Square – was pretty amazing, especially when Salma was talking about people walking around with their backs straight and their heads held high, some for the first time in their lives.
Thats the real driver of this revolution. Human dignity.
Thats probably why it seemed to me that it’d succeed from day 1 too, (tho I didn’t say it would till Sun 30th.)
All the other factors are there too, but that one is the most important.
The first thing the revolutionaries did, well one of the first things, was clean up the rubbish. Thats the act of people who care about and feel responsible for their home.
There’s another anecdote she (D) wrote somewhere online about a trip overseas, and meeting some young Egyptian in Germany, and his story. Kind of eye opening in itself. I’ll try and chase it up. Explores some of those other issues too, like lack of opportunity for yoof etc)
Update: [by Kim] Some interesting links from Open Democracy:
Comparisons with 1989
Humanity, Dignity, Liberty
Contested narratives
Why Egypt’s progressives win
J_P_Z @ 46
offers up an economic analysis of the costs to the economy of Egypt of the kleptocracy and how that might/ might not impact on the incomes of the average Egyptian.
I’m not an economist, but saturation broadcasting by the ABC and the Fairfax obsession with the capitalist means of alienation means I’ve heard & reade a lot of analyses of how market capitalism functions. Normally I don’t pay it much heed.
Given that the ‘recipe’ for (trickle down) full employment appears to be about 3% GDP growth abve and beyond population growth then what effect would a 3% contraction per annum of the money supply over 30 years (the theft estimate provided by JPZ) lead to?
Do we have any market economists who whould like to comment here from ‘a left wing point of view’?
Adrien,
I haven’t time right now to reply to all your specific points, though I can say from what you’ve posted in reply to my bad tempered and semi-literate (I couldn’t proof it because toddlers etc.) post, that you’re genuinely engaging with what I’ve said rather than jousting in the usual internet commentary style. So I’ll try to reply in the same spirit.
Let’s start with Israel. The tradition of Jewish socialism is and was immensely powerful. Many Jews historically have been socialist or communist for good reasons. These were the only political currents that supported them against persecution and oppression.
Zionism offered a different solution to the problem of anti-semitism – establishing a homeland somewhere(the Kimberleys, Namibia, Uganda were suggested at different times, though, perhaps inevitably, Palestine was settled on)and, after the Holocaust, many Jews accepted the necessity of this.
Israel, as it was first conceived, therefore, was a colonial settler state, but a colonial settler state where many of the colonists thought of themselves as socialist. But, inevitably, the reality of being a settler has triumphed over the “socialism”. There are, of course, kibbutzes still operating in Israel. But the reality of Israeli politics today is an unrelenting triumph of racist oppression – the model is apartheid South Africa, which was always a recipient of Israeli aid, despite the heroic tradition of opposition to apatheid by South African Jews.
BTW, as an aside, I first called myself as socialist as a teenager in the 1970s after reading a description of a kibbutz.
My second point is about Egypt’s class structure. You call it “fundamentally feudal” and give some statistics about the extent of the kleptocracy.
I would counter that the kleptocracy is an inevitable consequence of imperialism. And before you roll your eyes and dredge out images of Trotskyites with megaphones,let me explain.
Nasser was authoritarian and executed communists. He wasn’t a nice man. But he died, as Egyptian taxi drivers are apparently fond of telling people, leaving a tiny will. Nasser was a leader of the non-aligned movement. His successor, Sadat, did a deal with the US and, after he was assassinated, his successor, Mubarak, did what the US told him to do, for 30 years.
He did so against the will of his people. He shot and tortured everyone who opposed him. His minions were particularly useful in torturing people renditioned to them by George the lesser.
And at the end of this process he was richer than Bill Gates.
So, yes, there was a problem in Egypt. There was kleptocracy and torture and it didn’t help that there are 80 million people crammed into a fertile strip through a desert. But the cause of the crisis cannot be reduced to what is happening in Egypt. That is why this revolt has been so significant. The roots of this crisis are region wide, and they lie in the combination of a political crisis brewing since the invasion of Iraq and an economic crisis brought about by the GFC.
Finally, as to the “bourgeois” nature of this revolution. There are mass strikes in Egypt. The industrial city of Mahallah has been in a state of turmoil since Jan 25. It’s not as sexy for foreign journalists to cover provincial factory towns when they can focus on the drama in Tahrir, so I forgive you not for knowing about it. Now there are strikes among workers in the gas and oil sectors, the railways, and the Suez Canal.
These may be crushed, suppressed, diverted. They may fizzle out.
But they may not, and as an unrepentant, unreconstructed “Trotskyite”, I’m going to keep chanting, loudly and in rhythmic cadence: “Long live the Egyptian Revolution”. Because the longer it lives the further it goes.
That young woman, Salma, in the Foreign Corr. piece is an inspiration. What guts and what a laugh she has.
Robert – I withdrew the bourgeois description of events in Egypt for a reason. I don’t think you can evenly map western ideologies onto the events there. I believe what I meant was that middle-class elements of Egyptian society, normally quiet, have featured in this event quite markedly.
I don’t rely entirely on the mass media for my information and am well aware how it works viz the promotion of certain interests. That said revolutions have a habit of turning sour this is a fact. How many revolutions have been unmitigated success stories vs those ‘betrayed’?
If you’re eager for the emergence of socialist society in Egypt all luck to you. But as I say to all 4th International Marxist-Leninists the problem is that there’s no blueprint on how that will work. The bourgeois transformation of European societies in the 19th century were preceeded by centuries of design and practical experiment. When they’re moment came they had a plan. I’ve yet to meet a Trot that has even a model constitution. Any such that’d even be a bit successful would have to deal with the reasons that central control of economic life can slide into tyranny.
That all said I believe the events in Egypt are about the conflict of interests. Mubarak’s interest is in keeping his gravy train, everyone else’s is in getting rid of him. Kleptocracies are distinguishable from other forms of hegemony in that they’re not governments but simply straight up stealing. The government of, say, Henry the 8th might not have been exactly ideal according to any modern person’s standards but he was more than simply a thief.
For those still paying attention to this thread, here’s my latest on Egypt, at The Drum Unleashed.
From http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/prison-guards-accused-of-killing-dozens-of-jail-inmates-in-egypt-2219295.html