Egypt

Robert Springborg

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509520527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Egypt is one of the few great empires of antiquity that exists today as a nation state. Despite its extraordinary record of national endurance, the pressures to which Egypt currently is subjected and which are bound to intensify are already straining the ties that hold its political community together, while rendering ever more difficult the task of governing it.

In this timely book, leading expert on Egyptian affairs Robert Springborg explains how a country with such a long and impressive history has now arrived at this parlous condition. As Egyptians become steadily more divided by class, religion, region, ethnicity, gender and contrasting views of how, by whom and for what purposes they should be governed, so their rulers become ever more fearful, repressive and unrepresentative. Caught in a downward spiral in which poor governance is both cause and consequence, Egypt is facing a future so uncertain that it could end up resembling neighboring countries that have collapsed under similar loads. The Egyptian "hot spot", Springborg argues, is destined to become steadily hotter, with ominous implications for its peoples, the Middle East and North Africa, and the wider world.

1
Eroding Historical Legacies

By late 2010 former Air Force General Husni Mubarak had been ruling Egypt for almost thirty years. His primary preoccupation had become securing his younger son Gamal's succession as president. Otherwise there were relatively few clouds on his political horizon. The military, a perennial if intermittent challenger to presidential rule, he had successfully defanged in 1989 by discrediting and purging the charismatic minister of defense, Field Marshal Abd al Halim Abu Ghazala. Security and intelligence forces, which he had beefed up as counterbalances to the military and to repress autonomous political expression, were held securely in check by his key aide, General Umar Suliman, head of General Intelligence. He had already handed the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) over to son Gamal, who was busy extending its reach into the organs of the state and the patronage networks through which organized political life had long been controlled. Parliamentary elections held earlier in the year had, through a record amount of fraud and intimidation, produced a supermajority for the NDP, upping its seat total to 420 of the 444 possible from the 330 it had won in the more free and fair 2005 election. Conversely, the Muslim Brotherhood, the only effective organized opposition force, saw its record eighty-eight seats won in the 2005 elections reduced to one. So the newly elected parliament in 2010 promised to be docile, posing no threat to the father-son presidential succession.

As for the third branch of government, the judicial system, it was no longer the thorn in President Mubarak's side it had once been. He turned his attention to it in the wake of the 2005 elections, combining constitutional changes, intimidation of the small cadre of independent-minded judges entrenched in the Judges’ Club, and direct interventions into court management to effectively subordinate this third branch to the all-powerful executive by 2010. Civil society organizations were being choked by a yet more restrictive legal framework and interdiction by the Egyptian government of their sources of funding, primarily foreign. Newly emerged, privately owned media outlets had come grudgingly to accept the regime's more tightly drawn “red lines.” Mubarak, in sum, appeared on the 2010–11 New Year to be sitting astride an increasingly repressive but nevertheless stable authoritarian system that he could reasonably hope to bequeath to his son, albeit with some pushback from the military and ineffective grumbling from opposition elements and civil society activists.

As it transpired, this was a myopic view. On January 25, 2011, a veritable political explosion occurred as thousands of demonstrators, encouraged by civil society activists networked through social media—the Facebookiyyin as they were dubbed in Arabic—poured into the streets to voice their discontent with Mubarak, shouting for the fall of his regime. Within days the largest demonstrations since the funeral of President Nasser in 1970 were rocking Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailiya, and various urban centers in the Delta. As the crowds continued to swell in the face of remarkably poorly prepared security forces and with the tacit approval of the military, the Mubarak regime that had been in place for just shy of three decades collapsed in a remarkably brief eighteen days, with comparatively little bloodshed. The president fled to his villa at Sharm al Shaikh on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula to await his fate.

At first blush these dramatic events appeared to be a classic example of a “color revolution,” akin to those that had swept through the former Soviet Union and the Balkans. Essentially non-violent and led by non-governmental organizations, they relied on sheer “people power” to overthrow authoritarian regimes and begin transitions to democracy. The hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Cairo's Midan al Tahrir (Liberation Square) appeared to embody this inclusive people power, including as they did Muslims and Coptic Christians, middle-class professionals and workers, youths and retirees, women and men. But virtually from the moment of its success this broad-based if loose coalition began to fracture and be overwhelmed by two other, competitive forces. One was the military, which had deceptively claimed to be “of one hand” with the demonstrators, but which under Mubarak's long-serving minister of defense, Muhammad Husayn Tantawi, immediately began to assert its authority and reel in what it viewed as the excessive exuberance and inappropriate clamoring for democracy of the “mob.” The other was the Muslim Brotherhood, which had provided the most dedicated shock troops in dramatic battles with security forces in and around Midan al Tahrir and whose leaders and members believed that it was they, not the more secular Facebookiyyin demonstrators, who had engineered Mubarak's downfall. They thus felt entitled to exercise power in the new order they, in collaboration with the military, would establish.

Over the next two years the military played the mongoose against the Brotherhood cobra, first handing civilian power to it as a check on the more radical, democratic secular forces, then skillfully undermining it before dramatically overthrowing it by coup d’état in July 2013. In the interim the officers and Brothers collaborated to rehabilitate the much discredited security services, as both sought to use them against the other and against their common enemy, the civil society activists who had initially triggered the uprising. They also cooperated in drafting a new constitution that awarded the military powers it had never previously exercised, the tradeoff being an electoral law that virtually guaranteed the Brothers victory, hence control over parliament. State institutions, including the judiciary, parliament, and virtually the entirety of the public administration, suffered extensive collateral damage from this struggle for power that was frequently played out within and between those institutions, destroying any pretense to their impartiality and professionalism. As for civil society, it was marginalized through the application of brute force by the reconstituted security services, now backed by the military, and by its own internal fragmentation and weakness. Nobel Prize winner Muhammad al Baradei, a prominent international symbol of the uprising and the sole elder statesman with the potential to unify its forces, resigned his post as vice-president in protest against the killings by military and security forces of more than 800 Brotherhood supporters in Rabaa al Adawiyya and al Nahda Squares in Cairo in August 2013. He went into self-declared exile and has yet to return, his absence symbolizing that of civil society more generally.

The uprising thus turned out to be not a color revolution, but a “coup-volution,” aptly named such by an analyst of the country's armed forces.¹ The military had “sucker punched” both civil society activists and the Muslim Brothers, leading the former to believe that officers would midwife fundamental political reforms, and the latter to surmise that those officers would depend upon the Brotherhood as its chief instrument of civilian rule. In reality the high command, constituted as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), had from the outset intended to jettison Mubarak, but then protect him, in order to preserve, even expand the military's political role and their command of it. Although it took considerable maneuvering for the SCAF to accomplish this—including a change of its leadership, with Field Marshal Tantawi being replaced by the politically more adroit General Abd al Fattah al Sisi in September 2012—the outcome was never much in doubt. The SCAF first used the Brothers to crush the enthusiastic but weak and disorganized secular “revolutionaries,” then rehabilitated some of those very same marginalized, youthful elements to advocate and justify the coup they were planning against the Brothers’ president, Muhammad al Mursi.

If this was a color revolution, its color was black. Its net result was to strip away the civilian accretions on top of the military regime that had originally been established with Gamal Abdel Nasser's July 1952 coup d’état that overthrew King Faruq and ended the monarchy. Those accretions in the form of state institutions and processes, such as a formally civilian presidency, parliament, and elections, organizations of political society such as political parties, and a range of civil society actors, had over the years diluted military rule, hiding its residue from view. But the 2013 coup-volution restored direct military rule, paving the way for the officers to undermine virtually all manifestations of civilian rule, whether administrative, political, or even economic. The repression required to erode these civilian institutions, organizations, and actors exceeded that which Nasser and his Free Officer colleagues had employed when they destroyed the remnants of monarchial and constitutional government and politics back in the 1950s. In both cases the Brotherhood was a primary target of the crackdown, with General Sisi employing more draconian means than Nasser had, including cold-blooded killings of hundreds of its members in Cairo's Rabaa al Adawiyya and al Nahda squares, inglorious firsts in the history of Republican Egypt.² Once Sisi was sworn in as president in June 2014, discredited Mubarak-era officials were gradually rehabilitated, albeit more with the style than the substance of their former powers. The coup-volution, in sum, inverted the power relationship between Mubarak and his immediate entourage, on the one hand, and the military on the other, leaving in place an officer republic more brutal than any since the darkest days of the Nasser era, causing many “revolutionaries” and Brothers to long for the “good old days” of Mubarak, indeed, even for the monarchy.

The dramatic events since January 2011 raise four interrelated questions. First, what caused the 2011 uprising? Second, why did so few, including those who participated in it, not anticipate it? Third, why did it fail? And finally, what consequences have these tumultuous few years had for the political foundations of the country?

Causes of the Uprising

Of these queries, that of the uprising's causes is the easiest to answer, both because they are the most apparent and because they have been extensively analyzed, due primarily to the fact that the Egyptian uprising was but one case of the wider “Arab Spring” of 2011, exploding first in Tunisia in the last month of 2010. Indeed, cross-border learning was a primary cause of Egypt's and then other countries’ uprisings. The dramatic events on the streets of Tunis were graphically depicted in the pan-Arab media. Egyptians could see and easily identify with Tunisian protesters. It did not take a great stretch of their imagination to transpose the hated Ben Ali regime there to the unpopular Mubarak regime at home. Once the uprising had occurred in Egypt, others erupted in Libya, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, adding further regional pressure to the gathering momentum for change along the Nile.

The causes of the Arab Spring were both economic and political. The global economic downturn that commenced in 2008 had placed additional pressure on economies that were already underperforming. In Egypt's case, GDP per capita growth had been stagnating at a paltry 1 percent or so for years, the rapidly growing population eating up much of the economic growth that did occur. Unemployment hovered around 10 percent even during the boom period of 2003–7 that was fired by an export surge of natural gas. Youth unemployment was double, then growing to triple the overall proportion. Almost three quarters of new jobs were in the informal sector, meaning without contracts, social or medical insurance, serious prospects for advancement, or adequate remuneration. The absolute and proportionate growth of the middle class, one of the achievements of the Nasser era and still occurring under Sadat, had ground to a halt by the mid-1980s, then gone into reverse. The “desertion of the middle class,” a warning and cause of revolutions, was more pronounced in Egypt than other Arab countries.³ As middle-class prosperity became an ever more distant dream and unemployment and poverty spread, so did inequality grow. By the time of the uprising four of the ten richest Africans were Egyptians, but one quarter of the entire population and more than half the population in Upper Egypt lived in dire poverty. According to Facundo Alvaredo and Thomas Piketty, a careful analysis of available data reveals Egypt as having one of the highest degrees of income and asset inequality among lower middle income countries.⁴ Not surprisingly, most Egyptians suffered from relative deprivation, profoundly resenting the wealthy and the corruption commonly believed to have made them rich.

As the Mubarak regime ground on, it provided ever fewer vents for the political steam generated by the malfunctioning economy. Never an adroit politician and having a bland public persona, Mubarak seemed to lose interest in playing the public political game, spending longer periods in his villas on the Mediterranean Coast and in Sinai, and relying on his security and intelligence services to intimidate other active and potential players. Under pressure from the Bush administration after 9/11 to liberalize and even democratize, Mubarak grudgingly conceded relatively free and fair elections in 2005. The outcome frightened him and his security specialists, threatening as it did to derail plans for Gamal Mubarak's succession.

So despite lingering, albeit declining, pressure from President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then virtually none from President Obama, Mubarak ordered a political U-turn. His security and intelligence forces commenced a crackdown in 2006 that continued virtually until the day of his removal five years later. Hopes for democratic reforms were dashed, so those associated with them, essentially the leaders of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Map
• Abbreviations
• 1: Eroding Historical Legacies
• 2: The Deep State Presides: Military, Presidency, and Intelligence Services
• 3: Under the Thumb: Bureaucrats, Judges, and Parliamentarians
• 4: Political and Civil Society: Little Room to Breathe
• 5: Reaping What is Sown
• 6: The Rocky Road Ahead
• Index
• End User License Agreement