On Sunday morning there was some sign of the Egyptian military taking on some security duties. Soldiers started arresting suspected looters, rounding up 450 of them. The disappearance of the police from the streets had led to a threat of widespread looting is now being redressed by the regular military. Other control methods were on display. The government definitively closed the Aljazeera offices in Cairo and withdrew the journalists’ license to report from there, according to tweets. The channel stopped being broadcast on Egypt’s Nilesat. (Aljazeera had not been able to broadcast directly from Cairo even before this move.) The channel, bases in Qatar, is viewed by President Hosni Mubarak as an attempt to undermine him.
Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy? Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those. But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed. Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people. The Mubarak regime has had to shoot over 100 people in the past few days, and wound more. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have ignored Mubarak’s command that they observe night time curfews. He has lost his authority.
Authority is rooted in legitimacy. Leaders are acknowledged because the people agree that there is some legitimate basis for their authority and power. In democratic countries, that legitimacy comes from the ballot box. In Egypt, it derived 1952-1970 from the leading role of the Egyptian military and security forces in freeing Egypt from Western hegemony. That struggle included grappling with Britain to gain control over the Suez Canal (originally built by the Egyptian government and opened in 1869, but bought for a song by the British in 1875 when sharp Western banking practices brought the indebted Egyptian government to the brink of bankruptcy). It also involved fending off aggressive Israeli attempts to occupy the Sinai Peninsula and to assert Israeli interests in the Suez Canal. Revolutionary Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser (d. 1970) conducted extensive land reform, breaking up the huge Central America-style haciendas and creating a rural middle class. Leonard Binder argued in the late 1960s that that rural middle class was the backbone of the regime. Abdul Nasser’s state-led industrialization also created a new class of urban contractors who benefited from the building works commissioned by the government.
From 1970, Anwar El Sadat took Egyptian in a new direction, opening up the economy and openly siding with the new multi-millionaire contracting class. It in turn was eager for European and American investment. Tired of the fruitless Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian public was largely supportive of Sadat’s 1978 peace deal with Israel, which ended the cycle of wars with that country and opened the way for the building up of the Egyptian tourist industy and Western investment in it, as well as American and European aid. Egypt was moving to the Right.
But whereas Abdel Nasser’s socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970, from 1970 to 2000 there was no real development in the country. Part of the problem was demographic. If the population grows 3 percent a year and the economy grows 3 percent a year, the per capita increase is zero. Since about 1850, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries have been having a (mysterious) population boom. The ever-increasing population also increasingly crowded into the cities, which typically offer high wages than rural work does, even in the marginal economy (e.g. selling matches). Nearly half the country now lives in cities, and even many villages have become ‘suburbs’ of vast metropolises.
So the rural middle class, while still important, is no longer such a weighty support for the regime. A successful government would need to have the ever-increasing numbers of city people on its side. But there, the Neoliberal policies pressed on Hosni Mubarak by the US since 1981 were unhelpful. Egyptian cities suffer from high unemployment and relatively high inflation. The urban sector has thrown up a few multi-millionaires, but many laborers fell left behind. The enormous number of high school and college graduates produced by the system can seldom find employment suited to their skills, and many cannot get jobs at all. Urban Egypt has rich and poor but only a small “middle class.” The state carefully tries to control labor unions, who could seldom act independently.
The state was thus increasingly seen to be a state for the few. Its old base in the rural middle classes was rapidly declining as young people moved to the cities. It was doing little for the urban working and middle classes. An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.
The military regime in Egypt initially gained popular legitimacy in part by its pluck in facing down France, Britain and Israel in 1956-57 (with Ike Eisenhower’s help). After the Camp David accords, in contrast, Egypt largely sat out the big struggles in the Mideast, and made what has widely been called a separate peace. Egypt’s cooperation in the Israeli blockade of Gaza and its general quiet alliance with the US and Israel angered most young people politically, even as they racked up economic frustrations. Cairo’s behind the scenes help to the US, with Iraq and with torturing suspected al-Qaeda operatives, were well known. Very little is more distasteful to Egyptians than the Iraq War and torture. The Egyptian state went from being broadly based in the 1950s and 1960s to having been captured by a small elite. It went from being a symbol of the striving for dignity and independence after decades of British dominance to being seen as a lap dog of the West.
The failure of the regime to connect with the rapidly growing new urban working and middle classes, and its inability to provide jobs to the masses of college graduates it was creating, set the stage for last week’s events. Educated, white collar people need a rule of law as the framework for their economic activities, and Mubarak’s arbitrary rule is seen as a drag here. While the economy has been growing 5 and 6 percent in the past decade, what government impetus there was to this development remained relatively hidden– unlike its role in the land reform of the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, the income gained from increased trade largely went to a small class of investors. For instance, from 1991 the government sold 150 of 314 state factories it put on the block, but the benefit of the sales went to a narrow sliver of people.
The world economy’s [pdf] setback in 2008-2009 had a direct and horrible effect on Egyptians living on the edge. Many of the poor got hungrier. Then the downturn in petroleum prices and revenues caused many Egyptian guest workers to [pdf] lose their economic cushion. They either could no longer send their accustomed remittances, or they had to come back in humiliation.
The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the mass of Egyptians, whether abroad or domestically. The present regime is widely seen in Egypt as a state for the others– for the US, Israel, France and the UK– and as a state for the few– the Neoliberal nouveau riche. Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable. Muslim movements have served to protest the withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities, and to provide services. But they are a symptom, not the cause. All this is why Mubarak’s appointment of military men as vice president and prime minister cannot in and of itself tamp down the crisis. They, as men of the System, do not have more legitimacy than does the president– and perhaps less.
Posted in Egypt | 70 Comments | Print
Juan, Thanks for all your work and perspective on Egypt.
Can you recommend any history books? I’m interested in both the long version (not so much the ancient history, although I don’t know a lot about that either), esp the transition to Islam, and much more detail on post-WWII. Esp the details of the ‘peace’ with Israel. From what I’m picking up on al Jazeera, it sounds like the terms Israel got were completely humiliating toward Egypt.
That would also explain why Abbas gave into everything & still couldn’t get a country out of it. Israel hadn’t humiliated him & the Palestinians enough.
Are these remains of the Cold War ? Did it start with the removal of Mossadegh ?
Thanks. I relie on sources other then TV for my information and appreciate clear intelligent writing. I talk with my clients about world events and I desire to have non inflammatory information to calm fear and avoid the panic that makes people stressed.
Do you think the Egyptian people would accept Omar Suleiman as their transitional president, or is he too closely linked with the regime? Would Mohamed ElBaradei be a possible president, or is he not dynamic enough?
Why do you say the population boom is mysterious?
It started before modern medicine and has gone on longer than most
Excellent !!!
as Dr Zewail said and you implied
“2. The economic situation: the masses of the poor have been left behind, the situation of the middle class has actually gone backward, while a small elite at the top benefits from what economic progress there is– because of a marriage of power and capital.”
sounds familiar doesn’t it
a description of the whole capitaist world, the US in particular – there will be an explosion in more places than the middle east
150 dead according to Al Jazeera. Without in any way wishing to show the Iranian regime in a good light, contrast the coverage of that with the coverage of one dead in similar circumstances in Iran. There are worthy and unworthy victims, as John Pilger explains.
I await the subterfuge and provocation necessary to paint the opposition to Mubarak as some kind of fundamentalist madness that threatens us all. However, Egytians are a bright lot and I imagine they are pretty good at chess.
This excellent writing provides much needed sociological, economic and historical context for the events unfolding in Egypt today, and by analogy in other states in the Middle East.
I think this sentence in the last paragraph of “Egypt’s Class Conflict” needs to be highlighted and placed in the first, not the last, paragraph –
“Islam plays no role in this analysis because it is not an independent variable.”
What is happening in Egypt right now is about the foundations of state authority. Is a state’s authority with its people based on “power,” brute force, or is it based on its perceived “legitimacy” in the minds of its citizens? Prof. Cole clearly explains the reasons why and how the legitimate, citizen-acknowledged authority of the Egyptian state disintegrated into government-rule maintained through the barrel of a gun!
I’m sure many Egyptians do consider the Mubarak government to be either a puppet of or a part of a US-Israel-UK axis, which is standard fare for non-Islamist regimes in Middle East. However, Mr. Cole’s “class conflict” description of the roots of this crisis is somewhat seems to be at odds with reality.
It may well be true that the Egyptian public expects the government to guarantee gainful employment to all; they won’t be the only populace to hold that expectation. It is somewhat less clear that Egypt adopted “neoliberal” economic policies, if neoliberal is understood to mean reduced state intervention and greater reliance on market forces. For example Mr. Cole describes recent economic developments this way: “An ostentatious state business class emerged, deeply dependent on government contracts and state good will, and meeting in the fancy tourist hotels. But the masses of high school and college graduates reduced to driving taxis or selling rugs (if they could even get those gigs) were not benefiting from the on-paper growth rates of the past decade.” That kind of rent-seeking activity is certainly not the hallmark of a market-oriented economy. Furthermore, as the ILO study cited Mr. Cole suggests some of the steps needed to generate employment in Egypt such as “the removal of remaining obstacles to investment in general and FDI in particular; providing incentives to investors through availing land and infrastructure” (see p. 36) are standard parts of the neoliberal prescription. It may be the Egypt suffered from lack of neoliberalism rather than too much of it. It may well be that some privatizations involved insider deals and favors, but that is the fault of the mechanism used to conduct the transactions not privatization itself. Whatever the benefits on the economic policies employed by President Nasser, modern socialist societies have proven woefully inadequate at generating robust employment growth as the examples of Cuba and Venezuela show.
In short, instability in Egypt may be a result of a stagnant economy and Mubarak’s government may have mismanaged the economy but there is little evidence there was some utopian socialist alternative.
Most of Egypt’s people are economically desperate, and although there are increasing calls for political reform, changes in economic policy have typically not been among the prescribed remedies.
The Reagan-Thatcher triumph of privatization and deregulation has produced an ideological dead end for the majority of the world’s people, virtually all of whom live in capitalist countries.
We need to distinguish what is desirable about socialism – democratic control of essential economic activities and resources, from what was bad about “actually existing socialism” – personality cults, one-party states, and denial of civil liberties.
I assume, then, that you reject categorically and in its entirety every word of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.”
As detailed by Ha-Joon Chang in 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism (not an anti-capitalist book despite the name) the adoption of neo-liberal, or free market, policies in developing countries has shattered their economies for decades.
Before adopting them most African nations had healthy economic growth, even if slower in relative terms than some other developing regions like Asia and Latin America. Decades on and they’re only now reaching the place they occupied before succumbing to pressure from lenders in the developed countries (who are remarkably unwilling to forgive debts from the people they ostensibly wish to help out of poverty) to open their countries to foreign investment and competition.
No one has promised, or aspired to, a socialist utopia in generations. It’s a strawman aimed at distraction rather than enlightenment. That said, few countries have destroyed themselves by protecting their peoples’ interest but dozens have been bankrupted by favouring foreign investors over their own peoples’ welfare.
You’re not wrong to see a contradiction between neoliberal ideology and a business class that derives huge profits from state contracts, but that contradiction only exists at the level of ideology. In fact, neoliberal economic policies (as opposed to ideology) have created exactly this situation wherever they have been implemented. The 21st century state simply has to do certain things. It cannot fully divest itself of its responsibilities to provide certain services. But under neoliberal policies, it provides this services via the market, through private contractors because the idea that markets always deliver services more efficiently is a primary article of neoliberal faith (e.g., the most recent health care reform bill). Obviously, as a result of this excessive reliance on contractors, there is increasing interpenetration between the state and the market. It rarely leads to the more efficient allocation of resources, much more often leads to corruption, kickbacks, and the pillaging of public coffers (e.g. Halliburton’s role in the Iraq War). But what it does very well at is enriching a small slice of the business community, as it most certainly has done in Egypt.
Also, please don’t confuse social democratic with “communist”. They are two very different entities, and if you used the examples of France and Germany rather than Cuba, you would be led to very different conclusions.
Last night a fellow being interviewed in an Al Jazeera studio opined that some of the looting was being done by the police in plain clothes. The implication was that they were being ordered to do this. A few minutes ago on Al Jazeera a fellow on the street claimed that some of the looters arrested were found to have police IDs. I can only wonder whether any of this will prove to be true.
In every country, people (formerly the poor, nowadays the poor and middle-class) wish for a government dedicated to their good rather than to the good of foreigners, the very rich, etc.
Here, in USA, we see the bankers and various other of the very rich getting ridiculously richer — and getting bailed out when they have screwed up — while everyone else is static or worse, and the national debt increasing as if without limit, and still the government (and pols of both major parties) treat our nuttily expensive military-imperium as a “sacred cow” that cannot be touched, cannot be reduced, even as it is seen to do no good whatever.
Americans should be feeling envious of the Egyptians who, if they have nothing else, have at least their pride and their revolution.
“Americans should be feeling envious of the Egyptians…”
We are.
Thanks for the refresher course on power, authority, and legitimacy.
I don’t mean to belittle the problem of inequality — it needs to be addressed, and pronto — but Egypt also faces serious resource constraints. Food prices are rising, which are closely related to oil prices. Egypt has food subsidies, but they are made possible based on oil and natural gas exports, and and Egypt’s oil exports are declining. Natural gas exports have been able to close the gap but now natural gas exports have leveled off.
Not all of these problems, obviously, are within Egypt’s power to address — not much they can do about rising wheat prices. But everyone is going to have to address resource constraints due to the inability to increase worldwide oil production since 2005; and likely within a few years, we will have a decline in worldwide oil production. Egypt is a dress rehearsal for, well, the rest of the world.
Gail Tverberg’s comments on Egypt are quite interesting:
link to ourfiniteworld.com
Thanks so much for the link to the ILO paper by Samir Radwan, which is excellent.
[...] CROSS SECTION OF BLOG COMMENTS ON EVENTS: –Juan Cole: The Nasserist state, for all its flaws, gained legitimacy because it was seen as a state for the [...]
Just a thank you for your site and your time and effort in keeping it up to date and informative. I constantly push it on my students (who are less than supportive at times since I teach in one of the reddest of the red states!) and it has done some good in providing at least a spring board for discussions of the role of the media and alternative viewpoints. We are about to begin an entire unit on the region for the post-WWII period and I think this brief analysis contrasting Nasser and Mubarak’s policies will be required reading. Keep up the good work!
As went US-controlled Latin America, so goes the US-controlled Middle East.
Seems to me the US, at least the oligarchic and imperial fraction of the nation, still has a large and covert and destabilizing and repression-encouraging presence in Latin America — just what are 46 warships and 7,000 Marines and a whole lot of attack aircraft doing under “invitation by the government, snicker” in Army-less, non-MIC-ridden Costa Rica? link to eutimes.net
And gee, I wonder if Hugo Chavez, speaking of legitimacy versus power, sleeps like Moammar Gaddafi (or Saddam Hussein, former US “friend”) in a different location every night?
We can only hope that’s they way it turns out. I don’t think Egypt is going to return to the old way of doing business.
Thanks Juan
Thanks Juan! I’ll be using this post in my introductory sociology class when I introduce Weber’s ideas on power and authority.
Juan, thanks for this illuminating post. I hope you can also address how criminally negligent and evasive the NY Times editorial page has been. Compared to the sharp criticism of the Washington Post, a couple NYT editorials have basically echoed the tepid line of the US administration.
But more strikingly, at a time when serious debate and reconsideration is essential in the US, there has not been one regular or guest column in the NYT on Egypt since Jan 25. (All they can do is pontificate about Michelle Bachmann and the First Lady’s clothes.) This is so shameful that it makes the Wash Post op-ed by the thoroughly discredited neocon, Elliott Abrams, look reasonable by comparison.
Even the blog section of the NYT is less than buzzing. Krugman sums it up well: “Egypt: I don’t know anything, have no expertise, haven’t even ever looked at the economic situation. Hence, no posting.” (Note: Lack of expertise on social movements did not stop Krugman from portraying Obama’s grassroots supporters as a “cult” during the 2008 primaries.”) Krugman should at least write about the consequences of his own ignorance and how badly that distorts his analysis of global economics and politics.
The poverty of mainstream intellectual discourse is fully on display here and seems like further confirmation of what Chris Hedges has called “the death of the liberal class.” They’ve been caught totally flat-footed by Tunisia and Egypt and can’t articulate a coherent position (“stable,” “not a dictator,” “restraint on all sides”). And now they must deal with the fact that their foreign policy strategy is in complete disarray.
Where is my copy of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy?
A very instructive analysis. What I’d add is that the same policies that created an economic elite were also creating hundreds of thousands of young educated, English-speaking Egyptians who recognized that their rulers were obscenely corrupt and that the nation would get nowhere unless the political system was freed. They’re the ones who’ve created dissident groups, protested and engaged in digital resistance, and they’re in the forefront of these protests now (Tunisia provided the occasion for action that would get global attention plus the incentive for broader participation). This new class of “rooted cosmopolitan” Egyptians want the same rights they experience when they travel to the UK, US, or democratic Euro-Med countries. Juan Cole’s analysis shows why Mubarak lost his legitimacy in the eyes of the people long before these latest protests started. But one of the prime drivers of change now is a growing, popular desire for political rights and genuine democracy, which is fusing in the streets with the demand for a government that listens and does justice to those who have no property as well as those who do. As Desmond Tutu said, “When people decide they want to be free, there is nothing that can stop them.”
Gentlemen:
President Mubarak should provide quick solution to avoid violance in the region.
If he cannot, violance will continues because people needs are not satisfied.
One way to avoid this problem is call for Free and fair election with a date set.
Police to punish looters who will vandalise the city after a given election date.
Political party to start a company nacional wide.
Military action will just anger civilian and increase violance.
This is a great concise analysis of Egypt — news we can use, or rather, a framework for understanding the news.
I have only a minor tangential scholarly quibble in re Max Weber. The legitimacy framework you use, as something existing between a regime and the people, is a good one, and you use it well, and it’s widely known. But it’s really got nothing to do with Max Weber, even though it was originally developed by his acolytes and they attribute it to him. If you do analysis of his many examples, Weber’s three kinds of Herrschaft aren’t about the relation between the regime and the people. They are rather about the relations of the ruler and his regime. The puzzle, for Weber, was why the Praetorian guard obeyed Caesar, because they had options — they could cut off his head. And similarly with the question of why knights obey kings or why bureaucracies obey politicians. But as for the rest of the population, he generally assumed that if the staff was on side, the mass of the population could be kept down by force. One has to remember that Economy & Society is one of those classic Urschlim bis Gegenwarts books, and for 99% of the history that it is comparatively surveying, the “people” had little say.
I say this purely as ex-sociologist noodge. Most people think Weber said what you said because that’s what Parsons said he said. And there has been brilliant work in that tradition. But it’s closer to Habermas than to Weber.
With all due respect to Max Weber…
The Chinese Party had to reassert its authority with guns in 1989, but that it did. Sitting back we can sniff at how they, and now Mubarak, have lost their authority, but such a construct is intellectual and ultimately misses the point we can see in China: the people where not committed to see things through, and the full price they’d have to pay.
When the people have genuinely had enough, they will do what it takes (and pay the price in blood) to change things. The same can be said about the US, but its people are so rich and complacent, it hard to imagine when that could/would ever happen.
The question is how committed the Egyptians are to change, and how committed the status quo (ie, the Army) is to resisting it/obeying orders. Until one side caves i, it would seem you have the set-up for a civil war.
This analysis is so much more incisive and well-informed than any of the press commentary I’ve seen – much of which is both too politically engaged and thin. It is no wonder newspapers are in crisis and the blogosphere is taking over. Understanding any revolution calls for a cool analysis of the power, interests and perceptions of both rebels and regime, and that is something so many journalists, relying on either bland reportage or emotive polemic, seem unwilling to do.
Sir, may I ask if you perceive any set of influences or forces or conditions that will keep this “Revolution of Revulsion” from being hijacked by, shall we say, chaotic forces and interests?
All I’ve read about revolutions leaves the impression that most of the energies and motions of those periods of intense flux and desperation and yearning for legitimacy get as they say co-opted or perverted by people who recognize the pathways to power and often false legitimacy, and are willing and able to act to occupy them.
There are exceptions, of course. Any chance that legitimate aspirations, and aspirations for legitimacy, will drive enough people to keep the jackals and generals from doing what they so often do?
And isn’t it interesting that some military cadres recognize that their troops and their armaments and their marching orders come from an “economy” that requires healthy surpluses that usually come from a growing store of Real Wealth, and that “taking over” might be killing the egg-laying goose? Too bad that in the US and a few other nations, the MIC has such a huge reservoir to draw on, and the opportunity to do the imperial thing and take Real Wealth from less-well-defended people?
But hey, that’s been the model since “civilization,” as in grain surpluses and walled towns and granaries that need defense or can be pillaged, has existed. I love the irony that the Cradle of Civilization, as some would have it, the Fertile Crescent, has been the scene of so much that is the worst of what humans as “civilized creatures” can do…
Professor Cole, this sounds so much like a picture of the US, both as it is, and as it’s becoming.
and
and finally,
Dr Cole… I have been streaming Al Jezeera from their website and it says “live” on the films of Tahrir. If it is not their feed, whose live feed are they showing? Reuters perhaps?
What do you think of the fact that there are almost no women among the protesters on the street? Women enjoy considerable freedom in Egypt, and there is also a feminist tradition of sorts. Were are the Egyptian women now?
Here are a few
link to facebook.com
Ah, Juan, if only there were some Weberian charismatic leader to reunite the rudderless masses in Egypt. Hmm, I know let’s continue to stoke fears of international finance, barely register Nassar’s flaws, and continue the drumbeat of the volkish politics — sadly, the one constant here. Need I reference how the rest of this script goes? Instead of playing with fire, someone actually interested in peace and justice would be worried about the dangers to come.
Stay the course?
So Egypt should continue to rely on trickle-down to provide income, goods, and services to its population?
Should it make its economy even friendlier to investors and ‘international finance’ by lowering wages, abolishing subsidies and regulations, and eliminating unions?
What economic policy do you recommend?
An analysis from STRATFOR, worth reading at:
link to stratfor.com
pulls together many of these observations, reading into them the historical context and precedence. Most interesting point is the hypothetical potential for a junior officer coup reflecting genuine sensitivity to the people and their situation, (if there is to be any true revolution, IMHO).
This is the only obvious way the people can really get past the status quo. That is, some general/pal of Mubarak’s picking things up where he leaves off. The only other scenario, assuming the revolution doesn’t subside or isn’t successfully suppressed, as in China, would be the MB/Iranian alternative/model.
Other commenters bring up possible problems with the economic analysis presented here, but I for one would be glad to see the Egyptian populace feel they get a better chance to participate in economic policymaking. I do not think the United States should be in the business of mandating one particular economic model. The US people and government should distance themselves from neoliberalism, and Americans at the citizen level should let Egyptians (and others) at the citizen level know that America is not “doing neoliberalism” to them, but that the impact of international forces and institutions is doing similar things to the Egyptian and American people alike.
There is one Egyptian popular criterion for legitimacy that I do have a big problem with, and that is their problem with the Israeli-Egyptian separate peace.
I don’t know if Juan Cole was saying he agrees with this as a criterion of legitimacy or if he was just echoing Egyptian popular opinions. If he was agreeing I believe he and the public is wrong. If he is just echoing then he is just describing others’ wrong beliefs.
Having rage against the Israeli-Egyptian separate peace assumes that Israeli-Egyptian war would be morally superior, but do we really think it would be? It implies that we should be ashamed of the American role in promoting that peace and President Carter’s pursuit of the accord.
Frankly, the accord and even the compromises that have gone along with it (including some degree of bribery to both sides to make the deal stick) are nothing for the US to be ashamed of.
In particular, when the accords were signed in the late 70s, and for the first decade of their existence, they were quite necessary to reduce the risk of nuclear war in the world, even if the accord could arguably have had some negative side effects for individuals in the Middle East. The world went to the brink of nuclear war over Middle East wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973, and America need not be ashamed that the popularly maligned (in the Muslim world) Israeli-Egyptian separate peace, took that prospect off the table. The fate of the peoples of all Eurasia and North America was tied up in this, not just the fate of Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Syrians.
Thoughts Juan?
If the Egyptian people believe that the alliance with Israel is undesirable then it is a legitimate perspective, they are under no more obligation to consider whether their position hurts or helps America than the opposite.
The reality of the peace is that it weakened other Arab States by allowing the technology advanced and diplomatically protected Israel to attack other neighbours without having to worry about Israel’s most formidable rival coming to their aid.
Also the unbending support shown by Mubarak for the fradulent peace process has made Egypt complicit in the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Worse even than that, the willingness to enforce the blockade of Gaza is producing a generation of Gazans who will be physically and intellectually stunted from insufficient nutrition.
Egyptians have a greater responsibility to think of the implications of the separate peace to the Palestinians than to the Americans because the Palestinians are their neighbours, because they can see what is happening without all the ideological baggage that Western countries bring with them wherever they go and also because of their role in aiding and abetting crimes against humanity directed toward the Palestinians.
If the separate peace undermined the Egyptians belief in the legitimacy of their dictator, then I accept their reasoning.
Having watched Europe fall to Communism only to eventually tire of it gives me faith in the Egyptian people. There’s something amazing about people when they decide they’ve had enough. It’s so much easier and less messy to “do what you’re told”. But something happens and historically the people prevail. Oh, there’s always the next thing waiting to happen but that too will be dealt with. The politics of it all is obvious, but the actions of the people is a far more interesting study. I continue to wish them well. Thank you Juan Cole for your excellent coverage.
The most important coming story about Egypt’s strife may have nothing at all to do with Mubarkak or Obama or Netenyahu’s or anybody else’s next moves, but rather what corporate US media giants choose to do next with the story. What approval or disapproval of the popular Egyptian uprising is present? How accurate is US media’s reporting compared to other international media? Will a silver lining be found, or will storm clouds prevail? Will the tempo of media reporting increase, or will the current attention being paid falter, and the situation languish? In Egypt’s case, languishment is out; this story isn’t going away given the international interest in what’s going on. It will have to be spun. But finding the right spin is going to become much, much tougher in the event that any other Mid East nations now experiencing protests might follow Egypt into full blown national protest. This is how events, influenced by self serving media coverage that aims to manipulate rather than inform, spiral out of control. So, now with camera trained on the producers in our own control booth, we take you to the story that’s not going to be covered. Dr. Spin, as you please.
Re: population & price inflation
Some Western countries’ demographic transition, especially that in France, also predated modern medicine (i.e. vaccines, antibiotics, chlorinated water supplies, etc.).
Egypt seems to be roughly following the French style of demographic transition: mortality rates drop while birth rates remain high, then a gradual tapering of fertility rates.
I think Egypt’s fertility rate has dropped by at least half since the 1970′s. But the number of women of reproductive age is large so the population is still growing fairly rapidly despite the big drop in the number of babies per woman.
Inflation
One of the overlooked consequences of the very loose, very stimulative monetary policies in the developed world during the past decade has been mounting inflationary pressure in the developing world. Stimulus which was intended to boost economic output in the originating countries has instead overheated developing economies, causing serious price inflation in food, energy and housing.
Indeed, linearising the exponential function in the long-term is a common mistake. Fertility must drop below 2 children/woman in order to reverse the trend in the next 30 years. The Chinese understand this and were able to tackle with the 1-child policy. Dropping from 2 to 1 may seem harsh, but that’s the only way to make it fair (as having 1.5 children each is not feasible). Clearly the social structure of Egypt is very different that China’s, but lessons must be learned from the world’s fastest riser. Egypt is fast reaching demographic saturation point, with huge impact on the Nilotic and Eastern Mediterranean ecosystem.
Fisk reports from atop a US-provided Egyptian tank that the military and protesters are one, link to independent.co.uk
The two photos linked at the article prove it beyond doubt, link to independent.co.uk
And yesterday’s lead by _The Independent_ provided a terse yet accurate description of why, link to independent.co.uk
I see the interconnection between all the protest events being rooted in the incompletion of the anti-Colonial transition made impossible by US policy and enforced by its Cold War, and I see such protests spreading within Africa. The Class War aspect you note is present in the Albanian protests as well as others within Europe, the common thread being the neoliberal policies employed by elites at the behest of the US and EU meant to immiserate the many and transfer yet more wealth to those not needing another farthing. Events are proving unmanagable by the Metropole, which thanks to Wikileaks has lost what little legitimacy it retained. Thankfully, the policy goal of Full Spectrum Domination looks like it will be shredded by the planet’s people instead of being fought against by their governments.
The Egyptian revolution is the logical conclusion of the unholy alliance between neoliberal economic reforms and dictatorship. Massive urbanization and marginalization are a direct casue of capitalist land reforms, the privatization of the economy and the entranchement of the rentier state. It is extraordinarily amazing to hear H. Clinton and TV anchors urging Egypt to launch economic reforms!! A serious Martian earing these sages would think Earthians had gone crazy.
I hope the Egyptians will keep up momentum.
Note this sentence from the article: “After the Camp David accords, in contrast, Egypt largely sat out the big struggles in the Mideast, and made what has widely been called a separate peace.”
Egypt’s non-interference in regional conflicts involving Israel has been ordered and paid for by the US. Since the accords, our “foreign aid” to Egypt has been exceeded only by that to Israel.
link to ftalphaville.ft.com
I agree with those who have noted a disturbing similarity to Egypt in our own growing wealth divide.
If ElBaradei eventually replaces Mubarak, the US media will brand him a radical to discredit and ridicule his conclusions on Iran’s nuclear program for the IAEA.
Interesting analysis. I didn’t see you discuss the broad political repression and the pervasive police brutality during Mubarak’s rule. He banned opposing political parties, imprisoned opponents, and jailed and punished activists who spoke out against him. Also, the security services are widely considered to serve Mubarak, not the people or country. Torture and police brutality are widespread (not just of suspected “Islamists”).
This revolution isn’t just about redistribution of wealth. It’s also about restoring personal dignity and freedoms – the freedoms we in the US often take for granted.
Abdel Nasser did the same but they did not rise up against him.
Tear Gas Causes Anti American Sentiment in Egypt
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