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The Arab Predicament Revisited


By Elizabeth Iskander and Minas Monir

Published: Mar 4, 2011 8:09 PM Updated: Mar 7, 2011 4:22 PM

Popular unrest in the Middle East has raised serious questions about the future of the
region. Unable to hold back the wave of uprisings, Arab governments are faced with
tough decisions that will have far-reaching effects on stability, balance of power and
the lives of Arab communities from Tunisia to Bahrain.

In his book, The Arab Predicament, Professor Fouad Ajami argued that the politics of Arab
states between 1967 and 1981 were locked into a formula of stability versus chaos. He
described how the threat of instability, Islamist terrorism and western imperialism have all been
used as instruments to bolster Arab autocracies. The book, published as Hosni Mubarak
ascended to the presidency of Egypt, seemed to be just as relevant 30 years later when the
Egyptian people started calling for him to step down. In his interview with American TV network
ABC, responding to the demonstrations against him and his regime, Mubarak said that he
wanted to resign but could not “for fear of the country falling into chaos." In justification,
Mubarak warned of a potential takeover of Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood—using an Islamist
threat as a scarecrow to maintain the support from the West. In this way he set out his stall to
resist change, encouraged pressure from Israel on America to back his ailing regime, and hoped
for compliance from the Egyptian people.

The fear, particularly in America, of a destabilized Egypt had given Mubarak room to effectively
establish a police state, with only superficial gestures to democratic reform. The lack of real
democracy meant that the government and its president had never been genuinely accountable
to the people. Thus the regime never needed to listen to the demands of Egyptians nor learn to
adapt to changing social needs. When Mubarak succeeded Anwar Al-Sadat, the new president
tried to make a fresh start, but—as Ajami explained in his book—Mubarak “wouldn’t indulge in a
full-scale assault against what Sadat had left behind. After all, he himself had been picked by
Sadat, brought out of the air force into the political domain.”

Egyptians today are more open to multicultural ideas and are connected and exposed to the
outside world via modern media. It is a new generation that has only ever known one political
system at home, while being able to see different models elsewhere via the internet. The youth
were pivotal in the current protests but Mubarak’s government, which was formed in another era,
did not have the capacity to meet their aspirations for change and progress.

Those who seek to push Egypt forward without its president of the past 30 years will need to
transform the entrenched system that he has left behind. Mubarak’s regime can be considered
the natural development or evolution of the system put in place since the Free Officers
revolution in July 1952, when the monarchy was replaced by another form of autocracy; a
military rule with a leader crowned with the halo of heroism. Any strategy to take Egypt forward in
the post-Mubarak era should be formed in light of the profoundly intermeshed economic, military
and political legacies of Egypt after the 1952 revolution.

The Legacy of Mubarak’s Predecessors, Economic Schizophrenia and a Hero Complex

While Gamal Abdul Nasser was not the first leader of Egypt after 1952, he became the symbolic
leader of Egypt’s revolution. After achieving this status, Nasser started to apply the principles of
his brand of Arab socialism, beginning with the economy. He nationalized large economic
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concerns, such as the Suez Canal, to transfer their management into government hands. As the
president of a state with a single-party political system, a nationalized media sector and an
interventionist economic model, Nasser’s autocracy was secured. Added to this symbolic,
economic and political supremacy was his authority over the army by virtue of his military
background, his role in the Free Officers coup and the inclusion of army officers in his
government.

After about 20 years of such control and a growing tendency towards cronyism, Egypt’s public
sector had become unwieldy and inefficient. The economic and political scene languished in this
way until the crisis brought about by Nasser’s death. His successor, Sadat, dissolved the
Socialist Union, and following the 1973 war with Israel he gained enough kudos as a heroic
military leader to be able to abruptly exchange Nasser’s socialist economic model for a capitalist
one. In scrambling to achieve this transformation and distinguish his legacy from that of Nasser,
Sadat failed to take other sociological and political factors into consideration when applying this
infitah (Open Door) policy without an adequate social or economic foundation.

Corruption rose as controls were removed and the gap between rich and poor increased as a
direct consequence of the infitah. The 1977 Bread Riots—widespread civil unrest which Sadat
described as a “revolution of thieves”—can be also attributed to this radical and rapid policy
change. Sadat’s use of terminology more appropriate to an earlier feudalistic era illustrates the
disconnect that existed between Sadat and the Egyptian people. This year’s youth protests were
the largest seen in Egypt since 1977 and once again the president, this time Mubarak, appeared
to be surprised by the demonstrators’ demand that he leave.

Mubarak’s presidency saw a further shift in economic policy, the hallmark being privatization—
completing the circle after the initiatives instituted by Nasser. Wealth became concentrated in
the hands of a few entrepreneurs with links to the inner circle of the government. Mubarak didn’t
fix the damage caused by the abrupt changes of his predecessors and exacerbated problems by
incorporating businessmen into government and the National Democratic Party (NDP). Perhaps
the most infamous example is Ahmed Ezz, the steel magnate who was the chairman of the NDP
until the start of February.

The last government even became known as the businessmen government, because most of its
members were business moguls—some of whom now face interrogation by the Attorney General
because they are accused of abusing their positions in government to sell government land
cheaply to their own private companies. This conflict of interests between business and
government led to the failure to protect workers’ rights and to the misuse of billions of wasted
Egyptian pounds on failed projects. For example, Muhammad Nasr Eddin, the former minister of
irrigation, said that the state pumped 14 billion pounds into the Toshka project (a plan to direct
water from Lake Nasser to one of Egypt’s driest areas for agricultural purposes) “without any
recognizable outcome.”

Security, Stability

It was not only on the economic front that Egypt has had to absorb abrupt and extreme change.
Egyptians have been forced to grapple with basic questions about identity. While Egypt was the
“beating heart” of the Arab world in the time of Nasser, it was subsequently isolated after the
Camp David agreement—when Egyptians saw their “heroic leader” of 1973 shaking hands with
the perpetual enemy in the time of Nasser: Israel. In seeking to construct an image for his
presidency, Mubarak also used his military credentials as an air force pilot in the 1973 war. To
support this he began to construct a discourse of stability and moderation, perhaps because he
took over the presidency in the middle of political chaos. As Sadat’s vice president he had to
handle the leadership of a nation shocked by the assassination of their president in 1981, whilst
coping with a street war with Islamist groups and the policy of exclusion by its Arab neighbors.

Domestically, Mubarak’s main concern was to calm the waters of the unsettled period following
Sadat’s assassination. He declared a state of emergency, which gave him full power to arrest the
members of jihadist groups spread throughout Egypt. The interior ministry brought back its “iron
fist” policy used under Nasser and concentration camps—shut by his predecessor—were
opened again to incarcerate the Islamists that Sadat had released. Thirty years later and
Mubarak still appeared to be trapped in this time-period. Emergency laws were never lifted and
the police state became entrenched, as was the discourse on Mubarak’s leadership as a
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presidency of stability. The stagnation of the past 30 years is behind much of the fear
concerning what a post-Mubarak Egypt could look like—how will the country react?

It is this prioritization of security over social freedoms and democratic development that ironically
earned Mubarak his popularity in the West. He was viewed as a guardian of regional stability
having crushed the Islamist groups in the 1990s and maintained the peace accords with Israel.
At the same time, Mubarak’s government used Israel and Islamist groups, largely in the form of
the Muslim Brotherhood, to justify its heavy handed security service and continued state of
emergency. The Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to remain as a part of the domestic political
equation in order to be employed internationally as the scarecrow, which embodies the
alternative that the West would have to face if they failed to support him and his government.
Paradoxically, it is mistaking security bought with oppression and corruption for real peace and
stability that was one of the key contributing factors to the January protests, which took the world
and the Egyptian government by surprise.

Succession and Indications of a Coming Crisis

This false sense of security resulted in the inability to read indications that the Egyptian street
would not remain passive. With Mubarak’s health obviously failing, the question of succession
increasingly gripped Egyptian analysts and the wider Egyptian people. The consensus was that
Muabarak’s son Gamal would “inherit” the presidency from his father. In an article published by
The Majalla in July 2000—which led to the magazine being banned in Egypt—Saad Eddin
Ibrahim coined the term jumlukiyya, or republicarchy, which pointed to the transformation of the
Egyptian system into a new monarchy while it is still constitutionally defined as a republic. A
similar process was at the time underway in Syria after a constitutional amendment was
implemented in order to deliver authority to Bashar, the son of Hafez Al-Assad.

In Egypt, the state propaganda machine played the stability card and tried to pave the way for
succession by portraying Gamal as the only figure able to continue the stable regime of his
father. On Al-Jazeera TV, on 2 February, Muhammad Sabra—previously Mubarak’s office
manager for 18 years—exposed the details of the plan for Gamal Mubarak’s succession. When
Sabra was in office, he was asked to forward the daily presidential reports to Gamal. The
president’s son—who was working for a London branch of the Bank of America at the time—
suddenly became the head of the political committee of the NDP. Then his father called for the
controversial constitutional amendments of articles 76 and 77, which were seen publicly as an
attempt to legitimize succession.

But the government clearly failed to understand that for many people the prospect of Gamal
Mubarak continuing where his father’s presidency left off was a final straw. This prospect closed
the door on an opportunity for a change in the character of the government. Without the hope of
change people had nowhere to channel the frustrations emanating from economic hardship and
political repression. This has been clear in the gradual increase in protests, for example, those
in Al-Mahalla in 2008 and the springing up of resistance groups such as the April 6 movement—
culminating in the extraordinary events of this year.

Looking into Egypt’s Future

Undoubtedly, Egypt is witnessing a historic moment. The protests that began on 25 January
have pushed people to reconsider the present and future shape of Egypt, and the Middle East’s
most populous state now finds itself at a crossroads. While there have been indications of a
changing mood on the Egyptian street in recent years, the timing and scale of these protests
and the reactions of different parties involved, were unpredictable. Though Mubarak has gone,
the situation still remains in flux, making it difficult to predict the possibilities for political change
and the implications for policy in the short term. But regardless of the developments in the
coming weeks and months, the lessons of the past 60 years should be heeded in creating a
political system to meet the requirements of the Egyptian people and to avoid further violence
and upheaval.

To achieve this it is necessary that the Egyptian government learns to connect with its people
and not impose change, whether economic, ideological or political, simply from the top down.
This is particularly crucial when the directive is less about the needs of the country and more of
an impulse to distinguish the legacy and heroism of its former president. Since Mubarak
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resigned under pressure from millions of Egyptian demonstrators, a military high council has
taken power in Egypt and a new history is being written. Three steps are required to achieve
progress in the next stage in order to break the endless circle of mistakes. Firstly, the curbing of
presidential authority by amending the constitution to limit the number of terms the president can
hold office and the broadening of the field for potential presidential candidates. Secondly, the
end of the state of emergency, which undermines the widespread aspiration to create a civil
state governed by the rule of law. Thirdly, the distinct separation of the military and executive
political bodies, so that they become a check and balance on each other instead of simply one
and the same leadership—this third point may prove to be the biggest challenge in the long
term.

Clearly there will need to be an ongoing national dialogue to move Egypt forward. The next
president should source his legitimacy from the people rather than in representing himself as a
military hero or pioneer of a dramatically new political system. There are two crucial outcomes of
what has happened in Egypt that could potentially impact on the future of all Arab politics. The
first is the rejection of the stability versus chaos paradigm that has governed both the
international relations of the Middle East, as well as the domestic politics of several Arab nations.
The second is limiting presidential authority and therefore making the fate of each Arab nation
less conditional on the person of the president. While this will generate uncertainty in the short
term, in the long term national stability has the potential to be broadly based, rather than
imposed from the top through the means of a single autocrat.

Thirty years on, Ajami, who has become a prominent scholar in North American circles and a
political advisor to several American administrations, continues to follow Egyptian affairs
carefully and with great enthusiasm. Despite a possible rejection of his earlier thesis, Ajami’s
current writings fully resonate with the events in Egypt, if not the entire Middle East. Of the five
republicarchies existing today, Egypt and Iraq are gone. Libyan leader, Muammar Qadhafi, has
lost the entire eastern side of his country to popular revolt. Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh is under
severe pressure from the south to step down. And Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, where the concept
of hereditary presidency originated, and which inspired Saad Eddin Ibrahim to write about the
republicarchy trend, may have his turn yet.

In a February 2011 article for Newsweek, Ajami writes, “The realists tell the Arabs that they are
playing with fire, that beyond the prison walls there is danger and chaos. Luckily for them, the
Arabs pay no heed to these realists, and can recognize the “soft bigotry of low expectations that
animates them. Arabs have to quit railing against powers beyond and infidels and foreign
conspiracies. For now they are out making and claiming their own history.”

Elizabeth Iskander - Dinam Research fellow in International Relations at the London School of
Economics and Political Science. Dr. Iskander holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies
from the University of Cambridge, and writes regularly on Middle East politics.

Minas Monir - Editor.


© Copyright 2010 Al Majalla

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