General Discussion

Comrade Grumpy

(13,184 posts) Sun Oct 13, 2013, 10:11 PM Oct 2013

Serious, important read: London Review of Books, Hugh Roberts, "[Egypt] The Revolution That Wasn't"

This is a review essay of a handful of books on Middle East politics, but is especially noteworthy for its analysis of events in Egypt. It serves as a good corrective for the cartoonish discussions we see in the Western media and the even more cartoonish discussions that we see on this board.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n17/hugh-roberts/the-revolution-that-wasnt

Western opinion has had difficulty working out what to think, or at any rate what to say, about Egypt. It now seems that the pedlars of hallucinations have been cowed and it is no longer fashionable to describe the events of 3 July in Cairo as a ‘second revolution’. But to describe them as a counter-revolution, while indisputably more accurate, presupposes that there was a revolution in the first place. The bulk of Western media commentary seems still to be wedded to this notion. That what the media called ‘the Arab spring’ was a succession of revolutions became orthodoxy very quickly. Egypt was indispensable to the idea of an ‘Arab spring’ and so it had to have had a revolution too.

In part this was wishful thinking. The daring young Egyptians who organised the remarkable demonstrations in Tahrir Square and elsewhere from 25 January 2011 onwards were certainly revolutionary in spirit and when their demand that Mubarak should go was granted they couldn’t help thinking that what they had achieved was a revolution. They were of course encouraged in this by the enthusiastic reporting of the Western media, disoriented as they have been since the rise of the ‘journalism of attachment’ during the Balkan wars. But it was also the result of the influence of accomplished fact. The events in Tunisia were certainly a revolution. The role of the Tunisian army was a very modest one, essentially that of refusing, in its moment of truth, to slaughter the demonstrators to save Ben Ali. The role of the Egyptian army in February 2011, however, was not modest; it only seemed to be. Where the Tunisian army showed itself to be a genuinely apolitical servant of the state, the Egyptian army struck an attitude of neutrality and even sympathy for the demonstrators that masked its commanders’ real outlook. That was good enough for reporters who couldn’t tell the difference between appearances and realities. In outward form, both countries had had revolutions, and practically identical ones at that. So the ‘Arab spring’ was up and running and the question was simply: ‘Who’s next?’

To think about the recent appalling turn of events in Egypt in terms of an original ‘revolution’, with 25 January 2011 as the start of Year One, is to amputate the drama of the last two and half years from its historical roots, the story of what the Egyptian state became during the later stages of Hosni Mubarak’s protracted presidency. This is not a simple affair. It is the story of what the Mubarak presidency signified for the Egyptian state, for its various components, especially the army, and for its form of government, but also of what it signified for the various types of opposition his rule provoked or allowed. All this combined in the gathering crisis of the state itself, a crisis that was building long before the revolution in Tunisia got underway.

Mubarak ruled Egypt for more than thirty years, longer than Nasser (18 years) and Sadat (11 years) put together, and he made clear his intention to remain in office until he died, while simultaneously giving the impression that he intended his son Gamal to succeed him. His reign was thus an instance of both the wider phenomena that Roger Owen discusses in exemplary depth: the rise of ‘presidents for life’ in the Arab world and these leaders’ tendency – or at least the temptation – to try to secure the presidency for their families by instituting a dynastic succession. Mubarak concentrated power in the presidency to an arguably unprecedented degree, building on what Sadat had done but taking it much further.

<snip> much, much more at the link