The Egyptian Case
By
Sean Ewart
The Arab Spring flared across the
Middle East last year leaving toppled dictatorships, festering civil
wars, and countless dead in its wake. Billed as a democratic movement
spontaneously erupting in opposition to authoritarian governments,
the settling dust is revealing a much different picture. A year on
and we have apparently endemic tribal warfare in Libya, a civil war
in Syria, a military oligarchy in Egypt (with an Islamist government
waiting in the wings to seize power), a bloody family feud in Yemen,
and a variety of greater or lesser reforms implemented in other
nations which have (mostly) pacified the malcontents. Egypt, as the
location of some of the most radical changes resulting from the Arab
Spring, is an instructive example. Islamists have the people’s
mandate; the military is still in control of the real power; and
foreign and internal policies are increasingly destabilizing the
region. Yes, there is a democratic movement in the Arab world; no,
the Arab world is not yet democratic.
A prime example of the problematic
landscape created by the Arab Spring is a recent vote cast by
Egyptian lawmakers. On Monday, March 12, 2012, the Egyptian
parliament, which is now dominated by Islamist parties like the
Muslim Brotherhood, voted to revisit its peace treaty with Israel,
cut off the flow of Egyptian natural gas to its northern neighbor,
and label it the nation’s number one enemy. While the parliament
has little power over either the peace treaty, which has kept Israel
and Egypt from exchanging munitions fire for the past 30 years, or
the gas pipeline, it is at least symbolic of the attitude of the
Egyptian body politick. The increased participation on the part of
the Egyptian civil society is not going to translate to greater
regional stability in the short term. Truthfully, if the trend of
increasing Islamification of government continues, we can safely say
that a souring of regional tensions is likely and another
Israeli-Egyptian war possible. This is simply not an exaggeration; a
2011 Pew research report found that 54% of Egyptians, after the fall
of the authoritarian Hosni Mubarak, wanted to annul the peace treaty
with Israel, signed in 1979, and this would surely ignite an already
volatile situation.
This phenomenon has been explained by
famed war theorist Azer Gat, who said, “... it has been shown that
partly free states have been more war prone than non-democracies.
Indeed, viewed from a longer historical perspective, democratization
and liberalization in general were processes that did not consist of
a one-time transition from a non-democratic regime but continuously
unfolded, often over decades and even centuries.” While Gat was
here speaking about the formation of Western democracies, the
parallel to the Arab Spring is self evident. In other words,
while Egyptian citizens are increasingly gaining access to the reins
of power, we should not expect them to exercise it peaceably. If
anything, we should expect more bellicosity as the process of
democratization takes place. Gat: “Not only did the masses ever
since classical antiquity acquire a reputation for volatility and
rashness in crisis; they proved to be easily and deeply aroused by
questions of national honor and national glory.”
Another telling statistic in Egypt,
which in turn is unfortunately reminiscent of the rest of the Arab
world, is the median age of Egyptian men. A fact of human existence
is that you can directly track the likelihood of someone acting
violently to their sex; again, as per Gat:
Perpetration of serious violence and crime is in fact the most distinctive sex difference there is, cross culturally.... 'Crime statistics from Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, England and Wales, Germany, Iceland, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Scotland, Uganda, a dozen different locations in the United States, and Zaire, as well as from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England and nineteenth century America – from hunter-gatherer communities, tribal societies, and medieval and modern nation-states – all uncover the same fundamental pattern. In all these societies, with a single exception, the probability that the same-sex murder has been committed by a man, not a woman, ranges from 92 to 100 percent.'
As Robert Wright has noted: “ An
unmarried man between twenty-four and thirty-five years of age is
about three times as likely to murder another man as is a married man
the same age.” There are many reasons for male violence, but the
point is that men are violent;
young, unmarried men especially so, and societies which are comprised
largely of this group will necessarily reflect its make up –
democratic societies comprised of young, unmarried men are arguably
the most prone to violence and mob mentality. So consider that the
median age for men in the USA is 35.6 while the median age for men in
Egypt is 24 – these exactly represent the extremes of Wright's
statistics. These facts can help us understand much of the prevailing
attitudes in post-revolution Egypt.
There
are several things to be emphasized. Many have likened the Arab
Spring to the American Revolution – I have compared it to the
European revolts of 1848. We see the long term benefits of
democratization (i.e. liberalization, self determination, social
justice, equality under the law, etc) but we, in the West, have the
luxury of being historically distant from the main battles which
brought about these revolutions. None of my peers fought at Saratoga
or joined in the street battles in Paris. So while it is evident that
the Arab world is opening up to the will of the people, and this will
likely prove to be a positive development when viewed in a larger
historical perspective sometime in the future, we must also prepare
ourselves for exactly what this means in the short term. It certainly
does not mean peace in the Middle East. As insane as it sounds, the
very dictators that were so oppressive towards their own people were
often protectors of the world order. Gat: “As in nineteenth-century
Europe, and contrary to the prevailing cliché, public opinion in
Arab states tends to be more militant than the semi-autocratic state
rulers, who struggle to keep such popular pressures in check.” For
proof of this startling revelation, just observe Egypt's military
oligarchy and its reaction to the recent parliamentary decision to
end its treaty with Israel; the military is the entity now keeping
the peace between Israel and Egypt.
The
Arab Spring was (and to a certain extent still is) a movement focused
on removing truly oppressive regimes from power. That several of
these regimes are gone (or on their way out) is something to be
excited about. But we should not lose focus of the problems which
continue to exist: a young, underemployed, and violent male
population; rising Islamist sentiment which is antithetical to
modernization, democratization, and liberalization (this is not to
say that Islam is antithetical to any of these things, but Islamist
government, theocratic rule, is); and sectarian crises which have
been given new breath of life as the heavy handed autocratic rulers
have been overthrown. The Arab world is democratizing but has a long
road ahead. Remember, even after the (multiple) French revolutions,
the people still endured the Reign of Terror, Napoleon 1 and 3, and
two World Wars before anyone could say, at last, that France was
free. We are living in dangerous but marvelous times. We are best
served by keeping our eyes open.
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