Egypt: A Bloody Shame Indeed

Morsi’s supporters celebrate victory. Photo: Lorenz Khazaleh (Flickr)

One of the major victories of the Arab Spring was the new raft of democratically elected leaders who came to power following the fall of dictatorial regimes who terrorised their people and ruled without regard for freedom of speech, of the press and the views of the down-trodden who inhabited the levels in society below those of the privileged elite who controlled so much of their lives.

This process of democratising the region led to the first free and fair Egyptian election in decades; the election of Mohammad Morsi, candidate for a previously banned party (the Muslim Brotherhood), who successfully won the election as President of the newly freed country. This was a fresh political experience for Egypt’s young population, with millions never having had the opportunity to vote before during the term of the last leader, Hosni Mubarak, and his long fiefdom over the whole nation.

This glorious enfranchisement made the whole country feel like it had a real say in events, for the first time in years. This made the elections held after Mubarak’s downfall particularly engaging and exciting for ordinary Egyptians; their pet parties had to win, in order to get in there first and truly shape the country so monopolised by the oligarchs. The political energy, of the sort not seen in the more apathetic ‘reserved’ European and American democracies, was hailed as another success of the Arab Spring, with a strong vibrant culture around voting becoming the centrepiece for all those who (correctly) supported the Egyptians in their valiant struggle for self government.

However, this joyous revelling in a new found ability to determine the leadership of the nation also created many problems. The movements of mass action which had characterised the protests against the regime also had an effect on the way the campaigns were run as well as the level of political discourse in the country. For even after the brave citizen-led fight to stop the tyranny had been done in a spirit of unity, vast chasms of division remained amongst the politically educated. There were huge amounts of polarisation and partisanship in the run up to the election.

The BBC did an excellent piece analysing the potential results and cross-referencing the potential voters. It turns out that women (by a considerable margin) favoured the non-Islamic candidate, Ahmed Shafik, who was considered by some to be a stooge for the former government. This rejection by womanhood is significant in two ways: the first is their disenchantment with the Islamic message preached by Morsi and his supporters (perhaps showing an awakening amongst those the religion oppresses most?). It is also significant in that women were actually allowed to vote, in direct contrast to other ‘Islamic Republics’.

The world may not be ready for a democratically elected Islamic leader of a free country. People in the West who supported the military intervention in Libya were hugely alarmed when the Leader of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Jilil, said that the new constitution of the country would be broadly based on ultra-conservative Sharia Law, ‘obviously’. It does appear worrying that those who so keenly wrote and spoke in favour of Arabs making their own political futures and choosing their own leaders, are then recoiling when they choose something alien to our experience. Let me be clear, if the new countries’ governments stay within a democratic framework, then there are no problems.

However; if, like in Egypt now, the government exceeds its own powers and gives itself new ones (which the Morsi administration is currently doing) then the world at large is legitimised in its’ worries for the people, and the region. The consequences of further international involvement in a region already struggling to rebuild after the last encounter with hellfire missiles and a democratically elected demagogue at the helm are not happy ones.

It is a true travesty, after winning an election, and the respect of the international community in his mediation between Israel and Palestine (which not only prevented an escalation of the region’s problems, but also demonstrated a new resurgence from Egypt as a new power in the area) he had proved himself capable of the office entrusted to him. To see all of that disintegrate in a matter of hours from statesman to mob orator, who has to watch his party headquarters burn as the collective will of the Egyptians is once more released on another leader with dictatorial ambitions.

Morsi is defiant; he cannot govern while others have the ability to challenge his decisions and to amend them, he has decreed that none of his actions can be changed by the legislature; this is controlling, and hardly the actions of a democrat. But the other implications of his new move are profound. He is now able to take any action necessary to safeguard the revolution. This is Leninist in essence, and any mention of emergency powers whilst in the presidency is pure Putin.

He may genuinely think that by his actions he is stream-lining the process of making decisions, and he may think that concentrating more power in his hands is a positive attempt to respond to crises quicker, and he may well take false consolation in the evidence: he has, after all, done very well in the only major problem to come his way so far.

But this is no true indication of the stresses of his job and the future challenges, where his course of action may not be so well defined. The default Arab response is to defend Palestine, and that has served him well so far, but how can we guess he will respond to a more convoluted situation: presumably involving Iran and Israel? He has no obvious route to navigate the storm of angry rhetoric, UN Security Council vetoes and powerful backers. Let us hope the violence and strife makes him change his ways; we don’t want a situation like 1917, where the errors of a revolutionary government were considered as strong as to warrant another, and more disastrous, upheaval.

James Snell

Book review: Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason

It will long be remembered as the year of ‘the protestor’; as uprisings originating in the Arab world swept across the globe like a wild bushfire. Paul Mason, the economics editor of Newsnight, is therefore well placed to draw on his wide-ranging reportage in 2011 to answer the key question; how has this happened?

The global economy, troubled by a ‘shortfall between stagnating wages and increased consumption met by credit’, was bound to ‘explode’ Mason argues. Thus the influence of economics on the protests of today draws parallels to those in history; inflation correlates ‘closely with revolt: the higher the cost of bread, the more revolutionary the outcome’. Indeed, economic concern was so widespread in 2011 that the protests were populated by an unprecedented range of participants. Mason proposes three distinct socio-economic groups; the ‘graduate without a future’ of the discontented middle class, organized labour and the urban poor.

However, Mason argues that we cannot rely on economics as an explanation alone. If the uprisings are rampant flames, then technology rather than economics is the fuel spreading the fire. Social media, Mason argues, helped the movements ‘grow with dizzying rapidity’, observing the events in Tahrir Square as ‘a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube’. As such, technophobes may find themselves horrified at the prevalence of social media references – certain protesters are referred to by their Twitter names for example – but despite the fact that ‘there is no quantitative research’ on the impact of social media ‘on politics and political campaigns’ Mason is by no means guilty of hyperbole.

Influenced by sociologist Barry Wellman, who ‘long before Facebook’ noticed that ‘people preferred to live with multiple networks, flat hierarchies and weak commitments’, Mason argues that a ‘networked individualism’ allows groups to form with the aim of completing only a single task. In many ways, this poses an interesting paradox to the ideas of Robert Putnam, who in Bowling Alone (1975) argued that a breakdown of ‘social capital’ had caused a disconnect between people and forms of social organization. Perhaps then, we’re still bowling alone, but online we’re in the company of millions.

The book loses momentum in the latter half, as Mason travels through the mid-west of the United States and the slums of Manila, describing, at odds with the general theme of the book, people who rather than ‘kicking off’, are tolerant, if not satisfied, with the troubled lives they live.

Notwithstanding the value of such first-hand experience of humanity, the downfall of Mason’s connection with the grass-roots is that he is occasionally guilty of failing to take into account a wider picture. Despite his BBC connections, he is unashamedly Neo-Marxist in his critique of the global system whereby the root problem is ‘globalization, and the resulting monopolization of wealth by a global elite’. A theme throughout the book is that amidst ‘the near collapse of free-market capitalism’ a ‘desire for individual freedom’ is fundamental to the uprisings. However, if Mason is so dissatisfied with the former then surely his attitude fails to accommodate the desires of his subjects; for if Mason knows of a global system which provides individual freedom in greater abundance than liberal democratic capitalism, he is yet to reveal it.

The book, and the movements it explores alike, can therefore be credited for raising logical points and intriguing questions, but denounced for failing to suggest valuable answers or alternatives. ‘The future hangs in the balance’ warns Mason. Perhaps then, the forthcoming ‘Reflections on Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’, will provide more evidence of the way in which Mason believes the balance should tilt.

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
Verso, 244pp, £12.99
Published January 2012, London

Robert Smith is Editor of Politiker. Follow on Twitter @RobertSmithUK