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. (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.
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