Egypt After Mubarak

Chip Gibbons

The news we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. Mubarak is out. While many of us expected this it was by no means inevitable. Mubarak after 30 plus years of dictatorial rule did not want to go and hung on almost as long as possible. Just yesterday afternoon as he gave a condescending, paternalistic speech leaving many of us wondered if this moment would ever come. And yet it did.

However, while Mubarak is gone it is yet to be seen how much of the system he came to be symbolic of will remain in place. Mubarak, while a dictator, did not govern alone. There is a deeply entrenched elite power structure in Egypt that helped him maintain power and only shed themselves of him when he became more of a liability than an asset. The same can be said of the world’s lone superpower.

If dictators were easy to remove there would none left. The courageous struggle of the Egyptian people, in which young people and labor unions played the defining role, is a historic moment. A mass mobilization of people were able to from below force out the man on top. This is something to celebrate.

But what about Egypt After Mubarak? What comes next? Military rule? Democracy? Omar Suleiman? He is certainly no friend of the Egyptian people. Throughout the revolution he called on the people to disperse, blamed the unrest on foreign media, stated he would continue the Emergency law, and is closely associated with the CIA and torture. If he remains in power Egypt may not be much better off than under Mubarak.

Still we cannot underestimate the incredible psychological impact of the Egyptian revolution on the Egyptian people, Arab elites, the Middle East, and the world in general. It is a paradigm shifting event and has created new openings in the Middle East. For points of comparison look at the the unrest that shook the world after Russian Revolution, 1968, the color revolutions and the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet system, the national liberation struggles against colonialism, and the current shattering of the Washington Consensus in Latin America.

In each of these circumstances a triggering event created an opening across regions and nations, and while many of their goals or visions failed to be realized lesser reforms previously impossible were forced from elite structures from below. The failures are obvious. Not only did a totalitarian government prevail in Russia as opposed to the promised worker’s democracy, none of the various socialist inspired revolts succeed anywhere else. Not only did none of the participants in the 1968 uprisings achieve lasting power, in Prague and Tlatelolco they were violently crushed. Many colonial nations gained a de facto status of independence only to face domestic dictatorships and to continue to be made dependent by intentional underdevelopment and neocolonial structures. In the former Soviet Union and its satellite states people faced neoliberal shock therapy and oligarchs that sucked up economic and political power.

Yet, while the socialist-inspired revolution ended very badly for its instigators in Germany, it resulted in the resignation of the Kaiser and liberal democracy in the form of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. The turmoil of 1968 resulted in an opening in the public sphere that allowed for student, women’s liberation, and gay liberation movements to appear. And I think the end of the colonial or the Soviet system is nothing to scoffed at. In short, these mobilizations failed in the most obvious ways, but created openings that allowed for important advances otherwise impossible to made against elite power structures.*

While it’s easy to fall into a celebratory haze, it is also just as easy to think of the a lyric from The Who--“Meet the old boss, same as the new.” But neither blind optimist nor corrosive cynicism gives us any special insight. The historical examples given above are just that. The future of Egypt and the Middle East is by no means written.**.

*

You may notice the current events in Latin America, while previously mentioned as paradigm shifting moment, has been absent from subsequent anaylsis. This is because, the long term effects of the current events in Latin American will be, like the Arab revolutions, remains to be seen

**

Yes, it’s cliche and I feel pathetic not being able to offer anymore insights, but in order to say more I’d have to profess clairvoyance. I do not and am deeply skeptical of those who do.