Ten Days That Shook the World
-Title of a book by John Reed, describing the October Revolution.
A revolution is not a tea party.
-Mao Zedong
And so it begins....
-From Babylon 5, “Chrysalis”
A beginning is a delicate time.
-From Frank Herbert, Dune
Luan (chaos) is not something that appeals to old men.
-variously attributed to various “Old China Hands” during the runup to the Tiananmen Square massacre, June, 1989
As always, it is the best of times; it is the worst of times.
In contemplating the departure of outgoing Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak, one can’t help but think of a tale of four cities: Petrograd, Manila, Beijing, Cairo.
Each of these cities shares a number of things in common. Each is (or was) a national capital, each has a long history, and each has been a seat of revolution.
Though the heady days of 1917's October Revolution in Petrograd are nearly a century behind us, even the most cursory reading of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World brings immediately to mind the violent, tumultuous events that led to the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian state. “A revolution,” Mao Zedong rightly points out, “is not a tea party.”
Closer to our own time, we recall the People Power Revolution of 1986,that astonishing, powerful, nonviolent movement in Manila that brought the kleptocracy of Ferdinand Marcos and his incredible wife Imelda (She of a Million Shoes) to a long overdue conclusion.
Yet we also recall the ultimately tragic events that occurred just three years later, in Beijing, when the Chinese leadership had no compunction about using the full power of the People’s Liberation Army to crush the nonviolent demonstrators who had for weeks occupied Tiananmen Square. The televised coverage of the destruction of the “Goddess of Liberty” that had been erected facing Tiananmen itself remains seared in the memory of a generation.
So now, we come to Cairo. Mubarak is gone, but it is still far too early to know what may happen next. We may say “and so it begins,” but we are not sure what has actually begun. All we know is that a beginning is a very delicate time, particularly since we cannot know just how the various forces with Egyptian politics and society are interacting or will interact, and how they balance.
At this hour, there seems to be joy in Cairo --and indeed, throughout Egypt-- but joy can quickly become chaos, the sort of chaos for which the Chinese --denizens, like their Egyptian counterparts, of one of the oldest societies on earth-- have a unique word, Luan.
Luan, as several Old China Hands pointed out at the time of the events of Tiananmen Square, is not something that appeals to old men, including Hosni Mubarak or Omar Suleiman. Neither does luan appeal to military leaders nor to American presidents. This fear of luan will, in all likelihood, be a large part of what drives coming events.
At the moment, it appears that the Egyptian military, which is always been a significant player in that country’s post-King Farouk politics, will emerge as the primary shot-caller, at least for the short-term. Certainly, even an ostensibly civilian government will find itself guided by, and heavily dependent upon, the generals.
Cairo in 2011 may wind up looking rather like Berlin in 1919, when the struggling government of the Weimar Republic made common cause with the German military. In what many consider to have been the Faustian bargain that doomed the Weimar Republic, its leadership and the then-chief of the general staff, Gen. Wilhelm Groener, agreed that each would protect the other; the German army would protect the new government against efforts to overthrow it, while the government would protect the Army against efforts to reduce its role and status in the politics of post-imperial Germany.
It would hardly be surprising to see a similar development occur along the banks of the Nile; whatever government emerges in a post-Mubarak Egypt will need the support of the Egyptian military, particularly if the Muslim Brotherhood chooses to become hostile. By the same token, the military, which has been in many ways Egypt’s ruling class, and the primary beneficiary of Egyptian economic development since it overthrew King Farouk in 1953, will need the letigimacy that --in 2011-- only a democratic civilian government can confer..
At this point, however, it does appear safe to envisage an hypothesis that a democratic government may emerge, albeit in fits and starts, if it can avoid making the mistakes the Weimar Republic made. It took the Philippines years before that country’s democratic government was able to emerge from a period of post-Marcos instability. What neither the West, nor, it appears, the Egyptian public, desires is the emergence either of an Islamist regime or of a charismatic socialist of the Gamal Abdel Nasser type, at least not now.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Eighteen Days of Cairo has been the relative powerlessness of the outside world to influence events; certainly, the shot-callers of these events have been the Cairenes themselves, not any outside force or infiltrators, Glenn Beck and King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia notwithstanding. If there is anything we have learned over the last 18 days it has been at the events unfolding in Egypt have been driven, in no small degree, by the Egyptian middle class; this is not a religious rising, but a bourgeois revolution, more akin to that which drove King Charles X from the French throne in 1830 than to the events of Petrograd in 1917 or Beijing in 1989.
If a moderate regime, even one with military participation or overtones, emerges in Cairo the challenge for the international community will be to engage with that regime in such a way as to support it without triggering a nationalist or Islamist backlash. It is too early to say how the international community will address such a challenge, but addressed it must be. How and in what measure the international community does so may very well determine whether, in coming years, an authentic Egyptian democracy emerges, or is throttled in its cradle by reactionary forces dressed either in clerical attire or military uniform.
