Hazem Kandil - Soldiers, spies, and statesmen : Egypt’s road to revolt

Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen

Egypts Road to Revolt

Hazem Kandil

To the heroes of Tahrir Square for demonstrating that Egyptians can be everything they thought they were

We would see the defenders of the homeland sooner or later become its enemies, constantly holding a dagger over their fellow citizens, and there would come a time when we would hear them say to the oppressor of their country: If you order me to plunge my sword into my brothers breast or my fathers throat, and into my pregnant wifes entrails, I will do so, even though my right hand is unwilling.

Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality , 1755

Contents

Revolutions break our heart whether they fail or succeed. To study revolution is to study how the masses awaken from their slumber and thrust themselves onto the center stage of their own history only to watch their aspirations either usurped or repressed. In the very best of cases, outcomes fall way below expectations. But as disheartening as studying revolutions may be, these rare and enigmatic episodes draw scholars like a magnet. The heroism of everyday life is simply too hard to resist.

Personally, I have been thinking and writing about the prospects of revolution in Egypt for as long as I can remember. Five years ago, I resolved to publish a book about it. But shortly before the manuscript was complete, words jumped right off the page and materialized before my eyes: Egyptians finally revolted. And between a tranquil university campus in Los Angeles and the barricades around Tahrir Square, the manuscript assumed its final form. This time the Angel of History was facing forward; this time the Owl of Minerva took flight at dawn. This was a book about history caught unexpectedly in real time.

The root causes of the January 25 Revolt in Egypt are as impossible to disentangle and rank as those inspiring any other revolution. At the very least one must admit that it is too early to determine why the millions who have been repressed for so long took to the streets on that particular day and vowed not to return home. Political failure, economic crises, ideological agitation, and new forms of organization all appear to have been hopelessly intertwined during these last fatal moments in the life of the regime. Likewise, predicting the outcome of this massive upheaval can only be a matter of speculation at this point; if a new regime did in fact emerge, it would take years to crystallize. So steering away from these formidableand probably futiletasks, this book aims at a much more modest and concrete goal, which is to understand what made the revolt possible once its preconditions had arrived. Instead of asking what triggered the uprising, I try to explain how its path was cleared. How was it possible for the people to defy their seemingly invincible dictatorship and get away with it? The answer in this case, as well as in countless others, is the position of the military and security forces. The fact that no revolt triumphs as long as the old regimes coercive organs are willing and capable of suppressing it is one of the few truisms in the field of revolution theory. One might even claim that revolution scholars agree on little else. It is such a commonsense assumption that manymistakenlytake it for granted.

But why did the agents of coercion fail to protect their political masters in Egypt, even though they had not been worn out by war (like in 1917 Russia) or civil strife (like in 2011 Libya)? The initial success of the revolt in Egypt challenges the simplistic assumption that the military and security forces are essentially the iron fists or heavy hands of authority, or other such metaphors that portray them as mere appendages rather than independent institutions with distinct corporate interests. The armed forces and the security establishment are full partners in any countrys ruling bloc. They work with rather than for the political apparatusno matter what the constitution says. And while the interests of the three partners usually coincide (projecting an image of unity), they are never identical.

Machiavelli wrote: Between the armed and unarmed man no proportion holds, and it is contrary to reason to expect that the armed man should voluntarily submit to him who is unarmed, or that the unarmed man should stand secure among armed retainers. This quintessential axiom rings true today as much as it did in the sixteenth century. Yet the conventional approach to analyzing the relationship between politicians and the custodians of violence is to assume that the military and security act just like other pressure groups, bargaining with civilians to promote their interests. But these powerful institutions have more at stake than other pressure groupstheir corporate interests are entwined in the mind of their members with the nations security (maybe even its existence), and they are therefore determined to compel politicians to assign absolute priority to questions of war against foreign and domestic enemies. And because force is their ultima ratio , unlike other social organizations, politicians cannot simply check their influence through legal and administrative means, or even by increasing their popular legitimacy.

So how can civilian leaders subordinate their mighty partners? They usually negotiate a power arrangement demarcating spheres of influence. And the relative weight of each of the three institutions is what renders one regime democratic, another military-dominated, and a third an authoritarian police state. Hence, analyzing any regime must begin by clarifying (or demystifying) the relationship within this power triangle. This is the essence of institutional realism , which highlights the unrelenting power struggle between self-interested institutions within the state. It conceives the state not as a reified or monolithic body, but as an amalgam of institutions, each with its own power-maximizing agendas. Sometimes they are in conflict (no matter how muted), and at other times they are in alliance, but their aim is always to further their interests. Naturally, this competition results in power configurations that privilege some interests while repressing others, but even slight changes in domestic or geopolitical circumstances can disrupt the existing balance, precipitating a new round of struggle that finally results in new power formations. In this way, we can see that regime type reflects the prevailing balance of power at any given time, not an official hierarchy or ingrained practices.

A good point to start the analysis of the struggle within Egypts power triangle is the July 1952 coup, when leaders of the Free Officers Movement (just like other coup makers) effected an immediate division of labor among those who ran the government, those who handled security, and those who controlled the officer corps. The components of this internally differentiated regime oscillated between cooperation and competition over the six decades that followed the coup. This is because their interests, while sometimes overlapping, remained essentially separate. The political leadership needed military and/or security support to preserve its power should the masses refuse to obey, but played them off against each other to increase its autonomy and avoid falling hostage to any of them. The security establishment understood that its influence was contingent on the persistence of autocracy, that transition to democracy would spell its downfall from power. As for those who remained in the military, the adverse effects of politicization on the combat readiness and public image of the corps was unsettling. Their preference was to return to the barracks after implementing the needed reforms, and reintervene only if necessary. Driven by varying interests, the three institutions were inevitably drawn into a fervent competition over regime domination, a competition that unfolded within a turbulent domestic and geopolitical environment. The goal was surely not for one institution to eliminate the rest, but rather for one partner in the ruling bloc to subordinate the other two. For years, the shifting alliances among the components of this triangular ruling complex, as well as between them and the intervening forces within and outside the country, continually altered the balance of power between them. Yet the overall trajectory was one where the political and security components of the regime gradually coalesced to sideline their third partner. The military-dominated order of the 1950s began to founder by the 1970s. The day Hosni Mubarak took office, Egypt had already metamorphosed from a military to a police state. And the day he was deposed was brought forth by a military that saw in the popular uprising an opportunity for retribution.