Egypt: Revolution, regime change or just stress test?

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is in a shaky position, after days of rioting on the streets of Egypt. Clearly, his people followed the example of the Tunisians. When Mubarak finally addressed the nation shortly after midnight on January 29 it was to put the blame on the government (his government) and to vaguely promise better conditions for the poorest among his citizens.

The Tunisian example probably led many observers to expect Mubarak to slip out the back door that night. That did not happen. But since January 27 he has an outspoken rival in the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner and former IEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, who just returned to Egypt. What can we expect from this challenge to an obviously authoritarian leadership? How do revolutions turn out once they have gotten “out of hand”, beyond the point of no return? At the time of writing this seems to be where Egypt is at.

In April 1917 Vladimir I. Lenin returned from exile in Switzerland, seeking the leadership of the Russian revolution, which until then had been off to a slow start under the bourgeois Kerensky regime that deposed the Tsar. Lenin and his comrades Trotsky, Stalin and others set off their own Bolshevik revolution half a year later and turned their country into the totalitarian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), lasting 74 years. Though bad enough, this was not an isolated case.

In 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to an Iran in turmoil after the Shah had been deposed. From day one he made sure that moderate politicians – until then the most active in the reform process - would be weeded out from the new regime. Under Khomeini the Iranian Islamic Republic – a self-declared “theocracy” - was established in December 1979. As is well known, post-1979 Iran was and remains a totalitarian regime, irrespective of a few superficial vestiges of democracy such as a popularly elected parliament (with limited powers) and a president (with unconfirmed final authority).

Do these cases have something to say about Egypt 2011? Whether Mubarak is finished now or next summer is immaterial; he is effectively already gone. Could Mohamed ElBaradei’s return from exile signal the opening for a turn to a democratic regime, as the West would like to think, and as his own inclination would seem to indicate? Or could he fall by the wayside and mark just an interlude to a more authoritarian or perhaps even totalitarian/Islamist regime in Egypt, the way it happened in Iran and Russia? An Islamist state in Egypt would be a worst case for all concerned about Muslim extremism. Could it turn out that way?

Maybe – but probably not. Modern Egypt is a country with a strong, moderate Muslim political community, organized in the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1920s. The Brotherhood has long been banned and hence at the margin of politics, repeatedly bought off from attaining a more controlling place in Egyptian politics by whatever powers were ascendant. Their potential role under the new circumstances in Egypt is thus far uncertain, but their future ambition may remain modest like it has been before. That is, unless they have been waiting all along for an opening to reveal a previously hidden extremism. Be that as it may, the Brotherhood would anyhow require that the demands of the current popular protests are satisfied. 

This is where a moderate democrat like ElBaradei is potentially a key figure – and certainly not one to lead Egypt along the path to extremism. Yet, like Tunisia, the Egyptian system is without pointers to regime change. Should Mubarak manage to hang on for some time to come, the opening is still there for other actors - such as the army, for instance - to slip into the power vacuum and quietly take over. A strongly democratic leader (such as ElBaradei) backed by a broad popular movement (even if not genuinely democratic) like the Muslim Brotherhood, might be the way out of authoritarian dictatorship for Egypt. However, if and when the Brotherhood finds itself the legitimate governing party of Egypt, who knows what ideas might get into their heads. That is also where headaches come in for some of us.

To the West, an Egypt with the Suez Canal beyond Western political influence, is a huge strategic asset lost. No one in Western capitals will deny that. Will it mean back to another 1956? Or forward to a new kind of partnership? I’ll be as curious to know as you are.

Clamors for democracy where none existed before

I am not sure I would jump for joy if China were to go democratic overnight. Too much of everything there. But everybody should rejoice in the peaceful uprising of just 10 mill Tunisians. And let us all hope it stays peaceful, without losing sight of the aim of a democratic and stable system of government. A country with Tunisia’s advantages should have a decent chance at succeeding: a fairly well-educated population, advanced status of women, limited poverty. Yet the dangers are legion. The pool of qualified and untainted leaders is small. The opposition parties are (so far) weak and inexperienced. The trade unions are reasonably strong but without widespread membership. The Islamist movement in exile will presumably return and enter politics as well.

The demands for a new constitution and new elections are certainly justified, but will require a long process before they can be realized. Who writes the constitution? A constitutional assembly must first be elected that can draw up a proposal, which in turn must be ratified by the people in a referendum. Only once this is completed can ordinary elections be held. In the meantime people need to survive from day to day, and the country needs to be governed.

All of this will happen under the eyes of ordinary people under shabby governments all over the Middle East. It will unfold while the regimes in Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Jordan and Egypt are watching in suspense, and while Lebanon undergoes a severe political crisis of its own. A trigger or contagion cannot be ruled out.

Algeria’s aborted elections in 1991 are not forgotten. Won by the Islamist party in the first round – the second round canceled by the military – it triggered a decade of low-volume civil war, a slow-motion sequence of atrocities from both sides that wore Algerian society down. Although Tunisia is hopefully a different kind of case, that neighborhood memory hangs over current events like a cloud.

The Muslim world needs to prove it can go democratic, and perhaps this small Mahgreb country is the one that can deliver.

Political Asylum and Common Sense

All night - all year - I hear the patrol boat of the Guardia Civil, rumbling along the coast, back and forth, ceaselessly, over and over. The heavy diesel engine tells me Spain is on its guard. The refugees from African poverty are on their way. Several times a week the Guardia Civil rescues overloaded fishing boats with hopeful immigrants, 50 – 60 – 70 at a time, often pregnant women among them. Spain returns them all, except the pregnant women. Their children are allowed to be born Spanish citizens. Ever more pregnant women arrive.

Spain is both hospitable and tough on illegal immigrants. Most are now returned, by agreement with the governments of neighbouring African countries. But Africa is full of people who are full of hope. So is the Middle East. And South Asia. The poor majority of the world is looking for a better life.

This is not to raise a scare. Just understand that we cannot treat some of them as worthy of asylum because of political persecution, while the rest have to go back - or stay where they are. The worthy asylum seeker is an illusion of the current political majority in many European countries. The arrivals are practically all worthy of political asylum because of the conditions in their home countries. We just cannot take them all in. Our criteria are too open-ended to allow a fair screening to take place.

We need to accept that we have to treat them equally, and stop accepting any fairy tale told by those who happen to arrive. A Swedish immigration official described his practice in a TV interview today when asked how he evaluated his applicants: “You have to trust a human being.” As a humanitarian philosophy this is wonderful. As public policy – need I say more? There is no carrying capacity in all of Europe to keep all comers afloat on our welfare. It is their countries that have to be reformed, not ours.

Live With Disagreement

Historically, orthodoxy has been the norm in all societies. One view - that of the ruler – has been quite sufficient, thank you. Nevertheless, dissent always sneaks in. Over thousands of years, rulers have known two basic solutions: the gentle one, banishment (exile! Siberia!) or the simple one, "off with their heads!" Miraculously, after all the barbarities of the twentieth century, dissent finally started gaining broader acceptance. Democratic systems became the new norm, and dissent was the proof that democracy was real. Even in authoritarian societies diversity snuck in: Stealthily at first, by word of mouth, people began to disagree. Soon there was copying and tape recordings going around. Dissent became an organized activity. The fall of totalitarian governments in the former Soviet Union and ex-Yugoslavia, and the democratization of East European countries accelerated the trend.

Still, reactions to dissent were not far behind. Today Hungary is returning to censorship, the first European country to do so after the cold war. Beyond such bureaucratic solutions, there is, of course, the alternative of terror. Free thought and dissent can be stopped by spreading fear. A bloody example is good pedagogy – kill a few and watch how terror spreads. Western democracies look in horror as Muslims willingly take their own lives to kill even other Muslims who have chosen a slightly different persuasion.

Yet all Western democrats are confounded as they find the same issue at their own doorstep, where they have to confront people of a different conviction in their own societies, in their own neighborhoods. And too often they utterly fail their own test. If Western democrats can, they opt for the comfort of seeing and hearing only their own views – whether in Europe or the US, whether on the political left or right. Media have gradually become streamlined ("designer media") to fit this basic preference - they curtail dissent. We are close to the situation today where what is said by people or media of a different persuasion than our own does not count for us, we don't even have to know about it. 

Fortunately election campaigns still exist in countries where real democracy survives, to force us to think about alternatives, but the most comfy solution is always to do what we’ve done before. So – as a New Year’s commitment - shake loose: start reading something you expect to disagree with every day! (Lukashenko - that means you, too, please!)

How Can We Reduce Muslim Discomfort in Europe?

Clearly there are Muslim immigrants in Europe who do not feel at home. Ten or fifteen years ago they may have, but times are changing. Their host societies are no longer 100% pleased to have them. Many ethnic Europeans have started making demands on Muslims to learn the local language and accept the laws of the land, even to take a job before they receive state support. This is clearly uncomfortable for them, to such an extent that the EU and many host countries have taken steps to clear away such obstacles to understanding and make Muslims feel more at home. One example is that many schools have stopped teaching children to swim because the Muslim children are not allowed by their parents to participate. Another is the removal of Christmas from calendars and the neutralization of language pertaining to Christmas so that no-one should feel left out by having to see the name of the Christian idol so often.

Some of us wonder why this is such a strain for Muslims since Jesus Christ is one of their major prophets according to the Koran. It would seem only right for a religion that celebrates so many other prophets and illustrious leaders to add a holiday to mark the birth of Jesus. I have not seen anybody try to explain that, but I must be ill informed.

Then again I have been told I must be careful not to believe everything a Muslim tells me, since his utterances are not necessarily the truth – taqiyya excepts a Muslim from the ethical ground rule of telling the truth when he talks to a non-believer. This of course is not good news for a multicultural society, so we had better not talk more about it. 

China and the Peace Price

The capitalist dictatorship of China - after a long period of dithering marked by mandatory silence over the Tienanmen massacres (but not defence of its own behavior in 1989) - has launched its new line. China's communist government is now to be regarded as respectful of human rights and peace. The so-called "Confucian prize of peace" marks its conversion to such ideals. Let us hope that this new course can meander its way to a more genuine respect for the aspirations of Alfred Nobel and the prize that the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded to the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xaobo for 2010. Before China this year, no government since that of Alfred Hitler has deigned to put pressure on the Nobel Committee for the Peace Prize - and on the Norwegian government hosting this independent body - to cease its work for freedom and peace.

Whistle-blowing, free speech and leaks

I like whistle-blowing, the reporting of hard-to-detect crimes by other insiders or by digging reporters. Whistle-blowing makes it possible to catch people committing crimes that would otherwise go undetected. Wikileaks is not doing whistle-blowing – it is simply dumping into the public sphere massive amounts of confidential or inside communication about the ordinary business of the US and other governments. Some of this publication is bound to have harmful effects both on government policies and on the legitimate activities of individuals, corporations and NGOs. How have the Wikileaks movement succeeded in sneaking that good label onto their indiscriminate acts of – yes! - vandalization?

I will also defend free speech to my last breath, but then it is the speech of the speaker, not some material written by others that he or she found somewhere and appropriated without authorization. Many Wikileak supporters now defend these exposés as a matter of free speech. This is just confused. The fact that some information exists somewhere unpublished does not mean that it should necessarily be published, to “let the truth come out”.

In today’s The Australian (newspaper) Assange calls it “scientific journalism”, i.e., to write up a story and then make it possible to click on the source documents to prove that this is “the truth”. Well and good as far as it goes, but it is not the method that is in question, rather the indiscriminate choice of content. There is much that is true – my medical records, for example – without that being sufficient reason to publish it. Assange's actions may be well-intentioned but also both naïve and misguided, to the point of putting us all in danger.

Two National Celebrations

December 6 is the national day of two European countries - Finland and Spain. How different can you get? Granted, both countries celebrate their liberation from authoritarian regimes in the 20^th century, but they were more than 60 years apart. European political scientist Stein Rokkan spent much of his life seeking to understand why European countries modernized at quite different times and at different rates of progress - some rapid, others painfully slow. Spain was one of the tough cases; Finland much earlier, but still the latecomer among the Nordics.

And if we look at the specifics, they are curious, to say the least. Finland’s release from Russia’s grasp was a battle not against the Tsar, but against his imperial heirs, first the Kerensky regime from March to November 1917, then against the new Soviet regime (established on November 7) – with Red forces all along desperately seeking to retain Finland for the new revolutionary regime, heavily supported by Finnish Red guards. Hence, Finland’s liberation was by half a civil war, half a war of secession. The price in internal wounds was such that even fifty years later it was difficult for Finns to talk about it and find reconciliation. But December 6, 1917 was the day that independent Finland was born.

The Spanish celebrate their democratic constitution of 1978, approved on December 6 by a resounding majority. Their enemy was not any outside force – it was their own authoritarian regime, the Franco regime, which had for forty years kept democracy at bay, first by force of arms, then by vengeful repression. Spanish democracy is by now solidly engrained in society, but the wounds are still there, visible for those who take their time to look. As time goes by, the consensus decision of the new democracy to leave the past in the past seems slowly to be coming apart.

History does not necessarily move “forward” - it moves backward and sideways as well.

The sorry lesson of lessons not learned

I introduce this blog with a message about education and learning. We are in deep trouble all over the Western cultural sphere. Self-anointed priests of educational novelty and "reform" have had a full generation's time in power in too many (most) West European countries. 

Most of you who read this have been in their care and I'm afraid you never knew the difference between what you got and the education you could have had. These wayward idealists are now in positions at the top of the educational establishments; hence just a few potshots at them will not work. As OECD report upon report documents their failures, politicians still seek their advice for the education of the future. Their targets have been the classical education standards underpinning "bourgeois society", and they are not about to give up this close to their goal. 

By now, "bourgeois society" is long gone. Quality education, however, must be rebuilt. Formal education is indispensable to the societies we live in, and must be brought back to its former standards. The technology we are so proud of is dependent on that, and so are the political systems we have allowed to get watered down to he point of irresponsibility.

Mass immigration from cultures outside our own sphere is adding its own complications. Additional languages are central to what needs to be checked. The problem is nothing new - but the urgency is. Look to Finland for the solution. Look to Spain - or for that matter Norway - and their language education policies for examples of wasted resources.