Egypt: Lessons in Democracy

Together, the unarmed insurrection that overthrew the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the ongoing uprising in Egypt have dramatically altered the way many in the West view prospects for democratization in the Middle East. The dramatic events of recent weeks have illustrated that for democracy to come to the Arab world, it will come not from foreign intervention or sanctimonious statements from Washington, but from Arab peoples themselves.

While many observers have acknowledged how unarmed pro-democracy insurrections helped bring democracy to Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa, they had discounted the chances of such movements in the region, despite Tunisia being far from the first.

There has actually been a long history of nonviolent pro-democracy struggle in North Africa and the Middle East. Egypt wrested its independence from Great Britain as a result of a massive nonviolent resistance campaign launched in 1919. In Sudan, military dictators were ousted in nonviolent insurrections in 1964 and 1985, though the democratic experiments that followed were cut short by military coups a few years later. In 1991, in a nonviolent struggle succeeded in ousting the Traore dictatorship in Mali, despite the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters by the armed forces. Though it is one of the poorest countries in the world, Mali has been one of the most stable and democratic countries in the region ever since. The recently published book Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization and Governance in the Middle East documents numerous other popular pro-democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

The current struggle in Egypt--the center of Arab media, scholarship, and culture--has enormous ramifications for the region as a whole. The predominantly young secular activists who initiated the struggle reject not only the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak but also conservative Islamist leaders; they have put together a broad coalition of young and old, Muslim and Christian, poor and middle class to challenge a brutal corrupt regime which has held power for nearly thirty years. Like-minded civil society activists are organizing elsewhere. Indeed, 2011 could be to the Arab world what 1989 was to Eastern Europe.

In the early days of the uprisings, top U.S. officials defended the United States' close ties with the authoritarian leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and, making lukewarm statements about the need for "reform" and urging "both sides" to refrain from violence (despite the far greater violence from state authorities). They refused to back the pro-democracy movements, call for democratic change, or threaten the suspension of U.S. military aid. However, the very day Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia, President Obama came out with a strong statement lauding the pro-democracy movement and criticizing the dictator's oppression. Similarly, in the early days of the Egyptian protests, Obama administration officials made similar calls for "restraint" on "both sides," speaking only in terms of reform from within Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime. By the fifth day of the demonstrations, however, apparently not wanting to be on the wrong side of history, the Obama administration started speaking in terms of a transition to democratic rule and making it clear that large--scale repression of nonviolent protesters--which would presumably be implemented with U.S.--supplied weaponry--would be unacceptable.

These shifts illustrate that, despite the longstanding sense of fatalism among Arabs that Washington will ultimately impact what happens on the "Arab street," the Arab street has proven itself capable of impacting what happens in Washington.

This change is long overdue. The Obama administration, in rejecting the dangerous neoconservative ideology of its predecessor, had fallen back onto the realpolitik of previous administrations by continuing to support repressive regimes through unconditional arms transfers and other security assistance. Indeed, Obama's understandable skepticism of the neoconservative doctrine of externally mandated, top-down approaches to democratization through "regime change" turned into an excuse for further arming these regimes--which then use these instruments of repression to subjugate popular, indigenous, bottom-up struggles for democratization.

At the same time, there was a subtle, but important, shift in the U.S. government's discourse on human rights when Obama came to office two years ago. The Bush administration pushed a rather superficial structuralist view. It focused, for instance, on elections--which can, in many cases, be easily rigged and manipulated--in order to change certain governments for purposes of expanding U.S. power and influence. Obama has taken more of an agency view of human rights, emphasizing such rights as freedom of expression and the right to protest, recognizing that human rights reform can only come from below and not imposed from above.

Until now, this had largely been rhetorical. Even now, as of this writing, the United States still needs to take a firmer stance toward Mubarak and the Egyptian military. And, regarding U.S. policy in the region as a whole, the United States needs to stop propping up other Arab dictators and supporting the Israeli occupation through ongoing military assistance.

However, the Obama administration has been reminded of where power actually comes from: Even if a government has a monopoly of military force and even if a government has the support of the world's one remaining superpower, it is still ultimately powerless if the people refuse to recognize its authority. Through general strikes, filling the streets, mass refusal to obey official orders, and other forms of nonviolent resistance, even the most autocratic regime cannot survive.

One cannot help but admire the Egyptians, who--like the Tunisians, Serbians, Filipinos, Poles, and many others before--have faced down the teargas, water cannons, truncheons, and bullets for their freedom. However, as long as the United States remains the world's No.1 supplier of security assistance to repressive governments in the Middle East and elsewhere, the need for massive nonviolent action in support for freedom and democracy may be no greater than here.