Now that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, Egypt can turn itself to the still highly uncertain question of what comes next. As we watch, and still scramble to make sense of this global spectacle, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on some of the commentary and imagery of recent days.
The left and even much of the center in the U.S. have seemed universally to support the protesters and their aims. For many of these Americans with still inchoate understandings of Egypt’s dynamics, the recently enhanced role of the Egyptian military may have been difficult to assimilate. No matter one’s own political persuasion, a military force being welcomed, cheered, kissed by an enormous crowd of young protesters is not a familiar site, though there it was, yesterday, after the military’s first communiqué and apparent intervention. In such scenes we’re likely more inclined to fear for the protesters’ safety than to expect their elation. Certainly, many of the Americans expressing solidarity with the protesting Egyptians who were embracing their military are among those least likely to have such an affinity for our own. And yet, just as quickly as we were surprised, the military seemed to have backed away from any apparent plan to oust Mubarak, and now, in the hours following his abdication, the military’s intentions are still unclear.
Even still, this disconnect—this possibly jarring, nearly upside-down imagery of active young politcial dissidents actually physically embracing an independently empowered military—should serve as one indication of how little many of us really understand about the situation in Egypt. We’ve witnessed a massive political upswelling, one that we couldn't help but be moved by, and our commitment to the principle of democracy inspired many of us to feel strongly that if this many people thought that their leader should go immediately, then the man should take his leave.
If democracy is the goal, though, there are voices urging us to remember that Egypt is more than Tahrir Square. That point was the focus of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by many-time HUP author Edward N. Luttwak on February 4th. “The Obama administration, like much of the world, is not reacting to the situation in Egypt—a mostly rural country populated by poor peasants,” he wrote. “It is reacting to the media spectacle in the center of Cairo, in which huge but largely middle-class crowds have gathered to demand President Hosni Mubarak’s removal.”
The piece continues:
Interestingly, the few journalists who speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic report that among the poor majority of the population—those who wear the traditional robe (djellaba) and depend on bread subsidized by the state—many still support Mr. Mubarak. They know that Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, and that part of it is paid for by U.S. aid. While market prices have increased by 17% since last October, the rationed bread of the poor remains very cheap.
Perhaps the impoverished—a quarter of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day—fear that a government more modern than Mr. Mubarak’s paternalistic dictatorship will stop the current bread subsidy, or that a more Islamist government will not receive U.S. aid. Either way, many Egyptians have the prudence of the very poor. They cannot afford to take risks with the unknown—including a post-Mubarak government.
Now, we can place alongside the topsy-turvy imagery of protestors embracing soldiers the notion of the Wall Street Journal as defender of the impoverished, but Luttwak’s point here is sound. Though it doesn’t affect us in the U.S. nearly as much as it does others, food prices around the world are soaring, as noted by Paul Krugman, among others. Luttwak’s larger point was that a quick Mubarak exit would be too risky, and that the country should be given time to organize proper elections. This, like his noting of the impoverished, is on its face a reasoned gesture towards universal democracy. But much has changed in the week since he wrote, and had Mubarak not stepped down on his own the situation’s escalation may yet have overshadowed the traditionally cautious concern for what happens after foreign political transitions.
Indeed, in the Guardian yesterday, Slavoj Žižek wrote of the “miracle of Tahrir Square,” and addressed neoconservatives (of whom Luttwak is one) who are “facing their moment of truth”: “You want universal freedom and democracy? This is what people demand in Egypt, so why are the neocons uneasy? Is it because the protesters in Egypt mention freedom and dignity in the same breath as social and economic justice?”
This morning, hours before Mubarak announced his departure, the opposition leader and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei reported on the expanding protests via twitter: “Entire nation is on the streets. Only way out is for regime to go. People power can't be crushed. We shall prevail. Still hope army can join”
As ElBaradei notes, the protests had spread far beyond Tahrir Square, beyond Cairo even, while Mubarak himself had fled to Sharm el-Sheik. Žižek in his Guardian piece stood with the protesters calling for an immediate end to the whole Mubarak regime, more than a mere transfer of power to the new vice-president, Omar Suleiman. “Either the entire Mubarak power edifice falls down, or the uprising is co-opted and betrayed.”
We still don’t know how much power will rest with Suleiman, or whether the entire Mubarak edifice will in fact fall, but this is what the now-jubilant crowds of Egyptians favor. Even for those in the U.S. and elsewhere whose foreign policy concerns lead them to preach caution in these affairs, the scenes in Egypt must now clearly evoke that old leftist cry: This Is What Democracy Looks Like.
