Regime Change: Proof of Concept

Friday

---

The central demand of the protesters in Cairo’s El Tahrir Square has been met: President Hosni Mubarak has resigned his office. Thus according to this limited definition of success, we can call the Lotus Revolution a “success.” But we all know that this is not really the end — that it is, in fact, only the beginning of a process that will eventually define the future of Egypt’s political identity.

Just as we can distinguish long term causes, short term causes, and triggers in the lead up to an event (an historical etiology, if you will), so too we can distinguish long term consequences, short term consequences, and triggers in the aftermath of an event. Mubarak’s departure from office is a trigger for the end of the Lotus Revolution, but the occurrence of a triggering event is not the same as short term consequences or long term consequences.

While the short term consequences will be revealed to us over the coming weeks and months, and the long term consequences will be revealed over the coming years and centuries, there are certain observations that can be made. The more knowledge one has of a given society, the more accurate one’s observations will be. Since I know almost nothing about Egyptian society, I can only speculate in the most general way about the outcome of events triggered by the departure of Mubarak.

One thing that I know holds good across all societies, and which often makes revolutions disappointing, is that there is, in every country, a small group of elite and privileged people who are the ones prepositioned to assume prominent roles in any newly formed government. It is common for a government formed from privileged elites in the wake of a popular uprising to cherry pick a few of the ringleaders of the popular uprising to participate in the government. This gives the masses the impression that their voice has not only been heard, but that they now have a voice in the highest councils of state, and it gives “street cred” to the members of the government who did not earn their street cred on the street. Such appointments are usually symbolic, and they remain symbolic unless the arriviste is exceptionally brilliant and talented and is able to engineer his or her own Machtergreifung.

It is because of the stability of privileged elites across changed regimes that it was possible for a Bourbon monarch to sit on the throne of France and have it said that he had “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” since the revolution. The French Revolution was far more radical than the recent events in Egypt, and even the French didn’t decisively rid themselves of their aristocrats, despite their best effort during The Terror to cut off as many aristocratic heads as possible. Therefore I suspect that the Egyptians will not easily or readily rid themselves of the behind-the-scenes power-brokers who are much much responsible for the condition of the country as was Mubarak.

Institutional continuity almost always trumps discontinuity, and in so far as a revolution is an attempt to engineer historical discontinuity, these attempts at social engineering come to grief due to the friction of institutional stability. Institutions can be a social lubricant, and the primary ways of getting things done, but institutions, when opposed, are sources of social friction. That is to say, institutions on the whole possess macro-resiliency in contradistinction to the micro-fragility of particular individuals who people them and represent them. We could call this political symmetry by analogy with the use of the term “symmetry” in physical theory: regardless of political transformations (regime changes), certain things remain true, and among these things that remain true are the influence of the influential, the wealth of the wealthy, and the privilege of the privileged.

Already in Tunisia there has been grumbling on the street that the newly installed government is too close to the ousted Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Such things are to be expected, and they are to be expected because they are largely true. People want change, and when people agitate for revolutionary change they want revolutionary change. When a revolution is followed by the same-old-same-old, those who sacrificed for the revolution become frustrated and angry. And we already knew what they did when they were frustrated and angry with the previous regime.

The short term consequences of the Lotus Revolution will be worked out in the power struggles to create a new government. This power struggle will take place between privileged elites, the military, protest leaders like Mohamed ElBaradei, and powerful social institutions within Egyptian society like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is likely that several coalitions will be tried and tested, the fittest will survive, and go on through descent with modification to evolve into a government.

The long term consequences of the Lotus Revolution will be worked out regionally and internationally, as various nation-states and institutions vie to define the future of the region. As I attempted to put across in Popular Revolt in the Arab World, Egypt matters. Egypt has social capital. It has ancient universities with enormous intellectual appeal and authority.

What happens in Egypt resonates in the region. Thus even the narrow sense of the success of the Lotus Revolution is symbolically important. It will certainly lead to some consequences outside Egypt, putting great pressure on autocratic regimes. Here we are at great risk to listening too much to Western commentators who fail to make the correct distinctions between the players in the region. The popular discontent, for example, will not spread to Iran. Iran is an Islamic Republic. It may have repressive policies, but it is nothing like Egyptian society. Iran has a minimal degree of responsiveness to its people. And in Jordan, the Hashemite Dynasty has just enough social capital that the king’s dismissal of his government is not seen in the same light as Mubarak’s dismissal of his government. The events in Egypt will resonate most in the Arabian Peninsula itself, for it is there that we find repressive, unresponsive governments that have in the recent past been producing terrorist malcontents, as did Egypt. If the social malcontents should turn their attention from hatred of the West to hatred of their own oppressive governments (now that regime change in the Arab world has received its proof of concept), then dominoes may begin to fall.

. . . . .

. . . . .