I don’t know of anyone who would argue that democracy is a panacea. Democracy is known to coexist with high levels of social inequality and poverty, sometimes social violence (privatised and otherwise), ethnopolitics, and the deepening of patronage politics. In the short term, the competitive logic of electoral democracy may even intensify such pernicious phenomena; indeed, in many times and places, democracy was synonymous with patronage politics. But it’s no longer tenable to continue justifying the deferral of democracy by pointing to its hypothetically destabilising consequences. And it’s no longer acceptable to argue for “democracy in doses,” to be administered by national and foreign governments acting as tutors over Arab peoples. In Egypt, it baffles me how proponents of these arguments ignore or willfully suppress the dismal facts of life under Egypt’s ballyhooed authoritarian “stability”: 44% illiteracy, 44% of the population living below $2/day, a UN Human Development Index of 120 (the lowest in the Middle East save for Morocco {125} and Yemen {149}), a Corruption Perception Score of 3.2 (out of a perfect 10), and an out-of-control police force that routinely tortures and kills innocent citizens, let alone criminals. Goodness, democracy really is a terrible danger, let’s make sure we never come near it lest it dent Egypt’s all-around shining performance.
Two veteran Egyptian democrats weighed in this week with timely and important articles on real vs. fake democracy. Eminent law professor Hossam Eissa takes on Osama al-Baz in al-Araby, delivering a devastating and eloquent rejoinder to Baz’s latest turn as a philosopher of discourse ethics. Baz of course is the long serving presidential “adviser” and Gamal Mubarak’s guru (Eissa’s description, I love it). Eissa’s bottom line: “In the end, we are not in need of concord [as al-Baz argues], we need to open the doors to social and political struggle for all schools of thought and action in Egypt.” In Monday’s al-Ahram, esteemed political scientist Mohamed el-Sayed Saïd reflects on the death and revival of politics, calling the NDP’s “New Thinkers” bluff. “Reviving politics is a dialectical process that involves accumulation gained through learning. For example, the ruling party cannot be revived unless it is forced to really compete with strong parties and movements in a peaceful manner…relying on the skills of politics, not on using the state apparatus.” Real thought from real thinkers, how refreshing. All the more so at a time when the NDP is desperate to hog not just political action but political language.
Hossam Eissa and Mohamed Saïd are not government apologists masquerading as “independents,” nor instant experts pontificating about what they don’t know, nor reflexive oppositionists (if there be such). They’re among Egypt’s most respected and widely read public intellectuals, and both are very sweet persons to boot, with the genuine modesty of real scholars. They happen to be committed leftists, of the sort who sincerely believe in the Islamists’ right to participate fully in public life. Saïd came within a hair’s breadth of dying from prison torture in 1989 when he was rounded up in the so-called “Communist party” case with Kamal Khalil and the late human rights activist Hisham Mubarak. Eissa was a high-ranking member of the Nasserist party before firmly distancing himself from its internal squabbles and dictatorial management. Among the acres of political verbiage these days, Eissa and Saïd’s interventions are always lucid and thought-provoking. Their recent pieces prompt me once again to reflect on democracy and its dimensions.
Democracy as Idea
Democracy is based on a simple, radical, counterintuitive idea: the business of rule requires no special qualifications. Anyone can rule if they submit to a periodic popularity contest called elections. This is what amused and horrified Plato so much: “Isn’t it magnificent the way [democracy] tramples all this underfoot, by giving no thought to what someone was doing before he entered public life and by honouring him only if he tells them that he wishes the majority well?” (Republic, VIII, 558c). If the word is stripped of all its very recent, very positive sexiness, democracy is a very strange, unnatural notion that goes against deeply held beliefs about merit and achievement, “distributing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike,” as Plato rued. Most people, regardless of what culture they live in, are loath to accept the idea that they’re equal to those less qualified or gifted, and that is why there are very few principled democrats. It seems to me democrats are made and not born. Actual experience turns people into democrats, not philosophical speculation nor even instinctive political temperament. I don’t particularly like the idea of someone intellectually inferior to me telling me what to do or how to live, but if they’ve been through a grueling process of public election by a majority, I’ll accept them and figure out how to vote them out in the next round. But I’ll fight them to the end if nobody elected them and nobody wants them yet they persist in controlling others’ lives.
There’s another, less simple idea that lies at the heart of democracy, and that is the frank acknowledgment and acceptance of pluralism: pluralism of values and interests. The insight here is that no society can rally around a single ‘vision’ or ‘project’ or set of values, different social groups have ineradicably different and often conflicting interests and values. Herding all of society into a single organic unit is doomed to fail. Even imposing on society in compulsory functional groupings will be unsuccessful to the extent that sizeable social interests are marginalised or silenced. Fascism failed not just because it used force, but because it repudiated interest and value pluralism and thought that state power was sufficient to bundle disparate social interests into fake collectivities. Gamal Abdel Nasser was certainly not a fascist, but he did seek to monitor and limit Egypt’s dizzying array of diverse social interests into state-chartered organisations. His project failed because like any society, Egypt is too textured, too history-rich, too diverse, and too unwieldy to be managed by simple blueprints based on social harmony and manufactured institutions. The crux of the idea is that no one can be excluded, by either fiat or subterfuge, and everyone must learn to coexist no matter how unpalatable they find the views of others or superior they think they are to others. Conflictual pluralism, not harmonious unity, is the default state of affairs.
Democracy as Process
Ideas have a way of losing their allure when they descend down to the level of actual practice. That’s why democracy in history does not look like a group of civil people politely exchanging views around a table and arriving at some magical “word of concord,” as the Qur’an-quoting Mr. Osama al-Baz would have us believe. And it’s not a school where headmasters instruct the people in the virtues of democratic ‘values’ until they learn, as Mr. Alieddine Hilal claims. It’s clumps of people noisily and vociferously fighting for their interests, realising that they cannot get everything they want, and reaching settlements with their erstwhile adversaries and interlocutors to get at least some of what they want. Right, it’s the art of compromise. Sanitised, idealised histories of democracy in the “the West” paint it as a purposive project led by enlightened and valiant individuals. In truth, religion was intertwined with and often propelled politics, demagoguery and chauvinism were legion, wars and bloodshed were frighteningly common, and all manner of despotism flourished. How did they get democracy, then? Groups struggled with each other and with their governments to reach settlements based on delicate and ever-shifting balances of power. They got democracy even when they were not intentionally looking for it but fighting to preserve their interests.
Kings fought each other over territory and glory. To finance their wars, kings fought nobles over money and turf. Nobles got huffy and said to kings, you can’t keep stealing our money to fight your stupid wars, we want to have a say in how we get extorted. So Parliaments were born and started to fight kings over money and turf. Big changes in the economy created new actors, and burghers started fighting kings and nobles for money and turf. Peasants fought kings, nobles, and burghers over money and turf. Burghers sometimes made alliances with peasants and fought everybody else. They got into parliaments and started fighting the kings and their little dauphins over everything from taxation to terms of coronation. Resource-hungry kings tried to pack parliaments with their cronies and even bought some of them outright. But then things got complicated when ever more new actors kept complicating matters, such as workers, and later students, and later women. People formed combinations because it was easier to bargain and struggle as groups rather than as individuals. Then they formed political parties and started demanding the vote. Then kings and chancellors started to fear these potent new combinations and started welfare programs to seduce workers away from—gasp!—trade unions.
Out of this mess called history, democracy was born and developed in increments. There’s not much civility and consensus here, as Dr. Eissa reminds. And there’s plenty of iterated struggle and learning by doing, as Dr. Saïd says. Democracy came about because foes realised that they either had to live with one another or exterminate each other and they chose self-preservation. Often, tenuous democracy broke down, unable to cope with organisations hell bent on total dominance. Interwar Nazism and fascism are the textbook examples, but I’d like someone to show me how they triumphed because of democracy, as the charge is often hurled, rather than economic depression or the particular design of Weimar and interwar Italian democracy. Democracy is not perfect, and it’s certainly not irreversible. But it can also rebound. My favorite example is Indian democracy under Indira Gandhi, when for 19 months between 1975-77, the Prime Minister single handedly turned one of the world’s most vibrant democracies into an autocracy worthy of an Arab president or a Latin American general, while her crazy son Sanjay lorded it over slum dwellers and other poor Indians. Gandhi was roundly voted out in 1977, only to return to office three years later, when she abided by democratic rules until her tragic end in 1984. That’s democracy: imperfect, certainly not violence-free, but with a remarkable ability for self-correction, if left to run its course without foreign meddling.
Democracy as Procedure
If one were to strip democracy of highfalutin slogans and historical baggage, there remains a remarkably powerful core: democracy is a procedure for managing social conflict in a transparent, relatively peaceful manner. Democracy is a brilliant recipe for coexistence among any society’s necessarily contending and competing factions. The idea is that all must submit themselves to public vetting, and let the chips fall where they may. If group X wins over group Y, there’s a strict time frame within which the victors get to try out their programs, and they can count on being evaluated again in the near future. The set-up also maintains incentives for the losers. They have to figure out what they did wrong and work to alter their strategies, and often, their very identity. Periodic, competitive games such as elections are like an alluring siren, they draw in even the most puritanical and unwilling and turn them into shrewd vote-seekers. As long as the game’s outcome is truly mysterious, any political player worth his/her salt wants to enter the fray, even if it means losing but rebounding to try again. I was struck by this extremely perceptive and honest admission by Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Khatami’s vice president for parliamentary and legal affairs, in the wake of the Ahmedinejad victory: “Being able to accept that you have been defeated is more important than showing your happiness over victory.”
Because of the game’s mysterious outcome, there are always real surprises. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s out-of-the-blue victory is the most ambient example. But before that, there was George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, an outcome that stunned much of the world. Before that, former shoeshine boy and seasoned trade unionist Luiz Inácio da Silva became the president of Brazil in 2002. Before that, Ariel Sharon was elected Prime Minister of Israel in March 2001. Before that, Hugo Chavez was elected to the presidency of Venezuela in December 1998. I have my own strong opinions on who the good guys and the bad guys are in this gallery, but who cares? In each case, much of the outside world together with domestic defeated parties condemned the outcome, but again who cares? The important point as Mr. Abtahi reminds is to accept the popular will, and if you’re a losing candidate, work to understand how to better represent it in the next round. But to condemn people’s electoral choices because they don’t comply with your preferences and interests is to go down a very dangerous path.
Specific election results matter less than the integrity and validity of the process. And in the final analysis, what outsiders feel matters far less than the feeling of voters that the process is fair. That’s why on the Iranian elections, I couldn’t care less what American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice thinks, preferring instead to learn what Iranians think. As is known, the Iranian process is significantly controlled by the unelected Guardian Council, prompting no less a figure than the Nobel Prize-winning human rights activist Shirin Ebadi to boycott the poll. I have the utmost respect for her nuanced stance: “I don’t want anyone to follow my decision. People are politically wise enough to decide for themselves.” How incredibly transparent that Ms. Rice criticised the Iranian process, which anyone with half a brain would deem is loads more competitive than anything Egypt has ever seen, while soft-pedaling Egypt’s unholy guardians and their utterly phony democracy antics. And it must be said that with all its imperfections, the Iranian process could not prevent a two-term win for the reformist Khatami (1997 and 2001) and reformist parliamentarians (1997). I can scarcely imagine a Khatami or an Ahmedinejad coming to power in Egypt, not because we don't have their counterparts, but because we don't have the Iranians' vibrant electoral procedures.
Egypt and Democracy
I don’t know of anyone who would argue that democracy is a panacea. Democracy is known to coexist with high levels of social inequality and poverty, sometimes social violence (privatised and otherwise), ethnopolitics, and the deepening of patronage politics. In the short term, the competitive logic of electoral democracy may even intensify such pernicious phenomena; indeed, in many times and places, democracy was synonymous with patronage politics. But it’s no longer tenable to continue justifying the deferral of democracy by pointing to its hypothetically destabilising consequences. And it’s no longer acceptable to argue for “democracy in doses,” to be administered by national and foreign governments acting as tutors over Arab peoples. In Egypt, it baffles me how proponents of these arguments ignore or willfully suppress the dismal facts of life under Egypt’s ballyhooed authoritarian “stability”: 44% illiteracy, 44% of the population living below $2/day, a UN Human Development Index of 120 (the lowest in the Middle East save for Morocco {125} and Yemen {149}), a Corruption Perception Score of 3.2 (out of a perfect 10), and an out-of-control police force that routinely tortures and kills innocent citizens, let alone criminals. Goodness, democracy really is a terrible danger, let’s make sure we never come near it lest it dent Egypt’s all-around shining performance.
My point is that it’s no longer coherent or acceptable (if it ever was) to deny Egyptians and Arabs the right to make their own choices and their own history by invoking some hypothetical “side effects” of democracy. The logic is absurd: forego treatment because the side effects are painful! While Egyptians have never had truly competitive elections at the national level, we have had electoral contests of varying qualities since the 1920s. Even during the politically monistic Nasser years, some elections were bitterly fought, so the pitfalls of elections are not untried here. We would all do well to ponder English writer D.H. Lawrence’s derisive but truthful insight about democracy: “The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.” Democracy is much more often about mundane matters of public services than grand tussles between ideological visions.
So why is the Egyptian regime and its friends so afraid to enter the game of fair elections if as they claim they only want the public good? Why are the government’s legal tailors working round the clock to produce complicated and exclusionary election laws rather than innovating ways to strengthen their popular base? Why not test out Gamal Mubarak’s “New Thought” in the court of public opinion rather than air-conditioned hotel conference rooms and invitation-only receptions halls filled with credulous foreign journalists? Why not test out the Ikhwan’s electoral strength in the real world rather than sit around speculating whether they’ll get 30% or 60% or 42.7% of the vote? Why not allow Ayman Nour, the Nasserists, the Wafdists, and everyone in between to submit their programs to a vigorous public vetting? Isn’t it possible that Gamal bey and his cronies might just win in a free and fair contest? If that happens, I’ll gladly eat crow and then wait like a good citizen for the next electoral round, muttering and grumbling in the interim. Unless and until Egypt’s powers-that-be participate in an undistorted contest, their jejune democracyspeak will be worth much less than the fancy paper it is printed on.
I’d like to conclude with Salama Ahmed Salama’s column in al-Ahram today. Salama of course is another one of the last honourable men, always truthful, sincere, and delightfully pithy. Reflecting on the Iranian and Lebanese elections, he writes, “The Egyptian people have a right to at least the basic political and legislative requirements and conditions to ensure a free and fair poll, presidential and parliamentary, where the citizen can carry out his electoral duty without being subject to deception, fear, or intimidation.”
