Egypt: Aborted Emergence
Egypt was the first country in the periphery of globalized capitalism that attempted to “emerge.” At the beginning of the nineteenth century, well before Japan and China, Muhammad Ali had designed and implemented a renovation project for Egypt and its immediate neighbors in the Arab Mashreq. This wide-ranging experiment took place over the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century and only ran out of steam during the second half of the reign of Khedive Ismail in the 1870s. An analysis of its failure must include an examination of the violence of the external aggression perpetrated by Great Britain, the major power of central industrial capitalism at that time. Twice—in 1840, then in the 1870s, with seizure of control over the finances of khedival Egypt, which ended with the military occupation in 1882—England relentlessly pursued its objective: prevent the emergence of a modern Egypt. Undoubtedly, this Egyptian project had limitations, ones that were characteristic of the era since it was obviously a project of emergence in and through capitalism, unlike the second Egyptian attempt (1919–67). It is also true that the social contradictions inherent in this project, just like the political, ideological, and cultural concepts that underlie it, played a part in this failure. It remains the case that, absent imperialist aggression, these contradictions could probably have been overcome, as the Japanese example suggests.
Defeated, for nearly forty years (1880–1920) Egypt was forced to be a dominated periphery. Its economic, political, and social structures were reshaped to serve the model of capitalist/imperialist accumulation dominant in that era. The regression imposed on the country affected not only its productive system, but also its political and social structures. There was a systematic attempt to reinforce backward-looking and reactionary ideological and cultural conceptions useful for maintaining the country’s subordinate status.
Egypt—its people, its elites, the nation it represents—never accepted this status. This obstinate refusal lies behind the second wave of movements that developed over the following half-century (1919–67). In fact, I interpret this period as a moment of unceasing struggles and important advances. There was a threefold objective: democracy, national independence, and social progress. These three objectives—despite their sometimes limited and confused formulation—are inseparable. In this interpretation, the Nasserist period (1955–67) was only the last chapter of the lengthy moment of struggles begun with the revolution of 1919–20.
The first part of this half-century of rising freedom struggles in Egypt emphasized, with the formation of the Wafd in 1919, political modernization through adoption of a bourgeois form of constitutional democracy and the reconquest of independence. The democratic form that was devised made possible some moves toward secularization—though not necessarily secular in the radical sense of the term—the symbol of which was its flag (combining the crescent and the cross), which reappeared in the 2011 demonstrations. “Normal” elections not only allowed Copts to be elected by Muslim majorities, but even more, it allowed these same Copts to occupy very high posts in the state without that causing the least problem. The British, with the active support of the reactionary bloc, made up of the monarchy, large landowners, and rich peasants, worked to push back the democratic advances of Wafdist Egypt. The dictatorship of Ismail Sedky Pasha in the 1930s (with the abolition of the democratic 1923 constitution) came up against the student movement, which was the spearhead of the anti-imperialist struggles in that era. It is not by accident if, to reduce the danger, the British Embassy and the Royal Palace actively worked together to create the Muslim Brotherhood (1927), inspired by “Islamist” thought in its (backward-looking) Wahhabi “salafist” version formulated by Rashid Rida, the most reactionary (anti-democratic and anti-social progress) version of the new “political Islam.” The Second World War, by necessity, was a sort of parenthesis. But the struggles resumed on February 21, 1946, with the formation of the student-worker bloc, and its radicalization was strengthened by the entrance of the communists and the workers’ movement. Again, the reactionary Egyptian forces supported by London reacted violently and, for this purpose, mobilized the Muslim Brotherhood, which supported a second dictatorship of Sedky Pasha, but without successfully silencing the movement. The Wafd returned to the government, and its abrogation of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and the beginning of guerilla action in the still occupied Suez Canal Zone were only defeated by the 1951 Cairo fire, an operation in which the Muslim Brotherhood was deeply involved.
The first coup d’état of the Free Officers (1952), but above all the second one that started Nasser’s control (1954), crowned this period of continual struggles, according to some, or put an end to it, according to others. Nasserism replaced the interpretation that I offer of the Egyptian awakening with an ideological discourse that essentially eliminates the entire history of the years 1919–52. In the Nasserist version, the “Egyptian revolution” begins in July 1952. At the time, many communists denounced this version and analyzed the coups d’état of 1952 and 1954 as aimed at putting an end to the radicalization of the democratic movement. They were not wrong because Nasserism did not stabilize as an anti-imperialist project until after the Bandung Conference (April 1955). Nasserism then achieved what it could: a resolutely anti-imperialist international posture (in conjunction with pan-Arab and pan-African movements) and progressive social reforms (though not “socialist”). The whole thing was organized from above, not only “without democracy,” by prohibiting the working classes from organizing by themselves and for themselves, but also by abolishing any form of political life. Political Islam filled the void created. The project exhausted its potential in a brief time—the ten years from 1955 to 1965. The stagnation offered to imperialism, now led by the United States, the occasion to break the movement, which for this purpose mobilized its regional military instrument: Israel. The 1967 defeat marks the end of this half-century of fluctuating struggles. The retreat was led by Nasser himself, opting for concessions to the right (the infitah, or the opening to capitalist globalization) rather than radicalization, for which students, among others, fought (the student movement commanded center stage in 1970, a little before Nasser’s death, then continued after). Sadat, followed by Hosni Mubarak, pushed this move to the right even more and integrated the Muslim Brotherhood into their new autocratic system.
Nasser’s Egypt had established an economic and social system that can certainly be criticized, but it was coherent. Nasser had bet on industrialization as a way of getting out of the colonial international specialization that restricted the country to exporting cotton. This system provided for a redistribution of income favorable to the expanding middle classes, without impoverishing the working classes. Sadat and Mubarak worked to dismantle the Egyptian productive system, for which they substituted a totally incoherent system based exclusively on creating conditions for the profitability of companies that are, for the most part, only subcontractors of imperialist monopolies. This policy resulted in an incredible increase in inequality and unemployment that affected a majority of youth. This situation was explosive; it exploded.
During the Bandung and Non-Alignment period (1955 to 1970–75), some Arab countries were at the forefront of struggles for national liberation and social progress. These governments (Nasser, the FLN, the Baathists) were not democratic in the Western sense of the term, they were one-party states, or in the sense that I give to the term, which implies power exercised by the working classes themselves. But they were nonetheless perfectly legitimate because of their important achievements: gigantic progress in education, which allowed upward mobility (children of the working classes moving into the expanding middle classes), and in health; agrarian reforms; and guaranteed employment, at least for all graduates at all levels. Combined with anti-imperialist policies of independence, these achievements strengthened