7 -13 December 2000
Issue No.511
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 7 -13 December 2000 Issue No.511 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Civil erosion
By Salama Ahmed Salama
The sharp rise in the number of independent candidates elected to parliament reflects the demise of civil society. Increasingly, the political process is coming to depend on family loyalties and personal interests. The erosion of civil society has caused a regression in the role played by political parties, and an absence of the basic elements of modern parliamentary life. Instead of a modern idiom, political life speaks the language of the Middle Ages. Parliament is about families and individuals rather than genuine public issues or national projects.
This view is that of a venerable historian, Dr Yunan Labib Rizk, whose analysis of modern Egyptian history leads to unhappy conclusions: after two centuries of working to build a civil society, during which religious and family loyalties were painstakingly dissolved in a modern civil framework, the structure of political life is collapsing. The prospect is of a terrifying defeat for civil society. And this, in turn, is due to a combination of factors. In the 1960s, socialist policy and state centralism set the tone. Since then, various laws have established the state's hegemony over the press, the media, the syndicates... Sadat's uncontrolled open-door policy triggered the collapse of the bourgeoisie and gave way to new powers, which relied on the theory and practice of family loyalties and tribalism in the most recent parliamentary elections.
Those independent candidates who, after winning the elections, joined the National Democratic Party (NDP) were motivated not by the interests of the public but by their own, or by the interests of the cliques that helped them into parliament. The NDP accepted them as if giving in to developments that it was unable to control. These developments (which reveal the extreme weakness that has beset civil society organisations) are not exclusive to Egypt. They are equally characteristic of all the Arab countries that championed democracy or attempted to put its methods into practice. Despite much democratic preparation, these countries have not managed to alter political life significantly. In most cases, they take a step forward only to take several back.
In Tunisia, for instance, repeated clashes between the Human Rights Federation and the government do not bode well for civil society, particularly after the activities of the federation were frozen and some of its members were tried.
The greatest problem seems to lie with the failure of political regimes to accommodate civil society organisations that would provide an alternative to tribalism. Such organisations would also block the inflow of agents and middle-men posing as businessmen, who are looking for political cover merely to protect their own interests and recover what they spent on their election campaigns. Before the People's Assembly even began its term, the phenomenon of "visa MPs" who run into the government's embrace just to make a quick buck had already attracted attention.
This is why any talk of democracy in the Arab world is really dependent upon removing obstacles in the path of the "civil sector" and all those NGOs, institutions and syndicates that sustain social integration and reinforce political participation, freeing the body politic of the parasites that have sucked it dry. Unless these goals are realised, and however many articles are published, any talk of democracy in the Arab World will be worthless.
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