Issue No. 597
Opinion
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1 - 7 August 2002 Issue No. 597 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Nasser and the end of politics
The revived debate on the 23 July Revolution, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, has been as flat, lacklustre and uninspired as the fireworks that were set off along Cairo's Nile-side Corniche to mark it. It was largely a rehashing of the same tired old debate that followed Nasser's death in 1970 and has remained with us since: the revolution destroyed democracy and a vibrant civil society, setting the country along the road to political and economic disaster; or alternatively, the revolution's democratic failings (now practically everybody agrees that 'democracy' is a good thing) were ground in its times: the tasks of national liberation; the weaknesses of pre-52 liberal democracy; the requisites of national unity in the face of external aggression and imperial pressures; the emancipation of the working masses, effectively disenfranchised by the 'liberal age'.
Save for the surprising rehabilitation of Egypt's first and largely irrelevant one-year figurehead-president, Mohamed Naguib, the official line, aptly expressed in state-organised celebrations, was as bland and muddled as it's been for three decades. Rather like someone who inherits a fortune from a disreputable ancestor, the Egyptian state is constantly torn between the need to vindicate its claim to the inheritance and to distance itself from the benefactor, and his various radical antics.
Herein, in fact, lies the most interesting question about the July Revolution. Not the usual, superfluous question about when and how the revolutionary regime ended. The real question, rather, should be one that seeks to explain the anomaly inherent in the fact that the state structure created by the July 52 Revolution remains largely unchanged half a century later, despite sea-changes in orientation and in every other conceivable area of life, domestically, regionally, and internationally. The revolution may have committed suicide, been assassinated or simply passed away of old age; the state it created has been phenomenal in its obdurate capacity for survival, even as it mutates.
We might put the question in more concrete terms. For instance, how is it that a populist authoritarian state anchored -- ideologically, politically and institutionally -- in a concrete compact with the masses can maintain its fundamental structures largely unchanged once that compact has been torn to shreds and the corporatist bodies that embodied and instrumentalised it effectively ruined? How is it that this can go on for over a quarter of a century, with no end in sight? Or to put it another way: how is it that decades of a multi-party system cannot produce a single political party worthy of the name? How can greater press freedoms not produce a free press? How is it that a much wider scope for free expression does not have the slightest effect on decision-making or political life, creates hardly any new social and political awareness? How is that greater freedom of expression can become so overwhelmed by vulgarity and religious narrow-mindedness it merely serves to reproduce ignorance and bigotry on an ever expanding scale? The multi- party system has produced uncontested and incontestable single party rule. MPs do business and businessmen do politics. Civic freedoms are forever equivocal, easily crushed at a passing bureaucratic whim (ergo, Prof Saadeddin Ibrahim).
What is democracy? Having no intention of going the usual dull route (via ancient Greece) in search of a definition, might I suggest two basic, if distinct, ways in which the concept may be approximated. We have, first, the gamut of civil and political liberties, many of which have been codified in international legal instruments. Covering a whole range of freedoms, from free speech to free and fair elections, this is the most common sense in which the notion of democracy is understood. There is another no less fundamental sense, however, and that concerns self- determination. The grandiloquent "government of the people by the people" is widely recognised as more rhetoric and reality. Effectively, what we are speaking about here is degrees of popular access to, and influence over, state- power, which under capitalism is inherently delimited by the twin fetishes of a bourgeois economy and a bourgeois state.
This said, it is possible to contend that one sense of democracy does not automatically imply the other. Beyond liberal dogma, history (from Jacobean France through Bolshevik Russia to Peronist Argentina and Nasserist Egypt) has provided ample evidence that (the majority of the) people could have, and indeed have had, substantial access to and influence over the state under a whole range of authoritarian and highly repressive, even bloody, regimes. It is not, however, a matter of preferring one "democracy" over the other. The ultimate winner under a repressive authoritarian system is the state bureaucracy, which inevitably sends the people packing, as indeed has been amply demonstrated by the above examples of France, Russia, Argentina and Egypt. All they're left with is the repression.
There is a further twist. To have greater and wider civil liberties but virtually no access to and influence over the state demands the proscription of the space within which such liberties may be exercised politically. And in this respect Egypt may prove to have been a trend setter.
The modern bourgeoisie invented politics, reorganising social life around a new political space. It was, however, always unhappy with its temperamental creature, which -- like Frankenstein's monster -- had a proclivity to turn against its master. The master would act to confine it, tame it, and at times, strangle it, but for the greater part of some three centuries could not manage without it. Not, that is, until the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries came along. From the collapse of the Soviet Union to that of the Twin Towers; from "the winds of change" in Eastern Europe to the "global war against terror", what has been heralded is not the end of history but the end of politics. Ironically, the monster was being killed off not because it had become too fierce and dangerous but because, finally, its services could be dispensed with. The bourgeoisie no longer needs politics to rule. Welcome to the brave new world of businessmen and bureaucrats.
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