Almost a year on since the Arab Spring began with Tunisia in December 2010 it appears to be kinda fizzling out now. (…those dreaded words that no one wants to say). Sadly, while great changes are afoot in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, the regimes in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen look to have survived, for the moment. The latter group are far from stable of course, and sooner or later another wave of uprisings will occur for sure, if not next year then sometime in the next decade perhaps. And while it doesn’t sound very exciting to speak of decades, unfortunately that’s how long it takes. Historically, momentous changes are measured in epochs and generations, not months. So anyway, this moment seems as good as any, to round up my musings over the last year and summarise a couple of important lessons, starting with this posting on Egypt.
Lesson 1 says that please, please, please, can we finally drop this notion that America and the Western powers install and maintain dictators in the Middle East. The fact is that America, as the largest power ever known to man, has next to no influence or leverage. We saw this during the Egyptian uprising where American rhetoric followed (i.e. was led by) what was happening in the streets in Cairo and Alexandria. The Egyptian people themselves made it happen, which I’m sure we can all agree on, except for the most habitual of conspiracy theorists. The bit that people find harder to accept, however, is that the prior stability of the regime was also down to the Egyptian people – that they didn’t sufficiently want change or weren’t sufficiently capable of demanding it. It should be obvious, if one just thinks about it, that the political and cultural climate in any country is a reflection primarily of the economic structures of that society, not of outside forces. Mubarak had power because the Egyptian people were relatively weak. And while the West does business with whoever is in power, that isn’t the same as saying the West is primarily responsible for propping them up. It is worth remembering that despotic regimes ruled unequal societies of the Middle East (as everywhere else in the world) for centuries and millennia, well before the West was around to supply them with guns and money.
Lesson 2 is that economic freedom, or in other words free-market economics, is a necessary condition for real (or sustainable) revolutions – notwithstanding the tendency to associate revolutions with socialism or Marxism. European history demonstrates that successive changes in the social and political order went hand-in-hand with a bottom up economic empowerment of the lower classes – note the rise of the merchant class or middle classes. In Egypt then, it wasn’t so much the grinding poverty of the masses, but the disenfranchised yet capable, well-to-do that were a key ingredient in a successful uprising. Whereas decades of violent opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood had failed miserably, what we saw in 2011 was a rather more enlightened group of revolutionaries who knew how to get both the local population and the international community on side, and indeed how to annoy the hell out of a dictator and then make him look feeble. Mubarak’s mistake was to have let this group of well-to-do Egyptians prosper without fully co-opting them into the state machinery, whereas previous Egyptian rulers over the centuries had been adept at nullifying any emergent independently wealthy class. Yet, it wasn’t Mubarak’s dong either. In a sense, relentless trade and globalisation over many decades was dragging Egypt and its masses, as in almost every country in the world, ever so gradually, until at some stage a political awakening of the masses just had to come about.
Still, the scourge of collectivism remains. What we have now is an incremental and rather unsatisfactory rate of reform (with much disillusionment in Egypt as I write), and this is really not surprising at all, for the economic power balances and the cultural make-up of Egypt have barely shifted. As such, they do not warrant a real revolution. The military has always been the real obstacle rather than Mubarak himself, and the reason for this is their owning much of the country’s resources. Vast tracts of agricultural land, leading industrial and manufacturing plants, construction companies, Red Sea resorts, are all owned by the military top brass – which is by far the largest economic power base and dubbed as an ‘economy within an economy’. These guys might grudgingly allow elections, but real capitalistic free-market competition? Don’t think so. Then we have the Muslim Brotherhood, ostensibly pro-market right now, though I suspect only because they are the economic outsiders at present, while ultimately a centralising ideology lurks in their psyche. Finally, we have the secularists, be they political figures or grass roots revolutionaries, who largely subscribe to socialist ideas. These are the people who see great benefit in nationalised industries (a sure path to corruption, centralised power and yet another dictatorship), minimum wages, price controls/subsidies and generally supporting the dependent classes (as opposed to empowering them), and they see no great problem in a bunch of elites drafting a new constitution.
Basically, a libertarian culture hasn't really taken hold in Egypt, and so the counter forces of centralisation threaten to make this a one-time-only revolution, as we’ve seen in Communist and socialist experiments elsewhere (not least in the post-colonial Middle East and North Africa). As Friedrich Hayek observed of 20th century Europe (The Road to Serfdom), it is rather strange that so many people think they can have political freedom without economic freedom.
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