The Arab World's Transition to Democracy

Many people have lamented the degree of bloodshed that has occurred in Egypt and throughout the rest of the Arab world since the beginning of the 'Arab Spring' in late 2010. So far at least 125,000 people have died in the subsequent revolutions and wars. The lion's share of this total has occurred in Syria (where more than 100,000 people are estimated to have died, with no end to the war in sight) and Libya (where 25,000 to 30,000 people died in an eight month long civil war that ended in November 2011). The governments of Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt were also overthrown in relatively brief revolutions with the casualties in the low thousands. In 2012 Egypt held its first ever elections (quite a milestone given the country's 5,000 year history). The election was won by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate.

If Morsi's election had been the beginning of a lasting democratic transition in Egypt, that would of course have been fantastic. For five thousand years of despotic rule, by one dynasty or another, to end in a newly developing nation of 80 million people in barely two weeks, and at the cost of under a thousand fatalities, was little short of a miracle. It sounded too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was.

Several deep, structural flaws in Egypt's political system soon revealed themselves as Mohammed Morsi's administration went on. The Muslim Brotherhood, while it did 'win' the 2011 elections, did not in reality have the support of a majority of the population. In fact, it was not even close. In the first round of voting only 5,760,000 people, or just under 25% of the electorate, voted for Morsi. He received the largest individual share of the vote, but 75% of the country voted for someone else. Four other candidates won at least 10% of the vote, evidencing just how divided the country is. Even then his figure of 25% is only of those people who chose to vote. The turnout was calculated to be only 46% of all those of voting age.

In other words, a country of 85 million people elected to office a president who had the firm support of less than 6 million voters.

Whoops.

The result was predictable -

'People writing down their names on their forearms in case they get shot.'

http://rt.com/news/cairo-march-egypt-protest-574/

Much of the current tension is driven by the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is hardly the most progressive organisation that could have come to power. We have to bear in mind this is the Islamic world we're talking about. Few politicians in Egypt have attitudes to religious freedoms, women's rights and homosexuality that would be acceptable by western standards. By and large, Europe in 1900 was little different to the Middle East today in such areas. The Muslim Brotherhood however, is generally very conservative even by those low standards. Its attitudes to and treatment of women are particularly medieval, and have drawn sharp criticism. During Morsi's brief period in office, instances of violence against women in Egypt appeared to increase sharply. Though conceivably, there may not have actually been a significant increase in violence, but just more widespread reporting of it following the end of the dictatorship. Regardless, the issue came more into the public limelight, and the government was seen to be doing just about nothing about it. Since coming to power the Brotherhood has attempted to pass legislation decriminalizing female genital mutilation, a practice it supports on religious grounds against the wishes of many Egyptians, and earlier this year vehemently rejected UN calls to ratify a declaration calling for an end to violence against women. Their reasoning? That such a declaration would lead to the 'disintegration of Muslim society'.

Seriously, I kid you not.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/05/15/egyptian-lawmaker-pushing-to-legalize-fgm-in-the-name-of-islam/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/15/muslim-brotherhood-backlash-un-womens-rights

Actions such as this have alienated many women in Egypt in particular, a damaging blow to Morsi given that women made up a large portion of the protesters that helped overthrow Mubarak.

The Brotherhood is opposed by a coalition of groups. The most important by far is the Egyptian military, which is possibly the only force in Egypt capable of challenging the Muslim Brotherhood openly, as well as secularists, progressives and Egypt's Coptic Christian minority (which makes up maybe 10% of the population). Since the coup that ousted Mohammed Morsi, violence in Egypt has centered around public squares and mosques, where Muslim Brotherhood supporters have often been surrounded and massacred by the military, and government buildings and churches, where Brotherhood supporters have attempted to retaliate.

There are strong ethnic, religious and political undertones to the violence in Egypt, and the wider Arab Spring. Tempers are running so high there now seems to be a very real possibility of Egypt descending into a civil war. Given that the country is thirteen times more populous than Libya, and four times more populous than Syria, sits at the vital crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, contains the Suez canal, has a large minority of Christians and borders Israel, a war there would have serious geopolitical implications. The western world might even be compelled to intervene, especially in the event that Egypt's Copts face the risk of genocide. However, the sight of US planes bombing Cairo could cause tempers to flare further, leading to a regional war driven by religious conflict. This already appears to be happening in Syria, given the presence of US weapons in the hands of rebels at the same time as Iranian troops have been sent there to try to prop up Assad's regime.

The monolithic brutality of the military on the one hand, plus the medieval attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood on the other, sums up why it is so difficult to take sides in this conflict. Looking from the perspective of a westerner, its hard to tell who the 'good guys' are. Would you prefer the military dictatorship? Or the Islamist government? Where is the option of a progressive, secular democracy? A party that supports elections, women's rights, religious freedoms (including freedom from religion) and, by the way, doesn't support trying to wipe Israel off the map. That would be nice. Where is that party?

However, despite this disappointing performance for Egyptian democracy so far, history tells us that we shouldn't act so surprised. If you look at almost any democracy, and dig deep enough into its history, you'll find that the transition to secular democracy from whatever feudal despotism preceded it, was rarely bloodless. Such wars often were in fact, among the deadliest in history.

Take England for instance, arguably the world's first modern democracy. The power of the English parliament gradually gained on the monarchy for several centuries, but finally surpassed it in the 17th century. Two events contributed most to this, the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. These two events culminated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Never since then has a British monarch held absolute power. But what was the cost of this 'progress'?

The English Civil War was, as a measure of the percentage of the population killed, by far the deadliest war in English history. Out of a population at the time of only five million, as many as two hundred thousand people died. The relative death tolls in Scotland and Ireland were far higher, possibly as high as 40% of the population in the latter. As a portion of England's population, this is over twice as deadly as either of the world wars.

One would think that in a war in which a despotic government was overthrown, the 'good guys' would obviously be the revolutionaries, but this is much debated. Much like Mohammed Morsi in Egypt, the man who overthrew and signed the death warrant of England's monarch Charles I was a devoutly religious, dictatorial and extremely controversial figure named Oliver Cromwell.

Between 1649 and his death in 1658 Oliver Cromwell dominated the English parliament, ruling essentially as a dictator. A devout protestant, he implemented harsh policies against Catholics in the lands under his domain. England at the time had only a small minority of Catholics, so at first his policies did not cause a great deal of harm. In Ireland however the majority of the population was Catholic, and by some estimates over half a million of Ireland's one and a half million people starved or died of disease under his rule. So hated was he by many quarters of English society, that when the Royalists returned to power in 1660 they had Oliver Cromwell's corpse dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded. Since then, England's monarchy, while its power has been greatly curtailed, has never been completely dissolved, in no small part because of the deep scars left by Cromwell's rule. Even after the English Bill of Rights of 1689 was signed, it would be several centuries before Britain would come to resemble the modern democracy it does today. It wasn't until 1928 for instance that women were finally granted full voting rights.

England is not the only country that endured such a long and bloody transition to democracy. France has an even more cringe-worthy story. The French revolution broke out in 1789 because of the ineptitude of King Louis XVI, who was executed (along with several tens of thousands of other people) during the reign of terror from 1793-94. The 'First French Republic' was promptly proclaimed. However, rather than hold elections or do anything, you know, democratic, an intense political battle soon broke out among the victorious revolutionaries. Various short-lived military juntas were set up, with names like the 'Committee of Public Safety', the 'French Directory' and the 'French Consulate'. Finally Napoleon was able to cement his power and by 1804 had founded the First French Empire. Fearing the might of revolutionary France, and also the possible spread of the revolutionary sentiment it embodied, most of Europe's other major powers spent the next decade forming coalition after coalition to try and beat Napoleon. They would finally succeed in this effort with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

The French monarchy was restored, but was then overthrow again in the revolutions of 1848. The 'Second Republic' however was short-lived, and was overthrown by Napoleon's nephew when he proclaimed the 'Second French Empire' in 1851. His rule was in turn overthrown and a 'Third Republic' proclaimed in 1870. To what must have been everyone's complete surprise, this Republic actually lasted quite a while, until the Nazi occupation in 1940, when France again reverted to dictatorial rule in the form of the Vichy French Government. With France's liberation in 1944 the 'Fourth French Republic' was proclaimed. Even then the French still hadn't quite decided on whether they wanted to be a democracy, and in 1958 had to hold another Constitutional Referendum which changed the country from a parliamentary government to a semi-presidential system, and also ended France's ambitions to remain a colonial power.

There are many more examples we could go into. The United States has been relatively stable since its independence from Britain in 1776. But even its progression to a modern democracy has been a long, drawn-out affair. In the 1790 census it was recorded that almost four million people lived in the newly independent colonies, yet only 60,000 voted in presidential elections at the time, indicating that the wealthy and educated held almost as much disproportionate power as their feudal European counter-parts at the time. Slavery (by definition a very undemocratic system) was not abolished until after the Civil War in the 1860s, a war in which over 600,000 people died. Women were not given the vote until 1920, and it was not until the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 that true voting equality was enforced nationwide.

Perhaps the country with the most appalling record of resisting a transition to democracy is, lets face it, Germany. While the English had to fight their civil war and the French had to have a series of revolutions, the Germans had to fight, and lose, two world wars before they finally accepted democracy. While the world wars were fought for a variety of reasons and can be looked at in various contexts, one very simplistic summary is to say that the hundred million or so lives they cost was the price for Europe (and Japan) to transition from monarchies and empires to modern democracies.

It seems that Egypt's military rulers are aware of this history. Justified or not, they would seem to fear that Mohammed Morsi might have turned out to be Egypt's Oliver Cromwell. In other words, a leader who rides anti-dictatorial hysteria into office only to become a dictator himself. The old phrase 'none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free' explains the potential danger that a successful, overly-ambitious revolutionary can pose. Their legitimacy in the eyes of many allows them to cement their rule to a greater extent than any declared monarch ever could. Its much easier to justify genocide and tyranny when they are perceived as being for the greater good, rather than in the interests of a corrupt aristocracy. This is, indeed, an argument conservative Royalists have used for centuries to urge against any such revolutions. Better the devil you know...

The arguments warning against Islamist rule in Egypt have been laid out quite clearly. The worst case scenario is that Morsi might have further cemented his power in Egypt, gained influence over the military, made himself dictator for life, started persecuting (perhaps even slaughtering) Egypt's ten million Copts and then become more confrontational to Israel and the west, all in the name of appeasing his Islamist base and thus clinging on to power. Not everyone thinks such a scenario is likely, but those in Egypt who support the military's crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the many hundreds of deaths in the last week alone, clearly must fear something along those lines to justify the scale of the violence so far seen.

The Arab Spring is about the Arab World taking its next step down the, many would say inevitable, road to democratization. Women's equality, secularism and, arguably, economic socialism, are offshoots to this process if western history is anything to go by. The scale of these changes and the costs they may bring, especially in lives, are mind-boggling. The World Wars cost one hundred million lives between them, while the overthrow of the Chinese and Russian monarchies in 1912 and 1917 respectively led to decades of fighting and repression that between then claimed another 60-70 million lives. Against this potential chaos, it is perhaps understandable why many in Egypt are ambivalent over whether they should have removed Hosni Mubarak in the first place.

In the end though, the choice of sticking with an old, stable, authoritarian regime has one fatal flaw over the path to revolution, no matter how winding. It was summed up most eloquently by a certain US President in 1962 -

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy

This is the real dilemma countries like Egypt now face. An enormous deal of suffering came to, for instance, China and Russia after their revolutions. However, a great deal of prosperity and much needed change eventually resulted as well. The life expectancy in both countries roughly doubled during the first thirty-odd years of Communist rule. Russia was transformed from the poorest and most rural country in Europe in 1900 to one of the world's two economic superpowers by 1950. China meanwhile, has undergone the greatest and most rapid program of industrialization ever seen in any country, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty under the rule of the communist government (though how economically communist the country truly is, is a matter of debate).

Looking back on all these revolutions, at the initial violence and then the lasting change, they could be seen as being large but necessary doses of medicine. They are akin to a national trip to the dentist, one that all kids dread at the time, but for the most part later appreciate. Even the American Revolution came at a cost of 100,000 lives (including the War of 1812) but few argue that it was a flat-out bad idea.

Put another way, can anyone truly imagine the Russian Tsars, or the Qing dynasty, managing to cope with governing in the modern world?

The Arab world is set to undergo a series of revolutions, inevitably. What we've seen so far is only the beginning. The only questions now are how quickly, and how violently, this change will occur. We must bear in mind that figure, that a hundred million people had to die in the first half of the 20th century so that Europe would become democratic. Might a hundred million people have to die in the Arab world in the first half of the 21st century for the same change to take place?