Demographic change often drives conflict. Its an easy to identify trend of history. This is true not just in terms of the changing populations of different countries within a region, but of their economic growth as well.
When looking at the sort of demographic change that causes political instability, often leading to conflict, a classic example is the rise of Germany around the turn of the 20th century. Between 1870 and 1914 Germany went from a relatively undeveloped and greatly divided region to a powerful, unified and rapidly industrializing state. In steel production, for instance, Germany's went from half that of Britain's to double it over that period.
This sudden rise of a new great power in Europe greatly destabilized the continent. Britain, France, Austria and Russia had previously divided the region among themselves. Each member of this so-called 'Concert of Europe' acted as a deterrent to the ambitions of each other. The rise of Germany however, prompted a new entanglement of alliances which led directly to the semi-apocalypse that was the First World War.
The slightly later rise of countries like Italy, Japan and Russia (as the Soviet Union) greatly contributed to the Second World War as well. History shows that the rise of new great powers (let alone superpowers) is often greatly destabilizing to the world's political and economic systems. The reasons for this are basically self-evident. In any given world with a newly rising power, the older powers will already have tended to divide up the world's resources and markets into their own spheres of influence. The newer powers will rightly see this as unfair and attempt to challenge the order. Sometimes the older powers will concede this relative drop in their authority and retreat somewhat from the previous extent of their empire. Usually however, this fails to happen, or at least happen fast enough, thus igniting conflict, and conflicts between great powers tend to be very bloody indeed.
This was the ultimate cause of the First World War, just look at a map of the world in 1914. Britain and France control nearly half of the world between them. Their navies dominate its oceans and are able to bully almost any other countries into getting their way. Despite having only a few percent of the world's population between them, they are able to dominate it because of the enormous lead their recent industrialization has given them.
Along of course, then comes Germany, not to mention other rising powers like Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States. In some cases, like the US and Russia, they are states already large enough that they have little desire to seek an overseas empire (although the US did seize the Philippines, among other colonies, off the Spanish after the 1898 war). In the cases of Germany, Italy and Japan however, their homelands are relatively small and resource-poor, and there are few valuable regions overseas the British and French haven't already invested.
Hence their attempts to right this imbalance, hence, the World Wars.
Now, at the turn of the 21st century, we are in the midst of a similar transition. The 'BRIIC' countries - Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and most importantly China, are rapidly expanding their economies, and consequently demanding larger and larger shares of the world's resource pie. China's oil consumption has gone from virtually zero in 1970 to half that of America's today for instance.
There are plenty of signs of this new Chinese superpower grating up against its waning neighbors. World headlines were made back in 2010 when it was reported that China's total GDP had finally overtaken Japan's, no doubt contributing to the former country's sudden eagerness to dispute the sovereignty of the Senkaku islands. Within another twenty years or so, it could possibly have overtaken America's as well, though many analysts rightly question China's stability in the long run. The country's military spending is now second in the world also, though American military dominance is expected to continue until at least 2050, especially in terms of its navy.
Despite this rise however, things seem fairly stable for the time being. The Chinese do not seem liable to jump the Taiwan Strait and retake their wayward province any time soon, especially with the American navy parked right offshore. However, even if China's rise to superpower status does occur without significant bloodshed, it is only the first obstacle to world peace that will have to be jumped in the 21st century.
Africa is hardly the first place you think of when you think 'world power', but rest assured, that label will be coming to it. The extent to which Africa's status on the world stage will change over the next century is truly staggering. The demographic reasons behind it are eloquently summed up in this article -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/16/the-amazing-surprising-africa-driven-demographic-future-of-the-earth-in-9-charts/
In short, Africa's population is going to boom from approximately one billion today to about four billion by 2100. The rest of the world meanwhile, is going to stay much the same. Asia's population has mostly finished growing. It is predicted to crawl from the current four to just over five billion by 2050 before declining once more, while the rest of the world has stabilized already, or even started to shrink.
This has huge implications on the world stage. Just as the idea of the Chinese and Japanese dominating world car markets would have been thought laughable in 1950, the idea of Nigerian and Ethiopian goods flooding world markets in 2050 must seem somewhat far-fetched, but it is going to happen eventually. Just as America and Europe have been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China and India for the past fifty years, the same is already starting to happen to those countries in turn - this time to Africa, and other poorer parts of the world.
In terms of sheer population growth, Nigeria is the next big story, potentially almost as big as China and India were in the 20th century. In 1950 Nigeria had a population of just 38 million people, by 2000 it was 123 million and as of 2013 it is already 175 million, putting it at 7th in the world behind Pakistan. By 2100 its population could be almost a billion, behind only India and China and nearly twice that of the United States.
Three other big countries to look out for are Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, all expected to have around 250 million people by 2100. These four countries will contain nearly half of Africa's population between them. Bear this in mind as we consider the other elements of the potentially perfect storm that could engulf Africa in the second half of this century.
Basically, these four countries are going to be Africa's equivalent of Germany. They are going to be very large, resource-hungry, rising powers surrounded by weaker nations. It is easy to brand such thinking as evil, but the reality is more complicated. To feed and house, let alone provide all the modern appliances we consider so essential to modern life here in the west - from cars to fridges to the internet, to their people, the governments of these countries are going to face enormous challenges. The choice they could face is one of economic depression, if not outright collapse, or aggressive conquest of their neighbors. As one may justify a man stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, a government could justify invading a neighbor to provide needed resources to their desperate, not to mention angry, populations. History shows that when the risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting, that is the basis for war.
There are many different 'resources' to take into consideration, but oil is a good example. Despite a great deal of ongoing research into alternative energy sources the world is going to be largely dependent on fossil fuels for at least the next fifty years. Coal, oil and natural gas account for 67% of global energy production, the rest is largely nuclear (13%) and hydroelectric (16%). Other sources such as solar, wind, tidal, biomass and geothermal account for just 4%. Fusion may be an option someday, but is unlikely to be viable, let alone widespread, within several decades.
While past predictions of 'peak oil' have so far proven pessimistic, with new discoveries and technologies continually allowing global production to crawl upwards in recent years, the peak will come eventually. Most current predictions tend to congregate around the year 2030. Currently the world consumes 90 million barrels of oil a day, while proven reserves stand at 1,500 billion barrels. At current rates of consumption this is enough to last about 45 years. The two big uncertainties however are future consumption trends and future discoveries of new oil fields, plus new technologies with which to harvest them. The most optimistic predictions talk of their being enough fossil fuels to power the world for as much as a 'hundred years'.
This is a much-needed breathing space for the world to have, but it is far from certain whether it will be enough. Global production can't just hold steady to supply the developing world, but will have to increase exponentially in the coming decades. The 'developed' world today has about one billion people, but by 2050 the world's population is expected to reach ten billion, and they will be more urbanized than ever. We may have enough to supply the western world until renewables or some other energy source like fusion can take up the slack (or always have the option of going full nuclear, as France has already done) however, the developing world is going to have far harsher options.
In short, the west is likely to avoid the apocalyptic implications of peak oil, but the developing world probably won't.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios, by the second half of this century there are going to be several billion eager Africans who would otherwise be on the cusp of industrializing and enjoying all the fruits of the modern world, only to be informed that the rest of the world has beaten them to it. There will not be sufficient oil to drag all of them into the 21st century, and what remains won't come cheap.
One can imagine the results of this future shock. To rising powers like Nigeria, the choice may very well come down to conquest or stagnation. One can imagine a new generation of fascist leaders, in the style of Hitler or Mussolini, coming to power in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia or the Congo, urging for the conquest of their weaker neighbors in order to provide sufficient Lebensraum for their swelling populations. We could see whole new holocausts carried out, Ethiopians throwing Somalians or Congolese throwing Angolans in concentration camps. Racial difference will be played up. A westerner may be confused. Aren't they all black Africans? But to an African, there must be just as little discernible difference between a Frenchmen or an Englishmen, or a German or a Russian, yet that never stopped them from committing genocide against one another repeatedly.
These new, expansionist leaders will point to the historical injustices that caused the current crisis, that the borders dreamt up by European Imperialists in the 19th century have no real bearing on 21st century politics, that it is the fault of the west that they have been driven to such desperation. They will point to past resource exploitation of Africa as a precedent, arguing that what they are doing now is no worse. This is still occurring in the present day in fact. One may think that Nigeria, with its large oil reserves, will have enough left over for its own uses, but this is unlikely to be the case when it is needed most. There are 37 billion barrels of proven reserves in Nigeria at present, but 2-3 million is produced each day, and most of this is exported anyway, 43% of it to the United States alone. At present rates, Nigeria's oil will run out within 45 years, comparable to the global trend, and just as its population passes half a billion.
There are plenty of other factors with could contribute to this brewing conflict, one that may be on a scale comparable to the World Wars. Africa's population by 2050 will be larger than the entire world in 1940. There is lots of room in which wars and genocides may occur. The continent is already wracked with poverty and conflicts along ethnic, religious and political lines. Nigeria is almost exactly half-Christian and half-Muslin, while Ethiopia is two-thirds Christian and one third-Muslim. Will they be able to co-exist under such strains? Climate change may be another factor in the long run, further straining already dwindling resources. By 2100 sea levels may have risen as much as a meter or two, potentially forcing millions of coastal Africans to relocate. Lagos alone houses twenty million people. Where will they be able to go?
Different political movements are bound to rise amongst this background, ones that, as always, you can broadly categorize into left and right. At the moment most of Africa is still ruled by authoritarian regimes, and even most of the nominally democratic ones have elections so biased and corrupt as to be unworthy of the name. Just as Europe and the rest of the developed world had to go through a string of revolutions, civil wars, wars of conquest and civil uprisings to bring about real democracy (England in the 1640s and 1689, America in 1776, the 1860s and the 1960s, France in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1968, China in 1912 and 1949, Russia in 1917 and 1991, Germany in 1919, 1945 and 1989, etc) Africa will have to do the same.
Early signs of this can already be seen in the slightly more advanced Arab world with the recent Arab Spring, affecting countries from Libya to Syria to Yemen. Countries like Nigeria, Sudan, the Congo and Ethiopia will no doubt experience more revolutions like this in the near future. There will be populist uprisings against dictators, and often counter-revolutions against these movements as they grow power-hungry in turn (as happened in Egypt in 2011 and then again in 2013).
And when I say the Arab world is more 'advanced', for the most part I mean economically. In a nutshell, such revolutions are due once a people have moved beyond a subsistence economy. Previously, with the vast majority of the population toiling in the fields just to feed themselves, they were content to live under a corrupt and self-serving, but at least educated, aristocracy. Once in the early stages of industrializing however, people overwhelmingly shift towards democracy as their preferred form of government. For countries like England and France this was around the 1700s, for the Arab world it is in the present, for Africa it will be over the course of this coming century.
To conclude, the enormous level of political violence seen in the world over the past few centuries, from the French Revolution to the World Wars, may come to be seen by historians as just the beginning. They were essentially the price for the Western World to industrialize and democratize. The Western World however, only consists of around a billion people, or just 10% of the world's population (in 2050 at least). Nine-tenths of the world is still relatively poor and authoritarian. The 18th, 19th and 20th centuries each saw far higher death tolls than the century before it as the world's population grew -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYXv75o-j14
If we're lucky, and our leaders know what we're doing, hopefully we'll be able to manage this transition relatively peacefully. If not however, and I do not make this prediction lightly, I feel the 21st century is set to continue this trend. Two hundred million people died in wars and genocides during the 20th century, this is roughly double the eighty million or so that did in the 19th and four times the amount that did in the 18th. Looking at Africa so far in the fifty-odd years since most of its countries gained independence, the signs are not encouraging. In Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia and elsewhere, the first few million casualties have already occurred. Who's to say that four or five hundred million more won't have to die in order for Asia and Africa to make the same great leap of faith into the modern era that the western world has struggled with so dearly?
Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
Sunday, 18 August 2013
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 -
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?
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.'
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?
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