How Revolutionary Will This Revolution Be?

Some predict an Iranian-style result, others say Mubarak could meet the fate of Ceauşescu – but both outcomes are unlikely.

What happens next in Egypt is anybody’s guess, and the pundits (this writer included) are bending over backwards trying to do what we are notoriously bad at: predicting revolutions or their likely outcomes. After all, in May of 1989 it would probably have been wiser to suggest democratization of China rather than the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year (the Tiananmen Square protests did not happen until June 4, coincidentally the same day as the fateful Polish elections that saw an overwhelming Solidarity victory). Hosni Mubarak could face the same fate as Romania’s Communist strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu, or the youthful revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square might be forced to yield to religious zealots as happened in Iran in 1979. But both outcomes are unlikely, and some nuance needs to accompany both the hope and fear of the past 10 days.

To predict an Iranian-style result smacks of Orientalist thinking, something Edward Said would have been sure to remind us had he lived to see what is unfolding in North Africa and potentially in the Middle East. After all, several generations across the region have lived under the excesses of both secular and religious authoritarianism, and both have been illiberal in the extreme, whether capitalist or nominally socialist. Moreover, suggesting that democracy cannot cohabitate with Islam is belied by many examples to the contrary, most notably Turkey. After all, it was only in the last century that democracy and Catholicism were held as supposedly inimical to each other in Southern Europe. Of course, most Egyptians are secular – just, as it turns out, most Southern Europeans tended to be as well. There’s a big difference between religious identification or even religious fundamentalism and the political hijacking of a religion for extremist purposes. It bears remembering that there is no love lost between al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the same time, a Ceauşescu-style summary trial and execution is equally unlikely. In the past, Mubarak could depend upon Egypt’s gift horse and powerful ally the United States, and the Americans are unlikely to support anything less than an “orderly transition,” as Hillary Clinton put it earlier this week. And that presumes neither a hasty exit nor certainly a violent one. According to the Egyptian constitution, only an elected president can dissolve parliament and call elections, so this legal precondition creates at least a momentary place in the sun for Egypt’s beleaguered leader. Having said that, if Mubarak stepped down, constitutional reform may well be around the corner.

Would a more democratic Egypt ignite or stabilize the region? Hard to say. In international relations, scholars of “democratic peace theory” will tell you that democracies generally don’t go to war with one another. Citizens with the right to vote in free and fair elections have a disciplining effect on leaders wanting to expend too much blood and treasure in military adventurism. At the same time, research also tells us that it is exactly at the point of transition that regimes are most unstable.

And how revolutionary will this revolution turn out to be? The more peaceful and the more negotiated the revolution, the better the prospects for success. This is the real lesson to be learned from the revolutions of 1989; those that opted for roundtable negotiation and a principled commitment to non-violent dissent turned out to be the longest lasting and fostered civil societies capable of the onerous obligations of democratic citizenship. Poland and Hungary fared much better in the first two decades following the fall of Communism than troubled and fractious Romania.

In the coming days, the key player to watch will be the Egyptian military. In past revolutions both failed and successful, militaries have often been the lynchpin institution. In the case of Tiananmen, the PLA turned out to be the party’s army, not the people’s – who can forget the images of the tanks rolling into the square, literally mowing over the peacefully assembled masses? However, in the case of the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, the military symbolically and powerfully supported the protestors in Kyiv’s Independence Square. In Egypt, the military is a highly respected institution … and much of its leadership has been educated in American colleges of professional military education. Moreover, in Egypt as elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, militaries have been moulded in a national-liberationist cast, having played a central role in decolonization.

Finally, the end of the Mubarak regime reminds us once again that, absent the delivery of rising economic prosperity across the board, autocrats have a hard time garnering the most crucial currency of political stability: legitimacy. And without legitimacy, even dictators well-supported by western economic and military aid cannot survive indefinitely.