This article is a part of the HPR Arab American Heritage Month Collection and represents the independent perspective of the author.
Just over a decade after the Arab Spring protests in 2011, questions about the future of Arab nations continue to span the globe — as do misunderstandings and assumptions that stem from the West’s imperial projects and distorted media portrayals of Arab nations. I decided to explore this further by writing my senior thesis about democracy in the Arab world. In particular, I focused on how Egyptians’ public opinion on democracy has evolved since the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. As an Egyptian myself, I have a stake in the future of Egypt’s democratic governance. I care deeply about the voices of Egyptians being heard within the political system. However, over the last three decades, democratization efforts by the United States in Egypt have ignored what many Egyptians hope and envision for their nation. Therefore, we cannot advocate for democracy in Egypt without critically examining what democracy means, its history in Egypt, and the approach that the West (the United States in particular) has taken to promote democracy in Egypt. Through conducting this thorough examination, we can actualize the democratic future that Egyptians envision for themselves.
“الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام”
The protests began on Jan. 25, 2011. For 18 days, numerous sectors of Egyptian society called for a regime change, chanting al-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam — “the people want to bring down the regime.”
Protests erupted across all Egyptian sectors, in direct response to the issues that Egyptians faced: police brutality, high inflation, unemployment, corruption, media censorship, and more. The protests were further galvanized by the death of Khaled Said, an Egyptian civilian beaten to death by the police after criticizing them online. The photos of his death were released by authorities after unrelenting pressure, and a Facebook page entitled “We are all Khaled Said” was created, sparking a widespread social media movement. This quickly translated into mass mobilization and, eventually, the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 that took place in Tahrir Square in Cairo. After days of demonstrations, the Egyptian army announced that it would not use force against protestors, leaving President Hosni Mubarak without any support from his military. He was ousted on Feb. 11, 2011, after being in power for 30 years. More than one year later, on June 30, 2012, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was sworn into office.
This was a significant turning point for the Egyptians — Egypt was finally a democracy for the people. But for a nation like Egypt, where most of the population was familiar only with Mubarak’s dictatorship, it is important to ask ourselves the following questions: What is democracy, and what has democracy looked like in Egypt’s history? And how do Western ideas about democracy impact democratization in Egypt? Alongside this, it is also important to examine Egyptian conceptions of democracy in Egypt because they form the foundation of the nation’s democratic prospects. They elucidate what Egyptians want to see in their nation’s future — not just what Western nations, such as the U.S., might presume.
Democratization is the demand for empowerment and choice in government and politics. Movements for democratization stem from a growing awareness and criticism of repressive and “out of touch” governing bodies across the globe. More and more people living under authoritarian regimes are demanding political participation and empowerment through protests and alternative forms of civic engagement and disobedience. Although democracy manifests differently in different societies, democratic ideals — such as secular governments — are based on the political traditions of the U.S. and Western Europe. The U.S. has been a proponent of a secular style of democracy in recent decades and rejects alternative styles of democracy. But in many nations across the globe, religion plays a largely hegemonic role in the public and political sphere. For instance, Muslim-majority nations such as Egypt strive to reconcile Islam and democracy. Not only must they ensure that the regime meets the demand for increased political participation, they must also consider how to maintain an authentic Islamic republic. Within our increasingly globalized sociopolitical context, it is parochial to view a key concept such as democracy through the limited Western lens, as it only serves to set back the global movement towards democracy.
But the West has been far from amenable toward Egyptians and their ideas about democracy in recent decades. By way of background, during the Clinton administration, American leaders proclaimed that one of the three main pillars of American foreign policy was the promotion of democracy in other nations. This crystallized the U.S. mandate to promote democracy in Egypt, which led to the establishment of the United States Agency for International Development, an organization designed to support democratization efforts in addition to the traditional development aid. In the first few years of the 1990s, the aid sent to Egypt was deployed to support the rule of law and civil society; in the latter half of the decade, the aid expanded to support governance and media. The U.S. was spending nearly $2 billion annually to Egypt for a myriad of projects and specifically earmarked aid for democratic efforts comprising approximately $20 million of the total.
Although aid for democratic efforts was a step in the right direction, tensions between the U.S. and Egypt began to fester after multiple acts of U.S. aggression. After the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the U.S. committed substantial economic and military assistance packages to both countries to celebrate their newly developed diplomatic relationship. However, the assistance packages for the two countries were asymmetric. Israel received approximately $3 billion in aid per year as direct cash transfers to the government while Egypt received approximately $2 billion with extensive stipulations on how the funding would be allocated. This inequitable agreement led to Egyptian ambivalence toward democratic reform, and the USAID programs lost their legitimacy to promote democracy in an equitable way. Around two decades later in 2002, Bush criticized the Mubarak regime for the unjust prosecution of activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who had been convicted and sentenced to prison on what many believed were false charges. In addition to publicly criticizing the Egyptian government, members of the U.S. Congress later sponsored an amendment that gave USAID full oversight and discretion over democracy aid sent to Egypt, ultimately removing any oversight and power of the Egyptian government to allocate the funds.
The U.S. government’s misguided efforts to support democracy only exacerbated tensions between the two nations and limited progress toward the ultimate mission of a democratic future in Egypt. Although a segment of Egyptian activists believed that the aggression of the Bush administration aforementioned was an effective means to reform the regime, many also viewed this approach as an extension of imperialism and the relationship between the U.S. and Egypt as extractive.
And I would agree — the contentious approach that the U.S. has taken in its promotion of democracy in Egypt has been nothing short of flawed and rooted in imperialism. Although there has been enthusiasm for the future of Egypt as a democratic nation by Egyptians and Americans alike, not only has the approach been inequitable, but the country’s political context has been completely neglected. For instance, it is abundantly clear that many Egyptians continue to believe that religion plays a significant role in political life and that Islam and democracy are not mutually exclusive. So much so that when Hosni Mubarak was ousted after three decades in power after the protests during the revolution, the Freedom and Justice Party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood won the 2011-2012 free parliamentary elections in a landslide. Religiosity in Egypt, however, is just one facet of the nation’s context that has been ignored. The West must work with Egyptians and within the Egyptian context to design a framework for an Islamic democracy that may eventually lead to a democratic future for the nation.
The original artwork for this article was created by Harvard College student, Maddy Shirazi, for the exclusive use of the HPR
