Democracy, State and AID: A Tale of Two Cultures

Democracy, State and AID: A Tale of Two Cultures

 The State Department and USAID often take different approaches to promoting democracy abroad. Can they work together?

By Thomas Carothers

Recently I was in Eastern Europe researching U.S. democracy assistance (I'll leave the country unnamed to respect the privacy of the interviewees mentioned here). Early in my trip I met with the USAID mission director, who gave me a rundown of the portfolio of U.S. aid projects aimed at advancing the country's attempted democratic transition. It was similar to what I have seen in many other countries Ñ a mix of efforts to bolster independent media, encourage nongovernmental organizations involved in civic advocacy, advance judicial reform, strengthen local government, and other similar programs. The mission director stressed the long-term nature of their efforts, the need for caution and modest expectations, and the value of working outside the capital city at the grassroots level.

A day or two later in the same country I met with the U.S. ambassador and asked him to describe the U.S. government's approach to aiding democracy there. He quickly denigrated what USAID was doing, accusing USAID of being too interested in studies, assessments, and project plans and too enamored of NGOs and local level activity. What the U.S. government should focus on, he said, are key politicians with real influence. The embassy should send them on study tours to the United States to learn how democracy works and keep the pressure on them at pivotal junctures to make sure they do the right things politically, like not appointing weak or corrupt people to important posts. The U.S. government should also, he emphasized, make sure the political leaders "pull off" the next presidential election with some credibility. And to ensure a visible stamp of approval for that, the U.S. government should sponsor a high-level U.S. electoral delegation to those elections.

These contrasting points of view Ñ variations of which I have heard in numerous countries over the years Ñ showcase two distinct philosophies on how to aid democracy abroad that coexist uneasily within the U.S. government. 

On the one hand, in dozens of countries USAID underwrites technocratic democracy aid programs, such as efforts designed to improve the efficiency of judiciaries and legislatures or to get nongovernmental organizations to engage in more serious planning and organizational development. These activities are based on a model of democratization as a long-term developmental process consisting of the gradual reform of major state institutions matched by the slow building up of civil society, often with an emphasis on NGO development at the local level. This model is applied all around the world, in very different countries. In Guatemala for example, USAID has been working for 15 years to aid democracy by supporting the reform of the judiciary and the legislature while also trying to bolster the development of NGOs both in the capital and the countryside. In Russia, a country with an entirely different political background, USAID's democracy efforts have been basically similar. The long-term developmental nature of USAID's approach reflects the fact that its democracy programs originate from the same processes of strategic planning, assessment, and results management as do the more traditional types of U.S. foreign aid, such as public health work, agricultural development, or poverty reduction. The technocratic quality of the programs derives from USAID's continuing hesitancy about doing anything that appears to be too openly political, even in the very political domain of democracy building.

In contrast, many State Department officials who engage in democracy promotion, especially those posted abroad, work from very different instincts and impulses. They want action, not studies and assessments. They focus on politicians and political events, not on developmental processes. They want to concentrate on the here and now, not on long-term change. They are often skeptical about the importance of NGOs. They like to use visitor programs, high-level diplomatic visits, and election observer missions as strategic tools and do not shy away from emphasizing the American model of democracy. In Guatemala, for example, various U.S. ambassadors and State Department officers in the embassy have over the years emphasized jawboning of senior Guatemalan officials as the best way to get positive change on democracy and have often been skeptical about the value of NGO work and other long-term, less direct approaches. In Russia, State Department officials often interpreted democracy promotion as meaning specific support for specific political figures, above all, persistent efforts throughout the 1990s to bolster President Boris Yeltsin.

In some countries, due to particular personalities or circumstances, USAID and State manage to work effectively together on democracy aid, with visitor programs and political jawboning used to reinforce democracy aid programs aimed at different institutions or sectors. In Bulgaria, for example, cooperation across State and USAID lines on democracy promotion has worked well in recent years, with the ambassador fully on board with the USAID approach and State officials adding their own efforts. More often than not, however, the two agencies do not work so well together. USAID frequently ends up working by itself on democracy aid programs with State officials paying little attention to activities they regard as marginal. Or the two organizations work at cross-purposes, sending conflicting signals in the host country. For example, while USAID is stressing the importance of NGOs and local civic advocacy, State Department officials may be dismissing the significance of such groups in their meetings with high-level politicians.

State/USAID Differences

The philosophical differences between USAID and State on democracy aid are of course part of a larger divide. Despite the efforts of a few years back to integrate USAID more closely under State Department authority, the two organizations still live in fairly separate worlds. Some critics of USAID argue that USAID refuses to tailor its work closely enough to U.S. foreign policy goals. USAID officials counter that they have made an effort to align their strategic priorities with those of the State Department. They also believe that State does not have an exclusive say in what those goals are and that promoting long-term economic, social, and political development all around the world is very much part of America's mission.

Distinct subcultures separate the two organizations as does a regrettable accumulation of mutual dislike. In private, many State officials are prone to express disdain for an aid agency they see as hopelessly bureaucratic and ineffective. USAID officials in turn often view the department as the out-of-date preserve of diplomats interested in little more than "who's in-who's out" political analysis and their own career prospects.

It is tempting to downplay this split over democracy aid by portraying the approaches of USAID and State as complementary halves of a single whole. In fact, however, the two approaches are not mutually reinforcing and both are in need of some revision. State Department officials skeptical of, or uninterested in, democracy aid as practiced by USAID should recognize that using foreign assistance to promote democracy (as opposed to the more direct types of political action that State likes to engage in) has become a real field in the past 10 years, not just in America, but in many aid-giving countries, from Australia to Sweden, and in numerous international institutions as well. This growth of democracy aid does not mean that it is dramatically effective Ñ modest expectations are appropriate Ñ but it does indicate that it is much more than a passing enthusiasm of a few American idealists.

Many early democracy aid programs were indeed embarrassingly simplistic and misguided. But those who implement these programs have learned a lot, and the field is growing in sophistication and accomplishment. USAID is certainly too bureaucratic and frustratingly slow in many instances. But State officials should not dismiss as wasted effort all studies, assessments, and evaluations that they see in the democracy field. Promoting democracy is usually a complex business, one that in many cases merits reflection and study before plunging in. And though a long-term approach can be an excuse for lack of focus, in many problematic democratic transitions, whether in Ukraine, Nigeria, Indonesia, or Nicaragua, anything other than a long-term focus is likely to be a recipe for failure.

At the same time, USAID officials must not retreat into a technocratic, specialized conception of democracy promotion, one that denies the basic fact that such work is inherently political. A focus on politicians and political junctures is inevitably a necessary part of such work. The nature of politics requires democracy programs to move quickly in some circumstances and to use old-fashioned political leverage to gain results. Although USAID can make a good argument for keeping near-exclusive control within the U.S. government for programs to promote social and economic development, in the democracy domain it must accept partnership with State.

Bridging the Gap

With a new team taking up positions at State and USAID, and continued bipartisan support in our political system for democracy promotion abroad, the opportunity exists for a constructive effort to bridge the gap between the two cultures of democracy aid. The United States can and should play a role in helping democratic transitions succeed in many parts of the world, especially in southeastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. It will do so more effectively if State and USAID understand each other better on this front and work toward a synthesis of approaches.

The challenge in this domain is to avoid a debate over approaches to democracy aid becoming merely a squabble over institutional arrangements. State and USAID must try not to fall into a tug-of-war over whether democracy aid (or all foreign aid) should be brought into the State Department and run out of expanded sections of the regional bureaus or from an enlarged global division. If it is framed as such, the issue will become merely a turf battle, fought on the lines of power, control, budgets, and personalities, like any other bureaucratic turf battle.

It is important to recognize that the institutional arrangements for democracy programs do not necessarily determine whether the programs succeed or fail. Both good and bad democracy programs can come out of a USAID operating relatively separately from the State Department or from a State Department that has incorporated USAID. It is critical to work first toward a consensus on some fundamental elements of a good approach to democracy aid and then to move toward informed study of what institutional arrangements will most easily and effectively achieve them. I suggest the following basic points as building blocks of such a consensus.

No Place for Amateurs

First, institutional arrangements for democracy aid must be built on a recognition of the fact that this is a domain in which expertise is fast accumulating and the place for enthusiastic amateurs is shrinking. If the U.S. government wishes to continue to be in the business of sponsoring democracy programs, it will have to have a substantial in-house professional capacity to do so (unless more radical changes are considered, such as turning over the entire matter to some large new private or semi-private foundation Ñ a complex subject of its own). USAID has developed such a capacity, albeit slowly, as real training for democracy work did not begin until 10 years after USAID began mounting such programs on a broad scale. The notion that State Department officers could simply tack on a few democracy aid duties to their existing work is misguided. If the State Department were to play a dominant role in democracy promotion, it would have to take substantial steps to develop the capacity to do such work, which would be no small task.

Second, to oversee the design, implementation, and evaluation of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of democracy aid projects, an extensive field presence is necessary. Attempting to run everything from Washington would be a mistake, despite whatever benefits such an approach would bring in terms of central direction or coordination. This fact implies that whether democracy aid is primarily a USAID or a State function, the U.S. embassy or aid mission in recipient countries should continue to have a major role in the process.

Third, creating institutional arrangements that allow real flexibility and adaptability for democracy programs is essential. Aid providers cannot assume that democratic transitions will unfold in predictable linear paths. Institutional arrangements must allow democracy promoters to set up or shut down their activities quickly, to substantially adjust them along the way, and to take risks. It is also unrealistic to assume that democracy can be broken down into quantifiable bits to fit numerically-based systems of evaluation of the sort that USAID has tried to use in recent years.

Evaluation mechanisms, which are certainly necessary, must primarily utilize qualitative rather than quantitative information, preferably generated by genuinely independent evaluators, such as scholars and other research analysts. USAID has struggled to meet such imperatives but has often fallen short because democracy aid has been forced into the same bureaucratic structures as aid in traditional developmental sectors such as health and agriculture. The creation of the Office of Transition Initiatives in the mid-1990s at USAID was a step in the right direction; it established a mechanism somewhat outside USAID's traditional bureaucratic labyrinth that allowed for more flexible, rapid programming.

Needed: More Transparency

Fourth, democracy aid programs benefit from a diversity of actors. The temptation to call for greater order in the rather decentralized world of democracy aid is an understandable reflex but an incorrect one. USAID is sometimes criticized for the welter of organizations that carry out its programs, including non-profit democracy organizations, for-profit development contractors, educational institutions, and advocacy NGOs. There are certainly problems with the ways USAID chooses its partners: The biggest problem is that the organization's contracting processes often limit the bidding for larger projects to a small circle of organizations. Having many groups involved is a plus. These outside groups bring specialized skills in areas such as civic advocacy, media work, and political party development that the U.S. government itself inevitably lacks. They try different methods which can foster a spirit of healthy competition and experimentalism. The range of organizations involved in democracy promotion should be further increased by simplifying USAID's bidding procedures and avoiding the pattern of omnibus contracting arrangements that favor the few.

Fifth, although it is good to have many American groups taking part in the implementation of democracy programs, an effort should be made to increase the proportion of aid that goes directly to groups or persons in the recipient countries. Neither USAID nor State has a special advantage in this regard. Both have some experience in establishing direct grant mechanisms, experience that should be expanded upon.

Sixth, whether new institutional arrangements are developed or the existing ones preserved, it is crucial that U.S. aid providers be very open about the democracy work they do. Too often, USAID and State communicate poorly with the U.S. public as well as with people in the recipient countries about these efforts. This failing contributes to weak U.S. public support for democracy aid and considerable ignorance and suspicion about it in the places where it is carried out. Democracy aid must exemplify the same good-governance principles of transparency and accountability that it seeks to foster in other societies.

In sum, the right way forward is neither to continue with democracy aid as it is nor to hastily shift it all over to the State Department. There is a need for a serious review of existing approaches in this domain and a consensus-building exercise among State, USAID, other interested U.S. agencies, and the main democracy promotion NGOs, on the fundamental principles and methods of U.S. efforts in this domain. Then and only then, new institutional arrangements should be considered or established. With hard work, the "tale of two cultures" in democracy aid can be brought to a close and a more coherent story begun.

Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written extensively on democracy promotion, including his recent book Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Carnegie Endowment).

The June Rebellion in Egypt

The June Rebellion in Egypt

by Mohammed Bamyeh محمد بامية

Despite two and a half years of revolutionary experience, the rebels of June had no plan for the day after Morsi, just as they had no plan after Mubarak. One activist eloquently conveyed to me a typical attitude: he joined the 30 June protests because he believed in harakat al-shari’, the dynamism of the street, which would somehow produce the desired outcome. It was the same underlying logic of January 2011: too much planning makes the revolution heavy and immobile. Revolutions now require lightness and dynamism, and any plan may (or may not) emerge later. If not, the crisis induced by harakat al-shari’ will in some way compel influential actors to figure out a solution. If the solution produces a result that eventually proves undesirable, the street moves again, in the same way, and by its very movement gives rise to a different solution, as often as necessary, until we arrive at a happy destination. That was, and still is, the preferred method of the Egyptian Revolution. But after two and a half years, one would expect this methodology to be accompanied by a vision of a political system adequate to the character of the revolution. Is there such an imagination?  

Street Dynamism and Political Imagination

The need for new political imagination is now paramount. It is disheartening to see experienced politicians manipulate such an epic popular struggle only because that struggle, while capable of toppling regimes, has not established a system that resembled the revolution itself, propelled as it was by initiatives from below. That is why the usual suspects have filled the vacuum: opposition politicians, the military, officials from the old regime, and others who have no relationship to the “dynamism of the street” producing all this turmoil. Meanwhile no one asks why we need a president, or a government, or a parliament, or indeed any of the institutions of state, if it is ordinary people who are doing all this revolting, and who seem to want an equally ordinary system that lives with them rather than simply rules them.

There is a good reason why the street rather than the formal opposition has been the source of dynamism in Egyptian politics since January 2011. The street has existed outside the state and organized parties as an alternative form of social and political life. It has been typified by de facto pluralism; spontaneous organization; informal rules familiar to large numbers but not encoded in state law and often contradicting it; local knowledge as primary source of action; mutual aid; and an intuitive approach to solving problems. It was the system of the street, not state policies or promises by politicians, which made life bearable and possible for very large numbers of people. By contrast, organized groups produced at best one dimension of the richness of the street. But typically, they sought to replace the street with either ideological dogma or a celebrity figure. Today, following the June rebellion, politicians are taking the same approach, because they do not know how to think of the street as a source of lessons for political life. They think of the street only as chaos that needs to be controlled by those cultivated enough to know better.

 Exploring the aftermath of the June rebellion at the level of high politics reveals the same lack of imagination endemic to Egypt’s political elites, focused on internal struggles and competing to control the state. This relentless focus on the state has sidelined the sensibility of the street, the informing sentiment of Egyptian revolutionary mobilization. Central to that sentiment, it seems, is an expectation that the system that speaks to the ordinary person should itself possess ordinary qualities. Yet there was also good reason to overlook the ordinariness of the revolution. This is largely because the June rebellion, like the January revolution, was itself so focused on the president. But that was so only because there was a president. The fact that the “solution” of the current crisis includes early elections for yet another president suggests that we have learned nothing from this episode, only that we are predisposed to position that unfortunate person as the target of the next round of mass mobilization. If the elementary proposition is that rebellion occurs because society is ruled by somebody, would we resolve the problem if society rules itself in a different way?

I have proposed alternatives elsewhere, but I do not want to insist on them. Rather, I only want to point out a deeper crisis, and that is the virtual absence of new political imagination in conditions that require it most. Such imagination is usually the responsibility of the intellectuals. However, with few exceptions, such as Aref Hijawi’s recent proposal to have no president in Egypt, a great many Egyptian intellectuals have thus far been busy with joining the protests and chanting like everyone else. In itself, joining a revolt is a great source of experiential learning, but if one is an intellectual one should do more than simply repeat slogans, take positions with this or that party, and treat opponents like mortal enemies in the normal politics of mutual poisoning. What is most needed now is to learn something new from profound moments in history. This involves translating the street, the true source of all these uprisings, into the kind of political imagination that can then be returned to the public sphere, so that it may enrich debates and introduce dynamics other than those of total war. I do not think it is an underestimation to regard this dereliction of intellectual responsibility as one reason for the closing of spaces for meaningful exchange, learning, and imagination, and their replacement with savage battles, pure negativity, and zero-sum logics.

This imagination, or intellectual translation of popular dynamism, is all the more required now given that it is unlikely that street and state will continue to agree to live far apart after a revolution. This is evident in the intensity of the struggle from below, which suggests that ordinary people continue to be deeply invested in the events of high politics. They do not regard themselves as perpetually external to a political order that seeks to control them from without, and they seem to want that order to consult them as directly as possible. However, they have not expressed how, exactly, that is to be done. Their intellectuals have not done so either.

Clearly a new style of engagement with politics has become an inescapable feature of life for ordinary people. Countless examples may be cited, but one may suffice. During the struggle over the constitution at the end of 2012, with millions of people on the streets and the country on the edge of civil war, the most elementary observation of all appeared to escape all concerned: that this was the first time in modern Egyptian history that ordinary individuals actually cared about a constitution in such large numbers. That care was itself a profoundly new social phenomenon, indicating a great social transformation and the entrenchment in society of a perspective that no longer saw whatever happened at the level of high politics as external to ordinary people. But ordinary citizens do not know, yet, how to normalize this high politics, that it to say, how to bring it closer to them.

In the meantime, high politics continues its surreal course. It is the military that has now produced the “road map” to an eventual civic state, the original goal of the January revolution. But with the exception of Fahmy Howeidy, no one noticed that it had already been outlined by another, unexpected source: the road map is substantially the same as that President Morsi himself previously proposed. On 3 July the army suspended the constitution. On 4 July an interim president in his oath of office swore to uphold this constitution. Whatever he is supposed to uphold, he has the power to issue any constitutional declaration he wishes, checked only by the military. So this great struggle against a potential tyranny, which was at the heart of the June rebellion, replaced an ineffectual but democratically elected president with one who has unlimited power that is checked only by an authoritarian institution. The first acts of the new regime were to close down television stations, prevent coverage of Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations, and arrest their leaders. Nonetheless, throughout the country there is a palpable sense that what we see now is a great advance for the cause of liberty, progress, and–whenever it arrives–democracy itself.

This puzzling sentiment seems rooted in the single accomplishment of the June rebellion: unfreezing the stalemate, and setting in motion another political process with perhaps more open horizons. This new process might be tolerated until it, too, hits the wall. But until then, we need to understand how the June rebellion exploded in an environment characterized by a frozen stalemate, which produced a pervasive sense of closed future horizons–unfortunately for it, not felt by the party in power. Thus one can understand why, in spite of the military coming back to guide political life, the absence of any elected body, of any mechanism for translating popular will into acts of governance, and of a constitution, large numbers of Egyptians, likely a significant majority, seem to regard this condition as an opening rather than a closing of the system.

The rebels of June 2013 regard what they have done as a continuation of the revolution of January 2011. This may indicate that the meaning of the January revolution is becoming more apparent to them, even though they did not fully articulate or even comprehend the nature of what they were doing then. If this is the case then one may speak of an “unconscious” of the revolution that gradually emerges to the surface, sometimes in the form of sudden earthquakes, as one tries to experiment with building a post-revolutionary society. What is clear now is that the events we now know as the Arab Spring will constitute a long historical process. It will take many years to arrive at a stable destination defined by a new social consensus. This is because revolutions worthy of the name, at least to those who undertake them, are grand projects of total social renewal. This total social renewal, as is becoming evident to the revolutionaries themselves, is what they intended when they called for the fall of the “regime.” The old “regime,” I hear often now in one way or another, was not just a political institution, but a large cluster of daily worries, uncertainties, and harassments standing in the way of individual and collective self-determination. The “regime” was thus always a very large phenomenon. It was not just Mubarak; the regime was everyday life. It follows, then, that a post-revolutionary “regime” would likewise be as far-reaching in its implications, impact, and expectations.

The June rebellion may be regarded as a signpost along this long road. A signpost, because it declares again some resilient themes of social action from below that have already been elaborated in the January revolution. These themes cluster around related understandings of the ideas of legitimacy, peoplehood, and authority. However, its complete focus on combat tactics, that is, on method, and the absence of a new political imagination, has created a reality that threatens to bury all the above ideas in the ashes of civil war.

Revolutionary Legitimacy

One of the greatest indicators of how President Morsi misunderstood the condition facing him was his endless repetition of the fact that he was the elected president of the country, and thus represented “legitimacy.” It is important to understand why this argument held no persuasive power for his increasing number of opponents (and, conversely, why he could not hear the persuasive power of the alternative, “revolutionary legitimacy”). I heard many say that while they had voted for him a year before, now they changed their mind and wanted him deposed. Here, as in the original January revolution, revolutionary legitimacy trumps any other kind of legitimacy. Basic to this notion of revolutionary legitimacy are two constituting elements. First, revolutionary legitimacy is the property of any standpoint that represents a large enough social consensus. Second, formal procedures and rules–that is, legal or constitutional legitimacy–can be undone at any time by revolutionary legitimacy.

However, revolutionary legitimacy is not something that is constantly practiced: since January 2011, this concept has fluctuated in appearance depending on several factors, the most important of which is the existence of experienced and empirical evidence that what one was doing represented the popular will. Thus the success of the Tamarrod campaign in enlisting more than one quarter of the total population of this enormous country in a petition demanding the removal of the president, was a clear indication that the demand possessed more legitimacy than whatever the constitution or any law or court said. Without this campaign and the feelings it generated of the power of society over and above the state and its laws, it is possible that 30 June may have passed as just another day. Revolutionary legitimacy therefore first needed empirical proof of its existence, after which its work became easier.

In general, revolutionary legitimacy appears to be a constant undercurrent of the revolutionary climate. Like an active volcano, it makes its presence known through episodic rather than constant eruptions. As such, we should expect revolutionary legitimacy to be our subterranean but sometimes very noisy companion for a long time. Because it continues to be fed by two sources:1) acute alertness to all danger and developments that is a basic feature of revolutionary climates; and 2) the historically accumulating distrust of the state and its corrupt institutions, a distrust yet to be overcome by sufficient proof to the contrary.

“The People” and the Principle of Consensus

If consensus is what makes a revolution, it follows that majority rule is an inadequate means to establish a post-revolutionary system. The forty-nine percent are not willing to allow the fifty-one percent to rule them one hundred percent. In principle, all camps agreed that transitional governance should be based on a broad coalition, but could not agree on how exactly to do it. Morsi’s year was filled with countless acrimonies about who was responsible for the lack of cooperation. The mundane truth is: everybody, but in different ways. On the one hand, the Muslim Brotherhood made a fatal mistake when it disregarded Rashid al-Ghannushi’s sound advice based on his Tunisian experience, that it should not put too much stock into the transient fact that it won elections. It did not appreciate the fragility of its electoral majority (especially in the second round of the presidential elections, in which at least half of Morsi’s votes came from lukewarm supporters confronted by a bitter choice). The Brotherhood also vastly underestimated the sense of dread of an Islamic dictatorship they were arousing, whether unintentionally or due to poor experience or due to an actual inclination, among an increasing number of Egyptians. On the other hand, the formally organized opposition was hardly constructive. It rejected all offers of dialogue; acted as if it deserved to rule the country in spite of its dismal electoral performance; and wished that the Brotherhood would fail so that they could replace them. Its main spokesperson, Mohamed ElBaradei, began to openly call for military intervention in the political process long before the recent mass mobilizations.

By June, therefore, the January revolution appeared to be completely stalled, except of course from the point of view of the Brotherhood. But for so many others, the regime of the revolution was expected to showcase key features of the revolution itself. Thus, if one key feature of the revolution was consensus, then the absence of consensus after Mubarak appeared as a symptom of a stalled revolutionary process. The rapid decline of consensus during the Morsi year, and its replacement with endless acrimonies may be part of a revolutionary process itself, but the complete cessation of dialogue across political currents meant that a grand clash became unavoidable, and it appeared as another round of the revolution. This grand clash was preceded by several rounds of mobilization and counter-mobilization, from which no one learned anything other than the need for even more mobilization against one’s political enemies.

But the June rebellion was qualitatively different from all other struggles during the Morsi year, precisely because it appeared as something that was ethically larger than a mere struggle for power between a ruling and opposition parties. On 30 June demonstrators explicitly disassociated themselves from both camps, even though it is the opposition parties that stand to benefit most. But the June rebellion itself did not nominate anyone to replace Morsi or the Brotherhood. In this light it must be seen as a revolt against the idea that any single group or person should be able to control a system that came into being due to a collective popular revolution. Broadly based governance seems necessary not only because it better approximates the social consensus out of which the original revolution emerged; it is also essential given that it is now virtually impossible to implement any policy in any area without broad consent. An uncontrolled revolutionary climate stands in the way of any simple majority, just as it stands in the way of the state’s claim to be the only source of legitimate governance.  

Given the above, it seemed clear as we approached 30 June that the camp that most clearly resembled “the people,” rather than the camp that had only formal legitimacy would emerge victorious. Thus both camps mobilized completely, but their appearance was different. The rebels encompassed a broad social and ideological spectrum, including those with traditional religiosity, and thus were demographically closer to the makeup of the January revolution. The pro-Morsi camp, on the other hand, appeared monochrome by comparison: those it mobilized tended to be Islamist, though excluding the Salafis who abandoned Morsi and left the Brotherhood to their fate. Islamist rather than general revolutionary slogans were ubiquitous in the gatherings of the pro-Morsi camp. This monochrome character of the loyalists indicated a profound misunderstanding of the Egyptian Revolution, which has never been about Islamicizing society or the state and did not emerge out of religious motivation.

Still, one cannot describe the June rebellion as a people united against a regime, as in the January revolution, even though the size and energy of the mobilization was impressive. But unlike the January revolution, there is another camp now that has a solid presence in the streets, even though perhaps with less popularity than before. Unlike the Mubarak regime in January, this other camp is also able to mobilize large numbers throughout Egypt. It follows that the June rebellion more resembles a popular civil war than a popular revolution, with each camp possessing sufficient mobilizing capacity to convince itself that it stands for a cause worthy of sacrifice. But their appearance differs: one camp appears more as “the people” and is armed with revolutionary legitimacy, whereas the other appears more as a single faction and is armed with formal legitimacy. 

“The People” as Source of Authority and Anarchy

The above is part of the persistently anarchic character of the Egyptian Revolution. The June rebellion, like the January revolution, seemed disinterested in clear and solid leadership and preferred loose structures. The energetic Tamarrod campaign that set the stage included no known public figures and functioned more as a network of young activists dedicated to the single task of collecting millions of signatures. Like in January, no leader emerged to embody the spirit of the June rebellion, but qualities other than leadership seemed more important. The Tamarrod campaign exuded youth and vitality, aspects that initially led it to be dismissed by the formal opposition parties that, clustered around known public personalities, were capable only of obstruction but never of generating sustained popular mobilization. By contrast, the youth factor proved to be just as important in June as it had been in January, at least in the initial phases of the mobilization. One can say that it also imparted youthful characteristics into later phases, when mobilization became multi-generational, but continued to be characterized by lightness of movement, resistance to clear ideologies, preference for action as a means to knowledge, and tactical inventiveness.

In another respect, anarchy in June, just as in January, seems closely associated with a patriotic, rather than nationalist, conception of peoplehood. “The people” remains an abstract idea, and no one stands in for this abstraction as a whole. The profusion of pictures of the defense minister who “resolved” the crisis and the lavish praise of him in Tahrir afterwards was not associated with any call for him to rule the country, something that he seemed to be wise enough to not want to do. In general, the idea of “the people” remains inescapable for a revolution that can only be based on a conviction that it represents a social consensus. But "the people" are not producing anything like a Nasser or a Khomeini who would appear as great as the idea of "the people" itself. This manner of using the idea of peoplehood ensures that the revolution based on it would be well-disposed to managers rather than leaders. This expectation is evident now in the broad support expressed immediately after the fall of Morsi of the notion that the interim government should be one of technocratic experts rather than savior-leaders or even politicians.

Finally, even though the target of the June rebellion was an Islamist government, it is important to remember that it could not have succeeded without the mobilization of ordinary conservatism and traditional piety against the idea of a religious government. And that is because we are speaking of a country characterized by pervasive but pragmatic social conservatism, coupled with preference for informality and results rather than rigid, formal rules. The fact that a large number of traditional religious individuals joined the June rebellion against an Islamic party in power shows not their “liberalism,” but something more basic. It shows their resistance to the idea that religion should be transformed from a voluntary ethical system that is controlled and interpreted by the pious individual situationally and as needed, into a rigid structure of laws imposed by a government, and thus outside of the control of the pious individual. If the latter were to happen, religion would be transformed from a source of freedom from other human authorities and of self-discipline, into its exact opposite: a system of control and discipline by other human authorities. Noteworthy here is the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood was not opposed by so many traditional religious individuals when it was not the government.

Violence as Method?

While questions of legitimacy, peoplehood, and authority have been basic elements in debates about the nature of revolution during the two and a half years since it began, a few words are warranted about a new dark feature that has also become a companion of the revolutionary climate. One can document a steadily increasing role of violence, not only as sporadic instances but also as a tolerated tactic by those who formally disavow it and do not themselves practice it. It is important to remember that in June the actual violence happened away from the sites of mass mobilizations, except for the armed attack on the crowds around Cairo University. But among activists I did not detect any particular revulsion to violence, and more of a sense that it may be necessary. I am referring specifically to the storming of the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo, but also of several provincial Brotherhood offices during the preceding months, and the increasing crescendo of mutual attacks during the last year including senseless sectarian murders.

Since the Port Said sports stadium massacre there have been numerous unexplained incidents that have often been blamed on the “deep state” of the old regime. However, I have observed a number of events, including the burning of the Egyptian Academy, to doubt this explanation. Among those who were active in demonstrations at least, I did observe an increasing tolerance and expectation of violence, and in many cases even a feeling that somehow it may be necessary as part of the process of change. This issue is too complex to be adequately discussed here, but I only want to stress one dimension of violence that is related to polarization.

The road to June was filled with ominous feelings that were absent from the January revolution. The mood was dark, each camp saw in the other absolute evil, and also felt existentially threatened. This environment was itself for a long time fed by a constant stream of rumors that were usually reported as facts if they were politically useful. Unverified rumors of the worst kind were paraded as yet further definitive proof of the irredeemable nature of one’s political enemies, including by intellectuals who should have known to communicate with discernment and nuance. The opposition saw the Brotherhood as a real threat, bent on irreversibly dominating state and society. Similarly, the Brotherhood saw in their opponents a will to destroy them and a bitter hatred they did not understand. In short, it felt like a condition of total war. Some have pointed to Algeria in the 1990s as a possible scenario for Egypt, which is all the more reason for heightened sensibilities, inclusiveness, and openness at the moment. But I do not think anything we have seen in the past year has prepared anyone for this gratuitousness.  

But overall, the fact that after two and half years of constant dynamism we still have features of rebellion that are common with the January revolution and others that differ from it, suggests that we have a single revolutionary project. This project involves a process of learning, unavoidable as it is even if occasionally one learns the wrong lesson. But learning proper to revolution is one that produces a new imagination, and not just tactical inventiveness. We should hope for this imagination because it is good not just for Egypt but for the entire Arab Spring and for the world at large. That is because unless it is a suffocating, immobilizing dictatorship, what happens in Egypt will not stay in Egypt.