As citizens and policymakers alike wait to see where the 2011 Egyptian revolution will head, the anxiety may come with understandable sense of déjà-vu. Some 59 years ago, in fact, British colonialists faced similar turmoil, following a 1952 coup in which the Free Officers, a group of junior military officers led by Gamal Nasser, deposed the corrupt and ineffective King Farouk. As today, previous Western support for an unpopular autocrat complicated relationships with the new revolutionaries. Professor Kirk Beattie of Simmons College told the HPR, “Just as the British were looking over the shoulder of the king in ‘52 and constraining the foreign policy behavior of the king, so in more recent times have the successive Egyptian administrations, first Sadat in particular and then Mubarak, also had the Americans looking over their shoulder and constraining their policy behavior.” The parallels are worrying, but they are not complete. Significant differences between the anti-colonial movement and the modern revolution make 2011 an extraordinary moment of opportunity for American foreign relations and for the revolution.
Rise of the Arab Street
Although both 1952 and 2011 saw revolutions in Egypt, the modes, goals, and outcomes of both vary greatly. “It should be ironic that people are carrying posters of Nasser in the crowd,” Joel Gordon, professor of Middle East history at the University of Arkansas told the HPR, “because he put in place the system that Egyptians have been struggling to get out from under.” Indeed, if 2011 echoes 1952, it also repudiates the regime the Free Officers left behind, a military regime that turned into a dictatorship, stable only through suppression and boldfaced electoral manipulation.
From the beginning, then, the 2011 revolutionaries distinguished themselves from the Free Officers by their emphasis on grassroots advocacy rather than top-down motivation. Jeff Goodwin, a professor at New York University, credited the Free Officers as leaders of an “extraordinary coup” that honestly attempted to address real social problems. Still, regime change began in the ranks of the military. Not so in 2011, which saw millions of Egyptians in the street. It is safe to say that the Egyptian government today retains legitimacy and popularity of the sort which predecessors never enjoyed.
Nasser’s Tightrope
Further, many of the ultimate defects of the 1952 revolution were born from historical circumstances now dissipated. When Gamal Nasser gained the presidency, he inherited a complex relationship with the Western states. Egypt’s defeat by Israel in 1948 proved a final discrediting of Farouk’s regime and inculcated in Nasser the eagerness to build a stronger Egyptian military. Once in office, one of the president’s first moves was to seek an arms deal with the United States. Yet Washington’s refusal to sell arms to the Egyptians, followed by tit-for-tat diplomacy, soon pushed Nasser to purchase arms from Soviet suppliers instead.
As his term continued, Nasser attempted to steer a middle path in the Cold War, independent of the two superpowers. Claims Gordon, “this was the great era of nonalignment, but it was not possible in any practical sense at that point in the Cold War.” Stephen Calleya, a professor at the University of Malta, expressed agreement, noting, “In the Cold War context, there was a completely alternative and much more antagonistic international system. You had the two superpowers, you had the patron-client system, and of course the Arab world found itself in the thick of things very quickly.”
Nonetheless, Nasser’s nonalignment does not mean that the 2011 revolution should turn out similarly. “Today, it’s a completely different international system,” argued Calleya, “an international system that offers—or should offer— opportunities of engagement where mutual interests and commonalities can play out and where the Arab street can be direct players.” Where before Egyptian foreign policy could only shuttle from the West to the Soviets, today’s Cairo can hope for full integration into the world community.
It’s Not Always About Us
While the Nasser legacy of nationalism remains, 1952’s slogans of national sovereignty increasingly focus on checks against government rather than opposing foreign powers. “What we’re seeing now is an assertion of democracy,” Goodwin told the HPR, “recognition that there can be no national politics without democracy and that for the nation to speak, you need democratic institutions. You can’t have unelected, unaccountable military leaders claiming to represent the will of the nation.”
Indeed, the conversation about internal sovereignty, at least, leaves the language of anti-colonialism behind. Nada El-Khouny, a college student in Cairo and a participant in eighteen days of protests in Tahrir Square, deflected the HPR’s questions on how protesters felt about the United States’ role in 2011. “Honestly, in comparison to other situations there was hardly a reference to America or what America’s role in this is,” she explained. “It was very much a focus, for the first time in a long time, on internal affairs.” Rather than being defined by foreign influence, Tahrir Square declared an end, on its own terms, to the military regime left behind by the Free Officers.
Game Over, Start Again?
If the Egyptian revolution can consolidate sovereign rule by the people, the new government’s foreign relations will commence in a changed world. To Calleya, 2011 represents not just the end of the anticolonial era but an extraordinary opportunity for Western powers. “If the Arab street have turned the page by standing up against the system that was stifling their aspiration,” says Calleya, “now we should also be honest and respectable enough to say, ‘We also made mistakes and now we want to correct that strategic error.’” Democratic rhetoric on the streets of Cairo shows a readiness for friendly integration into the international system, and Western nations have a great deal to gain by trusting revolutionary aspiration.
Such optimism must be tempered by the recognition that no true democracy to emerge from Tahrir Square will be as hospitable to the interests of the United States as the Mubarak regime, as several old sticking points will be impossible to avoid. “At minimum,” Gordon told the HPR, the U.S. has to “stand back and let Egyptians determine their own political structure.” That could include watching the Muslim Brotherhood organize as a political party and begin entering candidates in elections. Furthermore, most Egyptians wish to challenge the recent status quo in Israel, an area in which Mubarak proved relatively quiescent.
Egyptian democracy won’t be easy. Its first manifestations spooked the Free Officers into establishing a military regime instead. Yet nearly sixty years on, now that the political order of 1952 has been destroyed, the West has no choice but to embrace the Arab street. If fellow nations fail to respect Egypt’s sovereign interests, the world community may lose Egypt as surely as Nasser turned to the Soviets in 1967.
Allan Bradley ‘11 is a Contributing Writer.