Keep the aid and the influence
I expect flak for this, which was published last night by al-monitor.com under the heading “US should not cut aid for Egyptian military”:
The American reaction to the Egyptian coup (yes, it was a coup, no matter how popular) is schizophrenic.
The Obama administration, with significant support in Congress, accepts the new situation and is trying to make the best of it, pushing behind the scenes for the Egyptian army to re-establish civilian authority and move quickly to revise the Constitution and hold new elections, which have been promised within six months.
You’ll have to go to al-monitor.com for the rest, as they don’t allow me to publish the whole thing.
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One thought on “Keep the aid and the influence”
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I agree with your main point – that the aid should not be cut off (even if, in a purely technical sense, the ouster of Morsi may have represented a coup). But this whole situation in Egypt raises a number of additional questions.
One is the prospect of a democratic Egypt. Do we automatically assume that democracy in Egypt would necessarily mean the same that democracy means in the West? If not, are we ready to accept whatever outcome democratization of Egypt might produce? Because democracy does not always bring either prosperity or stability. Nor does it always imply the acceptance of Western democratic values, such as human rights, freedom of speech and expression, minority rights and so on.
If, however, we insist exclusively on a democratic Egypt along the lines of the Western-style, liberal democracy, the question is whether such a scenario is possible at all? First, Egypt has a thousands of years long tradition of being ruled in a clearly autocratic manner, of one form or the other, and regardless of whether at a particular point in time it was occupied by a foreign power or was a free country. If a certain trend lasts for so long – and lasts virtually without interruption – there must be strong reason for that. In other words, we need to ask ourselves can a country like Egypt be handled in any way that is not autocratic, or at least semi-autocratic, no matter which particular force will be in command at a given time. This semi-autocratic model that I mentioned actually means a form of democracy, but one that is strictly controlled by an institution – preferably the army – powerful enough to step in and restore order when necessary. Something similar to Kemalism in Turkey – a combination of limited pro-Western secular democracy and Enlightened absolutism adapted to the modern world.
Finally, the question of all questions is whether a true, stable democracy that respects all positive values and achievements of the Western civilization is possible without economic prosperity (or basic social justice in a society)? I fear it’s not. And that’s exactly the biggest problem for Egypt when it comes to democratization. Simply, the country’s geography makes it inherently poor, with too many people directly dependent on government aid, which, in turn, is likewise dependent on foreign power’s interests. All in all, Egypt is virtually doomed to constantly maneuver in an extremely complex balancing act – whoever is nominally in power and whichever political system is formally in place.