On Egypt (and Tunisia and Libya)

Kai Bird has a good piece in Slate today on Obama's stance regarding the Egyptian protests. He makes (admittedly in passing) a point that I think is an important one:

This must be the Obama administration's fear: that after Mubarak an anti-Western, Islamist regime will come to power, most probably through the popular election of the Muslim Brotherhood. If elections are held, this outcome is not merely a probability; it is a near certainty. After decades of repressing the secular opposition, the Brotherhood remains the only political movement with an organized membership capable of providing nongovernmental charitable services. This gives it a reliable political base in the slums of Cairo and Alexandria.

This is the same point that Slavoj Žižek has made numerous times: that the Capitalist world's fear of the secular Left (which is probably what Bird means) outweighs their fear of the religious Right (in the form of the Muslim brotherhood). There has therefore for many decades been a concerted attempt to suppress the secular Left in, just to cite one example, the Arab world, leaving the Islamists as the only opposition movement with the organizational capacity to actually effectively oppose. In this sense we, the Capitalist West, have made our bed and now must lie in it.

But there is a broader point to be made here about the importance of civil society in the fostering of effective political opposition. Bird attributes the Brotherhood's power to being "the only political movement with an organized membership capable of providing nongovernmental charitable services." In other words, he's talking about the Muslim Brotherhood basically in terms of a civil society group. The admirable Anne Applebaum (incidentally the wife of Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski) makes the point in her own piece in Slate this week:

The benign dictators we have supported, or anyway tolerated—the Zine al-Abidine Ben Alis, the Hosni Mubaraks, the various kings and princes—have stayed in power by preventing economic development, clamping down on free speech, keeping tight control of education, and above all by stamping down hard on anything resembling civil society. Every year, more books are translated into Greek—a language spoken by 11 million people—than into Arabic, a language spoken by more than 220 million. Independent organizations of all kinds, from political parties and private businesses to women's groups and academic societies have been watched, harassed, or banned altogether.

Civil society can play a role as an alternate power structure to the political hierarchy in any given country - in dictatorships, then, civil society can be a potentially large threat to the government. The effective repression of civil society in a country like North Korea, for example, is the reason why any kind of opposition movement in that country is not only nonexistent, but practically unthinkable.

Curiously, this is one thing that Applebaum gets rather wrong. Hisham Matar, writing ten days ago in The Guardian, discussed the probability of the Tunisian uprising spreading to his native Libya. He notes that Tunisia's elite had long been pro-civil society, while Libya's has been anti. He says, furthermore:

One of the main reasons Tunisians were able to rid themselves of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali [...] was less because of the claim, endlessly repeated in the western media, that Tunisia is more European in its thinking than its neighbours, and more because of the extent to which Tunisian civil society and state bureaucracy have been allowed to develop since independence.

We Libyans are just as hungry for a just and accountable government as our Tunisian brothers and sisters. The lack of resilient institutions will make our task more difficult.

The point that Applebaum misses is that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were only possible because these are relatively well-developed countries with a fairly robust tradition of civil society. This is good, as it means the countries have a power structure to fall back on if and when the government falls. But Matar's distinction may become the relevant one when it comes to these uprisings spreading - organizing revolution in a country without an existing alternate power structure is likely much harder, and in some cases impossible.