This is your life in Russia

Demonstrators against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Copyright ZUMApress/Forum

The Polish weekly Polityka writes this week about political opposition in Putin's Russia and what will come next for Russia. (Sadly for non-polonophones Google Translate cannot for some reason deal with Polityka's webpage. So you'll just have to learn Polish, I guess.) Interestingly, the article reports on a sense among Russia experts that there could be major Egypt-style public protests in 2012 if the Presidential election is rigged, a suggestion which I have seen repeatedly dismissed in the Anglophone press:

[The director of the Institute of Contemporary Development] Igor Jurgens even warns the Kremlin against a repeat of the Belarusian scenario after 2012: "If the extra-parliamentary opposition is not allowed to participate in the elections, the stage of street democracy awaits Russia." [...] The majority of observers of the Russian political scene consider that the Egyptian option will be repeated in Russia if the economic situation turns radically worse.

And judging from this article, there are definitely signs that the political and economic pressure is causing people to crack. But don't get your hopes up that it will be change for the better.

It is nothing strange that Russians want change, and the political scientist Alexei Malashenko compares Russia to a "tank of hot water" coming to a boil, like in 1917 and 1991. Already last year in Kaliningrad 20,000 people protested against increased municipal fees and a road tax - a number unheard of in Russia for some time. On the wave of protests the then-governor was recalled. Young generations are also becoming radicalized, which was shown all too clearly by the December pogrom of immigrants in Moscow, when thousands of fanatical soccer fans hunted down immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

There's a certain parallel, perhaps, between this kind of militant Nationalism and militant Islam in the Middle East - and when it comes to Russia, I definitely fear that free and fair elections would produce a, frankly, Fascist government. But as the article points out, Nationalism is on the one hand encouraged by the regime itself as a way of undermining the liberal opposition, and on the other is a response to the very conditions that the regime has created. So in the long term, Russia would be better off. In the meantime it's pretty scary, though.

A new Egypt

The weekend referendum on changes to the Egyptian constitution passed overwhelmingly. The New York Times has an interesting breakdown of the voting coalitions for and against the amendments - there are some things that might surprise you. For one thing the groups most strongly in favor of the reforms are the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the remains of Mubarak's NDP.
 On the other hand many of the original activists, including Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, and the Coptic community are strongly opposed, arguing the process is too rushed and it will usher in authoritarian, possibly Islamist, rule. Hani Shukrallah, an activist in one of the new liberal parties, notes that there is a large urban-rural divide:

“I saw one sign that said, ‘If you vote no you are a follower of America and Baradei, and if you vote yes you are a follower of God,’ ” he said. “The idea is that Muslims will vote yes and Copts and atheists will vote no.” [...]
The results called into question how much the expected front-runners were really in tune with Egyptian voters.
Most “no” votes emerged from Cairo and Alexandria, Mr. Shukrallah noted, whereas support flowed in heavily from the provinces.
“The revolution was a revolution of the big cities,” he said. “The provinces are just not there. The secular values that drove the revolution have not reached them.”

Libya after Qaddafi

Slate does a pretty good job of laying out the challenges in a post-Qaddafi Libya (if we ever get there - which is no sure thing).

Unlike in Egypt, "the army" is not a coherent institution. Qaddafi took care to politicize the military and divide its commanders in order to prevent a coup or other challenges to his rule. Moreover, the army was involved in interventions, such as a disastrous war in Chad, that tarnished its credibility—its battlefield record is not a source of pride. So the military is less able to lead the country out of the mess.
Nor is there a bureaucratic structure that can simply resume basic government functions under new leaders. Qaddafi created one of the world's most bizarre governments, with "people's committees" playing important roles at the local level. Indeed, Qaddafi himself did not hold a government position in any formal sense, even though he was clearly recognized as "the leader." This personalized and politicized system is part of what Libyans hate; it should not survive its creator. But removing Qaddafi's regime demands more than just change at the top.

My suspicion right now is we're looking at a Romania-type scenario in Libya - Qaddafi is gone (in my view he'll probably get the Ceauşescu treatment), but all the old stalwarts of the regime are still in power. That's the game I see them playing with all of these resignations - people like the ex-Interior Minister can claim to have been opposed to Qaddafi all along and introduce a kind of pseudo-democratic one-party rule. But who knows at this stage - almost anything could happen.

And the world changes

From The Guardian's liveblog of the events in Egypt:

Egyptian state TV has bowed to the inevitable and is just showing al-Jazeera's feed.

Pretty much sums it up, really.

"Armenia: Egypt Events Energizing Opposition in Yerevan" by Marianna Grigoryan

News from Eurasianet.com (the best website ever) of the Egypt Effect spreading to Armenia:

Inspired by recent developments in North Africa, Armenia’s largest opposition coalition is preparing for “large-scale rallies” in Yerevan’s Freedom Square starting on February 18.
The government’s public response to the announcement by Levon Ter-Petrosian’s Armenian National Congress (ANC) has been muted. But official actions suggest that authorities are taking the potential for an “Egypt Effect” in Armenia seriously. Soon after the ANC revealed its protest plans, Yerevan city officials countered that Freedom Square would be off limits because it would be the scene of “sporting and cultural events” from February 15-March 15.
ANC leaders say that if they can’t secure permission to rally in Freedom Square via PR efforts and official application procedures, they will simply protest without a city permit.

From The Guardian's Egypt protests live blog

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad posted on the Guardian live blog some responses to the protests in Egypt from the rest of the Arab world. The most interesting response is from Iraqis:

The Iraqis I have talked to all expressed a sense of shame. A friend told me on the phone from Baghdad: "We Iraqis looted and gutted our museum in 2003 while the Egyptians protected theirs. They protected houses and public buildings while Baghdad was reduced to rubble within days of the fall of the regime. Egyptians love their country; they are patriotic; we weren't."

"The View from Tahrir", by Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof writing on his blog about what he saw on Tahrir Square today:

In my area of Tahrir, the thugs were armed with machetes, straight razors, clubs and stones. And they all had the same chants, the same slogans and the same hostility to journalists. They clearly had been organized and briefed. So the idea that this is some spontaneous outpouring of pro-Mubarak supporters, both in Cairo and in Alexandria, who happen to end up clashing with other side — that is preposterous. It’s difficult to know what is happening, and I’m only one observer, but to me these seem to be organized thugs sent in to crack heads, chase out journalists, intimidate the pro-democracy forces and perhaps create a pretext for an even harsher crackdown.

This sounds like a classic case of agents provocateurs. I think it's fair to say that this kind of thing is in the standard repertory of your tinpot dictator - empty the jails, pay off the poor to protest in your favor and coordinate the whole thing with plainclothes policemen, that kind of thing - and I had expected that a lot of the looting that was going on in Egypt already was an instance of government-sponsored mischief-making to simulate a security crisis.

I'd thought the situation was so far gone that Mubarak had no control over the security forces anymore, but this might suggest otherwise. If these are agents provocateurs, then this means that the police are still on Mubarak's side. Again, the actions of the military will be key. There's every chance Mubarak could send them in to arrest a lot of protesters, or, at worst, shoot a lot of people. I don't think it would come to that, but if it does it will mean Mubarak has completely given up on any pretense of a popular mandate. Another option is he could try to send them in, and the military could refuse. But the soldiers in Tahrir Square not intervening is not a good sign.

In my view, Mubarak is trying to hold onto power so that he can ensure a smooth succession to his new Vice President and make sure that the regime survives without him. I would guess that the Obama administration implicitly supports this, as in their view it would be the next-best thing to the status quo ante: a stable, pro-American, pro-Israel Egypt with the Islamists shut firmly out of power. We'll see what happens. I am very suddenly much less optimistic for the chances for democracy in Egypt.

"Army 'not to use force' in Egypt ", Al Jazeera English

The Egyptian army has declared that it will not use force to remove the protesters from the streets. In my opinion, this means Mubarak's goose is officially cooked. Political power at its most basic stems from control of the means of violence, and Mubarak no longer is able to make the police or the military do what he tells them to.

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.