Lifting the Lid in Egypt

A stable authoritarianism like the one that dominated Egypt for 50 years has high costs: spreading corruption, routine police brutality, the stifling of creative energies, the monopolization of power by people who really care about nothing but extending that monopoly. As the years drone by, a sort of depression can settle on the nation, expressed in despondent jokes, low productivity, and a desire to emigrate.

In their defense, the authoritarians always say that without them, chaos would break out. And they are not necessarily wrong. Look around the world, and you see that the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule is often accompanied by violence and some measure of social breakdown. Yugoslavia is an extreme case, but there has also been great turmoil in Thailand, South Africa, Iraq, Russia, and other places. Sometimes the conflict that erupts is ethnic, other times (as in Thailand) between peasants and the urban middle class, and in other places (South Africa) it takes the form of a massive surge in crime. It is easy to blame the outgoing authoritarians for the crisis, but even if they sometimes stoke the fires in a bid to hold onto power, I do not think they are responsible for the overall problem. Entirely peaceful transitions like those in Poland and Czechoslovakia are rare in history, and some level of turmoil is much more common.

I was thinking about this because of yesterday's soccer riot in Egypt, which left 74 dead. So far as I can tell, there was no special political animosity between the fans of the two teams; neither was associated with any particular political party. The only complaint against the police seems to be that they did nothing, and I have seen no accusations against them for fomenting the unrest. Instead it seems that Egyptian soccer fans are just a rowdy bunch, and that their lessening fear of the police has unleashed their basest instincts. Oppressed, Egypt's people built up a reservoir of rage and frustration that powered their political protests. Elections and parliamentary maneuvering are not very good channels for those feelings, so some of the rage may explode in other ways. Of course, the citizens of democracies also have reservoirs of rage that sometimes explode, but the problem is worse in countries experiencing profound political change. A lid has been lifted, and what boils out is sometimes ugly.

I have also been thinking, about Egypt, that nations embarking on democracy often do not vote in the way the leaders of pro-democracy movements would like. In Russia, liberal reformers have been marginalized, and the only ideas with wide electoral appeal are authoritarian nationalism and communism. This seems to be changing now, but certainly the immediate aftermath of the revolution led people to recoil against chaos. In Thailand, the middle class engineers of their democracy were shocked that their compatriots, especially the peasants, voted for a populist regime that they regarded as a theft ring. In eastern Europe the dominant parties have been conservative, nationalist, and religious, not exactly what Vaclav Havel and his friends had in mind. And in Egypt the people voted overwhelmingly for religious parties that have pledged to put Islam first and democracy second. How they will behave in office remains to be seen, but it is certainly possible that they will ally with conservative army officers to ensure that Egypt changes as little as possible.

None of this is any reason to despair. Political change is messy. Democracy is not a magic formula for change and reform, and those who thought the fall of Mubarak would immediately turn Egypt into Turkey were deluded. If that happens, it will take decades. Meanwhile, democracy is just plain better than authoritarian rule, and it opens up the possibility of other vital changes, such as an accountable judicial system and reduced corruption. The struggle for freedom and justice is never finished, and change never happens as quickly as revolutionaries would like.