[The below excerpt is from a New Left Review interview with Hazim Kandil on the origins, course, and future trajectory of the Egyptian Revolution. For the full interview, click here]
Mubarak has gone, but the apparatuses on which his dictatorship rested have not vanished. The armed forces currently hold ultimate power, in the shape of the Supreme Military Council. How should the Egyptian military be characterized, and what role is it now likely to play?
When a regime has come to power through military force, either by coup or conquest, it typically issues into a tripartite structure, with a division of labour between its three component parts, each crystallizing into separate institutions. The first component of this ‘power triangle’ consists of those who take over daily government through a political apparatus, typically composed of a presidency (or monarchy) and a ruling party. The second component consists of military officers who handle domestic repression through a multilayered security complex, which includes police, intelligence and paramilitary forces. The third group consists of those who return to the barracks and continue to represent the military proper. Over time, each develops different agendas, which observers mistakenly minimize or conflate. For institutions develop their own identities, form their own corporate interests and shape their members in their own image. Thus in the case of Egypt, analysts across the board tend to speak of Mubarak, Omar Suleiman and Ahmed Shafiq as military figures, because Mubarak was head of the air force thirty-five years ago, Suleiman was an army general over twenty years ago, Shafiq commanded the air force ten years ago. But this sort of classification is illusive. Once they pass into the regime’s political or security apparatus, these agents no longer represent the interest of the military as an institution.
By temperament and training the military is not particularly bent on exercising either direct governance or domestic repression. Its interest tends to lie in enhancing its firepower and overall combat readiness, in addition to the economic status of the armed forces as a whole. The officer corps is often content, as in Turkey or Latin America, with setting up a political process in which there are competing parties, and then stepping back to act as the guardian of the system it has just created—intervening only when necessary through warnings or limited ‘corrective’ coups.
Quite different is the security coterie, an unnatural creature that can thrive only in an authoritarian environment. Should the regime democratize, it becomes completely deflated, its influence diminished. Equally important, its members realize they will be held accountable for the atrocities they committed; compared to the military, the security apparatus is much more implicated in human-rights violations and much less able to guarantee amnesty for its own. When there is a democratic change, the new rulers flinch from antagonizing the military, but do not hesitate to mark security officers for trial. So unlike the military, security organs always push for authoritarian rule to continue.
The political leadership in this system is normally suspended in the middle. It is vulnerable in so far as it has no direct means of repressing the population without the support of the military or the security complex. At the same time, it does not necessarily require a permanent ultra-authoritarian setting; it can still cling to power while offering limited compromises leading to so-called ‘semi-’ or ‘quasi-liberalization’. Because of these varying dispositions and capacities, the three components of this kind of regime both cooperate and compete, their interests both overlapping and diverging all the time, according to domestic or international developments. What complicates the picture even further is that none of these components is monolithic in character; each has its own internal subdivisions and tensions.
[For the NLR interview with Hazim Kandil, click here.]