New Texts Out Now: Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance

[Cover of Jason Brownlee, \"Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance\"] [Cover of Jason Brownlee, \"Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance\"]

New Texts Out Now: Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance

By : Jason Brownlee

Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Jason Brownlee (JB): I had a series of experiences in 2009 that got me thinking about the intersection of US foreign policy and human rights abuses in Egypt. First, I was in Egypt in January 2009, during the massive protests against Operation Cast Lead (Israel`s military assault on the Gaza Strip, which ended just before Obama took office). The demonstrations eclipsed in size anything organized by Kefaya (the Egyptian Movement for Change) and other political reform movements during prior years—at least since the anti-Iraq War protests of March 2003. This showed me that if I wanted to understand what the opposition in Egypt wanted, I should pay more attention to their critique of Mubarak`s foreign policies, including his alignment with the United States. (This epiphany got a timely boost from a critical Al Jazeera documentary on the thirtieth anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.)

The next phase of this awakening for me was reading literature of leading Egyptian dissidents that summer, books by Mohamed El Sayed Said, Tarek El Bishry, Ibrahim Eissa, and Fahmy Howeidy. Their works underscored the importance of the US-Egyptian alliance as a subject of critique from intellectuals across the political spectrum. With this inkling of an idea, late in summer 2009, I participated in a conference of Egyptians and Americans who talked about, among other things, US "democracy promotion" in Egypt. But US collaboration with Mubarak`s repression was off the table. When I said the surest way for US officials to promote democracy in Egypt would be to stop participating in authoritarianism, you could hear the crickets chirp. I realized then that I was probing something un-discussable in polite company, the realm of the "taken-for-granted," to use a Gramscian phrase. That fall I wrote and presented the paper that was the germ of this book.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

JB: The book shows the bipartisan US tradition of backing the Egyptian regime, since 1973, to guarantee Egypt`s alignment in US geostrategy. It embeds domestic challenges to Sadat, Mubarak, and the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) in an account of the bilateral relationship based on untapped primary materials. Researching this book, I interviewed nearly all the former living US ambassadors to Cairo, several members of the George W. Bush administration, and top Egyptian officials involved in the US-Egyptian alliance. I also drew upon the Wikileaks cables. The evidence from these sources shows the United States prioritizing stability in Egypt over democracy—in order to maintain the protection of US military forces in the Persian Gulf and preserve the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

JB: My prior book, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization, as well as several articles, focused on the domestic sources of robust authoritarianism. I focused on the role of ruling parties in maintaining electoral dominance, the impact of elections in enabling democratic transitions, and the conditions that encourage hereditary succession in modern autocracies. Democracy Prevention follows the general problem of authoritarianism and popular emancipation beyond the borders of Egypt. The book shows that contemporary authoritarianism is transnational, co-constituted by domestic and foreign elites.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JB: I tried to keep the book concise and punchy. Not counting the notes, the main text runs 177 pages and it is written in plain English. I hope anyone who wants to learn what US and Egyptian officials have been doing privately (while they publicly talk about democracy) will pick it up.

J: How would you like to see this book affect current political and intellectual debates regarding Egypt, particularly in terms of US-Egyptian relations?

JB: I did not write the book with a policy audience in mind, although I think practitioners can benefit from it. My hope is that the book will give laypersons in the United States, Egypt, and elsewhere a resource for exploring their own questions about the US-Egyptian alliance. More ambitiously, I would like to see it shift the discussion away from superficial talk of democracy promotion and toward reformulating the priorities and interests that make Egyptian authoritarianism so valuable in the eyes of US policymakers. Rethinking US policies toward Egypt, I think, should begin with taking public opinion in Egypt seriously.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JB: I am exploring whether the argument from the book applies to other bilateral relationships that the United States maintains around the world. I think this is a valuable side of US foreign policy that political science research on international politics has ignored. If we look around the world, we can find many other post-cold war autocracies that have been strategically vital for the United States. Further, toward these pro-US regimes in places like Bahrain and Uzbekistan, Washington placed security interests ahead of local democracy. The US-Egyptian relationship, therefore, is not unique. It is an instance of a broader phenomenon.

Excerpts from Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance

From INTRODUCTION

Just as officials within each government have their differences, participants in the US-Egyptian network periodically disagree. More importantly, however, they share certain assumptions, taken-for-granted ideas that establish the conceptual frameworks within which they identify and solve problems. For example, the primary functions of post-1973 US-Egyptian relations—Israeli security and US force projection to the Gulf—are not on the table for discussion; they are the frame of reference for everyone at the table. Two other core assumptions undergird the bilateral alliance: distrust of popular sovereignty and an acceptance of US primacy.

Although some US officials advocate liberalizing reforms in Egypt, they accept that a sudden opening of public participation could bring unknown figures to power and jeopardize strategic cooperation. No US president, much less his Egyptian interlocutors, wants Egypt to follow the way of Iran, whether through elections or revolution. Indeed, even a subtler mix of populism and nationalism could jeopardize Egyptian support for US strategy. It follows that elections and political reform are welcome only insofar as they impede extremists and enhance stability.

The second area of consensus is a binational hierarchy. Despite the two countries’ codependency, Egypt has been a vital subordinate in US foreign policy, not an equal partner. This arrangement stems from political and economic asymmetries that thirty years of linkage have not ameliorated.

US antagonism towards overt Islamist movements shows the power of the unspoken assumptions of the US-Egyptian alliance.[1] After the USSR collapsed, US policy makers began regarding religious conservatism in the Muslim World as a strategic challenge to US power. Washington opposed any traditional Islamic group taking power, even through elections, at the expense of a pro-US government. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Edward Djerejian vowed the United States would not accept “one man, one vote, one time."[2] He implied that Islamist movements would use democracy to take power then shut it down after they had won elections. Given US reticence about democracy, however, his stance had more to do with preventing assertive nationalism than preempting authoritarianism. When Djerejian spoke, the only serious electoral challenge to Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) in Egypt was the Muslim Brotherhood, a leading critic of US and Israeli policies. The problem for Washington was not that pro-US authoritarianism would be followed by more authoritarianism, but that the successor government, democratic or not, could turn Egyptian policies away from US preferences. Hence, US officials worked to check Islamic political activity, either by cultivating a liberal option between the NDP and the Muslim Brotherhood or by squarely backing Mubarak.

From CHAPTER THREE: THE SUCCESSION PROBLEM

On November 6, 2003, with the US presidential election only a year away, Bush delivered the seminal address of the Freedom Agenda. The occasion was the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Reagan’s creation for aiding anti-Soviet dissidents and the backbone of US democracy programs after the Cold War.[3] Bush declared “a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East." He dismissed doubts about rapid reform, calling them a form of the same “cultural condescension" that had wrongly forecast undemocratic fates for Germany, Japan, and India. His volume rising with indignation, Bush scoffed, “Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are ‘ready’ for democracy—as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress."[4] The United States would emulate prior administrations that had nurtured democracy after World War II and after the Berlin Wall fell. Already, Bush saw “the stirrings of Middle Eastern democracy" in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, and the “multiparty political system" of Yemen. He challenged Saudi Arabia to give its people “a greater role," and he pronounced that “The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East." The line drew hearty applause. Democratic development would take time, but Bush implied that the clock was ticking: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty."[5]

The implications for US foreign policy were potentially vast. If officials genuinely saw democracy inside Egypt as a precondition for US security, then the United States would need to shift from backing an iron-fisted autocrat to accepting popular sovereignty, wherever that might lead. However, the strategy behind Bush’s words did not entail such a radical break. Even the most ardent democracy promoters did not want to risk, much less seek, Mubarak’s downfall. The septuagenarian had no vice president, and White House officials wondered about succession.[6] Opinion polls from Egypt showed an almost total rejection of US strategic priorities—attitudes that would surely shape official Egyptian policy if there were ever to be a democratically elected government. In the absence of a clear and friendly successor, opposition figures—whether religious conservatives or secular nationalists—could take power and potentially revise their country’s international alignments, especially since Egypt’s top-heavy political system granted the president tremendous discretion. In November, concerns grew that the Egyptian regime might face a sudden change of ruler; midway through a nationally televised address, Mubarak faltered and took an unscheduled thirty-minute break. Members of the presidential entourage called it a case of severe flu, but Egyptian and foreign observers speculated anew about how long Mubarak would last.[7]

Within the Bush administration, there were two main perspectives about the urgency of pressuring Mubarak to adopt stabilizing reforms that would ensure the US-Egyptian alliance against disruptions. One camp contended that Mubarak needed to broaden the political system to give more space to non-Islamist movements that were sympathetic to US interests. A more competitive playing field would safeguard Egypt’s alignments in two respects. First, it would eliminate the binary choice Egyptian voters and US policymakers faced of dealing with either the NDP or the Muslim Brotherhood. Second, it would provide Mubarak’s successor an institutional basis of legitimacy, mitigating the need for that figure to drum up anti-Americanism to garner public support. An alternative view, more consistent with the approach of prior administrations, was that the United States should encourage political change holistically, by continuing to support gradual socioeconomic development, and should not try to directly influence how Mubarak handled succession or other domestic policy matters. Advocates of this approach also emphasized the need for progress on Arab-Israeli peace talks. In sum, there was a group for “democracy promotion," aggressive about raising issues of political reform but still interested in stabilizing the regime, and a constituency for “diplomacy promotion," which sought to maintain a productive bilateral relationship with Mubarak on regional issues and envisioned reforms in Egypt occurring over the long term.

NOTES

[1] Fawaz A. Gerges, America and Political Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

[2] Edward P. Djerejian, “The US and the Middle East in a changing world," US Department of State Dispatch, June 8, 1992, accessed November 3, 2009.

[3] “The objective I propose," Reagan had said then, “is quite simple": “to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means." “Address to Members of the British Parliament," June 8, 1982, accessed December 15, 2010.

[4] Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy," Washington, DC, November 6, 2003, accessed December 8, 2004.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Mubarak’s tenure in office and the absence of a clear second-in-command may not have been coincidental. With no clear successor beneath him, the Egyptian president mitigated the chance for rival power centers like those that had initially bedeviled Sadat.

[7] Nadia Abou El-Magd, “Interruption in Egyptian President’s Speech to Parliament Focuses Attention on Succession," Associated Press Newswires, November 19, 2003.

[Excerpted from Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance. © 2012 by Cambridge University Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to purchase this book, click here.]

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New Texts Out Now: Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Betty S. Anderson (BSA): I always joke that I conceived the project in the pool of the Carlton Hotel in Beirut. In June 2000, I visited Beirut for the first time so I could attend an Arab American University Graduate (AAUG) conference. One day, I walked with some friends all along the Corniche and up through the American University of Beirut (AUB) campus and then back to the hotel. Since it was late June and ridiculously hot, the only option at that point was to jump in the pool as quickly as possible. Two minutes in the pool and the thought occurred to me that my next research project was going to have to be about Beirut in some way. I had fallen in love with the city in just that one day. A half second later, I thought, I should write a history of AUB.

Besides the fact that I wanted to get back to Beirut as soon as possible, I wanted to know why AUB had been so influential in politicizing its students. At the time, I was doing additional research for my book on Jordan (Nationalist Voices in Jordan: The Street and the State) and a number of the political activists I studied had attended AUB. Their memoirs were filled with explanations and stories about how important those four years were for the development of their political identities. However, I had no idea as I floated in the pool that day that I’d have to do extensive research on Protestant missionaries and education long before I could even get to those Arab nationalists. At the time, I really knew relatively little about the school’s history.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?

BSA: When I finally got back to Beirut in 2004, it was research on the educational systems offered at the Syrian Protestant College and AUB that eventually ended up directing my thesis. I was struck initially by the goals the American founders and their successors set for the school. They talked more about the transformative process they wanted the students to undertake than the course options they were offering. For example, Daniel Bliss (1866-1902) preached about producing Protestants who understood not only the liturgy but the lifestyle required of one converting to this faith; Bayard Dodge (1923-1948) exhorted students to follow the model of the modern American man as they sought to develop new characters for themselves. The former presided over a missionary educational system, the latter the new liberal education system then being formulated back in America. The first half of the book discusses this shift as the American University of Beirut was renamed in 1920.

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[Main gate of AUB campus. Photo by Betty S. Anderson.]

Liberal education, as American educators developed it in the second half of the nineteenth century, asks its students to be active participants in their educational experience. Before this point, professors taught their students a fixed body of knowledge; students were required to memorize and recite the data to prove that they had learned it. In liberal education, the system asks that professors teach students how to think and analyze so they can produce data on their own.

The second half of the book examines how the students reacted to this shifting pedagogical focus. The American leaders of the school repeatedly stated their goals for the students, and most books and articles on AUB focus on only those voices. However, that stance leaves out an important element of the AUB story, because only the students can truly determine whether the programs are effective. AUB is famous for the many student protests that have taken place on campus, starting with the Darwin Affair of 1882, leading to the Muslim Controversy of 1909, and then on to the large protests of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As I discovered when I delved into the archives, students used dozens of newspapers to explain why they were protesting. The catalyst was always a particular event, on campus or off, but the students always framed their arguments around the freedom they felt the liberal education system promised. They fought against any administrative attempts to curtail their actions and frequently accused the administration of not following the guidelines set by American liberal education. This issue became increasingly contentious as students worked to define an Arab nationalism that called on them to be politically active while on campus. The administration continually opposed this position, and many of the student-administrative conflicts centered on the differing definitions of freedom put forward on campus. I put “Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education” in the subtitle of the book because by the twentieth century, these were the two dominant elements defining the relationship between the students and the administration.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

BSA: Most of my work has centered on education in one form or another. In my book on Jordan, I wrote of the politicizing role high schools in Jordan and Palestine, as well as schools like AUB, played in mobilizing a national opposition movement in the 1950s. I have published a number of articles analyzing the narratives the Jordanian and Lebanese states present to their students in history and Islamic textbooks. Moving on to a comprehensive study of one particularly influential school was a natural progression. The difference was that I now had to study American education in the same way I had previously examined the influence of education in the Middle East.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

BSA: I hope AUB alumni want to read the book and, equally, that they find something of their story in it. I did not want to cite just the Americans who founded and ran the school; I purposely wanted to write about the students themselves. Typical university histories leave out the words and actions of the students in favor of hagiographies about the founders and their famous successors. I also hope that scholars and students interested in studies of education and nationalism will be interested. This is a book that addresses both Middle Eastern and American studies.

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[Assembly Hall and College Hall, AUB Campus. Photos by Betty S. Anderson.]

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BSA:
I have a contract with Stanford University Press to publish a book called State and Society in the Modern Middle East. Like with anyone who undertakes to write a textbook, I am frustrated with those that are currently available. Textbooks of the modern Middle East typically focus just on state formation, the actions of the chief politicians, and the political interplay between states. My text focuses instead on the relationship between state and society as it developed over the last two hundred years. The states in the region centralized in the nineteenth century, faced colonialism in the early twentieth century, and then independence after World War II; these stages created new roles for state leaders. Civil society, in the broadest definition of the term, emerged from the eighteenth century forward as people sought new ways to organize within and against the states now intruding on their lives. They took advantage of the new institutions the states built to establish for themselves new class, national, and gender definitions, while frequently opposing the states that had introduced these very institutions. My text examines how schools, government offices, newspapers, political parties, and women’s groups constantly negotiated new relationships with their respective states.

Excerpt from The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

From Chapter One:

"The great value of education does not consist in the accepting this and that to be true but it consists in proving this and that to be true," declared Daniel Bliss, founder of Syrian Protestant College (SPC; 1866–1920) and its president from 1866 to 1902, in his farewell address. President Howard Bliss (president, 1902–1920) said in his baccalaureate sermon in 1911, "In a word, the purpose of the College is not to produce singly or chiefly men who are doctors, men who are pharmacists, men who are merchants, men who are preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen; but it is the purpose of the College to produce doctors who are men, pharmacists who are men, merchants who are men, preachers, teachers, lawyers, editors, statesmen who are men." Bayard Dodge (1923–1948) stated at his inauguration as president of the newly renamed American University of Beirut (AUB; 1920– ), "We do not attempt to force a student to absorb a definite quantity of knowledge, but we strive to teach him how to study. We do not pretend to give a complete course of instruction in four or five years, but rather to encourage the habit of study, as a foundation for an education as long as life itself." The successors to these men picked up the same themes when they elaborated on the school`s goals over the years; most recently, in May 2009, President Peter Dorman discussed his vision of AUB’s role. "AUB thrives today in much different form than our missionary founders would have envisioned, but nonetheless—after all this time—it remains dedicated to the same ideal of producing enlightened and visionary leaders."

In dozens of publications, SPC and AUB students have also asserted a vision of the transformative role the school should have on their lives. The longest surviving Arab society on campus, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa, published a magazine of the same name during most academic years between 1923 and 1954 and as of 1936 stated as its editorial policy the belief that "the magazine`s writing is synonymous with the Arab student struggle in the university." From that point forward, the editors frequently listed the society`s Arab nationalist goals. In the fall 1950 edition, for example, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa`s Committee on Broadcasting and Publications issued a statement identifying the achievement of Arab unity as the most important goal because "it is impossible to separate the history, literature and scientific inheritance of the Arabs" since "the Arab essence is unity." Toward this end, al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa pledged to accelerate the "growth of the true nationalist spirit" among the students affiliated with the organization. In describing education as an activist pursuit, the statement declares, "To achieve political ideas which are aimed at our nationalism it is necessary for we as students to seek information by many different means." In this call, the AUB Arab students must take on the task of studying the Arab heritage as thoroughly and frankly as possible so that when they graduate they can move into society with solutions to the many problems plaguing the Arab world.

Since the school`s founding in 1866, its campus has stood at a vital intersection between a rapidly changing American missionary and educational project to the Middle East and a dynamic quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. As the presidential quotes indicate, the Syrian Protestant College and the American University of Beirut imported American educational systems championing character building as their foremost goal. Proponents of these programs hewed to the belief that American educational systems were the perfect tools for encouraging students to reform themselves and improve their societies; the programs do not merely supply professional skills but educate the whole person. As the quotes from al-`Urwa al-Wuthqa attest, Arab society pressured the students to change as well. The Arab nahda, or awakening, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called on students to take pride in their Arab past and to work to recreate themselves as modern leaders of their society; the Arab nationalist movement of the twentieth century asked that students take a lead in fighting for Arab independence from foreign control. The students streaming through the Main Gate year after year used both of these American and Arab elements to help make the school not only an American institution but also one of the Arab world and of Beirut, as the very name, the American University of Beirut, indicates. This process saw long periods of accommodation between the American-led administration and the Arab students, but just as many eras when conflict raged over the nature of authority each should wield on campus; the changing relationship between the administration and the students serves as the cornerstone of this book, for it is here where much of the educational history of SPC and AUB has been written.

From Chapter Five:

The 1952 April Fool’s Day issue of Outlook (called Lookout on that day) satirized the proliferation of student protests that had dominated campus life for the previous few years. In the paper’s lead article, the author declared, “A School of Revolutionary Government, designed to equip AUB students with a wide knowledge of modern techniques of conspiracy and revolution, is to be opened during the fall semester, a communique from the President’s Office announced late Friday.” Continuing the same theme, the article reports, “All courses will include a minimum of three lab hours to be spent in street battles with gendarmes and similar applications of theories learned in classrooms.” President Stephen Penrose (1948-1954), the article stated, gave a Friday morning chapel talk on the new school motto: “That they may have strife and have it more abundantly.” In a further announcement, the paper described the day’s protest.

There will be a demonstration this afternoon at three in front of the Medical Gate to object against everything[.] All those interested please report there promptly five [minutes] before time. The demonstration promises to be very exciting—tear gas will be used, and the slogans are simply delightful. If all goes well, police interference is expected. If not to join, come and watch.

This, of course, had not been the first era of student protest; the difference by the 1950s was the widespread and sustained nature of the conflict between the administration and the students. When Lookout published its satirical articles in 1952, students had been organizing demonstrations in support of Palestinians and Moroccans, and against any and all things imperialist, since 1947; these events only petered out in 1955 as the administration banned the two main groups organizing them, the Student Council and the Arab society, al-cUrwa al-Wuthqa. Students engaged in these exercises explicitly as Arabs, proud of their past, and striving toward cultural, political and economic unity in the future. In their actions, students sought to integrate their educational experiences at AUB with the real-life events taking place outside the Main Gate, for only then did they feel they could be trained to function as the vanguard initiating the necessary changes in their society.

[Excerpted from Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education. © 2011 by The University of Texas Press. Excerpted by permission of the author. For more information, or to order the book, click here.]