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Mubarak's phantom presidency - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
"The "March of Millions" in Cairo marks the spectacular emergence of a new political society in Egypt. This uprising brings together a new coalition of forces, uniting reconfigured elements of the security state with prominent business people, internationalist leaders, and relatively new (or newly reconfigured) mass movements of youth, labour, women's and religious groups. President Hosni Mubarak lost his political power on Friday, January 28.
On that night the Egyptian military let Mubarak's ruling party headquarters burn down and ordered the police brigades attacking protesters to return to their barracks. When the evening call to prayer rang out and no one heeded Mubarak's curfew order, it was clear that the old president been reduced to a phantom authority. In order to understand where Egypt is going, and what shape democracy might take there, we need to set the extraordinarily successful popular mobilisations into their military, economic and social context. What other forces were behind this sudden fall of Mubarak from power? And how will this transitional military-centred government get along with this millions-strong protest movement?
Many international media commentators – and some academic and political analysts – are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary "good guys versus bad guys" lenses most used to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate.
There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage: (1) People versus Dictatorship, a perspective that leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising; (2) Seculars versus Islamists, a model that leads to a 1980s-style call for "stability" and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist "Arab street"; or, (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth, a lens which imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures."
"The "March of Millions" in Cairo marks the spectacular emergence of a new political society in Egypt. This uprising brings together a new coalition of forces, uniting reconfigured elements of the security state with prominent business people, internationalist leaders, and relatively new (or newly reconfigured) mass movements of youth, labour, women's and religious groups. President Hosni Mubarak lost his political power on Friday, January 28.
On that night the Egyptian military let Mubarak's ruling party headquarters burn down and ordered the police brigades attacking protesters to return to their barracks. When the evening call to prayer rang out and no one heeded Mubarak's curfew order, it was clear that the old president been reduced to a phantom authority. In order to understand where Egypt is going, and what shape democracy might take there, we need to set the extraordinarily successful popular mobilisations into their military, economic and social context. What other forces were behind this sudden fall of Mubarak from power? And how will this transitional military-centred government get along with this millions-strong protest movement?
Many international media commentators – and some academic and political analysts – are having a hard time understanding the complexity of forces driving and responding to these momentous events. This confusion is driven by the binary "good guys versus bad guys" lenses most used to view this uprising. Such perspectives obscure more than they illuminate.
There are three prominent binary models out there and each one carries its own baggage: (1) People versus Dictatorship, a perspective that leads to liberal naïveté and confusion about the active role of military and elites in this uprising; (2) Seculars versus Islamists, a model that leads to a 1980s-style call for "stability" and Islamophobic fears about the containment of the supposedly extremist "Arab street"; or, (3) Old Guard versus Frustrated Youth, a lens which imposes a 1960s-style romance on the protests but cannot begin to explain the structural and institutional dynamics driving the uprising, nor account for the key roles played by many 70-year-old Nasser-era figures."
