Joel Beinin offers the last word in our week-long blog series on the Egyptian uprising.
When the popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak erupted on January 25, 2011, I followed the events from my television and computer screens at Stanford, feeling that I had not been invited to my best friend’s wedding celebration. Three years later, many observers across the political spectrum, whether gleefully or with remorse, have concluded that the party is over and have pronounced the failure of the Egyptian revolution. I beg to disagree.
Since 1979—more years than the age of two-thirds of the country’s citizens—I have visited and worked in Egypt regularly, occasionally for years at a time. The social conditions that made the 2011 uprising are rooted in the Arab defeat of 1967 and have been present since then: autocracy, police brutality, radically skewed distribution of the nation’s wealth, youth unemployment, domination of all institutions by older men. There have been periodic upsurges of oppositional mobilization since 1968. An extraordinary social movement of workers’ strikes and other contentious actions has been underway since the late 1990s and continues today, but it has not had the capacity to become a national political force.
Nothing has happened in the last three years to address the discontent that exploded in 2011. Nonetheless, the 98.1 percent “yes” vote in the constitutional referendum of January 14-15 appears to have given popular endorsement to a restoration of the Mubarak regime with even more power in the hands of the military than previously. The army and its commander, Minister of Defense ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi are absurdly popular. Many Egyptians, exhausted from three years of upheaval and seeking a restoration of “normalcy,” have made themselves forget the abuses of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which ruled the country for the year after Mubarak’s demise—violence against unarmed protesters, detentions without trial, torture, “virginity tests” of young women arrested in demonstrations (justified by al-Sisi himself), failure to hold the institutions and leaders of the old regime to account for either the deaths of over 870 “martyrs of the uprising” or the systemic perversions of justice and equity for the previous decades, and a political arrangement that allowed the Muslim Brothers to acquire the lion’s share of civilian power until the military commanders called the deal off on July 3, 2013.
The Obama administration, despite mild reproaches to the generals and their civilian proxies for violations of civil liberties and human rights, is in the process of making its peace with the restored new-old regime. Secretary of State John Kerry gave his imprimatur to the military when he asserted, rather simplistically, that the Muslim Brothers had “stolen” the revolution.
Nearly every journalist I have spoken to since January 2011 has asked, “What’s going to happen?” My answer has always been that it is impossible to know. Those who claim otherwise are charlatans or fools.
The possibilities of the future will unfold around three poles. First, the 2011 popular uprising was much more than a social movement. It was a popular rebellion with a revolutionary thrust directed, albeit vaguely and without a clear program, against both autocratic neo-patrimonial rule and neo-liberal crony capitalism. Second, grievances alone are insufficient to generate movements culminating in regime change. Some organizational capacity and at least a minimal political program are also necessary. Third, apparently defeated movements may ultimately win.
The most radical achievement of the 2011 uprising is that the Egyptian people, after nearly sixty years when meaningful public participation in politics was banned, found their voices. They removed two presidents through popular street action in the course of two and a half years. It will be very difficult, but not theoretically impossible, to suppress the memory of the millions of Egyptians who were exhilarated by the discovery of their power. Revolutions take many years to unfold. Reversals and revivals of old regimes are common. Egypt’s new-old regime will certainly be as incapable of addressing the country’s real problems as were Hosni Mubarak, the SCAF, or the Muslim Brothers and their former president Muhammad Morsi. The future of the 2011 uprising is open.
See the entirety of this blog series on the Egyptian uprising, beginning with the late Samer Soliman's epilogue excerpt written immediately after the outbreak of protests in Tahrir Square.
Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He is coeditor of both The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 and Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa. He is also the author of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern (University of California Press, 2005).
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