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Three years after the uprising that ousted Hosni Mubarak from power, Egypt continues to grapple with an authoritarian state. Throughout the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, authoritarian forces remained the key political players. Democratic alternatives have not capitalized on cracks in the system. Prospects for the Brotherhood’s political reintegration and a democratization of political Islam are bleak. As long as credible alternatives fail to gain traction, the old state will persist and Egypt’s central challenges will remain unresolved.

Key Themes

• Egypt is where it was before the 2011 uprising—revolutionary battle lines are being drawn over support for an old state characterized by a series of institutional fiefdoms that act in their own interests rather than in the national interest.
   
• The Muslim Brotherhood’s rule constituted an undemocratic interlude in Egyptian politics, and its downfall was a product of its inability to deal effectively with the old state. It can only be politically reintegrated after a complete political surrender on its part, which is unlikely.
   
• Egypt is becoming increasingly ungovernable. The state cannot convert its reasserted dominance into legitimacy, and as intrastate competition and unruly protest politics engulf the political arena, the country faces a political vacuum with no clear resolution.

Findings

The old state, with its competing institutional power centers, persists. The new constitution has the potential to exacerbate the problem, preserving the privileges of old state institutions and providing them the capacity to act as power brokers within a fragmented system. 

Egypt needs a complete reinvention of its political sphere. Despite the development of a contentious public space since 2011, Egypt still lacks a capable political class, without which it will be unable to confront entrenched institutional obstacles to democracy.

The coalition that supported the July 2013 coup that overthrew then president Mohamed Morsi is fragmenting. A split is developing between groups that want to reproduce Mubarak’s authoritarianism and those that support a more democratic future for Egypt. No one group has monopolized the debate.

The possibility of reconciliation between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood remains elusive. So far, the Brotherhood has chosen a path of political intransigence. Given the regime’s crackdown and the Brothers’ political incentives against moderation, they face an increasingly limited set of options.

Democratic forces must overcome leadership and capacity deficiencies. They need to move beyond hollow slogans and develop tactics that support their goals. The development of a successful democratic movement is crucial for Egypt’s future.

Introduction

Confusion and incoherence in Egypt following the 2011 uprising against the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak have left analysts puzzled and undecided about the nature of the political evolution of the country. Many point to the problems of a putative democratic transition as the source of Egypt’s woes. However, more than simply struggling to achieve a democratic system, Egypt is still grappling with the continued reality of an outdated, authoritarian, and oligarchic old state. 

Egypt is in need of a complete reinvention of its politics: wholly new state-citizen relations based on democratic social, political, and economic contracts.

Egypt is in need of a complete reinvention of its politics: wholly new state-citizen relations based on democratic social, political, and economic contracts. Such a far-reaching transformation is necessary to address the country’s myriad socioeconomic and political problems. 

The fall of the Mubarak regime was a hopeful moment for many revolutionaries. The January 2011 uprising was spurred by a demand for changes to state authoritarianism and despotism in Egypt. The main enemies in this context were the old state’s military and civilian institutions and their associated networks and interest groups, as well as these forces’ political worldview, interests, and value system. But that system did not disappear with Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011. Rather, the strongman’s overthrow ushered in more of the same—an authoritarian political process. This time around, the process was dominated first by the military and then by a new partner, the Muslim Brotherhood. 

After two and a half years of confusion and disturbance, the military removed the country’s first elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated Mohamed Morsi, from power on July 3, 2013. Both the Brotherhood-led regime and the military’s decision to overthrow it were described as “democratic” and “revolutionary” by their respective supporters, but despite this empty rhetoric, both were not.

Problems continue to mount in Egypt, and the existing political forces have proven unable to deliver any real solutions. The country faces a societal and political vacuum, with no democratic, popularly based governing institutions to fill the void. The undemocratic, proto-fascist, and intransigent Islamist movement’s political behavior has exacerbated the void that emerged when Mubarak was overthrown. Moreover, the old state’s deep authoritarianism continues to plague Egyptian society and thwart efforts at real change, while infant democratic protest movements are incapable of offering a viable third way. 

In many ways, Egypt is now back where it was nearly three years ago. The popular mobilization against Morsi, which reached its crescendo in the mass demonstrations of June 2013, signaled a reorientation. Following the long parentheses of Muslim Brotherhood rule, society is returning to the revolutionary battle lines against the old state’s authoritarianism. Some optimists believe that after the old state finishes off the Brothers, it will establish a democracy. At the root of this hope, however, lies either naïveté or dishonesty. 

The current political process, framed by the military’s announcement of a political road map after Morsi’s overthrow, is no less authoritarian than that led by the military and the Muslim Brotherhood together after Mubarak’s ouster. Furthermore, the new political process does not position the interim government to better handle Egypt’s current crisis of democratic legitimacy, much less create a better political future for Egyptians. A political battle rages on between the old state and the Islamists, immobilizing all political actors in the country. 

A new, inclusive, democratic polity is not likely to emerge soon, but the old authoritarian system cannot be sustainably reproduced either. Though the old state is reasserting its dominance over the political system, it faces endemic crises of legitimacy and performance. As long as the institutional crises of the state, society, and economy persist, the old state will remain incapable of turning its current dominance into a legitimate grip on power, and Egypt’s problems will remain unsolvable. Accordingly, any future success on key issues, including economic development, state modernization, security, and political stability, will remain highly unlikely. All this means the system will continue to suffer from a lack of acceptable, inclusive rules of the game.

In addition, the sizeable coalition that supported the July 3 coup is divided into subgroups of actors with different viewpoints about the new political system. These include the more conservative political forces who want to reproduce the authoritarian, clientelist, and elitist politics of the Mubarak era as well as those who want to introduce substantial policy and governance reforms. Both options are problematic and lack widespread support for various reasons. 

Different state actors are competing with one another for influence, resources, and power. These elite divisions and this rapacious intrastate competition have led to considerable differences among political players about the new constitution, electoral system, and public policies. No state or nonstate actor within the July 3 caretaker regime has managed to dominate the debate. This situation threatens to produce a fragmentation of powers rather than a separation of powers. 

After their unpopular failed experiment with governance, the Muslim Brothers are seeing their old dreams of state domination move further out of reach. Instead, they face a more limited set of options and are encountering a series of political and existential challenges. The fate of Islamism in Egypt is key to the potential for the emergence of any new democratic polity in the country. However, Islamists are part of the problem and cannot in and of themselves be the solution. Democratic forces continue to lament their unmet revolutionary goals, but they remain as helpless as ever. Suffering from crises of organization, funding, leadership, and discourse, they have a long way to go in developing their own tools of change and resistance and moving beyond slogans to clearly define the new polity they pursue. 

An entirely new structural approach must be taken if Egypt is to establish a democratic and effective state and political system.

Society is confused and significantly polarized; average citizens increasingly tend toward public engagement but do so in a perplexed manner. Bonapartism is probably unachievable and certainly unsustainable. But this does not mean democracy will emerge as the automatic alternative. Instead, a political vacuum and a period of political limbo are likely to persist. So far, the Egyptian uprising has been a demonstration of the intensity of the ongoing political and socioeconomic crisis, which is making Egypt increasingly ungovernable. An entirely new structural approach must be taken if Egypt is to establish a democratic and effective state and political system. 

The Old State

It is difficult to capture the political substance of the term “old state” due to the shifts in policies under the different regimes over the last century and changing historical economic, institutional, and social conditions. But the post-1952 state in particular stands out. Its institutions, value systems, modes of performance, and interests made the post-1952 era a significant milestone in the history of state-led modernization in Egypt. 

Despite some initial developmental successes, the post-1952 state experienced a series of far-reaching debacles that revealed its fundamental limitations. Even though this crisis-ridden state is often depicted as “the modern state” of Egypt, it can be dubbed the “old state” because it quickly proved outdated, lacking the capacity to address problems and deliver solutions. It was at the heart of the political breakdown in Egypt through the 2011 uprising. 

Although it evolved over time, this old state retained three primary features in its constitutional and legal structures and its political behavior: elitism and centralism, authoritarian guardianship, and violence. 

Elitism and Centralism 

The old state was dominated by power elites grouped within the military, security, and bureaucratic institutions. 

Historically speaking, over the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the elites who dominated Egypt’s economy and were largely responsible for the state’s modernization, such as the landed aristocracy, commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, and the business class, partnered with state elites in a marriage of convenience. When Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military elite came to power in 1952, the power balance shifted to the state elites. 

The new government installed a state-led, paternalistic mode of production, which obstructed the development of self-aware and empowered social groups and a clear class structure. Any political or social institutions that sought to articulate or represent the wishes and interests of the grass roots were co-opted by the state elites and incorporated within the existing, elite-dominated structure in a top-down fashion using a complicated system of administrative and legal control, police intimidation and monitoring, and political patronage and clientelism. Political corporatism prevailed. 

The state was not a totalitarian “big brother.” Civil society and a small margin of popular political representation did exist, particularly with the policy of political liberalization under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. But civil society was always controlled. The state was the predominant political and social actor in the country. Modernization projects that were not led by the state were for all practical purposes nonexistent because it was impossible to drum up popular support for them. 

Upper-crust Egyptians either tried to find ways to manipulate the state to meet their socioeconomic interests or simply accepted being co-opted by the state if doing so was more suitable for their interests. Traditional forces in rural and semi-rural areas, such as family groups, clans, and tribes, behaved similarly. The state’s political system was for all intents and purposes a forum for incorporating these classes and groups and allocating patronage. 

Disempowered and lower classes looked to the state as the key patriarchal modernizer that tended to the interests of all. Since Nasser’s time, the mainstream labor or peasant movements did not think about reconfiguring the state-led political economy but rather pressured the state to make good on its moral and populist duties and promises of economic egalitarianism. 

Authoritarian Guardianship 

Despite regime changes over the last two centuries, the old state retained its status in Egypt as the sole agent of social and economic modernization and progress as well as its place as the exclusive protector of Egyptian national identity. The state was the guardian of a society that was otherwise backward, underdeveloped, and unruly. 

The state guided the economy in a paternalistic way and in partnership with the private sector when necessary. This became particularly clear under Mubarak’s oligarchic crony capitalism.

In this unbalanced state-society relationship, different social forces, actors, groups, classes, and agencies were not allowed to compete for power or represent their own interests, demands, or worldviews. The diversity and plurality of interests, viewpoints, and even identities was overlooked. The state blocked effective political competition and pluralism by denying rights of independent organization, representation, participation, and expression. Myriad legal and administrative mechanisms restricted activism that the constitution might have nominally tolerated. 

Instead, the military and civilian bureaucracy technocratically managed the state and the society. This state bureaucracy was above social and class conflicts (essentially, above politics) and had the national mandate to decide on public policies in the name of the national interest. That national interest was defined exclusively by the state elites, morally and politically acting as the guardians of the people. Leaders cited Egypt’s paternalistic culture and doctrines of state custodianship and tutelage to justify the system. The “people” were merely the objects of state public policies. 

In practice, this meant the death of politics. 

Violence

State institutions used violence to discipline Egyptians. State violence ranged from the legal to the extra-legal and was at times employed with fatal results. The state also proved unable to protect the lives of Egyptian citizens, for example, in cases of political and social unrest as well as symbolic violence against women and religious and ethnic minorities (such as Copts, Bedouins, and Nubians). 

Old State Failures Today

These three structural features of the modern authoritarian Egyptian state persisted throughout the second half of the twentieth century and were codified in constitutions and laws. No less importantly, they were enshrined in the state elites’ and the masses’ political imagination and policymaking processes. 

This overdose of state authoritarianism could have been justified if it managed to introduce significant achievements. Many authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world have developed their countries. But this was not the case in Egypt. The old state was both undemocratic and unable to bring about development. Rule of law by even the most conservative definition was absent, in terms of not just favoritism and arbitrariness in law enforcement but also the declining quality of regulative capacity, especially under Mubarak. The state did not achieve sustainable economic development or wealth-generating industrialization, there were no competent state institutions, unemployment soared, poverty spread, food insecurity increased, rent-based activities prevailed, budget deficits ballooned, urban slums and shantytowns swelled, and the educational system collapsed. Negligence was evident in the deteriorating quality of public utilities and basic service provision as well. By the end of Mubarak’s rule, Egypt ranked low in human development reports assessing living standards, quality of life, and access to basic needs such as housing, food, education, and healthcare. Many Egyptians also died in traffic accidents each year thanks to poor government implementation of transportation regulations. 

The state may be authoritarian, but it is administratively and organizationally incompetent.

The erosion of state regulative capacity also led to the growth of the deregulated informal economy and the spread of informal services including housing and transportation. Islamic organizations thrived on the vacuum created by the state’s economic lethargy, but the vacuum did not provide an opportunity for the creation of development projects that were not led by the state. As long as the state retained its powerful security institutions and its monopoly on key policy decisions and economic resources, particularly public land and energy, it was more than willing to tolerate these informal phenomena as safety valves and nothing more. Finally, the state failed in terms of competence in most of its military engagements with adversaries throughout Egypt’s modern age. 

The state may be authoritarian, but it is administratively and organizationally incompetent. 

Origins of Uprising

The old state in Egypt, suffering from twin crises of legitimacy and achievements, survived mostly in the name of the necessity of making war, then peace, with Israel. Fighting radical and violent Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s became another raison d’être for the crisis-ridden state. When the radical Islamist threat in Egypt subsided by 2000, peace with Israel having been achieved two decades before, political mobilization against the regime began to develop between 2004 and 2011.

The 2011 uprising was the cumulative outcome of a decade of protests against the old state by different sectors of the population—including youth movements, labor movements, and nonpartisan political groupings. These actors were either not represented in the state or could no longer tolerate dismal living conditions and the weight of incompetent and politically vacant state authoritarianism. Many members of the upper-middle class, who, thanks to education and employment, have access to international markets, also joined the uprising to protest government corruption and the lack of transparency and accountability because Egypt’s crony capitalism is a waste of resources that does not develop the economy or make it competitive.

The main thrust of the January uprising was less about the installation of a legitimate electoral system and more about the need to re-create Egyptian politics in a deeper way. Many Egyptians aimed to deconstruct the old state, which excluded the majority of the population from decisionmaking and was defined by the domination of the military and security institutions, bureaucratic elites, and economic oligarchs. 

Under Mubarak in particular, this “modern” authoritarian state unofficially but effectively morphed into an ensemble of different fiefdoms. Each state institution occupied its own sphere of influence, made its own rules, and allocated its own resources in an oligarchic fashion among its own functionaries and clientele, who were accountable only to their own fiefdom’s rules and institutions. Moreover, recruitment within these fiefdoms became increasingly dependent on kinship and personal networks. These fiefdoms included the military, police, intelligence services, judiciary, bureaucracy, and public sector companies, as well as nonstate actors, such as the business class and Muslim and Christian religious organizations. State public policies were the outcome of compromise and bargaining shaped by the balance of power and interests and by the functional division of labor between these different state and nonstate fiefdoms. 

This taifas state is central to conceptualizing Egyptian state politics under Mubarak and what remains today. Taifa is the Arabic word for sect, and the term taifas state refers to a system in which state institutions act as distinct, closed, and self-interested sects rather than governing institutions of the national polity. This system was reminiscent of the politics of the Mamluk state in Egypt in the eighteenth century before Muhammad Ali founded the modern state.¹  Only in this context can one truly comprehend the Egyptian military-industrial complex, the “republic of officers,” and the military’s economic empire, consisting of huge investments in tradable nonmilitary products, industries, and services, in addition to trade in public land, tourism, and energy production facilities.² 

The police force was the fiefdom with the most recognizable power. It was not just the repressive tool of the regime. For the common people in Egypt, it was essentially the state because it was the government institution with which they were most familiar. Under Mubarak, when depoliticization and bureaucratic incompetence were at their worst, the police force was left to assume the power of government in relating to the people. The force did so not just in terms of law enforcement but also in terms of running state affairs, administering social relations, allocating local social and economic resources, and resolving conflicts. Accountable to no one, self-interested, brutal, and bad at its sociopolitical and administrative functions, the police force earned the wrath of wide segments of the population. 

Over time, the scale of corruption, arbitrariness, brutality, and repression associated with the police’s management operations became unbearable. The January 2011 popular uprising against the regime therefore meant practically targeting the police institution, demolishing its stations, defeating its forces in street battles, and forcing it into a humiliating surrender. 

Beyond the deconstruction of old institutions, significant ideological aims developed at the core of the uprising. Demonstrators chanted for social justice, demanding a radical break in public policies on economic resource allocation and income distribution that would hit the heart of the old state and its system of political economy. 

The demonstrators demanded freedom, which is a very complicated term in this context. Free and fair elections are, of course, a component. But freedom was also understood by many who took to the streets as the ability to defy authorities; press for their own demands; conquer the public space; express their own culture and value systems unashamedly; protest their marginalization and exclusion; challenge hegemonic ideas; question national political, social, and cultural taboos; and experiment with violence as a mode of political rebellion and self-fulfillment. 

The fact that these demands were hailed enthusiastically by diverse groups and actors upholding different ideologies and orientations was rather telling of a general mood of displeasure with the old state and its creeping domination of society. Disparate actors yearned for a more inclusive and egalitarian state built on new social, political, and economic contracts. In this new polity, the masses would contribute to decisions about social, political, and economic public policies. 

Achieving these aims required rebuilding state institutions by restructuring state-society relations; reconstituting the concept of rule of law; democratizing the public sphere and civil society against authoritative restrictions; protecting public and private liberties, socioeconomic rights, equality, and sociopolitical pluralism; and integrating minorities and marginal groups into the state and the public sphere. This state, with its newly founded and unprecedented democratic legitimacy, would in theory be more capable of developing new policies to serve wide segments of the population, improve living standards, and advance socioeconomic development, thereby bettering living conditions for the majority of Egyptians. Such objectives were unattainable under the old state. 

The disgruntled revolutionary masses knew what they loathed but had no clear idea of what they wanted instead, let alone how to achieve it.

But conditions were not right for the creation of this new state. The disgruntled revolutionary masses knew what they loathed but had no clear idea of what they wanted instead, let alone how to achieve it. Rooted in the “death of politics” era, the amorphous revolutionary masses lacked organization, funds, leadership, and political platforms to build their dreams into a real political alternative that could be institutionalized. Instead, the revolutionaries went for the lower-hanging fruit—the easily identifiable target of getting rid of Mubarak himself. To achieve that aim, they resorted to a restorative practice: turning to the military to force the “bad state leaders” out. Anything beyond that was inconceivable given the opposition’s limited political resources. 

The only actors in the country who had the necessary resources—members of the old state, with the military at its center, and the Muslim Brotherhood—were not interested in creating a new democratic political system. Their objectives were more authoritarian. And to advance them, they only needed to seize upon the opportunities and minimize the constraints presented by the uprising.

Muslim Brothers: An Undemocratic Interlude

The Muslim Brotherhood played a key role in the popular mobilization that brought down Mubarak over eighteen days of demonstrations and sit-ins in January and February 2011. It marshaled human and political resources and its logistical talents in support of the uprising. 

But the Brothers were not on board with the revolutionaries’ broader goals. The struggle for a new democratic state was never their cause. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and political, social, and economic viewpoints mean the organization is fundamentally biased against the notion of a radical democratization of national politics.³ 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Ideology 

In very general terms, the Muslim Brotherhood’s project is about individual and communal religious redemption in contemporary Muslim societies that are doomed, according to the Brothers, by Westernization and secularization. The Brotherhood’s intensive process of Islamist ideological indoctrination aims at educating members in the values necessary for acquiring Islamic identity. This process is meant to lead to their individual salvation. 

Politics is indispensable to the Brotherhood’s ideology, as it shapes the social context that governs any possible individual salvation. Politics is also understood to be part and parcel of the Islamic religion, system, worldview, and manhaj (methodology of change) itself. 

Central to the Brotherhood’s ideological project is the elitist dream of an “Islamic state” that will resurrect the Islamic caliphate and lead Brothers toward the actualization of their Islamic identity and hence their salvation and empowerment. Islamic identity is presented as a static set of inherited religious attributes and essentialist cultural features that need to be guarded by the Islamic state. In parallel, Brotherhood ideology employs a more dynamic understanding of Islamic identity as a vibrant project of political, social, economic, and cultural constructs that are yet to be established by the Islamic state. The two understandings are contradictory, but both imply that the Islamic state is the true representative of Islamic identity and has a key role to play in protecting and shaping that identity. 

Practically, the Islamic state has been reduced to one exclusively dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has become synonymous with Islam and the Islamic identity. Brothers consider the Brotherhood as the ideal, pure of the dirt that contaminates society outside of the group. In practice, this means the Muslim Brotherhood is essentially a sect that cements its ties not just through religious ideology but also by invoking shared economic interests, social and familial connections, and common lifestyles and personal experiences. 

The Muslim Brotherhood has had a complicated relationship with the modern state in Egypt. The state marginalized the Brotherhood and other Islamic movements, but those movements thrived nonetheless in the social vacuum created by the failures and incompetence of the old state. The death of politics left only religion as a space for resistance. The Brotherhood filled the vacuum, gradually building considerable social, cultural, and economic capital. 

Of course, the Brotherhood has not been immune to the deeply embedded idea that the Egyptian state—the most modernized and powerful institution in society—is the golden prize that every ideological and political movement targets in order to achieve its own objectives and make its dreams about Egypt come true. This is another reason the authoritarian Islamic state is central to the Brother