Democracy, in name only.

The new waves of unrest that have roiled around the Middle East since being ignited by the Tunisian uprisings are being viewed by many press establishments as the local population asking for democracy. This is a fallacy, as the examples of both Tunisia and especially Egypt show. Democracy is not just something a country can impose from the top down, and in Egypt, you can see there is no will by the ruling military clique to impose such open freedoms on a population that has no real understanding of the meaning of democracy.

The only real change in Egypt is a sense of greater political room for new actors to engage in, this gives the population (read middle classes) a palpable result for all the efforts they put in to get change. But when all is said and done, it’s still the same junta ruling the state, with a new headman, and maybe in time a new puppet government, who will only ever have limited freedom of governance. The only way this government will be able to enact changes when formed, is not through enacting legislation or demanding that its dictates be followed by the army, but by the rule of the mob, pawning to popularity. The legislature is increasingly weak vis-a-vis the judiciary, in fact the law courts are becoming increasingly bold and over powerful and this is now sending danger signs to foreign entities that would invest or act within the new Egypt.

This prosecutorial zeal has frightened conservative Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which has warned that it won’t provide economic assistance to Egypt if Mubarak is humiliated. But the greater danger is that Egyptian and international investors will steer clear of the country if they think doing business there might expose them to legal risks....

What’s needed in Egypt and the other Arab countries that have suffered from dictatorship is a sense that the rule of law will prevail, with safeguards against vindictive prosecution. This protective legal framework is as important as democracy itself, which as Alexander Hamilton and other American founders warned more than 200 years ago can be bent to become the tyrannical will of the mob.

 And this is the point, mob rule. It is the rule of the mob that is enacting changes in and to the system; the judiciary has seen it can gain power from enacting the popular will of the mob. The next government that is voted in will also likely use the rule of the mob to enforce and push its agenda. This they know they can do because the military junta showed they are unwilling or too politically weak to enforce the rule of law on the mob, they want to be popular and not be seen as a new Mubarak.
But this isn't democracy in action, democracy has grass roots, there are none in Egypt, there is no real understanding of democracy in Egypt or many of the other embattled countries in the Middle East. Democracies are more than just a system of voting freely, it also ensures that no one branch of government can dominate, it protects the minorities from mob rule. This is conspicuously absent in  post-revolutionary Egypt, where attacks by the Muslim majority on the Copts (about 8% of the population) has become a daily occurrence and is sending out danger signals to all and sundry who deal with Egypt.

What we now have is a fractured and failing state, though this is easily reversible. It needs a population that is more understanding and open to each other, and to allow freedom of information to spread ideas of reconciliation to the wider population. This whole problem has come about due to long years of government control over the information and news that people received in the time under Mubarak. This was always getting more strident, racist and extremist. So nowadays you have a population brought up on a steady diet of conspiracies, anti-Semitic jargon and racist ideals. So it is little wonder that there are now daily calls for action to be taken against the Copts, Israelis and foreigners.

So what we are looking at here is the legacy that the Mubarak regime left behind after 30 years of rule, a country that is dominated by a discourse of extremity and is badly in need of reconciliation. Democracy is still a foreign ideal and will continue to be as long as the freedom of some is given greater credence than that of others. There needs to be a real discourse and an opening of eyes into what greater political engagement means to the population. Yet this is no easy task for a country on the brink of a major crisis over it being unable to feed itself and this in itself may drive the government to become more populist in order to appease their anger and desperation and this could lead to dire consequences for Egypt. The country can’t afford to fight any war against Israel or to allow the riots against the Copts to continue as this will halt very fast its major sources of income, US military aid and the tourist economy. So there are hard choices to be made in the upper echelons of the Egyptian hierarchy, someone needs to take a stand and do the unpopular things that will allow the country to continue to function as a normal society, or else they will be lead down the long slippery road to that most detested and feared of Arabic words, fitna(chaos).