While it is still too early to say where the political crisis in Egypt will end, the military’s decisive role in any settlement is already clear to most informed observers. Ever since the fall of President Mubarak, Egypt’s transition has been marked by political instability, cronyism and the new administration’s failure to deliver urgent reforms. Two months ago the BBC journalist Tim Sebastian was advised by a source in Cairo that “The military will be back in power by the autumn and the West has already signed off. The one condition is that the army is fronted by a civilian face.” Sebastian argues in a New York Times Op-Ed that most of the current public political drama is a distraction, for “while you can shuffle the political cards in Egypt, there are still only two cards that count: the Muslim Brotherhood and the military.”
The Morsi administration comprehensively failed to govern Egypt. It did nothing to address the complex economic challenges, to improve a shameful human rights record, or even to sustain the modest advances in freedom of expression that had followed Mubarak’s departure. Morsi’s inflexible attitudes and relative ignorance of the formal processes of government meant that his administration struggled to work with the bureaucrats, technocrats and members of civil society that are essential to the smooth functioning of any modern state.
These failures were part of a pattern that was noticed, more than 20 years ago, by the French scholar Olivier Roy. In a book that was translated into English as The Failure of Political Islam, Roy argued that Islamists lacked the skills necessary for efficient modern governance. Resistance to despotic regimes might be morally compelling, but the project of making a society more religious offered precious little guidance as how to maintain a complex infrastructure or to make the trains run on time. Once in office the new rulers might double down on the importance of the religion but they could not defer a reckoning with their incompetence indefinitely.
Roy’s insight helps explain the difficulty many political parties have faced after long stints at the margins of government, regardless of their religious affiliations. From Northern Ireland to Nicaragua, groups that assume the reins of government with little real experience often discover, to their considerable chagrin, that it is surprisingly difficult to run a modern state, and to maintain even flawed democratic institutions.
For a transition to democracy to succeed, ideological certainties must give way to practical debates over resources and budgets. And compromises with longstanding political rivals must be made if meaningful progress is to be achieved. Even in mature democracies presidents often admit – regrettably, after they have left office ‒ that the strain of governance has made them much less willing to criticize their predecessors. It is always easier to critique the failings of a government from afar, with imperfect knowledge, than it is to wrestle with the scores of day-to-day policy decisions on which a country’s economy, civil service, infrastructure, and social and cultural well-being actually depend.
Whether or not the coup against President Morsi is acknowledged as such may ultimately prove to be of little consequence, for the failures that led to his removal are set to recur, in short order, given Egypt’s larger institutional crises. As Sebastian observes in the Times, the present state of “permanent uncertainty, of weak and collapsible institutions, run by even weaker public servants, watched over by an interventionist army” bode ill for the next government. Following the early disappointment of political Islam, and the current absence of credible alternatives, Egypt’s political future remains precarious.
