What seems now to have been an unprovoked massacre at the Cairo barracks will not make the path back to democratic stability any easier for Egypt.
Adly Mansour, the country’s Chief Justice and now interim president, has set out a timetable to re-establish constitutional democracy. This will involve the appointment of a panel of fifteen, which will review and amend the constitution, the new version of which will be put to a referendum later this year, thereby paving the way for parliamentary and then presidential elections in early 2014. It all sounds impeccably ordered and proper.
The problem is that Adly Mansour is only proposing this because the army deposed Egypt’s (first and only) democratically-elected leader, Mohammed Morsi, whom it is now holding under arrest. A coup, a prison, and a suspended constitution are not exactly the best auguries for peaceful democracy.
Before we rush to judgment, it is worth noting that this particular coup was not simply a matter of disaffected generals flexing their muscles. Morsi’s removal was widely demanded, by the public and many prominent, religious and secular, leaders. And it was demanded not simply because he had failed to solve the nation’s economic and social woes (were that the case, Cameron and Clegg should be worried) but because many felt that Morsi’s longstanding affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood was threatening the liberties that had delivered him to power in the first place. As opposition figure Mohamed El Baradei remarked, “we were between a rock and a hard place.”
It all makes the eschatological enthusiasm with which most Westerners greeted the overthrow of Hosni Mubarack and Morsi’s subsequent election look hopelessly naïve. And it reminds us, yet again, that democracy is not, at heart, about ballot boxes, constitutions, parliaments, or presidents. Rather, at heart, it is about hearts, ideas that are deeply felt and cherished.
All the democratic infrastructure in the world is useless without trust, a sense that those with whom I passionately disagree will not seek to shortcut our disagreements by silencing me. And trust itself is made difficult (not impossible, to be sure, but far harder) by a perceived lack of common identity, good and objectives. If there is genuinely nothing that turns you and me into ‘us’, it is hard to see why we should seriously trust one another, let alone why I should let you exercise power over me. In a sense, the formal phrase “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” embodies what really makes democracy possible: a commitment – “loyalty” – to a set of values, in this case embodied in the monarch, which provides a sufficiently strong centripetal force to outbalance the centrifugal ones that are part and parcel of political life. Without such gravity, society flies apart, taking the structures of democracy with it.
This is not, of course, an argument specifically for monarchy, as the U.S. example illustrates. Rather, it is the argument, first and most perceptively articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville in his study of Democracy in America that the “manners” and “customs” of the people are “one of the great general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic… is attributable”, explaining that he used “manners” and “customs” in the widest sense, to mean “the various notions and opinions current among men and to the mass of those ideas which constitute their character of mind.” Democracy in Egypt, as in America, or Britain, or anywhere, rests on habits of the heart.
If this is right, it is both hopeful and dispiriting. It is hopeful because it means there are no reasons, in principle, why any nation should not develop and sustain a free and secure democracy. The potential for forging a political ‘us’ – the “customs” and “manners”, values and institutions – which root, sustain and protect our common commitment to one another is not limited to any one ethnic, religious or cultural group.
Certainly, de Tocqueville himself traced the success of the American “experiment” with democracy to ideas of equality and liberty that were embedded in American Christianity. And it is also true that there is a strong, positive historic correlation between democracy and Christianity (first, Protestantism; second, Catholicism) worldwide.
Nevertheless, those who are minded to say this is something unique to Christianity (or uniquely absent in Islam) should remember that in 1819 the cavalry of a Christian nation killed fifteen and injured hundreds in a crowd that was campaigning for wider suffrage (the so-called Peterloo Massacre, an event grimly similar to the barracks massacre this week).
A mere thirteen years later after Peterloo, the British parliament passed the first great reform Act, and within a century, the nation had settled upon universal suffrage with remarkably little bloodshed in between. And here, of course, lies the dispiriting element.No-one wants Egyptians to wait 13 years for full suffrage, let alone a century. There is no insurmountable reason why they must. However, the events of the last two weeks offer a sobering corrective to those of the last two years. Democracy is a craft that floats on the surface of human beliefs. It certainly helps if it is well-made but no construction, however secure, will guarantee that it stills, or even survives, the violent passions that stir beneath the surface.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
Image from Commons Wikimedia available in the public domain.
