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Introduction

Revolutions break our heart whether they fail or succeed. To study revolution is to study how the masses awaken from their slumber and thrust themselves onto the center stage of their own history only to watch their aspirations either usurped or repressed. In the very best of cases, outcomes fall way below expectations. But as disheartening as studying revolutions may be, these rare and enigmatic episodes draw scholars like a magnet. The heroism of everyday life is simply too hard to resist.

Personally, I have been thinking and writing about the prospects of revolution in Egypt for as long as I can remember. Five years ago, I resolved to publish a book about it. But shortly before the manuscript was complete, words jumped right off the page and materialized before my eyes: Egyptians finally revolted. And between a tranquil university campus in Los Angeles and the barricades around Tahrir Square, the manuscript assumed its final form. This time the Angel of History was facing forward; this time the Owl of Minerva took flight at dawn. This was a book about history caught unexpectedly in real time.

The root causes of the January 25 Revolt in Egypt are as impossible to disentangle and rank as those inspiring any other revolution. At the very least one must admit that it is too early to determine why the millions who have been repressed for so long took to the streets on that particular day and vowed not to return home. Political failure, economic crises, ideological agitation, and new forms of organization all appear to have been hopelessly intertwined during these last fatal moments in the life of the regime. Likewise, predicting the outcome of this massive upheaval can only be a matter of speculation at this point; if a new regime did in fact emerge, it would take years to crystallize. So steering away from these formidable—and probably futile—tasks, this book aims at a much more modest and concrete goal, which is to understand what made the revolt possible once its preconditions had arrived. Instead of asking what triggered the uprising, I try to explain how its path was cleared. How was it possible for the people to defy their seemingly invincible dictatorship and get away with it? The answer in this case, as well as in countless others, is the position of the military and security forces. The fact that no revolt triumphs as long as the old regime’s coercive organs are willing and capable of suppressing it is one of the few truisms in the field of revolution theory. One might even claim that revolution scholars agree on little else. It is such a commonsense assumption that many—mistakenly—take it for granted.

But why did the agents of coercion fail to protect their political masters in Egypt, even though they had not been worn out by war (like in 1917 Russia) or civil strife (like in 2011 Libya)? The initial success of the revolt in Egypt challenges the simplistic assumption that the military and security forces are essentially the “iron fists” or “heavy hands” of authority, or other such metaphors that portray them as mere appendages rather than independent institutions with distinct corporate interests. The armed forces and the security establishment are full partners in any country’s ruling bloc. They work with rather than for the political apparatus—no matter what the constitution says. And while the interests of the three partners usually coincide (projecting an image of unity), they are never identical.

Machiavelli wrote: “Between the armed and unarmed man no proportion holds, and it is contrary to reason to expect that the armed man should voluntarily submit to him who is unarmed, or that the unarmed man should stand secure among armed retainers.”¹ This quintessential axiom rings true today as much as it did in the sixteenth century. Yet the conventional approach to analyzing the relationship between politicians and the custodians of violence is to assume that the military and security act just like other pressure groups, bargaining with civilians to promote their interests. But these powerful institutions have more at stake than other pressure groups—their corporate interests are entwined in the mind of their members with the nation’s security (maybe even its existence), and they are therefore determined to compel politicians to assign absolute priority to questions of war against foreign and domestic enemies. And because force is their ultima ratio, unlike other social organizations, politicians cannot simply check their influence through legal and administrative means, or even by increasing their popular legitimacy.

So how can civilian leaders subordinate their mighty partners? They usually negotiate a power arrangement demarcating spheres of influence. And the relative weight of each of the three institutions is what renders one regime democratic, another military-dominated, and a third an authoritarian police state. Hence, analyzing any regime must begin by clarifying (or demystifying) the relationship within this “power triangle.”^* This is the essence of institutional realism, which highlights the unrelenting power struggle between self-interested institutions within the state. It conceives the state not as a reified or monolithic body, but as an amalgam of institutions, each with its own power-maximizing agendas. Sometimes they are in conflict (no matter how muted), and at other times they are in alliance, but their aim is always to further their interests. Naturally, this competition results in power configurations that privilege some interests while repressing others, but even slight changes in domestic or geopolitical circumstances can disrupt the existing balance, precipitating a new round of struggle that finally results in new power formations. In this way, we can see that regime type reflects the prevailing balance of power at any given time, not an official hierarchy or ingrained practices.

A good point to start the analysis of the struggle within Egypt’s power triangle is the July 1952 coup, when leaders of the Free Officers Movement (just like other coup makers) effected an immediate division of labor among those who ran the government, those who handled security, and those who controlled the officer corps. The components of this internally differentiated regime oscillated between cooperation and competition over the six decades that followed the coup. This is because their interests, while sometimes overlapping, remained essentially separate. The political leadership needed military and/or security support to preserve its power should the masses refuse to obey, but played them off against each other to increase its autonomy and avoid falling hostage to any of them. The security establishment understood that its influence was contingent on the persistence of autocracy, that transition to democracy would spell its downfall from power. As for those who remained in the military, the adverse effects of politicization on the combat readiness and public image of the corps was unsettling. Their preference was to return to the barracks after implementing the needed reforms, and reintervene only if necessary. Driven by varying interests, the three institutions were inevitably drawn into a fervent competition over regime domination, a competition that unfolded within a turbulent domestic and geopolitical environment. The goal was surely not for one institution to eliminate the rest, but rather for one partner in the ruling bloc to subordinate the other two. For years, the shifting alliances among the components of this triangular ruling complex, as well as between them and the intervening forces within and outside the country, continually altered the balance of power between them. Yet the overall trajectory was one where the political and security components of the regime gradually coalesced to sideline their third partner. The military-dominated order of the 1950s began to founder by the 1970s. The day Hosni Mubarak took office, Egypt had already metamorphosed from a military to a police state. And the day he was deposed was brought forth by a military that saw in the popular uprising an opportunity for retribution.

The work at hand is a revisionist history of the subtle configurations of Egypt’s July 1952 regime from start to finish based on primary sources (memoirs, interviews, declassified documents, news clips) and a rereading of a massive amount of secondary literature. The realist historian E. H. Carr said: “The real job of the historian is never simply to ask questions and look up the answers in the book, but to find answers which aren’t in the book; and that requires understanding and imagination quite as much as access to facts.”² In line with his valuable advice, this book essentially reconstructs the critical junctures of the six-decade power struggle that consumed Egypt—a reconstruction centered on institutions as the primary players in a social drama governed by the logic of power. As problematic as this reconstruction might appear to some, it is a necessary first step on the road to clear understanding of the Egyptian question. The political scientist and veteran Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali began his memoirs by explaining:

Whoever intends to write about the past must be aware that … important events rarely unfold in a coherent narrative and sequence; they are scattered through time … but once the different aspects of a single subject are collected, they appear much more connected than they did in reality. The thoughts and actions that [seem to have] occurred in a random and segregated manner appear in the form of a lucid and flowing sequence. That is why reality as it occurred is truly difficult to grasp … Historians … ultimately pass judgments on the [sequence of] events in its full constructed form.³

After a brief overview of the military grievances underlying the 1952 coup, the first five chapters of the book examine in great detail the climactic episodes that locked Egypt on its destined pathway: the March 1954 crisis; the June 1967 defeat; the May 1971 “corrective revolution”; the October 1973 war; and the January 2011 revolt. Each chapter outlines the balance of forces, the issues at stake, the constituting events, and the outcome that set the stage for the next encounter. The concluding chapter presents the January 25 Revolt as one of several episodes of struggle, an episode that simply reshuffled the players and reconstituted the field of forces to pave the way for yet another round.

To my knowledge, no other work has yet integrated the whole string of episodes that occurred in the period between 1952 and 2012 in a single analytical narrative, whose unfolding is examined systematically through a distinct theoretical model. In fact, the 2011 revolt has taken many by surprise because of the misguided belief that the Egyptian regime has maintained its military character throughout. In other words, observers unanimously treated army support as a constant, not a variable. Even the earthquake that shook Egypt to the core left this unshakable consensus intact, with writers insisting that the high command had no qualms with the existing order and only reluctantly deserted Mubarak and his cronies because they became liabilities. This is clearly because very few took the military seriously as an institution with distinctive interests, depicting it instead as a supplement to the regime, and conflating the officer corps with any political actor with a military background (whether he be president, intelligence chief, or prime minister).

The key to explaining the initial triumph of the 2011 uprising is therefore to understand that the ruling bloc has not been as well integrated as many assumed. The day the people resolved to overthrow their rulers, the military was no longer invested in the regime; it has become the least privileged member of the ruling coalition that emerged out of the 1952 coup. After a series of wars, conspiracies, coup plots, and socioeconomic transformations, the balance within Egypt’s tripartite alliance tilted heavily toward the security apparatus, with the political leadership living contentedly in its shadow, and the military subordinated, if not totally marginalized. The economic niche that the military controlled began to diminish with the aggressive privatization policy of the capitalists who colonized the ruling party; its social privileges were dwarfed by those of the security and political elite; the quality of its manpower deteriorated significantly as a result of the social and educational collapse of the Mubarak years; its exclusive reliance on the United States might have made it impressive on paper, but in reality has crippled its capacity to project regional power. Unfortunately for the political rulers, the effort to isolate the army ultimately backfired because passing the responsibility of domestic repression from the military to the police weakened its coercive power, and the substitution of officers with crony capitalists in leading government posts imposed unbearable austerity measures on the population. The conjunction of these two processes provoked the uprising that was welcomed, rather than repressed, by the armed forces. Once the people took to the streets, it was only natural for officers to rally to their side. The revolt was not a bullet they had to dodge, but rather a golden opportunity to finally outflank their unruly partners and get back on top.

* What about economic and ideological power? I believe in general that there are three “sources” of social power: coercive, economic, and ideological. Yet in terms of “institutions of rule,” the modern world knows only three: political, military, and security. Economic and ideological powers are loosely organized in networks and agencies of varying sizes and functions and are mostly located in civil society; their influence over the state must pass through one of the three ruling institutions. This is why economics and ideology are accounted for in this book through their relationship with the three partners in the ruling coalition.