Cook: This was an extraordinary moment. Even after the Tunisian uprising that happened
just ten days before, no one expected these kinds of events to occur in Egypt. Egypt had
been described as stable. But after what had happened in Tunisia, it gave the uprising
in Egypt, even from the first night on January 25, a sense of hope and possibility.
In order to understand the uprising, you have to understand Egyptian history. None of Egypt's
leaders have ever developed a compelling vision of society. They've never answered the question
what does Egypt stand for? What is it's place in the world? And as a result, they've been
vulnerable to political challenges and have been unable to establish the loyalty of the
Egyptian people and have relied almost exclusively on force to maintain control.
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's strong man in the 1950's 1960's, was really only the master
of the political scene for about a decade between 1956 when he nationalized the Suez
Canal and the 1967 defeat at the hands of the Israel defense forces in six short days.
That defeat revealed the hollowness of Nasser's claims to national empowerment and even social
justice and economic opportunity. Egyptians were asked to suspend political and personal
freedoms in order to achieve these things. And the defeat showed that none of these things
had actually been achieved. In the aftermath, with Israelis occupying the Sinai Peninsula,
there was an uprising against Nasser, who had been extraordinarily popular and what
Egyptians, mostly students, were demanding was democracy.
Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, talked about correcting the revolution and this meant,
in his words, building a state of institutions, transforming the Egyptian economy to a commercial
economy and aligning Egypt with the West. The culmination of which was Egypt's peace
treaty with Israel in 1979. The problem was that all of these changes didn't bring what
Sadat promised and by the time of his assassination in October 1981, Sadat's Egypt was more contested
than ever. Egyptians just didn't buy into his vision of the future.
Unlike Nasser and Sadat, Hosni Mubarak didn't even try to develop a compelling ideological
vision for his 30 years in power. The coda of the late Mubarak period was stability for
the sake of development. This wasn't exactly something that pulled at the heartstrings
of Egyptians and absent this compelling vision, Mubarak, in many ways like Nasser and Sadat,
had to rely almost exclusively on force and coercion as a mean of controlling the Egyptian
population.
Egypt's new leaders need to learn the lessons from the past. They need to develop a coherent,
compelling, emotionally satisfying vision of Egyptian society and answer the question
of what Egypt stands for and what it's place in the world is. If they don't answer those
questions in a way that makes sense to most Egyptians, they too will be forced to rely
on coercion and fear to maintain their rule. This, like Mubarak before them, will be their
undoing and the struggle for Egypt will continue.