Watching Egypt
Mohammed Adam on the nervous West
The reluctance of the Western powers to denounce the military coup in Egypt — dare we call it that — which ousted a democratically-elected president, has once again exposed the inherent contradiction at the heart of the West’s push for democracy in the Middle East, and shown how ephemeral its commitment really is.
More than three weeks after the military tossed out the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, Western governments can’t even bring themselves to call the ouster what it is: a coup d’état that forcibly removed Egypt’s first-ever democratically elected leader from office, taking cover under the umbrella of the mob that demanded his removal. From Barack Obama to British Prime Minister David Cameron and our own Stephen Harper, Western leaders have been dancing around the issue, parsing words.
“This is obviously an extremely complex and difficult situation,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently intoned. “The fact is we need to take the time necessary because of the complexity of the situation to evaluate what has taken place.”
But it was Cameron who perhaps said it best, showing how the West speaks from both sides of the mouth: “We never support in countries the intervention by the military. But what now needs to happen, what we need now to happen in Egypt is for democracy to flourish and for genuine democratic transition to take place ...”
No condemnation of the subversion of the kind of democracy the West constantly preaches it wants. If there is a contradiction or inconsistency in that statement, it would come as no surprise to many in the developing world who have long watched the West’s push for democracy in far-flung places. They know that when the rubber really hits the road, the action never matches the rhetoric. As Noam Chomsky once said, the Western attitude to democracy comes down to: “It is fine as long as its outcome is the one we want.”
That sums up the reaction to the coup in Egypt, and basically defines the Western attitude to democratic enterprises around the world. Morsi has been left to hang because he was never the leader of choice for the West. The Muslim Brotherhood has long been considered a danger to Western interests and the U.S. and other countries reluctantly accepted Morsi because he had been democratically elected. But they never warmed up to him, and their antipathy toward what he represented burst into the open when he was deposed.
Let’s be clear about Morsi. He made serious mistakes, most notably trying to give himself unprecedented powers to legislate without judicial oversight, and prompting Egyptians to mock him as the new Pharoah. But that’s no reason for the West to support his overthrow, if they really believed in democracy in that country. In countries such as Egypt, where there has never been a culture of democracy and the institutions that underpin it, mistakes by new governments are inevitable. It is not a surprise Morsi overreached and had to be pushed back. For all its organizing ability, the Muslim Brotherhood had never governed and did not understand the art of governing. The reason democracy works in the West is not only because of years, and in some cases centuries of practice, but crucially because there are strong institutions — an independent judiciary, a free press, strong opposition and vibrant civil society to act as a check on government excess. In places that have only known tyranny and dictatorship, no such institutions exist. And these institutions don’t just fall from the sky at the snap of a finger, and they don’t flourish in a vacuum. They have to be nurtured, and as many fledgling African democracies such as Ghana and Senegal have shown, this can only happen when people freely elect their leaders and create the incentive and momentum to build up these institutions. For the most part, the U.S. and the European Union have recognized and supported this approach in Africa, refusing to do business with any military dictators who overthrow democraticallyelected governments, giving young democracies a chance to make mistakes, learn from them and thrive.
Egypt needed time to create and nurture its own institutions in order to solidify its democracy, and Morsi never got the chance to learn from his mistakes. Western governments knew better than the mob baying for his blood, but they didn’t come to his aid because he was simply not their man. He did not serve their self-interest.
In Africa, the U.S and other Western countries have come a long way from the time they backed military despots such as the Zaire’s (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko, but their attitude to the Middle East has remained the same. Experts say that because of oil and protection of Israel, dictators have often been given a pass because they are allies. These leaders may be harsh and murderous, but because they are the West’s thugs that’s fine. And where democratic governments strayed from the Western line, it was OK to procure their removal. Iran is now Public Enemy No. 1 in the West, but few remember that the seeds of the religious autocracy that rules the country today were sown when the U.S. and U.K. authored a 1953 coup that removed democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, paving the way for the rule of the Shah of Iran. We know how that story ended, and the West is now reaping the whirlwind.
The handling of Morsi’s removal shows the West has still not learned the lessons of history.