By Hazem Kandil, February 21st, 2011 
Revolutions break our heart, whether they fail or succeed. Will Egypt’s revolution escape this grim prophecy, or will it follow the ‘human, all too human’ pattern of disappointment and betrayal that has haunted the great majority of human revolts? Cautious observers along the Nile banks and elsewhere are waiting anxiously for Egypt to recover from its revolutionary hangover and comfort them by answering a simple question: Did the Internet savvy demonstrators accidentally push the restart button? Is this July 1952 all over again?
Pessimists are certainly justified in pointing out a few chilling similarities. To begin with, Egyptians are back again on the receiving end of military communiqués issued by a tight-knit group of officers they know so little about. Also, in a way reminiscent of 1952, vocal and violent critics of the old regime were caught flat-footed when it finally gave way: after driving the country to a precipice (symbolized in January 1952 by the burning of Cairo), opposition activists had neither the stomach nor the vision to make the leap from dissent to rule. Political power, and the responsibilities that come with it, ultimately fell into the lap of the men in khaki uniforms. Liberals, leftists, and Islamists are yet again making demands, and then waiting for the military junta to call the shots. Our suspicions grow even more now that we know that high-ranking officers were the ones who finally nudged the president out of office (though in a less conspicuous way than in 1952).
Refusing to accept this unsettling analogy, optimists find recourse in one resounding difference between 1952, when the people wholeheartedly supported a military coup, and 2011, when the military was swept over by the strong current of popular revolt. Is this enough guarantee that the military will act any differently? It might be too early to judge, but there are reasons to be hopeful.
The Khaki Uniforms ought to have learned from their own history that military governance inevitably degenerates into authoritarian police rule, which can drive a country to disaster, and ultimately marginalize the military itself. Egypt’s Supreme . . .
Read more: Egypt: Hope against Skepticism
By Chad Alan Goldberg, February 20th, 2011
Yesterday Anna Paretskaya presented a report on the political standoff in Madison Wisconsin. This stimulated comments by Michael Corey and Iris, the first generally critical of Paretskaya’s presentation and analysis, the second supportive. This evening, Chad Alan Goldberg, Vice President, United Faculty & Academic Staff (UFAS), AFT 223 and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered his analysis in a reply to that discussion, which I think requires deliberate consideration as a post of its own. -Jeff
1. Dr. Corey suggests that Anna Paretskaya’s account of events here in Wisconsin is insufficiently objective and lacks a “suspension of belief.” To be sure, knowledge of the social world is always socially situated. Those of us with backgrounds in the labor movement–those of us who are public employees, like Anna and myself, whose collective bargaining rights are now threatened in Wisconsin–are indeed likely to see things differently than someone, like Dr. Corey, with a background in corporate management. However, the tradition of critical theory suggests the possibility of another kind of relationship between the observer and the events she observes. As Max Horkheimer put it, “If … the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges…. His profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is a part.”
2. Much of Dr. Corey’s comment lays out the differing claims of the social and political actors in Wisconsin in a “he said, she said” manner without making any real attempt to investigate the substance of those claims. As social scientists, we are interested in facts. And the facts are on the side of the tens of thousands of protesters gathering day after day at the Wisconsin state capitol.
a. Corporate-funded right-wing propagandists insist that public employees are a new privileged class which taxpayers can’t afford. However, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported, a new study by the . . .
Read more: Workers’ Rights and Democracy in Madison
By Anna Paretskaya, February 19th, 2011 
Anna Paretskaya is a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary academic focus is on the study of political and economic liberalizations and the relationship between democracy and capitalism. She has a front row seat observing the developing events in Madison. This is the first of a series of reports. Jeff
What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill, effectively occupying the building since Tuesday, diverting traffic from the streets around the Capitol, and hindering Madison’s recent, but beloved tradition, the Winter Festival, that was to take place in downtown’s isthmus area this weekend despite unusually warm temperatures.
On Tuesday, when state legislature’s finance committee was to take up the discussion of the governor’s bill, thousands of people from all over the state descended on the Capitol to lobby against it. At the 17-hour-long committee hearing—a “citizen filibuster,” as one speaker dubbed it—hundreds of Wisconsin residents spoke, nearly all against the bill, and scores expressed dismay at the governor’s attempt to take away the right of 175,000 Wisconsin’s public sector employees to collectively bargain. It wasn’t only union activists, Madison’s aging hippies, and liberal university professors, who waited for up to seven hours to make their two-minute statement before the committee. Amid nurses and teamsters and teacher aides were several self-describe d Reaganites, fiscal conservatives, and Republicans (or newly ex-Republicans) who were just as distraught by the governor’s heavy-handedness. The UW-Madison’s teaching assistants’ union (TAA), which has been representing graduate employees for the past 40 years, expressed the prevailing sentiment best: “This bill is an affront to democracy on two important levels. First, it proposes to completely . . .
Read more: The Wisconsin Protests: Cairo on the Isthmus?
By Daniel Dayan, February 17th, 2011
.jpg "Tunisian protesters with the message \"President Ben Ali must leave\"")
Until now, the current revolutions in the Arab world were a case of serious politics, momentous politics, the “politics of tall things.” To try and decipher such lofty events, analysts, including myself, have had to rely on large categories. One had to be hopeful despite the many odds, or skeptical against a climate of pervasive bliss, both expressed at DC. In either case, what was at stake was much too large to be really assessed. Events were shrouded by their very size. But something new and genuinely baffling has happened in Tunisia that has caused analysts to cast aside previous assumptions.
After what has been hailed throughout the world as the “Jasmine Revolution,” thousands of Tunisians fled their country. Flotillas sailed towards the Italian Island of Lampedusa, filled with young people seeking access to Europe. Fishermen had to spend the night aboard their boats to prevent them from being stolen by would-be emigrants. I heard of an estimated five thousand already on Sicilian soil.
Judging from television images, these refugees are not hardened members of the former ruling party. These are not officials in flight from retaliation or punishment: their group includes women, and young people. These are economic immigrants who have taken the risk to cross over to Europe in search of employment. These boat-people share the same kind of desperation as the young man whose suicide triggered the insurrection. As he chose to die by fire, they chose to risk everything at sea.
Yet, the street vendor’s sacrifice was immensely consequential. A revolution took place. The future looked rosy. Why would thousands of his brothers be running away from happiness? Why would they become refugees at the risk of drowning? One cannot just speak of an unfortunate timing, of a coincidence. 5,000 passengers cannot just happen to board dozens of boats by accident. Did they forget they had just won? Imagine 5,000 French attackers of the Bastille migrating en masse to Brazil. Imagine victorious Bolsheviks settling in Tyrol. Why bother with a . . .
Read more: A Baffling Exodus in Tunisia: Exit or Voice or Both?
By Gary Alan Fine, February 16th, 2011 
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, of ecstatic Egyptians have been seen celebrating in the streets and squares of Cairo. They are delighted that they are to be ruled by the Egyptian military who have dissolved the parliament and abrogated the constitution. This once was the well-worn tradition of banana republics. Surely the idea of the military as an institution of popular rule has changed dramatically. The duly, if not fairly, elected government has been overturned through the continuing demonstrations of the people. Hosni Mubarak is no longer President Mubarak. What is next?
In the coming days and months and years citizens and power brokers in Egypt will shape the answer to this question. And Americans will be watching nervously. There is a joke among Jews, all social change is to be evaluated through the prism of a simple question, “But is it good for the Jews?” Jews are not the only ones who ask the question. All peoples worry how massive change will affect their own lives. American policy makers and pundits are asking the equivalent question. If we determine that change has distressing consequences, a search begins for explanations and for those responsible. Typical of the narcissism of nations, the question of blame will arise. “Who is the scapegoat?” “Who is the traitor?” We read history backwards to discover culprits. Should the outcome in Cairo not be to our liking it will be hard for Americans to avoid asking: “Who Lost Egypt?”
Sixty years ago a powerful version of that question was being asked by journalists and in the halls of Congress: Who Lost China? The Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek had recently fallen to the communist troops of Mao. Americans believed that China was within our sphere of influence. We had been propping up the corrupt Nationalist regime, but suddenly these leaders fled to Taiwan. We found Chinese troops fighting against American soldiers on the Korean peninsula. Perhaps most of the blame could be given to Chiang’s corrupt . . .
Read more: Who Lost Egypt?
By Nahed Habiballah, February 15th, 2011
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned a group of European diplomats of the result of ‘the riots’ in Egypt and the possibility that the government could fall in the hands of radical Islamists. Amidst concern for what is happening across its southern border, Israel struggles with a haunting fear that the ‘democratic Jewish state’ may end up with an extremist neighbor. Personally, I found Netanyahu’s remarks repulsive for two reasons.
Firstly, it is quite puzzling to me why Jewish extremism is less threatening than Muslim radicalism. Recently, we have witnessed a shift in Israel’s form of government from a somewhat democratic type to a religious extremist one. In numerous occasions Netanyahu himself has celebrated and encouraged religious extremism in his country with his support of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and his defense of the occupation of ‘Jewish land’ in the West Bank and Gaza. Also, as was reviewed in DC, he has refused to take any action against religious officials after they incited hatred against Arab minorities.
Secondly, the Prime Minister insists on the existence of an ‘Islamic threat’ despite numerous testimonies and evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood represents only a segment of the Egyptian people. Of course, Netanyahu knows full well that playing the ‘Muslim extremism card’ is politically powerful in a world that has turned Islamophobic. To give just one recent example, the former US Assistant Secretary of Defense, Mary-Beth Long, has voiced concern over the ‘democratic moves’ in the Arab world. She cautioned that the consequences of overthrowing old regimes might be both a threat to American interests in the region as well as Israel’s security.
This is a paternalist approach that has been used by previous colonialist powers. The idea is that Arabs are not ready for democracy and possibly do not deserve it yet, especially when it might create unwanted results for the Western democratic world and for Israel.
Prime Minister Netanyahu considers Israel the only stable country in the rocky region. In fact, time and again, the Israeli government uses the instability of . . .
Read more: Democracy, Israel and Egypt
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 14th, 2011 
I had the good fortune of being an eye witness to one of the major changes in the geopolitical world of my life time. I observed the Soviet Empire collapsing, chronicled it at the front lines, even before many saw the collapse coming. I don’t have such a privileged seat as we observe the transformations of in Egypt and Tunisia, but my intuition tells me that these may be every bit as significant as the ones I saw in their infancy thirty years ago. We can’t be sure that the changes begun this past month will reach a fully successful conclusion: fully? probably not. But there is no doubt that the world has changed, not only there, but also here.
A big change: the idea of the clash of civilizations has been defeated. It turns out, and should be clear to all, that Muslims are quite capable of initiating a genuine democratic movement. It may or may not prevail, but it is certainly an important strain in Egyptian and Tunisian political culture.
Another big change: I suspect that the commitment to democracy is now “in,” more appealing than radical jihad, even for the disaffected in the Muslim world. How long this lasts and with what effect will depend on the continuing success of the transformation begun last month. I believe this is the first major victory in the so called “war on terrorism.”
A little change, close to home: in everyday life, Islamophobia may be in retreat. After seeing the images from Cairo, why should Juan Williams wonder about that person in Muslim garb on an airplane? It may never have been particularly rational, but especially not now. There are crazy people of all sorts of cultural and religious persuasions, and also admirable ones. Now the admirable of the Arab and Muslim world are front stage. Now they are most visible. Only the most close-minded will refuse to see them, i.e. over at Fox,  Glenn Beck but, I suspect, not Juan Williams.
And now the “only democracy in . . .
Read more: The Week in Pre and Re-view: Revolution in Egypt and Beyond
By Daniel Dayan, February 12th, 2011 
Both the Tunisian insurrection and the Egyptian revolt have been described in terms of an absolute evil versus an absolute good, i.e. a mean, illegitimate and greedy dictatorship in contrast with a popular insurrection. In a first snapshot one can define the insurrections as “lessons in democracy.” But the larger question is: What comes next?
In the French account of the Tunisian events, an immolated street vendor has become an emblem, or ‘root metaphor’, for the uprising. Here was a young man who had gotten himself an education but could not find a job in the corrupt economy that was controlled by the families of the former president and first lady, the Ben Ali-Trabelsi clan. Courageously, this young man tried to earn a living by acquiring a street-cart to sell vegetables. The youngster went wild with grief when the police confiscated his cart. He put himself on fire. Immediately, he became a symbolic figure, a martyr. But whose martyr will he be? Who are the future victors?
The Ambiguity of ‘NO’
These current insurrections are often described as negations of what exists. Yet, what exists is rarely unambiguous. Rejection of the former Tunisian president Ben Ali can be inspired by both a yearning for a just or free society, as well as by a desire for another sort of authoritarian society. In the case of Egypt, some analysts believe that the dismissal of Mubarak carries an obvious meaning. But of course it does not. Behind it can be both the urge to challenge a police state AND the wish to salute another type of police state. Mubarak himself is both an adversary of democracy and an enemy of fundamentalism.
The first images of the Egyptian insurrection were crowd shots, aerial views. They project unity over diversity. While the masses show unanimous fervour now, over time the picture will become more specific. Already now we can see that the champions of democracy wear hijabs, demonstrators carry banners proclaiming “Mubarak in Tel Aviv,” they stomp with their feet on American and Israeli flags, and row after row of protesters . . .
Read more: Tunisia and Egypt: Questioning Insurrections
By Elzbieta Matynia, February 11th, 2011 
As I post this, Mubarak has resigned. The military is in control. Elzbieta Matynia submitted these reflections yesterday, and now they are even more timely. She looked beyond the immediate crisis and imagined the process of successful political transformation, thinking about past experiences, specifically about Roundtables – the form invented in the late twentieth century to facilitate peaceful transitions from dictatorship to democracy. She writes in South Africa looking at Egypt, thinking about South Africa and her native Poland. She presents her position in three acts. -Jeff
Act One: The Meeting on the Square
How many of us, including the tourists to Egypt’s pyramids, were really aware that Egypt has been under a state of emergency for 30 years now? That the rights and freedoms of its citizens, guaranteed in the constitution, were indefinitely suspended, including the freedom of association, freedom of movement, and freedom of expression? (Except for family gatherings it is illegal for more than four people to gather even in private homes.) How many of us knew that censorship was legalized (no freedom of the press) and that tens of thousands have been detained without trial for defying these limitations? That people have lived in fear of the ubiquitous security forces? And that the number of political prisoners in this country of 77 million runs over 30,000…
Just a reminder to those of us who try to make sense of the developments in Egypt, including the recent Day of Rage, and the Day of Departure…
The people who gathered on Tahrir Square saw themselves for the first time as citizens, and indeed the square became their newly constituted public space. For Hannah Arendt such a coming into being of a space of appearance is a prerequisite for the formal constitution of a public realm. In this space, there is an accompanying enthusiasm and joy of discovering one’s own voice, even if interrupted by the attacks launched by undercover police and those who side with the ruling . . .
Read more: Egypt, Squaring the Circle: A View from Poland and South Africa
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, February 9th, 2011
How does the head of state of the oldest of modern democracies, born of a revolution, approach the uncertainties of this revolutionary moment? Many are quick with criticism of, but also with appreciation for, President Obama’s apparent conservative realism.
Ross Douthat wrote in Monday’s Times: “Obama might have done more to champion human rights and democracy in Egypt before the current crisis broke out, by leavening his Kissinger impression with a touch of Reaganite idealism. But there isn’t much more the administration can do now, because there isn’t any evidence that the Egyptian protesters are ready to actually take power.”
On my side of the political tracks, opinion is different. My friend and colleague, Elzbieta Matynia, posted on her Facebook wall an open letter: “Dear Barack, Dear Mr. President, Why are we still hesitant to join the Egyptians’ cry for their rights and dignity? The longer we wait, the more doubt there is around the world in the sincerity of our commitment to democracy. Why are we failing to appreciate that these determined people are trying hard not to resort to violence? Too often, geopolitics has smothered the hopes of an entire people!”
A more extended application of these questions was developed in a piece by Asli Bali and Aziz Rana, “Supporting democracy in the Middle East requires abandoning a vision of Pax – Americana.” But I wonder about such judgments of the President and the Western leaders. Are these judgments responses to actual policy, or are they responses to the politics of gestures as examined by Daniel Dayan in his post last week?
Gestures that are thought to reveal what is going on in closed negotiations between the authorities and some oppositional figures, but may not actually be representative, may be more significant as expressions in and of themselves, as Dayan suggests. Their appearance is significant. They have a power, while they may not be telling an underlying story.
As President Obama seems to gesture toward human rights, democracy advocates in Egypt and abroad are heartened, while America’s traditional allies in the region . . .
Read more: Obama and Egypt
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