President Obama explained himself and his administration’s policies last night. He was precise about means and ends in Libya: use force to stop a massacre, use politics to support regime change. He reminded me of a revolution past. In Central Europe in the 80’s, there was a self-limiting revolution. Now, in North Africa and the Middle East, we have the self-limiting revolutionary solidarity by a superpower, as strange as that may seem.

Obama did imply a doctrine in the address. Use necessary and unilateral force to defend the safety of Americans, develop multilateral engagements whenever possible in pursuing American interests abroad, turn to the  appropriate international organizations, try to form as wide an alliance as possible. If there is an opportunity to use force to stop a humanitarian disaster, there is a moral imperative to do so. On the other hand, diplomacy and political pressure are understood to be the most useful instruments to foster desirable political results, including regime change and fostering democracy.

I know that for many of my friends on the left, this summary seems naïve or worse. E. Colin R. commented on my last post, the “US intervention within Libya is not linked, IN ANY WAY, with an interest in promoting ‘democracy.’” There are of course much harsher judgments in the press and the blogosphere. They think that the Americans and their European allies are enforcing the no fly zone, protecting Libyan civilians and supporting the rebel forces of Libya, and not in Bahrain, because of oil and corporate interests, without any concern for democratic ideals. This is roughly speaking the position of the Noam Chomsky wing of the American political spectrum.

But what would the same people have said if we did not get involved in Libya? If we allowed a brutal dictator (whose high quality oil fuels Europe) to massacre innocents? “Obviously,” it would have been because we are not willing to upset the status quo, which provides for Europe the oil that it needs, We would have been revealed to be unwilling to support the democratic aspirations of the people of North Africa and the Middle East, because of our dependence on oil from the region, especially from Saudi Arabia. For the no blood for oil crowd, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The speech last night reminded me of the opposition strategies of Central Europe in the eighties, because of fundamental insights about human capacity and the need to balance aspiration with capacity, and to formulate ideals as they are realistic. Back then, the democratic opponents of the totalitarian order in Poland understood that they couldn’t overpower the regime. The Communist authorities had a monopoly over the means of violence and the distribution of scarce goods, and the Soviet’s and the might of an empire stood behind the Polish authorities. By seceding from the system as much as they could, by openly pursuing workers’ rights as workers understood these rights in a workers state, and by developing a free public life, the regime was transformed one step at a time, and finally its end was negotiated at a roundtable.

World attention focused on the most dramatic, the most televisual moments, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before that, Lech Walesa announcing the Gdansk Agreements at the Lenin Shipyards. But the profound change was actually quite gradual, brilliantly rendered metaphorically by Vaclav Havel, then a dissident, later a President, with his notion of a shop keeper deciding not to put a sign declaring “workers of the world unite,” along with the fruits and vegetables. Action and aspiration were limited and focused.

There was a combination of modesty and forcefulness, directed toward a goal, greater self-determination, with an understanding of means and their consequences. I heard such a combination in Obama’s speech. In terms of my last post, Obama knows that the defense of innocent citizens required a military response. While he also understands that for regime change a limited international force may be necessary, he also understands it’s not, indeed, cannot be sufficient. Libyans themselves must overthrow the dictator, and for a successful transition, this is more a political project than a military one. An opening has been presented to the Libyan people, thanks to the international military engagement. Now they must meet with each other in their differences and work at a way to change their political reality without mirroring the oppression of the past. Before the brutal crackdown, Libyans revealed that they were capable of taking the first steps, as have many people are now showing throughout the region. The intervention provides an opportunity to take the next steps. Last night by explaining the limited nature of American involvement, President Obama expressed our support.

While the military intervention of Libya is both important and controversial, I am convinced that the importance and the controversy will be decided less by arms, more by speech. Talk, there and now, is decidedly not cheap, and this applies both to Libya and to the region. I have theoretical preferences that lead me to such an assertion. I admit. I am guided by a book by Jonathan Schell on this issue in general. But I think the specific evidence in Libya and among its neighbors is overwhelming.

The battles in Libya will yield one of three possible military outcomes. The Libyan resistance, with the aid of outside firepower, will overthrow the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Alternatively, Qaddafi and company will prevail. Or, there will be a stalemate. Of these three logically possible outcomes, I think it’s pretty clear that a regime victory with a return to the status quo ante is nearly impossible, given the level of internal resistance and external armaments. The best the regime can hope for is a military stalemate, which it would define as a victory. Yet, both in that case and the case of the victory of the resistance, the door will be opened for political change. The form of the change, then, will be decided politically not militarily, by the word, not by the sword.

And the direction of politics will depend on what people are doing in Libya and among its neighbors in the region off the center stage, as I explored last week. The young modern forces that played such an important role in the transformation in Tunisia and Egypt may very well be outmaneuvered by Islamists or by those privileged in the old regime cunningly maintaining their interests. (A New York Times report suggests that this is the unfolding case). These are the three main actors: those who are trying to maintain their privileges, the Islamists of one sort or another, and the young protesters who played a key role in initiating the present course of events. A democratic outcome would accommodate each of these actors.  How they are interacting now will shape the way they will interact in the near term, which will determine the course of history. Alarmists interpret the reports of collaboration of the military with the Muslim Brotherhood as a sign of democratic defeat. Yet there is an alternative way to look at it. It is something normal, typical of democratic life. As Matt Yglesias observes  a “political coalition between religious conservatives, the military, and economic elites is the bedrock of center-right politics in most democracies.” It is somewhat surprising that it is emerging in Egypt right now, but it is also to be expected.

Roundtable Talks in Warsaw, Poland, from February 6 to April 4, 1989 | Wikimedia Commons

Back in Libya, either a victory by the rebels or a stalemate leads to the necessity of the competing forces to negotiate. As Andrew Arato and Elzbieta Matynia suggested in their posts focused on Egypt, this will require a framework which will promote the possibility of compromise between groups that have fundamentally opposing views and interests, such as the roundtable, an old form developed in the late twentieth century for modern democratic purposes. There is great need for this in Egypt and Libya, and among their neighbors.

The time for mutually respectful talk and the democratic confrontation of competing interests is upon us. The mission creep that I hope for is primarily political not military. There is much about Libya and the region which suggests that a democratic transition is unlikely. Sectarianism, tribalism, authoritarian histories or no history at all are being invoked to explain what a horrible mess we have gotten into. But words can matter and have. Charles Hirschkind, in an important post at The Immanent Frame, shows how “The Road to Tahir,” was constructed with such words over a long time, facilitated by the new social media. There was nothing sudden or magical about Mubarak’s downfall. How powerful such experience will be in paving the road from Tahir is the question. I saw in East and Central Europe how such words overwhelmed authoritarian tendencies in some places, but not in others. I suspect the mixed results of 1989 will be mirrored in the results of 2011. As Arato highlighted in his post, intelligent political action will be decisive.

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 the Middle East” seems to be most openly uncomfortable about democratic developments in Egypt and among its neighbors.  Better the autocrat you know, than the democrat you don’t know, seems to be the operative insight animating Israeli official reaction to recent events.  The striking limitations in Israeli democratic practice are also now strikingly apparent, as will be explored by Nahed Habiballah in her post tomorrow.

Indeed, this is not to say that everything and everyone is or should be happy.  Such expectations of revolutionary change are naïve, even dangerous.  The contradictions in American foreign policy, our professed commitment to democracy, and our pursuit of good relations with our “moderate” autocratic allies, are now clearly revealed and present pressing problems.  I have some expectations that this may be resolved in Jordon with the formation of a genuine constitutional monarchy a la Britain. Perhaps we will even see an interesting movie in the not to distance future about the King’s speech and the President’s speech there, and discuss it at DC. But such will not be the case in Saudi Arabia.  If there are negative consequences of these contradictions for American interest, we may be hearing the nationalistic question – who lost Egypt?  – echoing the old who lost China debate.  This will be explored by Gary Alan Fine in an upcoming post.

I think the discussion that we have had about the events in Egypt this past week illuminated the events as they were happening and provide insights for understanding what is yet to come.  Hazem Kandil concern about the need for the democratic movement to develop alternative grounds for political action is even more pressing this week, than it was last.  Thus far there has been a military coup against a dictatorial regime.  Those in control right now include principally those who benefited from the old order.  It is imperative that the forces in the society that opposed that order get their act together.

There is a clear analogy to be drawn to the changes of ’89.  There is a danger that those who can say “no,” but little else, will be overwhelmed by those who positively assert a new authoritarian order, as I have shown happened in Romania in 1989.  I am not sure that the alternatives are as stark as Daniel Dayan fears, military dictatorship or religious integralism.  But there clearly is a need for people who want alternatives to these stark alternatives to speak to each other and develop a capacity to act in concert, as Hannah Arendt would put it, beyond protesting against.  They must develop programs, policies, and parties, and a way to discuss their competing visions.  They must present alternatives to what Dayan calls “fear mongers “and “sleepwalkers.”

I was talking to Elzbieta Matynia about her post through Skype on Friday, just as Mubarak’s resignation was announced.  I thought that her post was too long.  We were discussing how I might edit it, so that it appeared in two installments.  But at that revolutionary moment, I decided not to cut her piece in two, because of the importance of what she had to say and my sense that it should be said as quickly and coherently as possible.  She put forward a key way that the sorts of problems that Dayan and Kandil anticipate have been avoided in transformations from dictatorship to democracy in the recent past.  Opposing parties and interest groups have to work together on the transformation, and the roundtable with its public etiquette, is an invention that has facilitated this.  I hope the Egyptian generals and oppositionists keep such experience in mind.

And as I am posting this, the revolution is spreading, confirming my conviction that 2011 may very well be as significant as 1989.  The headline in The New York Times is “Unrest Spreads in the Middle East” at this moment, with reports from Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Egypt.

A specter is haunting the Middle East and it is up to the people of the Middle East to decide what this specter is all about – my point in my appraisal of President Obama’s performance thus far in these revolutionary times.

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 regime.

Tahrir Square is hardly a square, as its center is a circle, huge and grassy, now occupied by a tent city. Its shape is additionally confused by construction work, as it spills over into two limbs, one ending at the Egyptian Museum, and the other, Al-Tahrir Avenue, ends up at a bridge over the Nile, where an army checkpoint is installed.

Act Two: Hope – Speech, Conversation, Nonviolence.

Press coverage mentions the extraordinary solidarity of people sitting around bonfires and talking. We all know by now that Tahrir Square means Liberation Square, and though it has been advertised on tourist webpages as gay-friendly, only now has its very name gained a performative power. This is where the people regain their dignity, expressing on their own “yes we can”. We hear their freedom chants (horiya, horiya). From the bits of interviews we know that the object of their discussion is above all Mubarak and the regime he embodies, but we also hear them talking about real elections, and about a new constitution. And they pray. That is the beginning, the beginning of a larger conversation, of the dialogue they need so badly.

Over the past two weeks Tahrir Square has become both site and narrative of a societal hope that centers on the kind of change activated by a newly arisen public realm. Such a realm could create the conditions for dialogue, engaged conversation, negotiation, and compromise that are deeply invested in the democratic promise. But how to facilitate the transformation of an authoritarian political context into a democratic one? How to prepare the ground for a democratic order to emerge where there was none before?

How to make sure that the change is not just a gloss-over, but that it is inclusive, that it also respects the rights of minorities in the society, and that it takes into account the rights of women? How to ensure that the transformation that aims at creating democratic institutions and  practices takes care to nurture the richer texture of democracy?

Finally, how to ensure that the path to a new democracy is not a mere copy of  what has worked in other places? We have learned our lessons, and we already know that democracy cannot be imported or imposed from the outside. We know that if limited to its key benchmark — free and fair elections — democracy could legitimately bring to power non-democratic regimes. We know such instances, and they serve as a cautionary reminder not only for democratic missionaries, but also for the citizens of any democracy that has become taken for granted and relies increasingly on experts, electoral campaign managers, bureaucrats, and money.

The transition to a meaningful and enduring democracy, never an easy project, has the best chance to succeed if it is initiated and owned by the local people and takes into account their voices, imbued as they are with their respective histories, cultures, and economies. But since we know this, how can we respond to those who are disappointed that we appear not to support the aspirations of the Egyptian people?

Well, there is a mechanism devised in the last four decades, known as the roundtable, that by taking dialogue between the people and the regime seriously, has facilitated peaceful political transformation from authoritarianism to democracy.  The choice is clear: either the use of force, or the negotiated settlement.

Act Three: Furniture Needed — a Sizable Round Table

The political mechanism, the roundtable, was introduced in Spain in 1975 and tested in Chile in 1988, and made possible the negotiated transitions in Poland and Hungary in1989, and in South Africa in1993. The roundtable institutionalizes dialogue by providing for it a concrete framework in space and time, by authorizing and legitimizing the actors, by necessitating the drafting of a script, and by establishing rules for the conduct of negotiations.

In each case assuming local features, the roundtable seems to transcend geography as well as the varied historical and political circumstances that brought about the varied forms of dictatorship. After all, the cases of Spain, Chile, Poland, and South Africa are hardly analogous. The one thing they had in common was, generally speaking, the ostentatiously non-democratic character of their regimes, which were otherwise very different from each other. What may seem a paradox at first glance is that while in Poland it was the hegemonic communist party that was the ultimate confiscator of civil and human rights, in Spain and in South Africa it was mainly the outlawed communist party that acted against their respective dictatorships of fascism and racial apartheid.

Still, beyond society’s mastering of local ways of social self-organization in Spain under Franco’s aging fascism in the 1970s, in Poland under Jaruzelski’s compromised communism in the 80s, or in South Africa under the desolate Botha – de Klerk apartheid of the 90s, there was also a recognition on both sides of the pressures exerted by the international human rights community and by world public opinion, foreign governments, investment companies, and donor agencies.

• Who is to be the intermediary?

As the launching of a dialogue between enemies is a daunting task, an external third party, serving as promoter, guardian, or intermediary in the process, usually assists it.  Interestingly, there emerge often surprising or even unlikely allies. Both in Spain and in Poland the third parties that exhibited considerable initiative in facilitating this experimental path were the ancient if not pre-modern institutions of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, respectively. In South Africa they were the Afrikaner nationalists, or more specifically the verligte wing of the governing National Party, enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals, mostly academics, but still loyal to the nationalist outlook. Who could perform such a role in Egypt?

Who is to furnish the table for the dialogue and negotiations? Who is to authorize and legitimize the actors/participants in the talks? Who is to draft a script for the talks, establish the principles of negotiations, and plan for a contingency infrastructure in which any lack of agreement could be dealt with?  In both Poland and South Africa, the roundtable established the grounds for the new order and marked the beginning of the long, tedious, and less thrilling process of building the new– in Adam Michnik’s words—“gray democracy”.

Who will act as the “intermediary” in Egypt? The military, which is already seen as the quiet protector of the protesters, and is not hated as the state police are? Or perhaps exiles who are not known to the larger public but are not tainted, and who bring with them the experience of living in overseas democracies?

• Who might to be sitting at the table?

The roundtable provides tools for institutionalizing a dialogue between those who hold dictatorial power and those social movements which — though still illegal, and often represented by people just back from prison or exile and labe

led enemies of the state — are now acknowledged by the regime, however reluctantly, as the only ones able to bring credibility to the proposed dialogue and an eventual contract.

Omar Suleiman

At the roundtable, outside of a few pre-written threads, the rest has to be improvised, or “written on stage”. That kind of performance requires enormous discipline, continuous research and training, a study of the new language, and a search for fresh ways of encouraging support from, and interaction with, the audience. The key actors have to come from both sides, the regime and the dissenting civil society.

Among those that we know from the media is General Omar Suleiman, former Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, recently named Vice-President of the county, who seems to be trying to take charge of  the talks. There is a reluctant leader Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, a lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency ; and there are some political prisoners better known in Egypt, such as Ayman Nour, a lawyer, leader of the Ghad Party,  and a presidential candidate who ran against Mubarak  in the 2005 elections that according to international monitors were rigged.  There is – no doubt— the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest and one of the oldest opposition groups, illegal since 1952, but therefore even more influential, though currently holding back from  the forefront of the current protest. But of course there are no doubt actors on the ground that we outsiders have not heard of.

Mohamed ElBaradei

• The Benefits of Conducting the Process in Public – a Key to Building Democratic Culture  in Egypt

The manifest publicness of the roundtable talks serves an additional purpose in building any democracy: it exposes the larger society to the broad foundations of democratic politics, serving as a tutorial in participation, deliberation, representation, and discussion. Like its great-grandfather the New England Town meeting, the roundtable engenders the arts of dialogue and compromise and further underscores the performative dimension of democracy-in-the-making.

The anxious monitoring of the talks by the public – including its frustration over their less publicized parts — adds its own voices and gestures, expands the size of the theatre of political negotiation, and enables a larger co-participation in the roundtable talks. At the same time, the very mechanism and performance of the roundtable expands the stock of non-violent settings and political idioms that facilitate democratic change in contexts that lack democratic institutions and processes.

What is most important: the launching of a dialogue is not the result of the “good will” of the ruling regime, but a combination of factors, one of them being the recognition by the regime of the creative emancipatory invincibility demonstrated by society, the other party to the negotiations. It is important to observe that the invincibility reveals itself in a non-violent way (even if — or especially if — the non-violent approach is a recent one), and that it is not fueled by fear.

It is important to mention that the Spanish, Polish, and South African roundtables were not generated by frightened, atomized societies deprived of any capacity to resist the dictatorial power. Instead they brought together a motivated, hitherto rather unlikely assembly of modern subjects, half of whom at these tables, representing the oppressed, were well aware of having been stripped of their basic rights and capabilities as citizens. The other half at the table, the oppressors, have to acknowledge — even if reluctantly – that they are the keepers of a system whose very existence depends on excluding large parts of society from participation in the political decision-making process, and therefore from access to the resources and capacities needed to advance the well-being of both community and its individual members. But this is only the beginning.