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Egypt's Revolution Stalls in Divide-and-Conquer Politics
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CAIRO—Early Friday, 16 months after ousting former President Hosni Mubarak from power, Egypt's young revolutionaries huddled with leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, once close allies, and pleaded for help to save the revolution.
A pair of Supreme Court rulings a day earlier had dissolved the Parliament—which had been filled this year through free elections—and returned legislative powers to the Egyptian military. The rulings came a day after the declaration of martial law, which those at the meeting agree had amounted to a military coup.
The revolutionaries urged the Brotherhood to withdraw their presidential candidate, Mohammed Morsi, from this weekend's election and instead join street protests, according to three people who attended the meeting at the Muslim Brotherhood's Cairo headquarters.
The Brotherhood representatives refused. "It's the end of our relationship, they've made catastrophic choices," said Rabab El-Mahdi, a Marxist political science professor and activist who had mediated between the Brotherhood and the revolutionaries.
Egypt's Arab Spring revolution, which toppled Mr. Mubarak in 18 days, has stalled in a quagmire of divide-and-conquer politics, leaving the country's revolutionaries splintered and disillusioned.
On Friday, there was little visible reaction to the court rulings. A small evening protest drew no more than a few hundred people.
The unity between Egypt's secular and Islamist forces drove the uprising. But growing rifts between the conservative, religious Brotherhood and the largely liberal, secular revolutionaries now appears one of the most damaging cracks in Egypt's revolution.
The Muslim Brotherhood had long preferred backroom deals with the regime over street protests. Egypt's secular opposition, meanwhile, grew suspicious of the Brotherhood's political ambitions and Islamist agenda.
The generals who have ruled Egypt since Mr. Mubarak relinquished power on Feb. 11, 2011, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, were initially dismissed as bumbling neophytes struggling for a grasp on national politics. They now appear as master tacticians who shrewdly derailed a movement that had seemed unstoppable.
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Egypt's 2011 revolt had coalesced around a group of about 15 young political activists who represented a broad swath of political ideologies. Calling themselves the Revolutionary Youth Coalition, they were instrumental in plotting the demonstrations that unraveled the regime. Their ability to bridge deep political divides—uniting Islamists and secularists, in particular—led to the ouster of Mr. Murbarak who held power for 30 years.
The generals who took over Egypt hosted the young activists at the military's marbled intelligence headquarters in Cairo's leafy Heliopolis neighborhood two days after Mr. Mubarak stepped down.
"They said, 'You are our children, you are so very brave,'" recalled Ahmed Maher, a member of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition whose April 6 Movement was instrumental in organizing the protests.
"We were so stupid," said Shadi Ghazali Harb, another member of the coalition. "We thought, 'Oh swell, they're really good people, they'll help us.' "
Mssrs. Ghazali Harb and Maher and their fellow revolutionaries demanded sweeping democratic changes that reached Egypt's privileged military class.
"They smiled and told us, 'We'll discuss the details at our next meeting," said Mr. Maher. That never happened.
The unraveling of Egypt's revolution began soon after Mr. Mubarak quit, with the Muslim Brotherhood seeking greater accommodation with the new rulers.
The military in February 2011 set up a committee of legal scholars to draft constitutional amendments—the pivotal first-step in shaping post-Mubarak Egypt. It was stacked with Brotherhood sympathizers, not revolutionaries.
"They knew how to play the game," Mr. Ghazali Harb said of the Brotherhood. "They were cutting deals, while we were banging our fists on the table."
The Muslim Brotherhood supported amendments that called for holding elections first. The victors would lead Egypt's democratic transition, including the drafting of a new constitution. The Brotherhood said the amendments, which also set term limits and reformed election laws, would provide the quickest exit from military rule.
The young revolutionaries were opposed. They wanted to draft a constitution first, arguing it was better to design the rules of Egypt's nascent democracy before getting bogged down in divisive electoral politics.
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The rival campaigns on the proposed amendments turned into a religious struggle, opening the first rift in the revolution's Islamist-secular unity.
The Revolutionary Youth Coalition, which included members of both camps, urged their respective leaders to find common ground. The efforts failed. "This was the moment it all went wrong," said Mr. Ghazali Harb.
The amendments won 77% of the vote in the March 2011 referendum, setting up a tumultuous transition that left the military in complete charge.
At the end of July, Islamist parties flexed their new political muscle with a call for a demonstration dubbed "Sharia Friday." Egypt's revolutionaries scrambled to respond, knowing such a demonstration would tug further on the coalition's fraying unity.
Islamists and revolutionary leaders spent three days negotiating principles they could all support at a coming Friday demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square. They reached agreement and the revolution seemed back on track.
"It was the perfect moment," said Ms. Mahdi, "a huge achievement."
But hours before the demonstration, hard-line Salafi Islamists began adorning the square with the black-and-white flags of jihad and banners calling for the implementation of Islamic law. Ms. Mahdi made frantic calls to Brotherhood leaders, who told her there was little they could do.
Egypt's non-Islamist opposition pulled out of the demonstration. Instead of heralding the revolution's recaptured unity, the day was dubbed Kandahar Friday, a reference to the Taliban's Afghan stronghold.
As the Islamists grew more menacing, the secular revolutionaries began to splinter, with growing tensions between Islamist and Christian members.
Prominent revolutionaries, such as Google executive Wael Ghonim, disappeared from public view. Mr. Ghonim, whose account of his arrest by security forces during the revolution won the support of millions of Egyptians, has recently returned to politics but kept a low profile.
Fresh whiffs of old regime tactics appeared in the summer of 2011. New coalitions sprouted with military-friendly positions: the Revolutionary Youth Assembly, a Revolutionary Coalition of Youth, and the Revolutionary Youth Union, which is supporting presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq, an ex-Air Force Commander and Mr. Mubarak's last prime minister.
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The April 6 movement, one of the most powerful grass roots activist movements within the coalition, suddenly splintered in June when a faction turned against the group's leadership.
Longtime opposition activists said the emergence of regime-friendly revolutionary parties and the splintering of influential opposition groups recalled Mubarak-era political tricks.
"Suddenly, the military started saying, 'You're not the only voice speaking for the revolution,' " said Mr. Maher.
In late July, the military started to go after the revolutionary leaders they once praised. They issued Decree #69, accusing the April 6 movement of sowing discord. State media branded movement leaders as foreign-funded agents. April 6 activist Asmaa Mahfouz was charged with assaulting a state employee. She was acquitted last month. Another coalition member, leftist labor activist Mustapha Shawqi was sentenced to two years in prison for joining in a Christian solidarity protest before Mr. Mubarak's ouster.
"Everyone thought the military were idiots. They weren't," said Josh Stacher, a professor at Kent State University in Ohio who spent 15 years in Egypt studying the Mubarak regime's ruling tactics. "The revolutionaries didn't understand how the system works and they miscalculated again and again."
In November, on the eve of parliamentary elections, the military-backed cabinet issued suggested principles for a new constitution. It included provisions that would guarantee secular governance, as well as protections of military privilege. The document infuriated the Muslim Brotherhood and split the secular opposition, drawing support from revolutionaries angry with the Islamists.
"If your goal is to splinter the opposition, you couldn't draft a more perfect document," said Mohammad al-Qassas, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood and member of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition.
The Brothers, after refusing protests for months, returned to the streets for one day in November and were joined by young revolutionaries. But the Brothers went home that night. Security forces attacked the protesters who stayed.
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Dozens died in the week of clashes that followed. The Brotherhood refused to come to the revolutionaries' defense or support their demands that the military relinquish its grip. Parliamentary elections were days away and the Brotherhood was poised to dominate the races.
"I screamed at them, 'Why are you selling us out and running to the military, don't you realize they will eat you alive in the end?'" Ms. Mahdi said.
The Brotherhood won control of Egypt's 508-seat Parliament in free elections that ended in January.
The two Revolutionary Youth Coalition members who won seats accused Brotherhood lawmakers of siding with the military against them. One, Basem Kamel, pushed a bill banning military trials for civilians and requiring independent prison monitors to prevent torture. The legislation was stalled by Brotherhood lawmakers, raising accusations they were burying bills to appease the ruling generals
In early February, days after Parliament was seated, the military next went after nongovernment organizations, arresting 43 senior NGO workers, including 16 Americans. The targeted NGOs gave legal support for activists, pushed voter education and provided more than 25,000 election monitors during the Parliament elections.
The Americans were allowed to leave the country, but the Egyptians' criminal trials are continuing. The arrests had a chilling effect and dried up funding, the groups said.
Egyptian NGOs have mustered just one-third of the vote monitors for this weekend's presidential elections that they employed in the Parliament elections. All but three international monitoring groups are staying out of the presidential vote.
As Egypt headed into presidential primary elections earlier this year, the Muslim Brotherhood rallied behind Mr. Morsi.
Egypt's revolutionaries were split between moderate Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and opposition activist Hamdeen Sabahy. Both men had solid revolutionary credentials. The Revolutionary Youth Coalition preached unity but failed to persuade them to unite on one ticket.
Both candidates lost. Together, their vote totals would have given them an easy victory.
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越障
Liberalism——Classical and modern
Enlightenment philosophers are given credit for shaping liberal ideas. Thomas Hobbes attempted to determine the purpose and the justification of governing authority in a post civil war England. Using the idea of natural law, he constructed the concept of social contract and concluded that absolute monarchy is the ideal and just form of society. John Locke, while adopting Hobbes's idea of natural law and social contract, nevertheless argued that when the monarchy become a tyrant, that constituted a violation of the social contract, which bestows life, liberty, and property as a natural right. He concluded that the people have a right to overthrow a tyrant. By placing life, liberty and property as the supreme value of law and authority, Locke formulated the basis of liberalism based on social contract theory. To these early enlightement thinkers securing the most essential amenities of life—liberty and private property among them—required the formation of a "sovereign" authority with universal jurisdiction. In a natural state of affairs, liberals argued, humans were driven by the instincts of survival and self-preservation, and the only way to escape from such a dangerous existence was to form a common and supreme power capable of arbitrating between competing human desires. This power could be formed in the framework of a civil society that allows individuals to make a voluntary social contract with the sovereign authority, transferring their natural rights to that authority in return for the protection of life, liberty, and property.[62] These early liberals often disagreed about the most appropriate form of government, but they all shared the belief that liberty was natural and that its restriction needed strong justification. Liberals generally believed in limited government, although several liberal philosophers decried government outright, with Thomas Paine writing that "government even in its best state is a necessary evil".
As part of the project to limit the powers of government, various liberal theorists such as James Madison and the Baron de Montesquieu conceived the notion of separation of powers, a system designed to equally distribute governmental authority among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.[63] Governments had to realize, liberals maintained, that poor and improper governance gave the people authority to overthrow the ruling order through any and all possible means, even through outright violence and revolution, if needed.[64] Contemporary liberals, heavily influenced by social liberalism, have continued to support limited constitutional government while also advocating for state services and provisions to ensure equal rights. Modern liberals claim that formal or official guarantees of individual rights are irrelevant when individuals lack the material means to benefit from those rights and call for a greater role for government in the administration of economic affairs.
Early liberals also laid the groundwork for the separation of church and state. As heirs of the Enlightenment, liberals believed that any given social and political order emanated from human interactions, not from divine will. Many liberals were openly hostile to religious belief itself, but most concentrated their opposition to the union of religious and political authority, arguing that faith could prosper on its own, without official sponsorship or administration by the state.
Beyond identifying a clear role for government in modern society, liberals also have obsessed over the meaning and nature of the most important principle in liberal philosophy: liberty. From the 17th century until the 19th century, liberals—from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill—conceptualized liberty as the absence of interference from government and from other individuals, claiming that all people should have the freedom to develop their own unique abilities and capacities without being sabotaged by others. Mill's On Liberty (1859), one of the classic texts in liberal philosophy, proclaimed that "the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way".[67] Support for laissez-faire capitalism is often associated with this principle, with Friedrich Hayek arguing in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that reliance on free markets would preclude totalitarian control by the state.[68] Beginning in the late 19th century, however, a new conception of liberty entered the liberal intellectual arena. This new kind of liberty became known as positive liberty to distinguish it from the prior negative version, and it was first developed by British philosopher Thomas Hill Green. Green rejected the idea that humans were driven solely by self-interest, emphasizing instead the complex circumstances that are involved in the evolution of our moral character. In a very profound step for the future of modern liberalism, he also tasked social and political institutions with the enhancement of individual freedom and identity. Foreshadowing the new liberty as the freedom to act rather than to avoid suffering from the acts of others, Green wrote the following:
The official logo of the French government displays the motto of the French Revolution. The mantra of liberté, égalité, fraternité has featured prominently in the social and political fabric of the modern world, a testament to the wide-ranging influence of liberal principles.
Rather than previous liberal conceptions viewing society as populated by selfish individuals, Green viewed society as an organic whole in which all individuals have a duty to promote the common good. His ideas spread rapidly and were developed by other thinkers such as L. T. Hobhouse and John Hobson. In a few short years, this Social Liberalism had become the essential social and political program of the Liberal Party in Britain, and it would encircle much of the world in the 20th century. In the 21st century it is being argued that emerging is a New Liberalism that is centred on the concept of timeless liberty, which would extend negative and positive liberty to future generations through proactive action today. In addition to examining negative, positive, and timeless liberty, liberals have tried to understand the proper relationship between liberty and democracy. As they struggled to expand suffrage rights, liberals increasingly understood that people left out of the democratic decision-making process were liable to the tyranny of the majority, a concept explained in Mill's On Liberty and in Democracy in America (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville. As a response, liberals began demanding proper safeguards to thwart majorities in their attempts at suppressing the rights of minorities.
Besides liberty, liberals have developed several other principles important to the construction of their philosophical structure, such as equality, pluralism, and toleration. Highlighting the confusion over the first principle, Voltaire commented that "equality is at once the most natural and at times the most chimeral of things". All forms of liberalism assume, in some basic sense, that individuals are equal. In maintaining that people are naturally equal, liberals assume that they all possess the same right to liberty. In other words, no one is inherently entitled to enjoy the benefits of liberal society more than anyone else, and all people are equal subjects before the law. Beyond this basic conception, liberal theorists diverge on their understanding of equality. American philosopher John Rawls emphasized the need to ensure not only equality under the law, but also the equal distribution of material resources that individuals required to develop their aspirations in life. Libertarian thinker Robert Nozick disagreed with Rawls, championing the former version of Lockean equality instead. To contribute to the development of liberty, liberals also have promoted concepts like pluralism and toleration. By pluralism, liberals refer to the proliferation of opinions and beliefs that characterize a stable social order. Unlike many of their competitors and predecessors, liberals do not seek conformity and homogeneity in the way that people think; in fact, their efforts have been geared towards establishing a governing framework that harmonizes and minimizes conflicting views, but still allows those views to exist and flourish. For liberal philosophy, pluralism leads easily to toleration. Since individuals will hold diverging viewpoints, liberals argue, they ought to uphold and respect the right of one another to disagree.[81] From the liberal perspective, toleration was initially connected to religious toleration, with Spinoza condemning "the stupidity of religious persecution and ideological wars". Toleration also played a central role in the ideas of Kant and John Stuart Mill. Both thinkers believed that society will contain different conceptions of a good ethical life and that people should be allowed to make their own choices without interference from the state or other individuals.
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发表于 2012-6-16 22:46:46
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