The nature of the regime further limits its options for combating economic issues. The modern Egyptian republic, founded in 1952 when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a group of army officers to oust the monarchy, was designed with the military at its center. Every president since (with the exception of Morsi during his one-year rule following the Arab Spring) has been a former military commander. The armed forces remain the country’s only coherent institution and have controlled large swathes of the economy since the republic was founded, leaving very little room for private Enterprise.
The Fall of the Once Mighty
The 1952 coup was as much a domestic revolution as it was a regional one, resulting in Egypt leading pan-Arabism under the Nasser regime. Then, during the 1950s and ’60s, the Egyptians led the drive towards secular republicanism; they did this against the traditional monarchical regimes led by the Saudis. Egypt’s influence spread throughout North Africa, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula and even Mesopotamia. Through short-lived initiatives, Egypt also formed a unified polity with Syria in 1958 to establish the United Arab Republic, which formed a loose confederation with the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen (also known as North Yemen). This confederation was called the United Arab States.
Nation-state-based nationalism held sway over pan-Arab form, and both of these entities dissolved in 1961. Egypt, however, continued to lead the Arab world even after its shocking defeat in the 1967 war against Israel. It launched another war against Israel in 1973, and although Egypt failed to win, it negotiated a peace treaty with Israel in 1978 and remained the undisputed heart of the Arab world until the early 1980s. However, its failure to establish a viable political economic system limited its success thereafter.
While the military was prevented from having direct involvement in politics during the Nasser era, genuine civilianization of politics has failed to take root because the military has continued to dominate the system and created a single-party regime with an autocratic nature. Nasser founded the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) as a civilian vehicle to oversee governance while the military ruled from behind the scenes. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, then replaced the ASU with the National Democratic Party (NDP). After Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Mubarak led the NDP for three decades. His 30-year dictatorship created resentment among the masses, which erupted in 2011 and resulted in his own ouster in the wake of the Arab Spring.
Further weakening Egypt’s influence, the NDP was disbanded when the military took direct control of the government after Mubarak was forced to step down. This move created a problem that the military has not yet been able to solve: the lack of a political vehicle through which to control the polity. When the Brotherhood won parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012, the military briefly moved to establish a modus vivendi with the Islamist movement, which was evident from the fact that the constitution crafted during the short Brotherhood reign gave massive authority to the armed forces. The Brotherhood appeared able to establish a working relationship with the military regime, as has been the case with the Islamist movement’s counterparts in Tunisia and Morocco.
However, the Brotherhood’s strategy of trying to placate the armed forces while pushing out competing political groups (secular as well as Islamist) backfired. Meanwhile, even as it tried to forge an arrangement with the Egyptian military, the Brotherhood faced opposition from other parts of the establishment as well as from civil society groups. It resulted in the uprising that was led by the Tamarod movement on June 30, 2013. The resulting gridlock, with Morsi refusing to step down, created a situation where the military had to once again hit the reset button.
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