Just over one year ago, Egyptians packed Tahrir Square to celebrate the first democratic presidential election in their history. “Finally, Egypt is born,” wept an elderly Egyptian man via CNN. Pundits across the world crowed that the Arab Spring had turned into an Egyptian summer and began extrapolating its effects to the entire region.
Fast-forward to now. President Mohamed Morsi has been removed from power. Egyptians on both sides of the dispute are back in the street, claiming to represent the popular will. And pundit tongues are clucking at the unraveling of Egyptian democracy, preparing editorial eulogies for the event of its demise.
Where did Egyptian democracy go wrong?
Egypt successfully held a free election last year. Elections being the one measurable hallmark of democracy, one could argue that Egyptian democracy began the day the first ballot was cast. Yet to reduce democracy to an electoral process is to ignore what George Jonas recently labeled the “dilemma of democracy.” The problem with democracy, Jonas noted, is that good democrats must respect the results of a fair election, even if that election propels the “undemocratic” to power. If democrats do not honour the election, their country ceases to be a democracy, but so too will it if the undemocratic assume control.
In Western political thought, undemocratic tendencies are generally conflated with a lack of liberal ideals. As such, many observers (and not only Western ones) argue that Egypt’s democratic experiment failed for want of liberal values following the election. After all, Morsi may have been elected democratically, yet when he granted himself unlimited powers last winter to “protect” the nation, onlookers and Egyptians alike collectively furrowed their brows at this illiberal – read; undemocratic – behavior.
It is tempting to judge democracy by its liberalism and point to the absence of liberal values as the death knell of young democracies like Egypt. However, these values exist to varying degrees across the democratic Western world itself. Even Germany does not allow a level of free speech and religion that we would expect of a Western democracy – it may very well be illegal to belong to the Church of Scientology in Germany in the near future, just as it is already illegal to possess the book Mein Kampf or utter a Holocaust denial. Nevertheless, Germany is a democracy, for it is the German people who have decided that these measures are legitimate (or at least never tried to undo them).
So if democracy is not an electoral process, nor dependent on the existence of liberal values, what exactly is it?
Stemming from the Greek roots “demos,” meaning people, and “kratos,” meaning rule, the word itself means “the people rule.” This simplistic yet powerful concept is one that democrats of all colours can embrace, for how the people rule is up to every democratic nation-state to determine for itself.
The only prerequisite of democracy is that the people rule collectively. While this is, in theory, best achieved through pure democracy, few countries can feasibly operate such a system and instead elect representatives to rule on the people’s behalf. Collective rule in representative democracies is thus preserved in the instruments which define, and limit, those representatives’ powers. In most democracies, this instrument is a constitution.
Morsi’s government attempted to pass an Islamist constitution last fall, which many applauded as a step towards democracy. Yet Morsi’s constitution had a fundamental flaw: constitutions must flow from some commonality that all citizens in a country share, for the instrument which safeguards the collective will must represent it. In other words, the foundation of a democratic state must be a national identity that ties people to one another. And this identity must supersede, or at least be compatible with, all other religious, tribal, or political identities citizens may have.
Benedict Anderson was correct that national identity is “imagined”; all citizens of a nation must share some sense of communion. Yet Anderson’s assertion that this shared identity is attached to shared culture is not necessarily true. National identity can stem from common culture, as in Japan, yet it can also stem from common values, as in the United States.
Egyptians’ central problem is that they have not yet found a shared national identity. At least, whatever national identity the country has does not yet transcend the partisan and sectarian identities which currently divide the population. It is the same problem facing the fledgling democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan. Without this fundamental commonality, Egypt cannot begin to build democratic institutions. Any constitution the government tries to pass will be built on air, even if it is full of liberalisms borrowed from other countries’ adaptations
Albert Einstein perhaps put it best: “The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.”
Egypt’s task, and the task of any democratic nation, is to identify what commonality binds its citizens together. Only then will a constitution hold meaning, and only then can Jonas’s good democrats calmly hand power to whoever wins the vote, reassured that they will not rule to the detriment of others or to the detriment of democracy.
~
Yule Schmidt is a Special Assistant to the Yukon cabinet. She holds a B.A. in History from Stanford University and an M.A. in History from McGill University. This article reflects her personal views and not that of her employer.
