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Jon Alterman: Issandr El Amrani is the regional director for the Middle East/North Africa region at the Open Society Foundation. Prior to joining Open Society, Issandr served as the North Africa project director for the International Crisis Group, covering everything from Morocco to Egypt. I first encountered him as an early blogger on The Arabist, a blog he started back in 2003. Issandr, welcome to Babel.
Issandr El Amrani: Happy to be here, Jon.
Jon Alterman: Looking back, what are you proudest about what you got right about the Arab Spring and what are you most embarrassed you got wrong?
Issandr El Amrani: Let me start with the most embarrassing. I think, like everyone who was caught in that moment, that I was over optimistic, over enthusiastic, too caught up in the moment to perhaps see down the line that it wouldn't be as easy as it looked in those heady days in early 2011. I think what some of us got right though was in terms of seeing it coming. Maybe not knowing exactly that it would be the type of world event that was happening in so many countries at the time, but the sense that we had in the 2000s that the ‘this can't hold anymore, that there will be a shock,’ particularly in Egypt as the Mubarak regime was clearly nearing its end. There was a lot of anxiety about what would happen after Mubarak, that the role of the army would probably once again be important. I think a lot of us saw that coming, and looking back of course, I think one of the things that we underestimated as people who are political observers is that the public has a limited tolerance for the massive political disruptions that took place in those years, between 2011-2013.
Jon Alterman: And you were in Egypt when Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power and pushed out the government of Muhammad Morsi. Did you sense that this was a restoration by the intelligence services at the time? Did it feel like the public had just run out of patience with the ineffectiveness of the Morsi government? How did it feel, and then looking back, do you think something else was going on then?
Issandr El Amrani: I've never been a believer in the theory that the overthrow of Morsi and the restoration of authoritarians in Egypt was a long and carefully planned plot. There were various actors—the army, the intelligence services, parts of the business elite, parts of the judiciary in Egypt—that plotted together to make it happen. That's true to some degree behind the scenes, but maybe a month or two in advance. I don't think you can underestimate the degree of incompetence, the lack of foresight of the Muslim Brotherhood and its leadership—including President Morsi—in setting itself up to fail. The army would have been perfectly happy to come to an arrangement with them. I think that's partly why the opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood found an opportunity to get the army to switch sides.
Jon Alterman: You have been critical of foreign governance a lot on your blog and in other places. As you look back, what do you think that Western governments got right, and what you think they got wrong in responding to the Arab Spring? And do you think they overestimated their influence or underestimated it?
Issandr El Amrani: I think overall they underestimated their influence, and this was particularly the case with the Obama administration. The Obama administration had a view of the Arab Spring that basically it couldn’t really affect things that much there, that it should get out of the Middle East as much as possible because—I think—it viewed it as a trap.
I think a lot of the diplomatic community was exhausted with what was happening in Egypt—much like Egyptians were—and was too dismissive of the liberals in Egypt who were warning about the dangers of what the Muslim Brotherhood was doing and had not really seen, until fairly late, what the army was doing.
The example I always give, or the parallel I always give is that, at the end of the day—not to mention of course, internal debates within the Obama administration—the Obama administration constructed soldiers in June 2013. I didn’t see the coup in Egypt as a pivoting point that would really fundamentally change the region and would lead an authoritarian backlash. You have a momentous event and you decide to stand back and wait to see what's going to happen, rather than trying and influence the unfolding of these events.
Jon Alterman: The United States government cut off aid to Egypt after the coup.
Issandr El Amrani: It cut off some aid to Egypt, it didn't cut off all aid to Egypt and refused to declare the coup.
So there was a limit, I think, to what they were willing to do. Rhetorically, the administration saw what was happening as a major event. But in policy terms, I'm not sure that they really put the thought and effort and resources into trying to help this region through his transition. Not that this is an American responsibility, of course.
I think that would have looked like a lot more handholding with politicians and region. At least to encourage transitions that are not just democratic in the electoral sense of the word, but also that are plural, that are reasonable transitions, that are like what Spain or Portugal went through in the 70s, maybe negotiated to some degree.
I think a more hands-on role would have been desirable, would have had more political implications, not necessarily more spending or more money or a use of military force. But there was always the impression of a certain amount of detachment from the Obama administration, and again putting it into context, whose strategic priority was pivoting to Asia, was looking at the next 20 or 50 years globally. I think they tended to underplay what was happening in the region.
Jon Alterman: Well, I was certainly critical of the way the Obama administration responded. It also seems to me that it's hard to figure out who the partner would have been. You had a Muslim Brotherhood government that was not very interested in process. It seems to me that throughout that the message from the Obama administration was “the way this has to work is processes rather than outcomes. The outcomes will follow but the first thing is to create a process. And if we want to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, there's a process to get rid of them. We call it elections.” And it seems to me that the challenge they had was they were interested in trying to get people to believe in process, and neither the liberals or conservatives nor Islamicists were interested in that message at all. They all wanted outcomes. I mean, is that not how you think things are unfolding?
Issandr El Amrani: I think that's partly true but the whole point was that process isn't everything. It’s that the reality is that these things evolve in a highly charged context, and you can do things to defuse tensions, and it's not true that the Obama administration stayed aloof on every issue. For instance, it worked carefully and hard to ensure that the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt would not be prejudicial to the security of Israel or the Camp David agreements. That's one thing where it put significant amount of efforts to guarantee and of course it was what the brotherhood had to offer to each of its Western partners as a guarantee.
But I think that was missing. If you are looking at a few of the details, you are missing the bigger picture in Egypt. Could they have gotten involved in a parallel diplomacy or in track two efforts to put real pressure on Egypt? I'm not saying that these are easy decisions and that they should have seen coming, I'm saying that I think that there was a general reluctance to get involved.
Jon Alterman: I think a lot of people were very optimistic about how liberalism would be the order of the day after Mubarak fell. What do you think liberals have learned throughout the region from the way the last 10 years have unfolded?
Issandr El Amrani: I think if you mean liberal in the sense—not of basically social democratic— but of open to pluralism, wanting to see at least a gradual improvement in human freedom in the region, I think one of the big lessons is that there's way too much of a disconnect between those liberal—often elites—and the average population and their concerns, and that's a reflection that this is one of the most unequal regions in the world.
There were factors such as if you take a country like Egypt, at least 50 percent of the population of the country is working in the informal sector, and that just gave people different priorities. Stability for them means day-to-day living and earning. That wasn't the case for most of the middle class or upper middle class, self-described liberals. There is a lot of work to be done. And here again, one of the reasons we can point to Tunisia as a relative success is that that work was done to bridge ideological gaps between Islamists and secularists. I think that's a hugely important part of the equation. Just because the polarization that existed then still exists today in a place like Egypt is a huge part of the problem.
It's good to have a thought about how you build power for your values, whether you're liberal, leftist, Islamist, and so on, but in a way that is not just to grab power as soon as the opportunity presents itself, but to build it long-term, to build a social base. I don't think that today, almost anywhere in the region, you can say that you have a liberal camp with a strong social base.
I think you have to recognize that Islamic parties and movements have invested considerable amounts of resources and time into building social basis. Not just ideological ones, and that's something that needs to be done.
Jon Alterman: In your judgment, have those Islamist trends played themselves out? The Muslim Brotherhood—principally because of its utter failure in Egypt both to govern and to stay in power and the government's increased hostility to the brotherhood—Salafi movements because they were discredited by the Islamic State. Have we seen all the movements fall apart, or do you think there's still—in the embers of the brotherhood experience, the Salafi movement, the liberal experience—something that could come back?
Issandr El Amrani: I think, ideologically, there's something there that can come back, absolutely. It’s a reflection of the sociological reality that in much of the region, religion is deeply in its core and is core to people's identity. There's something there. I think I wouldn't say that the Brotherhood has failed as an ideology, the Brotherhood has failed as an organization and has been essentially destroyed, especially in Egypt as an organization. That particular strand of Islamism perhaps has failed to create enough diversity in its ranks to be able to evolve and have the conversation.
The evolution of Ennahda and Tunisia—which happened largely in exile in the 1980s, 1990s and in England and France—never happened to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. I think partly they were as ossified as the Mubarak regime, and that's one reason that they failed. But if you look at Islamism today across the region—and here I'm excluding those violent manifestations like Islamic State or Al-Qaeda—and in all the various strengths of non-violent Islamism, it's still very rich, it's still very much alive. Salafism and certain strands of Salafism, in particular Madkhali Salafism, are on the rise across the region potentially.
Jon Alterman: You think potentially politically potent as well.
Issandr El Amrani: I think politically potent just not necessarily in an electoral sense. If you take a look at a place like Libya, where the Madkhali Salafists have proliferated and really taken control and accumulated tremendous amounts of social capital—both in east and west Libya—because there's a vacuum there and they've been able to fill that vacuum. That's not politically relevant today because when you look at the political leadership, you'll see on one side General Haftar and on the other side various politicians in the west of the country. But now, they are rebuilding the social base of that country. They are installing themselves often, not just in militias, of course, but also as the people with the most social capital.
Jon Alterman: Final question. What trends do you see in the Middle East now that are underappreciated? You talked about the fact that there was a general sense that the center couldn't hold in 2010 that led to the Arab Spring. What do you think people aren't seeing now that they need to be seeing?
Issandr El Amrani: There's a number of things. Probably the biggest one that, although it's noticed, is still underappreciated and understudied, is the impact of the demographics of the region. This is a very young region that hit its peak youth phase about five or ten years ago, that's moving towards being older, but there will be an impact of that probably in the next 20 years. That's going to be significant if only just because you have so many new entrances into the job market.
Many of the old political idols have fallen. Much of the political culture of the Arab world pre-2011 was stuck in amber around certain certainties—Arab nationalism, certain form of Islamism. That's changing very fast. We're seeing it with, for instance the Abraham Accords, which has not gotten massive outrage from the Arab streets, which once would have been the received wisdom.
Jon Alterman: Did that surprise you?
Issandr El Amrani: No, not at all. I think for various reasons, but probably the most important reason is that the Palestinian cause itself has been adrift and Palestinian leadership has been adrift for many years. It wasn't surprising to see people rally around the Palestinian cause when it had leaders or was just terrified or even many others that could symbolize something to people, but you don't have that today. The evolution of that youth bulge, I think, is going to be an interesting thing to watch. I think that there's changes discreetly underway in social morals and social relations. Even if religion remains a very important part of people's identity, the sense that I have is that it's evolving in multiple contradictory ways. And in part I think that's a return to the impact of the Internet, more exposure to the rest of the world.
Jon Alterman: In terms of gender and sexuality?
Issandr El Amrani: In terms Gender and sexuality, yes. But in terms of also being more open to not everyone understanding religion in the same way, or being more open to not being publicly seen as biased all the time and so on. I think you see a few trends of that and it's contradictory. Because I think what you also have—because of the discrediting of the religious establishment in many countries—you have people looking for alternatives. In some cases, those alternatives may be radical, may be various forms of Salafism and so on. But in other cases, there may be people trying to be religious differently.
I think that there is a search for a more palatable and... I'm struggling to find the right word, but perhaps a relatable form of religiosity or also not being religious. These are things that are very hard to measure. So it's partly an impression, but I think that's moving. I think on the other hand, especially because you have several countries where the economies have collapsed, the state authority has collapsed, you have more of a certain type of conservatism, but it's not a religious conservatism or ideologically religious. It more has to do with social relations.
In so many countries across the region, you have a resurgence of tribalism, for instance, that sometimes superficially, it looks like people are becoming more religiously conservative, but actually they're just becoming more socially conservative and you have a resurgence of what our rural values often at the expense of more cosmopolitan urban values. It was never a homogeneous Arab world, but it's much less homogeneous now than it was probably 20 years ago.
Jon Alterman: But you're also describing societies that are becoming more diverse internally with the demonstrated absence of political processes to try to at least create internal coalitions between different points of view.
Issandr El Amrani: Yes, and that brings us back to the problem that I think one of the big lessons that many have learned about the last decade is that the revolutionary radical method of change is extremely dangerous and will probably backfire. But we come back to the problem of: is there reform? Is there a credible reform path ahead? Can we form those coalitions that—without upsetting the establishment too much—allow for gradual change? So we've come back to that question. There are places where that's a possibility. I come back to Tunisia. Algeria is struggling through that in complicated ways at the moment, Morocco has had that promised for all, but in some ways in the last five years, that's gone backwards because of the general regional authoritarian backlash. It really depends from place to place.
But I think fundamentally it is the way you framed it as the question. Can you see a coalition emerge organically that allows for that kind of change, that allows for elite rotation, that prevents the same people holding onto the power, and then fewer people holding onto all the power all the time, that allows for a circulation of ideas also, or will things become ossified again? That to me is the fundamental question. It's not strictly one of more or less democratic, or whether you'll have free and fair elections or not. It's a more complicated question of social relations and how different elements of society have buy-in into the system at the end of the day.
Jon Alterman: Issandr El Amrani, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Issandr El Amrani: My pleasure.