We are pleased to welcome the following guest post from “Professor Jason Brownlee”:https://webspace.utexas.edu/jmb334/www/ of the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of “Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization”:http://www.amazon.com/Authoritarianism-Age-Democratization-Jason-Brownlee/dp/052168966X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-0137395-6195603?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1185304543&sr=8-1.
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Nascent and escalating revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other Arab countries show, once again, that the most consequential events in contemporary world history span American political science’s partitions among US domestic, foreign domestic, and international politics. Major phenomena of interest – war, trade, democratization, authoritarian durability, socio-economic development, state failure – cannot be empirically grasped, much less theoretically analyzed, without following them across geographic and sub-disciplinary borders. Nowhere is this clearer than in the demonstrator-filled streets of Cairo, where tens if not hundreds of thousands of Egyptians “have pressed for a week”:http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/01/egypt.protests/index.html?hpt=T1 to end President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades in power.
The uprising in Egypt is an obvious bailiwick for Middle East comparativists, who have been establishing throughout Mubarak’s tenure that his and other regimes across the region are both authoritarian and normal, i.e., non-democratic but vulnerable to the same economic and political forces that felled repressive governments elsewhere. The origins and implications of this event, however, spread outside of Egypt and the Middle East, to the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in nearby Tunisia and foreign handwringing about how Mubarak’s departure will affect Egypt’s treaty with Israel and strategic alliance with the US.
While one would be tempted to look for regional precedents – in vain – the best analogue may be Ferdinand Marcos’s ouster twenty-five years ago this month. Lodestone of democratization studies, the Philippines moved from strongman-rule to national upheaval through a confluence of political corruption, economic decline, outraged opposition, and Washington’s belated withdrawal of support for a geopolitical linchpin. During the peak of the crisis of February 1986, Ronald Reagan’s eleventh-hour realization that Marcos needed to go curtailed an impending military assault upon the partisans of Corazon Aquino, and was life-saving if not regime-determining.
From Huntington (The Third Wave) to Linz and Chehabi (Sultanistic Regimes) political science has approached the success of Philippine “People Power” as an international event that both underscored western security concerns and ultimately trumped them. The legacy of Egyptian People Power remains to be determined, but as political scientists chronicle this epic, they can take a cue from the iconoclastic masses in Liberation Square and surmount their own barriers.