Civil Society, Social Movements, and the Arab Uprisings of 2011

Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History

and Professor of Middle East History Stanford University

© August 2013

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During the 1990s, a broad neo-Tocquevillian consensus crystalized

among Western policymakers, scholars, and donors affirming that,

“dynamic civil society represented the sine qua non of democracy.”1 Larry

Diamond, a leading exponent of this consensus and a proponent of

democracy promotion by public and private US agencies, argues, based

on the examples of the Philippines, South Korea, Chile, Poland, and

others, that, “in a number of prominent cases, civil society has played a

crucial role, if not the leading role, in producing a transition to

democracy.”2 Consequently, “building civil society” was embraced and

funded by USAID, the EU, the UNDP, and private foundations as the

strategy for democracy promotion in the Arab region. Advocates of this

view typically regard non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as the

quintessential expressions of associational life and an “emerging” civil

society.

Definitions of civil society are diverse, and the concept is often

deployed imprecisely, rendering it of dubious analytical utility.

Nonetheless, this consensus motivated a profusion of academic and

policy literature and the emergence of a new object of analysis –

comparative transitions to democracy (transitology) based on the premise

that there are identifiable patterns and preferred sequences of transition.

1 Sean L. Yom, "Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World," Middle East Review of International Affairs 9, no. 4 (2005): 15. 2 Larry Jay Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 235.

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Applied to the Arab region, there was a widespread assumption that

autocratic regimes were liberalizing and civil societies (however defined)

were emerging.3

However, “civil society organizations” and authorized opposition

political parties (not considered part of civil society in some definitions,

but often considered a sign of democratization by transitologists) played

only a small role in mobilizing the demonstrations and occupations of

public space that were the emblematic expressions of the Arab uprisings

of 2011. Many NGOs, trade unions, professional associations, and

political parties recognized or tolerated by the old regimes eventually

joined in. But in no case did they initiate the mobilizations. Why did

Arab civil society organizations fail to play a decisive role in this

conjuncture?

First, the claim that “building civil society” is a strategy for

democracy promotion has been over-stated. Freedom of association is

undoubtedly an essential feature of a democratic polity. But, NGOs and

similar forms of association should not be fetishized or taken out of their

historical and political contexts. Not all associations embrace democratic

3 Rex Brynen, Bahgat al-Korany, and Paul Nobel (eds.), Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO: Lynee Reinner, 1995, 1998) and August Richard Norton (ed.), Civil Society in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994, 1996) offer an array of examples. For critiques of this trend see Maha Abdelrahman, Civil Society Exposed: The Politics of NGOs in Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004); Francesco Cavatorta, Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World: The Dynamics of Activism (London: Routledge, 2011); Yom; Quintan Wiktorowicz, "Civil Society as Social Control: State Power in Jordan," Comparative Politics 33, no. 1 (2000): 43-61; Thomas Carothers, "Think Again: The Concept of Civil Society is a Recent Invention," Foreign Policy, no. Winter (1999-2000). http://carnegieendowment.org/pdf/CivilSociety.pdf

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values and practices, and associational life has flourished in

undemocratic societies.4 Prior to the 1994 genocide, “Rwanda had the

highest density of associational life in sub-Saharan Africa.”5 Even in the

paradigmatic case of Poland, as elaborated below, a closer examination

raises questions about the efficacy of this strategy.

Second, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of transitology,

democracy often emerges from the mobilization of social movements and

explicitly political struggles that involve considerable instability, violence,

and even civil wars, and not from licensed, and therefore necessarily

limited, opposition to authoritarianism.6 Arab advocacy NGOs did

succeed, to varying extents, in propagating the discourse of universal

human rights. Yet, those NGOs tend to be staffed by a predictable group

of cosmopolitan, middle class professionals socially distant from the

majority of the population. They easily learned, if they did not already

know, to speak a language familiar to Western governments, academics,

journalists, think tanks, and funders. Most such NGOs do not have the

capacity or the mission to mobilize popular opposition to regimes. They

cannot be a substitute for political parties, movements, and ideologies.

Consequently, when the Arab uprisings erupted, advocacy NGOs could

4 Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Bad Civil Society,” Political Theory, 29 (No. 6, 2001): 837-865 cite post-1918 Italy, Weimar Germany, Communist Yugoslavia, and post-1989 Russia as examples. 5 Michael Edwards, Civil Society, (Cambridge: Polity Press), 2009, 53. 6 The classic examples are Great Britain, the United States, and France; more recent ones include Ireland, Haiti, and Nicaragua.

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not serve as social movement organizations capable of framing the

demands of insurgents.

Third, “building civil society” was conjoined with the consolidation

of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” symbolized by the ascension

to power of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain (1979) and Ronald

Reagan in the United States (1980). The “unholy trinity” of international

financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund, the World

Bank, and the World Trade Organization – sought to roll back European

social democracy, the American new deal, and economic nationalism in

the global south.7 In the Arab region, large public sectors, commodity

subsidies, and subsidized social services were targeted for elimination by

the international financial institutions backed by the US government.

Civil society organizations were hailed as institutions that would assume

the responsibilities abandoned by shrinking states.

In so far as Arab authoritarian regimes (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco,

Jordan) adopted neoliberal economic restructuring as their lodestar,

opposition to its consequences – especially by movements of workers –

made important contributions to fostering the culture of protest that

targeted Arab autocrats in 2010-11. However, NGOs, especially those

funded and supported by programs like the Middle East Partnership

Initiative or the National Endowment for Democracy and similar EU

7 Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and the WTO (London: Zed Books, 2009).

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institutions were not positioned to oppose neoliberalism. Some explicitly

supported it. NGOs that did criticize neoliberal policies, like the Egypt’s

Center for Trade Union and Workers Services or the Egyptian Center for

Economic and Social Rights had few resources and were subjected to

repression. Tunisia’s trade union federation, the Union Générale

Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), was also brought to heel after it opposed

an early version of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

Civil Society and Democratization in Poland

Michael Bernhard, an authority on democratization in Eastern

Europe, agrees with Diamond that the Polish Solidarity trade union was

an example of “building civil society” leading to democratization.

Bernhard’s definition of civil society emphasizes the active role of the

state in establishing its institutional and legal framework.

For its agents to constitute a civil society they need the sanction of the state; the public space must be guaranteed as a realm of freedom from the state by the state itself. Thus civil society, as well as the private sphere, must be legally separated from the state by law, and the actors within it must be guaranteed specific personal and group liberties…8

This is similar to Diamond’s widely quoted definition of civil

society.9 The salient difference is Bernhard’s greater emphasis on the

state’s active role in legitimating and legally regulating civil society

8 Michael Bernhard, "Civil Society and Democratic Transition in East Central Europe," Political Science Quarterly 108, no. 2 (1993): 309. 9 Diamond, 221.

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associations. I would add that the separation between states and civil

societies is relative, not absolute. States and their agents actively and

continually intervene in civil society by establishing the ground rules

according to which trade unions, professional syndicates, and other

associations may function, seeking to ensure that the constituted order

and its hegemonic ideology are perceived as legitimate. Variations in the

extent and the severity of regulation and discipline of civil society by

states typically reflect the qualitative difference between authoritarianism

and democracy.

Bernhard maintains that Poland is exceptional because civil

society did lead the transition to democracy there. But for East

Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia he argues that the emergence of

civil society did not precede the demise of authoritarianism; it developed

subsequently. This is consistent with the views of Theda Skocpol and

others who argue that civil society is more likely to develop in already

democratic states rather than to generate transitions from autocracy to

democracy.10 A recent Ph.D. thesis based on a quantitative analysis of

sixty-nine countries concurs:

… after two decades of enthusiasm it is becoming clear that civil society does not live up to the high expectations. The empirical evidence of civil society’s contribution to democracy is mostly confined to transition periods…. In addition there is a growing

10 Theda Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 27-80.

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body of evidence of the negative impact of civil society on democracy…. The…institutional perspective… argues that democratic institutions precede civil society in time, and provide the grounds for civil society to flourish….11

According to Bernhard, a Polish civil society began to emerge in

1976 with the formation of the Workers Defense Committee to support

striking workers. It went into occultation with the repression of the 1976

strikes and was briefly reconstituted during the strike wave of the

summer of 1980, when Solidarity was established. At its September

1981 congress Solidarity adopted a republican political program, that is,

it called for regime change. This led to the suppression of Solidarity and

civil society with the declaration of martial law in December 1981. But

in late 1988, shielded by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy, the

state negotiated with Solidarity and ultimately

legally recognized Solidarity and other independent movements and allowed them to legally contest partially free elections [in June 1989]. This development reinstitutionalized civil society after an eight year hiatus.12

Bernhard’s claim for the Polish case can only be sustained by a

historical ellipsis. He recognizes that there was not a continuous

development of civil society from the establishment of the Workers

Defense Committee in 1976 to the founding of Solidarity in 1980 to the

11 Yevgenya Paturyan, “Civil Society and Democracy: The Country Level Interrelations and the Individual Level Impact,” Ph.D. thesis, Dept. of Political Science, Jacobs University, Bremen, 2009. 12 Bernhard: 316-17.

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fall of the Communist regime in 1989. He acknowledges that only “[b]y

treating martial law as a temporary interruption [can] the Polish

democratic transition… be understood in fairly linear terms.”13 This

omits much that a proper historical analysis requires. Moreover,

according to Diamond’s distinction between civil society and political

society, by adopting a political program in 1981 and by competing in

elections in 1989, Solidarity actually became a component of political

society because it sought, and achieved, “not only a democratic

transition, but control of the state.”14

Regardless of how one defines Solidarity and its historical role, the

international context for regime change in Poland was critical. Solidarity

received enormous support from the Catholic Church and the West –

including some $50 million from the United States.15 The Soviet Union’s

unwillingness to intervene militarily, as it did in Hungary in 1956 and

Czechoslovakia in 1968, was decisive. Even if one fully accepts Diamond

and Bernhard’s argument, it is not clear that absent this international

context “building civil society” would have succeeded in democratizing

Poland.

13 Ibid. 14 Diamond, 223. Carothers, 19 also considers political parties to be outside the realm of civil society. 15 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 589.

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The example of Poland and its neighbors indicates the problems of

“civil society” as an analytical concept. The claims for its capacity to

generate a transition to democracy are inflated. Multiple and slippery

definitions permit all “good” institutions to be included. A fetishized

focus on civil society can result in inadequate consideration of historical

details and broader contexts, and most importantly, political struggle.

Arab NGOs

The original impetus for the proliferation of NGOs in the Arab

region was the political defeat of the Arab new left and the Islamic revival

in the 1970s and 1980s. This led to the retreat of the urban

intelligentsias from secular party politics. Leftists and liberals who

sought to continue political activity founded and joined advocacy NGOs

promoting human rights, prisoners’ rights, women’s rights, children’s

rights, workers’ rights, etc.16

Despite, the proliferation of Arab NGOs and other forms of

association, authoritarian Arab regimes were fairly effective in blocking

the emergence of truly independent organizations of any sort. Except for

the qualified success of human rights and women’s rights NGOs and

trade unions in Morocco and Bahrain, forms of association tolerated by

autocratic Arab regimes never became effective, enduring structures of

16 Joe Stork, "Three Decades of Human Rights Activism in the Middle East and North Africa: An Ambiguous Balance Sheet," in Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd ed., ed. Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univesity Press, 2013).

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oppositional mobilization or democratization during the era of ascendant

Arab authoritarianism.

NGOs deemed improperly “political” according to the very

restrictive legislation governing them were routinely dissolved. If and

when NGOs did threaten them, the regimes changed the rules of the

game. The existence of what transitologists, funders, and Arab human

rights defenders called “civil society” and the large number of “civil

society organizations,” was not an index of democratization. Maha

Abdelrahman concludes that in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, civil society was

characterized by authoritarian and repressive tendencies. Moreover, its organizations, such as NGOs, …often actively engaged in reproducing unequal relations and an unjust status quo rather than providing alternatives to existing systems of power.17

Quintan Wiktorowicz concurs that in Jordan (as well Egypt,

Morocco and Algeria before 1992, and I would add Tunisia, Yemen, and

Syria before 2011)

civil society organizations…were embedded in a web of bureaucratic practices and legal codes which allows those in power to monitor and regulate collective activities….Under such circumstances, civil society institutions are more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism of collective empowerment.”18

17 Abdelrahman, 1. 18 Wiktorowicz: 43.

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Vickie Langohr goes further to claim that the proliferation of NGOs

and the creation of a permitted and closely supervised sphere of public

activity may have contributed to depoliticization by providing middle

class professionals with a relatively safe arena of activity which did not

involve mobilizing significant elements of the population in

demonstrations or campaigns that directly challenged the regimes.19

Writing shortly before the 2011 uprisings, Shadi Hamid, an energetic

supporter of funding Arab NGOs and active engagement in democracy

promotion by private U.S. foundations and quasi-governmental agencies

confirmed Langohr’s argument.

[E]ven pro-democracy NGOs are not, in fact, pro-democracy NGOs. Democracy entails “alternation of power,” but most NGOs that favor democratization do not do anything that can be construed as supporting a change in regime.20

The combination of effective authoritarian power and the inherent

limits on the mobilizational capacities of NGOs prevented them from

playing an active political role or imagining how to undertake a transition

from autocracy to democracy regardless of the sincere democratic

aspirations and good work of their staffs. A partial exception to this

pattern is trade union and labor movements. Although in the 2000s

workers typically did not call for regime change, their mobilizational 19 Vickie Langohr, "Too Much Civil Society, Too Little Politics: Egypt and Liberalizing Arab Regimes," Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004). 20Shadi Hamid, “Civil Society in the Arab World and the Dilemma of Funding,” Brookings Institution, October 2010, http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2010/10/middle-east-hamid

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capacity and the clear link between workers’ economic demands and the

neoliberal policies of Arab authoritarian governments made the

contestations of workers a salient component of the culture of protest

that emerged in the 2000s and culminated in the uprisings. The

following comparative survey of NGOs and labor movements in Egypt,

Tunisia, and Bahrain demonstrates this argument.

NGOs in Egypt

In the mid-1990s there were at least 15,000 and perhaps as many

as 28,000 NGOs in Egypt; by 2008 the number had reached 30,000.

About 43 percent were Islamic associations; 9 percent were Coptic

associations; and 25 percent were community development associations,

which are quasi-governmental entities. There were also business

associations and several dozen secular, liberal, and left-oriented

advocacy NGOs. The Ministry of Social Affairs (now the Ministry of Social

Solidarity and Justice) registers and licenses NGOs and monitors their

budgets and activities as stipulated by the quite restrictive Law on

Community Associations and Foundations (Law 84 of 2002; previously

NGOs were regulated by Law 32 of 1964). Business associations, while

subject to the same requirements, were treated with a lighter hand.21

Among the prominent advocacy NGOs are: The Arab Women’s

Solidarity Association (established in 1982), the New Woman Research

21 Abdelrahman 2004, 6-8.

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Center (established in 1984), the Egyptian Organization for Human

Rights (established in 1985), The Ibn Khaldun Center for Development

Studies (established in 1988), the Center for Trade Union and Workers

Services (established in 1990), The Nadeem Center for Rehabilitation of

Victims of Violence (established in 1993), the Hisham Mubarak Law

Center (established in 1999), the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights

(established in 2002), and the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social

Rights (established in 2010).

NGOs that substantially challenged authoritarian practices in the

Mubarak era were repressed or banned. AWSA was dissolved by an

administrative decree after it criticized the regime’s support for the U.S.-

led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War. EOHR founder Hisham Mubarak was

arrested and tortured in 1989, officially for establishing an illegal

organization, but more plausibly for defending striking steel workers.

The Mubarak government ignored the 2003 court order directing that the

NWRC be duly registered.22 The Ibn Khaldun Center and its director,

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, professor of sociology emeritus at the American

University in Cairo, were targets of exceptional hostility. Despite his dual

Egyptian-US citizenship, Ibrahim was imprisoned for over two years

between 2000 and 2003 on spurious charges.

22 For details see Human Rights Watch, “Egypt’s New Chill on Rights Groups” at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/06/21/egypt6167.htm and Women Living under Muslim Laws, “Egypt: The New Woman Research Centre (NWRC) has won its legal battle against the Ministry of Social Affairs” at http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd%5B157%5D=x-157-27198.

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Because the internal security forces commonly blocked legal

registration of objectionable NGOs, several NGO-like associations were

established as non-profit companies to avoid the strictures of

registration. This did not prevent the Egyptian government from closing

the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services for a year in 2007-08.

The Muslim Brothers won electoral majorities on the executive

boards of many of Egypt’s professional associations (syndicates) in the

1980s and 1990s. Consequently, the regime enacted new legislation

regulating their elections (Syndicate Law 100 of 1993). Several

associations were placed in government receivership to prevent the

Brothers from exercising their democratically obtained majority.

Although the Lawyers Syndicate and the Press Syndicate are among the

most vibrant civil society organizations in Egypt, they are not considered

NGOs according to Law 84 of 2002 and received none of the USAID funds

targeted for democracy promotion in the Mubarak era.23

The Labor Movement in Egypt24

In June 1991 the government of President Hosni Mubarak signed

Economic Restructuring and Structural Adjustment Program agreements

23 Carothers, 25. 24 This section is based on Joel Beinin, The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Washington, DC: Solidarity Center, 2010) and Joel Beinin and Marie Duboc, "A Workers’ Social Movement on the Margin of the Global Neoliberal Order, Egypt 2004-2012," in Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd ed., ed. Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

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with the IMF and the World Bank. Law 203 of 1991 established the

framework for privatizing 314 public enterprises. The Egyptian Trade

Union Federation, effectively a branch of the state, accepted these

measures and also ultimately acquiesced to the enactment of the Unified

Labor Law of 2003, which radically altered the prevailing practice of

tenured employment after a trial period. Henceforth, employers could

engage workers indefinitely on “temporary” fixed-term contracts and

dismiss them at the termination of those contracts at their sole

discretion. This eliminated the job security workers considered a “right”

and was a frequent issue of contention as privatization of the public

sector advanced.

In July 2004 “the government of businessmen,” as it was known,

led by Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif, was installed. Nazif’s mandate was

to accelerate the neoliberal transformation of the Egyptian economy and

the sell-off of the public sector. He was largely successful.

Workers’ responded to Nazif’s policies by escalating their already

elevated level of contentious collective action. From 1998 to 2003 there

was an average of 118 collective actions per year. In 2004 there were

265 collective actions – more than double the 1998-2003 average. From

1998 to 2010, well over two million, and probably closer to four million,

Egyptian workers participated in some 3,400 to 4,000 strikes and other

collective actions. Although centered in the textile industry, by 2007 the

movement encompassed nearly every sector of the economy.

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Not only did workers’ collective actions spike sharply in 2004, they

assumed a more militant character than previous upsurges. There were

more strikes, as opposed to factory occupations while continuing

production. Strikes also became longer, with several lasting for months.25

Previously, collective actions were largely in public sector enterprises,

where workers fought to preserve gains made in the Nasser era. After

2004 an increasing number of workers in the expanding private sector

became engaged. In 2009, 37 percent of all collective actions were in the

private sector; in 2010 the figure reached 46 percent. Women workers,

who previously had participated in workplace actions mainly in an

auxiliary capacity, became increasingly assertive. Some became

prominent activists and even spokespersons.26

No political organizations were involved in these actions. With the

exception of a handful of journalists, there was only limited and sporadic

support from urban intellectuals. During a protest movement of

unprecedented proportions, there were only two civil society

organizations working primarily on labor issues with less than half a

dozen paid staff between them: the CTUWS and the Coordinating

Committee for Trade Union and Workers Rights and Liberties, which was

established to monitor the 2000 trade union elections and continued as a

25 Mustafa al-Basyuni and ‛Umar Sa‛id, Rayat al-idrab fi sama’ misr: 2007, haraka ‛ummaliyya jadida (Cairo: Markaz al-Dirasat al-Ishtirakiyya, 2007), 13, 15, 19. 26 Francesca Ricciardone, “Gendering Worker Contestation in Egypt” (M.A. thesis, American University in Cairo, 2008).

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monthly forum for exchange of information and advice. In 2010 the latter

group was folded into the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social

Rights (ECESR) directed by the labor lawyer, Khalid ‘Ali.

While workers could mount powerful local actions, the only major

instance before 2011 in which a sectoral mobilization generated a lasting

institution was the Independent General Union of Real Estate Tax

Authority Workers representing tax collectors employed by local

authorities. It emerged from a successful strike in 2007 and was

recognized by the ministry of manpower and migration in 2009.27

The local character of the networks that enabled the workers’

movement of the 2000s limited their ability to act as a national force.

Those networks could not be replicated beyond the local level, and there

was a certain distance and distrust of the intelligentsia. Because

workers were unable to expand their networks of trust beyond the local

level, the workers’ movement arrived at January 25, 2011 with no

national organization or leadership, no political program, and only a

minimal economic program – the demand for a monthly minimum wage

of EGP1,200 (about $200 in 2010-11).

Towards January 25, 2011

27 Jean Lachapelle, "Lessons from Egypt's Tax Collectors," Middle East Report, no. 264 (2012): 38-41.

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During the 2000s there were three largely parallel Egyptian social

movements. This remained largely the case in the two years following

Mubarak’s ouster. One was the workers movement described above.

A second consisted of oppositional urban middle-classes –

Nasserists, Marxists, unaffiliated leftists liberals, and some Islamists.

The best-known expression of this trend was the Egyptian Movement for

Change (popularly known as Kifaya or Enough) launched in the summer

of 2004 by a manifesto of three hundred intellectuals, many of whom had

previously participated in the campaigns in solidarity with the

Palestinian intifada and against the US invasion of Iraq. Kifaya’s first

public demonstration on December 10, 2004 called on Mubarak not to

run for a fifth presidential term (he did), not to promote his son Gamal as

his successor (he did) and to reduce the powers of the executive branch

(they were arguably expanded). Kifaya maintained a high level of activity

until mid-2006 and became less visible thereafter.

The third consisted primarily of educated, middle class “Facebook

youth,” whose political activity until 2011 was organized mainly via

social media. Esraa Abdel Fattah, then twenty-seven-years-old,

established a Facebook page calling on Egyptians to stay at home on

April 6, 2008, the day workers of the Misr Spinning and Weaving

complex in Mahalla al-Kubra planned to strike in support of their

demand for a national monthly basic minimum wage of EGP 1,200. To

everyone’s surprise, the page received some 70,000 “likes” within a week.

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But there is no way to know how many people actually stayed home in

response to Esraa’s call. Mahalla workers, in fact, did not strike on that

day due to a combination of coercion and cooptation.

Esraa subsequently joined Ahmad Mahir and others in

establishing the April 6 Youth Movement. However A6YM had no direct

relationship to the Mahalla workers or the massive demonstrations that

broke out in Mahalla in lieu of the April 6 strike.28 A6YM called for

demonstrations on April 6, 2009 to commemorate the (non-) strike at

Mahalla al-Kubra and on Police Days, January 25, 2009 and 2010. On

each occasion, only several hundred answered the call. Esraa was

detained for two weeks following April 6, 2008 and disappeared from the

political scene until a few weeks before January 25, 2011, when the

A6YM again called for demonstrations on Police Day.

Wael Ghonim anonymously administered the “We are all Khaled

Said” Facebook page established to memorialize a twenty-eight-year-old

businessman who was brutally beaten to death in by the Alexandria

police in June 2010 for no apparent reason. The page amasses over

325,000 members. ‘Abd al-Rahman Mansur, who became co-administer

of the page, convinced Ghonim to use it to call for demonstrations on

January 25, 2011 in collaboration with A6YM, several other youth

organizations, and some small unrecognized political parties. Neither the

Muslim Brothers, nor any of Egypt’s legal opposition parties except

28 Joel Beinin, "L’Egypte des ventres vides," Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2008.

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Ayman Nur’s al-Ghad (Tomorrow), endorsed the demonstrations, though

some of their members participated. Mohamed ElBaradei did not attend,

though he supported the demonstrations, and actively joined the

movement on January 28. He was a favorite of many liberal youth, some

of whom had already been encouraging him to run for president in 2011.

NGOs in Tunisia

Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali seized power from Tunisia’s founding

president Habib Bourguiba in November 1987. Ben Ali explicitly called

for expanding political freedom and developing associational life, and for

a brief period he made good on his promises. By 1992 there were 5,186

registered NGOs in Tunisia, including 3,300 formed since 1988: 3,171

cultural associations, 822 athletic associations, 509 charitable, relief and

social associations, 400 friendship associations, 126 development

associations, 41 “general” associations, and 2 women’s associations.29

NGOs were required to register with the ministry of interior, obtain prior

approval for public meetings, and refrain from political activities.

Tunisia boasts the first Arab human rights advocacy NGO – La

Ligue tunisienne des droits de l’homme (Tunisian Human Rights League,

LTDH). Established in 1976 and legalized in 1977, during Bourguiba’s

presidency, it was the only human rights NGO recognized by the Ben Ali

regime and was classified under the “general” rubric.

29 Eva Bellin, "Civil Society in Formation: Tunisia," in Civil Society in the Middle East, vol. 1, ed. Augustus Richard Norton (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 136-37.

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The Islamist Ennahda won 14.5 percent of the votes in the 1989

elections, the first of the Ben Ali era, making it by far the largest

opposition party. In 1991 the regime reacted by alleging that Ennahda

was planning a coup. It imprisoned their cadres and tried them in

military tribunals. Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi went into exile.

Because the LTDH severely criticized the regime’s treatment of the

Islamists, the regime moved to repress it as well. Legislation adopted in

1992 required “general” NGOs to accept anyone who applied for

membership and banned political party leaders from serving on their

boards. The LTDH was overwhelmed by Ben Ali loyalists belonging to the

ruling party, the Rassemblement constitutionnel démocratique (RCD)

and resolved to dissolve itself. LTDH vice-president Souhyl Belhacen was

forced into exile. After a campaign of international and domestic public

pressure the government agreed to provisionally reclassify the LTDH as a

“non-general” association.30 But the LTDH adopted a much less

confrontational policy until October 2000, when it elected a more

militant leadership.

The LTDH then joined the Conseil National pour les Libertés en

Tunisie (National Council for Liberties in Tunisia – CNLT), which had

been established in 1998 by defectors from the LTDH who opposed its

conciliation with the regime. The CNLT was the first human rights

advocacy NGO established in the Ben ‘Ali era. But it was under constant

30 Ibid., 138.

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pressure and never received legal recognition.31 Police attacked the office

of one of its founders. Several CNLT leaders were banned from travel;

Moncef Marzouki, Sihem Bensedrine, Mohamed Abbou, Zakia Dhifaoui,

and Mohamed Ben Saïd were all arrested at one time or another.

The government also repeatedly harassed the Arab Institute for

Human Rights, a pan-Arab NGO founded in 1989 on the initiative of the

Arab Organization for Human Rights, the Arab Lawyers’ Union, and the

LTDH. Its assets were frozen because it was funded by the United

Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNESCO, and UNICEF.

Repression of NGOs increased after September 2001. In

September 2005, the government closed the office of the Association of

Tunisian Judges and banned the congress of the Union of Tunisian

Journalists. The LTDH was prevented from convening a congress after

2005. Some unregistered NGOs, like the International Association for

the Support of Political Prisoners, continued to operate. International

NGOs were permitted to operate relatively unhindered. However, the

government at one point attempted to block contact between foreign

NGOs and local Tunisian organizations.32

31 Langohr: 184. Amor Boubakri, “What are democracy’s prospects for the Tunisian revolt?” Maghreb Review (December 2010-January 2011), http://www.academia.edu/461780/Tunisias_five_key_challenges_on_the_road_to_democracy; http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/1030 32 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Arab Political Systems: Baseline Information and Reforms – Tunisia, 2006, 11-14; Laurence Michalak, “Tunisia: Igniting Arab Democracy,” http://www.diplomatshandbook.org/pdf/Handbook_Tunisia.pdf

24

Workers in Neoliberal Tunisia

The Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (General Union of

Tunisian Workers - UGTT) was established in 1946 and was a leading

force in the movement for independence. Therefore, depending on the

balance of forces, it was sometimes able to maintain a degree of

autonomy from the regime. Moreover, unions of higher paid and better

educated university professors and high school teachers, engineers, and

employees in banks and the Post, Telephone, and Telegraph have often

been more militant than the national leadership of the UGTT. Some

members of these unions were close to Le Parti communiste (now

Mouvement Ettajdid) or Le Parti communiste des ouvriers de Tunisie

(now Le Parti des travailleurs tunisiens). The extreme poverty of the

Gafsa phosphate basin and other areas of the south also impelled

mobilizations unsanctioned by the UGTT national leadership.

Since the IMF’s first intervention in Tunisia in 1964, the central

issues for Tunisian workers have been rising prices and unemployment.

During the 1970s, militants organized a historically high level of wildcat

strikes seeking to compel the UGTT leadership to confront the

government more forcefully on both economic and political issues. The

strike wave achieved substantial wage increases. But the UGTT

estimated that they were only half the increased cost of living from 1970

25

to 1977.33 A “social contract” concluded by the UGTT and the regime in

January 1977 failed to stop the strikes. Hundreds of delegates to the

March 1977 UGTT congress opposed it.

In early January 1978 the government signaled a new hardline

stance towards the strike movement. To counter the repression and

preserve the UGTT’s relative autonomy, the leadership called a general

strike for January 26, 1978. Bourguiba was not willing to tolerate this.

On “Black Thursday” security forces attacked strikers killing dozens,

wounding hundreds, and arresting over 1,000, including UGTT Secretary

General Habib Achour and most of the other leaders.34 The regime

installed a new UGTT executive board of “fantoches” (puppets), as they

were derisively labeled.

The government adopted the recommendations of an IMF mission

that visited in the fall of 1983 to cut the budget deficit by reducing

subsidies on consumer products. Even before the official announcement

of price increases of 70 percent for pasta and semolina and 108 percent

for bread, on January 1, 1984 demonstrations began in the southern

cities of Gafsa and Gabes – an almost exact replay of the Egyptian events

of January 1977. The demonstrations spread to Tunis, where citizens

erected barricades in the streets. Martial law was proclaimed on January

33 Eva Bellin, Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Sponsored Development (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 103-04. 34 Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 155.

26

3, and order was not restored until Bourguiba announced cancellation of

the price hikes on January 6. Perhaps half a million people were involved

in the riots and demonstrations – ten times more than in the 1978

general strike.

Most of the UGTT leadership was in prison in 1986, so the

government had more room to maneuver when it could not meet its

foreign debt payments. In exchange for a $180 million credit from the

IMF, it adopted a standard Washington Consensus economic reform and

structural adjustment program. The first priority of the Ben Ali regime

was to implement the IMF plan. In response, there were 2,586 strikes

during the next six years, far more than the 1,761 in the seven years

preceding the January 26, 1978 general strike.35 Most were conducted

without the approval of the UGTT central committee.

Ennahda’s emergence as the strongest opposition to the regime led

Ben Ali to conclude a corporatist bargain with the UGTT leadership. By

the mid-1990s the UGTT leadership established a “partnership with the

state” based on its preference for authoritarianism to Islamism.36 While

continuing to defend collective bargaining rights in the workplace, the

UGTT leadership abandoned its resistance to the neoliberal agenda and

duly supported Ben ‘Ali in successive fraudulent elections.

35 Ibid., 156. 36 Nigel Disney, "The Working Class Revolt in Tunisia," MERIP Reports, no. 67 (1978).

27

GDP growth of 3-6 percent per year and a reduction in the extent

of poverty during the 2000s won Tunisia consistent praise from the

international financial institutions.37 However, about 80 percent of the

GDP is generated on the coast and relies on low-skilled, cheap labor

sectors with low value added – textiles and clothing, agriculture,

commerce, and tourism – that do not provide enough jobs for the well-

educated.38 In the 2000s the national unemployment rate was officially

about 15 percent (actually, perhaps 20 percent) but as high as 40

percent in the Gafsa phosphate mining basin; 72 percent of all the

unemployed were under 30. As unemployment and poverty are

concentrated in the center-west, southwest and northwest regions, it

should not be surprising that the first stirrings of revolt against the Ben

Ali regime emerged from Gafsa and Sidi Bouzid.

During the 1990s and 2000s the UGTT leadership became

increasingly complicit with the regime. But as Béatrice Hibou suggests it

was “[n]either totally ‘submissive’ [n]or totally ‘aligned’.” In part this was

because internally, there was “an unstable cohabitation between a

neutralized leadership and an uncontrolled base.”39 Supervised by the

37 Karen Pfeifer, "How Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Even Egypt Became IMF "Success Stories" in the 1990s," Middle East Report, no. 210 (1999). 38 Lahcen Achy, Trading High Unemployment for Bad Jobs: Employment Challenges in the Maghreb (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010). 39 Béatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011), 127. For a forgiving account of the relationship between the UGTT and the regime see Chris Toensing, "Tunisian Labor Leaders Reflect Upon Revolt," Middle East Report, no. 258 (2011).

28

government, the UGTT negotiated wage agreements with L’Union

Tunisienne de l’Industrie du Commerce et de l’Artisanat every three

years. Nonetheless militants continued to organize wildcat strikes and

hunger strikes. Because they were not reported in the press, as they

were in Egypt in the 2000s, there are no reliable estimates about their

numbers. As in Egypt, there was a gap between the local bread and

butter demands of most workers for jobs and decent treatment and the

discourse of some of the bolder Tunisian NGOs, which linked those

issues to their broader critiques of the regime.40

In January 2008, street demonstrations erupted in Gafsa and

nearby Redayef.41 From 1980 to 2010 the Compagnie des Phosphates de

Gafsa eliminated about 10,000 jobs; by 2010 it employed fewer than

5,000 workers, though about 3,000 jobs have been added since then.42

Workers accused the CPG of nepotistic recruitment practices in

collaboration with local UGTT leaders. The protests spread throughout

the Gafsa governorate, with teachers, women, street youth, and some

local union branches joining in, demanding not only fair recruitment

40 Hibou, 226. 41 Amin Allal, "Reformes néo-libérales, clientélismes et protestations en situation autoritaire: Les mouvements contestaires dans le bassin de Gafsa en Tunisie (2008)," Politique Africaine, no. 117 (2010); Laryysa Chomiak and John P. Entelis, "The Making of North Africa's Intifadas," Middle East Report, no. 259 (2011). 42 African Development Bank, African Economic Outlook 2013 - Structural Transformation and Natural Resources, May 27, 2013 http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/en/countries/north-africa/tunisia/

29

practices in the mines but a comprehensive jobs program. The

oppositional press, radical students in the more prosperous coastal cities

and diaspora Tunisians in France and Montreal expressed support. The

protests were brutally repressed.43

Nonetheless, support for the people of Gafsa grew into a broad-

based social movement. On April 4, wives of jailed miners demonstrated

in Redayef while supporters held solidarity actions in Tunis. Security

forces occupied Gafsa and Redayef. Clashes continued for several

months, culminating in a militarized police unit shooting dead one

demonstrator in June. A second died from his wounds in September.

Internet activists publicized the events in the mining towns. In

desperation, the regime shut down access to Facebook in August.

The 2008 Gafsa revolt was the most important social movement in

Tunisia since the bread revolt of January 1984. The difference was that

in 1984 the UGTT supported the protest. In 2008 UGTT militants, the

unemployed, and their families initiated the movement, and both the

UGTT leadership and the regime were the targets of protest.

The next cycle of contention in Tunisia began in December 2010 in

response to Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. The UGTT leadership

was driven by its base from advocating “dialogue,” to issuing statements

opposing repression of demonstrators, and finally to supporting the

43 Amnesty International, “Tunisia releases prisoners held over Gafsa protests” November 6, 2009 http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/good-news/tunisia-releases-prisoners-held-over-gafsa-protests-20091106 (accessed June 12, 2013).

30

movement only days before Ben Ali’s demise. In a January 10 speech

Ben Ali dismissed his opposition as “hostile elements in the pay of

foreigners, who have sold their souls to extremism and terrorism.” In

response, thirty workers stormed into the Gafsa regional UGTT office,

demanding that the local leadership support the protests. Ben Ali’s

insensitivity impelled the national federation to authorize regional

general strikes in Sfax, Kairouan and Tozeur on January 11, followed by

a general strike in Tunis on January 14, the day of Ben Ali’s departure.

After trailing behind their constituency for decades, the UGTT

leadership successfully played catch-up in the new era. Three UGTT

representatives were ministers in the first transitional government. Their

resignation after only one day, on the grounds that members of the RCD

retained too much influence, led to the formation of a new government

and the RCD’s dissolution on March 9. In December 2011 the UGTT

congress elected a new leadership consisting largely of militants

historically connected to the left. However, none are women, an

important undemocratic exclusion.

NGOs in Bahrain44

A movement demanding independence and an end to the British

occupation emerged in Bahrain as early as 1954. It included both

communist and Arab nationalist elements and was linked to trade

44 Much of the information in this section is based on Stork, 86-90.

31

unions. Layoffs of hundreds of Bahraini workers at the Bahrain

Petroleum Company in 1965 sparked an uprising against the British

which ultimately led to independence in 1971. A decade later, both the

secular left and Shi‘i Islamists were repressed after the government

alleged that the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain was planning

a pro-Iranian coup d’état.

In response to the repression, in 1981 one of the Front’s leaders,

‘Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja, who had already gone into exile in the late

1970s, established the Committee to Defend Political Prisoners in

Bahrain – the country’s first human rights NGO. It was originally

envisioned as an entity linked to the IFLB, but by the end of the 1980s it

morphed into the politically independent Bahrain Human Rights

Organization. The BHRO was based in Copenhagen, where al-Khawaja

had been granted asylum, and it received training from the Danish

Center for Human Rights.

About the same time Abdulnabi Alekry, a member of the Popular

Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, which emerged from the left wing of

the Arab Nationalist Movement, together with exiled leaders of the

National Front for the Liberation of Bahrain, a Marxist-Leninist party,

established the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Bahrain,

based in Damascus. Gradually these secular leftists embraced the

discourse of human rights.

32

From 1994 to 1999 leftists, liberals, and Islamists collaborated in

the “Intifada of Dignity” demanding democratic reforms. The uprising

was initiated by a demonstration of some 1,500 unemployed workers

demanding jobs in front of the ministry of labor (unemployment was then

about 15 percent). It subsided when Hamad bin ‘Isa Al Khalifa

succeeded his father as emir in 1999 and promised to establish a

constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament and an independent

judiciary. A National Action Charter, embodying those promises, was

overwhelmingly approved in a referendum on February 14-15, 2001. The

charter permitted opposition parties to form and established less

restrictive limits on freedom of assembly and expression.

A year later Hamad proclaimed himself King and amended the

constitution. Only the lower house of parliament is elected. The king

appoints the entire upper house and the prime minister, giving the Sunni

minority and royal loyalists a veto over legislation. The Shi‘i Wifaq

National Islamic Association called for a boycott of the 2002 elections.

The Bahrain Human Rights Society was established in May 2001 –

the first independent human rights NGO to be licensed in the new

political era. Dr. Sabika al-Najjar, a social scientist and women’s rights

activist, became Secretary General. Returning from exile, Abdulnabi

Alekry joined the leadership. Thus, the BHRS emerged from a defeated

secular left, whose roots reached back half a century.

33

‘Abd al-Hadi al-Khawaja was also permitted to return to Bahrain

and in 2002 reestablished the BHRO as the Bahrain Center for Human

Rights. The government refused to recognize the BCHR on the grounds

that it duplicated the mission of the already registered BHRS. In 2004

al-Khawaja was arrested for criticizing the prime minister for corruption,

human rights abuses, and failure to ensure equal opportunity economic

development. The regime officially closed the BCHR, reflecting its

distrust of the Shi‘i majority.

Nonetheless, the BCHR continued its activities underground.

During the 2000s, the BCHR and the BHRS established several sectoral

human rights organizations – the Bahrain Youth Society for Human

rights, the Committee for Martyrs and Victims of Torture, the Committee

for the Homeless, the Committee for the Unemployed, etc. Unlike human

rights NGOs in Egypt and Tunisia, they were popularly based and had

some mobilizational capacity. Moreover, as the BCHR emerged from an

Islamist political organization and did not receive foreign funding, it was

immune from charges of cultural imperialism and inauthenticity.

Security forces began to crack down on opposition forces after a

demonstration of some 80,000 in March 2005 demanded a new,

democratic constitution. Wifaq participated in the October 2010

elections and won a plurality of 18 out of 40 seats in the lower house of

parliament. The Haq Movement for Liberty and Democracy, a more

militant opposition party, and others called for a boycott. Their leaders

34

were arrested shortly before the elections after they raised concerns

about human rights violations.

Following the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, young Bahrainis

using Facebook and other social media began calling for a “Day of Rage”

on February 14, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the Charter of National

Action. The “Revolution of February 14 in Bahrain” Facebook page

garnered 11,000 “likes” (proportionately nearly double the response to far

less provocative Facebook pages in Egypt). Wifaq helped plan the

demonstrations. The BCHR sent an open letter to the king urging him

to ease tensions by: releasing detainees, dissolving the National Security Apparatus and engaging in serious dialogue on disputed issues. BCHR calls to avoid the use of force against peaceful protests and to guarantee basic rights such as freedom of assembly and freedom of opinion including the free use of social networking.45

Bahrain was much freer than most of its Gulf Cooperation Council

neighbors. But, the BCHR was illegal, and the monarchy regarded it and

Wifaq as stalking horses for Iran. Thus, the February 14th movement

was a bold political initiative in which a Facebook campaign of youth, a

political party, and an NGO called for the reorganization of state power –

well beyond the normal concerns of a human rights NGO.

Demonstrators occupied Pearl Roundabout on February 14 and called for

rewrit[ing] the constitution and…establish[ing] a body with a full popular mandate to investigate and hold to account economic, political and social violations,

45 Bahrain Center for Human Rights, “An open letter to the king to avoid the worst case scenario,” February 12, 2011. http://bahrainrights.org/en/node/3726

35

including stolen public wealth, political naturalization, arrests, torture and other oppressive security measures, institutional and economic corruption.46

The Trade Union Movement in Bahrain

The General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions was legalized in

2002 and formally established in 2004. By 2011 its sixty company-

based unions represented 22,000 of Bahrain’s 140,000 local workers in

construction, textiles, insurance, petroleum, aluminum, airport services,

and other sectors. The GBFTU joined the International Confederation of

Free Trade Unions (now the International Trade Union Confederation),

which in 2005 declared Bahrain “a bright spot in an otherwise dismal

landscape of persistent labor rights violations in the Middle East.”

Legislation banning firing workers for union activity was adopted in

2006.

The GFBTU has an exemplary record of opposing sectarianism and

defends the rights of contract migrant workers, a large portion of the

workforce. It advocates the unionization of domestic workers, mainly

south and southeast Asian migrants. Thirteen of its union committee

members are women.

Security forces attacked the Pearl Roundabout occupiers on

February 17. The GFBTU supported them by calling a general strike for

46 Nonprofit.wikitube.in, “Bahrain - 15 Feb 2011, Massive Demonstrations at Pearl Roundabout in Manama” http://nonprofit.wikitube.in/v/bahrain-15-feb-2011-massive-demonstrations-at-pearl-roundabout-in-manama-15-02-2011.html

36

February 20. The strike was suspended on February 21 after security

forces withdrew from the roundabout. Three weeks later, the king

requested military assistance from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf

Cooperation Council. The GFBFTU again called for a general strike.

Thousands of workers struck from March 13 to 22, as Saudi and

mercenary troops using U.S.-supplied weapons occupied Bahrain and

brutally suppressed the pro-democracy movement.

Consequently, over 2,500 (according to some accounts as many as

4,000) GFBTU members were fired from their jobs.47 Union leaders were

targeted. Eight members of the executive board and more than forty

union leaders, including the heads of the teachers federation, the nurses

association, and the Bahrain Petroleum Company union were sacked.

In July 2012 the government promoted the formation of a rival

Bahrain Labor Union Free Federation. Six unions, among them those at

firms whose owners are linked to the ruling family, disaffiliated from the

GFBTU to form BLUFF. In at least one case, the decision to switch

affiliations was apparently undertaken without a vote.48 The pretext for

establishing BLUFF – a naked effort to split the trade union movement

and weaken the GFBTU, which had been fairly effective and independent

47 Email from Karim Radhi, GFBTU Assistant Secretary for the Private Sector, July 25, 2011. 48 Bill Law, “New Bahrain trade federation splits union movement,” BBC, November 17, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20324436

37

given the limits of an absolute monarchy – was the claim that the GFBTU

had been improperly “political.”

Conclusions

The 2011 Arab popular uprisings were not the result of

proliferating NGOs or “building civil society.” Rather, they were the

consequence of converging vectors of diverse social protest movements

over the previous decades involving urban intelligentsias, disaffected

educated youth, blue and white-collar workers and professionals (Egypt,

Tunisia, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan), disaffected tribes (Libya, Yemen,

Jordan), religious communities (Bahrain, Yemen), and regions (Tunisia,

Syria, Yemen, Jordan). A revolutionary movement for democracy and

social justice enveloped the Arab world in 2011 on a scale comparable to

Latin America in the 1820s and Europe in 1848 and 1989. But, the

combinations of forces, the dynamics of mobilization, the historical and

political contexts, the framings of the issues, the extent and nature of

foreign interventions, and the outcomes are specific to each country.

In no case did the initiative for pro-democracy demonstrations

come from “civil society organizations.” The response to Mohamed

Bouazizi’s self immolation was spontaneous and rooted in the same

feelings of regional deprivation and marginalization that had sparked the

2008 protests in Gafsa. Once demonstrations were underway and being

suppressed by the police, Tunisian bloggers, the rapper El Général,

38

unemployed degree holders, lawyers, middle class oppositional elements,

UGTT locals, and ultimately the national leadership of the UGTT joined

in. In Egypt, the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page and the April 6

Youth Movement were among the first to call for a demonstration on

January 25, 2011. That demonstration was preceded by a decade of

protest by the middle-class intelligentsia, a massive strike wave,

outrageously fraudulent parliamentary elections in November 2010, and

of course the demonstration effect of Tunisia. In Bahrain too, the call for

a demonstration on February 14, 2011 originated on Facebook, but

unlike Tunisia or Egypt, an important human rights NGO and a political

party joined in before the demonstration, giving it a much sharper

political character from the outset.

In Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain, as well as Morocco and Jordan,

workers movements were an important component of the protest

movement. Because the Egyptian Trade Union Federation is effectively a

branch of the state, it very rarely mobilized workers. All but one the

strikes and collective actions of the 2000s, the dozens of strikes in the

last days before Mubarak’s demise, and the nearly three thousand since

then have been wildcats. The national political role of workers was, and

remains, limited. In contrast, although the UGTT leadership endorsed

the overall neoliberal strategy of the Ben Ali regime, this was not

accepted by important components of its base, which eventually pushed

the leadership into joining the popular uprising. As the largest civic

39

organization in Tunisia, the UGTT was able to play a pivotal role in both

ousting Ben Ali and ensuring that there was a clean break from the old

regime. In Bahrain, the GFBTU did not participate in planning the

February 14th demonstration. But it unequivocally backed the

movement when it faced armed repression. Pro-monarchy business-

owners targeted GFBTU members and ultimately the federation itself

after the first wave of the movement (which is continuing in mid-2013)

was dispersed.

The outcomes of the uprisings likewise had little to do with the

degree of development of civil society. Bahrain had the most popularly

based civil society organizations of the three cases examined here. The

illegal BCHR and the BGFTU had good relations with the largest legal

parliamentary party, Wifaq. But the pro-democracy movement could not

withstand the armed intervention of Saudi Arabia countenanced by the

United States. The administration of President Barack Obama, after

slapping the wrists of the Bahraini regime by delaying a $53 million arms

sale for half a year, authorized the deal in May 2012.

The Egyptian opposition’s lack of a political organization or

program, indeed the distrust of what passed for “politics” in the Mubarak

era by both workers and the “Facebook youth,” meant that when

Mubarak fell, they had no effective levers to shape the transition to the

new regime. Only the army and the Muslim Brothers had national

organizations and political agendas, even if neither were actually capable

40

of addressing Egypt’s myriad problems. From Mubarak’s ouster until

late 2012, the Brothers sought to share power with the army and the

internal security apparatus of the Mubarak regime. Hence, those

institutions were totally unreformed. The political overreaching and

incompetence of the President Muhammad Morsi, who did not seem to

realize that his narrow victory in the second round presidential election

of June 30, 2012 depended on about half his votes coming from those

who did not support him in the first round, continuing beatings and

murders of protesters, torture, detainment without charges, “virginity

tests,” and other abuses by the army and police, and the deteriorating

economic situation fueled the Tamarrud (Rebellion) movement of April-

June 2013.

Unlike any other Egyptian political movement except the Brothers,

the youthful Tamarrud cadres successfully brought their demand that

President Morsi resign to millions of Egyptians who had never before

participated in politics. Consequently, the demonstrations of June 30,

2013 were even larger than those demanding that Mubarak leave. The

army seized the opportunity to oust Morsi on July 3. As neither

Tamarrud nor the diverse coalition of opposition parties comprising the

National Salvation Front had a viable organization or political program,

the army, once again, was the force most able to fill the political vacuum.

Many revolutionaries, apparently having forgotten the army’s crimes in

2011-12, enthusiastically supported the military intervention.

41

In Tunisia, Ennahda, like the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, was by far

the most effective political party. In neither country did Islamists

“hijack” the revolutions, as many claimed. They stepped into a political

vacuum. However, the existence of a strong UGTT, the interim

presidency of Moncef Marzouki, a former human rights activist, and a

coalition government kept Ennahda from overreaching to the extent that

the Muslim Brothers did in Egypt.

Some of the same negative legacies from the old regime remain in

Tunisia as in Egypt. The Ennahda led government has not successfully

addressed the economic grievances that underlay the Tunisian uprising.

The police have continued to use excessive force against demonstrators,

and the judiciary remains unreformed. Many suspect that Ennahda has

been complicit, before or after the fact, with violent attacks by Salafists

on secular individuals and institutions. The most spectacular of these

were the February 2012 assassination of the leftist labor leader, Chokri

Belaid, who was assembling a secular leftist Popular Front and the July

2012 assassination of Mohamed Brahmi, leader of the Nasserist

Movement of the People party.

Nonetheless, both Freedom House and Human Rights Watch were

relatively positive about the state of human rights and the prospects for

democracy in Tunisia.49 They noted advances in women’s rights – 49

49 Human Rights Watch, World Report 2012: Tunisia http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-tunisia; Freedom House, Countries at the Crossroads: Tunisia,

42

women were elected to the Constituent Assembly out of 217 members –

far more than the 8 women out of 508 members of parliament elected in

Egypt in 2011 and a higher proportion of women than in either house of

the US Congress. More liberal laws governing the press, political parties,

associations, and demonstrations were enacted. In sharp contrast to the

conviction of forty-three members of internationally funded democracy

promotion organizations in Egypt in June 2013, in Tunisia 7,000 to

10,000 new associations, unions, and professional organizations were

registered in 2011. In other words, in a more effectively democratizing

regime, civil society organizations flourished.

Undeterred by the failure of civil society organizations to lead a

transition to democracy in the Arab region, Western governments, think

tanks, foundations, and their academic followers have doubled down on

their bet that “building civil society” is the best strategy to promote

democratization in the post-2011 Arab region.

In Egypt this has involved recruiting or coopting some people who

were prominent in the 2011 uprising. Wael Ghonim has become closely

associated with TechWadi, a Silicon Valley non-profit organization that

promotes entrepreneurship in the Arab world. He took a long term

sabbatical from his position as Google’s Director of Marketing for the

Middle East and North Africa “to start a technology focused NGO to help

2012 http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/countries-crossroads/2012/tunisia#_edn16

43

fight poverty & foster education in #Egypt.”50 Esraa Abdel Fattah, one of

the A6YM founders, is now media director of the Egyptian Democratic

Academy, an NGO established in 2009, which teaches civics and media

skills.51 The EDA is financed by European Foundations including the

Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, the Danish Institute for

Parties and Democracy, and the German Friedrich Nauman Foundation

for Freedom. Jawad Nabulsi, another former A6YM leader, is co-founder

of Nebny Foundation, which combines philanthropy and promoting

entrepreneurship. There is nothing in principle wrong with such efforts,

though they have a clear upper-middle class orientation.

However, it is not a plausible argument that Egypt has had a more

fraught transition to democracy than Tunisia because it has not had

enough “civil society organizations.” The most urgent weakness in

Egypt’s democratization process is the lack of civil political debate

conducted with a modicum of regard for actual facts and based on

acknowledging the equal rights of all individuals and all sectors of the

national community. The priorities for Egypt remain what

revolutionaries demanded in 2011: “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.”

Radical reform and reeducation of the security and judicial apparatus

can ensure that Egyptians enjoy personal and collective freedoms. Good

50 Twitter message, April 23, 2011 https://twitter.com/Ghonim/status/61809204129824769 51 Lauren E. Bohn, “Egyptians learn tough lessons in democracy,” CNN March 10, 2011 http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/03/09/egypt.democracy/index.html

44

jobs, education, and healthcare can ensure that votes cannot be bought

for a sack of rice. A new political vision empowering youth, women,

Christians, professionals, and workers and dispersing power beyond

highly centralized Cairo-based institutions would mobilize the democratic

aspirations of the population. This is first-and-foremost a political

project, not the remit of NGOs, whether chess clubs or human rights

advocacy groups.