Why I Got It Completely Wrong

There's a reason experts keep referring to these protests as "unprecedented"

In my course “Introduction to International Studies” at Miami University, we spend the first fifteen minutes of most classes talking about the news. When the Tunisian uprising reached its climax and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled, my students asked me whether I thought it was likely that this would occur elsewhere in the region, perhaps in Egypt.

“Almost certainly not,” I assured them. “Egypt is a very different country than Tunisia. There might well be protests, but they won’t reach the level of uprising we saw in Tunisia.”

I was completely wrong.

Let me make one thing clear: I stand by my answer. It was the right answer to give in that class to those students; it was just incorrect. Here’s why:

I am a social scientist. In answering questions I make hypotheses (educated guesses) based on the available data. I’m not alone; among scholars of Egypt, nobody saw this uprising coming, although once it was underway we all knew why it was happening.

Egypt has had frequent anti-Mubarak protests since the 1980s. These fall roughly into two categories: labor unrest and political reform movements. No protest on either side has been even moderately successful at bringing about economic or political reform by the regime.

Labor Protests

Labor unrest is driven primarily by the devastating effects on factory workers of the efforts to transform Egypt’s economy from a paternalistic socialist economy to a neoliberal economy. As in many other countries in Africa, Asia and South America where “structural adjustments” were imposed at the recommendation of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, there were enormous economic dislocations—lay-offs, inflation rising faster than wages, loss of benefits—that deeply affected the millions of people working for state-owned enterprises.

Nor did these workers ever see the supposed benefits of their sacrifices, because the regime never really instituted capitalism either. As I describe in my book,

most of what has been called “privatization” since then has not, in fact, put companies under the control of non–public sector actors or agencies; it has consisted of public offerings of stock (usually limited to no more than 10 percent of the company), opportunities for employees to buy into the company (again, usually limited to 10 percent), and sales of assets. Sixty-four percent of privatization transactions thus did not actually remove companies from government control but rather provided the government holding com­panies with much-needed infusions of cash … (Connected in Cairo, p. 177)

The Egyptian Government does not keep reliable public records of strikes and other labor protests. In 1999 I helped supervise a thesis in which a student went through a newspapers searching for tiny stories buried in the back pages of newspapers as a way to get a sense of how much labor unrest there was. The student found dozens of strikes every year, mostly consisting of individual factories, or a few hundred laborers at most. Collectively, worker unrest has included tens of thousands of workers.

Joel Beinen calculates that there have been more than 3000 strikes or protests over the past ten years involving 2 million workers.

Such labor protests were relatively easy to put down by the police apparatus, but because they failed to address root causes, the numbers of striking workers has continued to increase. For example, “textile workers took part in a wave of strikes from 2004 to 2007, with more than 7,000 laborers and their supporters participating in mass demonstrations to protest structural adjustments” (Connected in Cairo, p. 177-178). As always, these were eventually settled by a combination of promises of reform, and force.

Political Protest