Egypt and the Global Crisis of Legitimacy

I've been having trouble wrapping my head around the implications of what's already taken place in Egypt, and clearly there's still a lot more on tap. The U.S. and Europe are now calling for an orderly transition to begin immediately, and while that makes for sound policy, the sheer impossibility of that demand underscores what I think is the most alarming dynamic here: a crisis of legitimacy, on three levels.

The first level is clearly within Egypt itself, because while it's easy to say that President Hosni Mubarak must go, there's no objective standard for determining the legitimacy of what comes next. The opposition is neither organized nor monolithic. The Mubarak regime is inseparable from the institutions of governance. And while there's no doubt that the Mubarak regime is widely despised, it, too, represents interests that cannot be discounted, most notably that of the Egyptian military.

That leads to the second level, that of the legitimacy of the U.S. intervention in Egypt, which has been effective primarily because of the military-to-military links between the Egyptian and U.S. militaries. Andrew Exum makes an insightful comparison on this subject between Egypt and Pakistan, where our lack of military contacts helps explain our inability to exercise the same kind of influence over Pakistani politics. While Exum makes a compelling point, it's one that goes right to the heart of the problems inherent in the militarization of foreign policy. One of those is that leveraging U.S. military influence leads to the militarization of domestic politics on the receiving country's end, as the armed forces become the ultimate kingmaker. And that's especially the case when military influence is all the U.S. has to leverage.

The contrast here between Egypt and Côte d'Ivoire is thought-provoking, even if the two situations are clearly not identical. An overwhelming or exclusive client relationship with the U.S., whether in terms of military ties or trade relations, give Washington the equivalent of a "kill switch" when it comes to internal politics. But that only creates an incentive to diversify, something that is possible and already happening in trade terms. I have a hunch we'll be seeing that happen more and more in terms of military relationships, even if there is a trade-off for receiving countries in terms of the quality of arms and training. So we're likely to see more Côte d'Ivoires over time, and fewer Egypts. And as much as China is watching the Egyptian street with alarm, India is probably watching the backroom deals going on between Washington and Cairo with the same attentiveness.

There's also a troubling element to Washington's sudden about-face in order to get on "the right side of history." In this sense, the word "history" can be understood to mean "the news cycle," or even, if I unleash the cynic in me, "the Twitter cycle." But international relations isn't Facebook, where we can just "unfriend" Mubarak and "friend" the Muslim Brotherhood overnight, thereby erasing 30 years of real history, as measured by tanks, planes, extraordinary renditions, and gazes averted to maintain plausible deniability. In other words, the Obama administration's sound policy in light of the current developments serves as an indictment of American legitimacy in light of the past 30 years.

And that leads to the third level on which a broad crisis of legitimacy seems to be installing itself, and that's on the global level. I mentioned yesterday that the democratic West should hold off on any self-congratulatory celebrations, because the same passions being unleashed in Egypt have been on display in Europe and America, and have not been throughly addressed. For the reasons outlined above, what's happening today in Egypt is a condemnation of the global order, the one that was well-served by a "stable" Egypt and that continues to reward a rising, if repressive, China. At a time when nation-building is at the heart of the security discourse, and where our military engagement in Afghanistan is based upon a scientific approach to legitimacy and governance, the events in Tunisia and Egypt remind us that social order and political legitimacy is as much, if not more, the result of an unpredictable alchemy as it is the product of precise formulas.

Now we're witnessing a moment where the challenge to legitimacy seems to be leaping across frontiers and taking on the qualities of a nuclear chain reaction. That challenge goes beyond questions of democracy and dictatorship, because it occurs in a global order where democracies remain beholden to dictatorships, and vice versa. For now, the U.S. is scrambling to keep up with events in Egypt. But until a credible alternative to the status quo ante is formulated, I suspect we will have trouble catching up, there and elsewhere.