History has traditionally situated the terms 'revolution' and 'military coup' as widely opposing. In Egypt, however, the two terms are entangled as never before. Ahmad Hosni explains the concept of couprevolution.
The central point of debate in Egypt since the disposition of the president Mohamed Morsi by the military on July 3 has been whether to call it a 'coup' or a 'popular uprising'. The political players of the orthodox, revolutionary groups (who despite their previous position apropos the military) have hailed the generals’ decision while the conservative Muslim Brotherhood decried it a military coup. In fact, what is occuring in Egypt is probably a mixture of the two.
This convergence of interest between the revolutionary forces and military is best crystalised by the term couprevolution. This convergence of the two terms has become a new model for dissentious politics that arrives by tank. The point here is not to dissect the event in order to procure the most accurate definition but just to simply try and understand how the confluence of these two notions is possible.
Coup is an unambiguous notion; when an army interferes to overthrow a government it is a coup. Revolution on the other hand, is less amenable to such technical definitions. It is identified intuitively; we know it when we see it. We tend to register a coup as an image, an image of the people in congregation against the sovereign, the acute surge that seems to come out of nowhere, reshuffles the scene and soon dissipates. But that is rarely the case. History is ripe with revolutions that lingered on without endpoints and became constant states under the rubric of revolution; revolutionary parties, revolutionary governments, revolutionary policies and even revolutionary countries. It is during this afterlife that revolution assumes its indeterminate and loose character, even to the point that it would subsume a coup under its semiotic cloak.
We can think of revolution according to two analytic schemes. Firstly, it is the event of a quasi-absolute consensus against a common target (namely the sovereign), followed by a mobilization of the populace. Consensus temporarily suspends discordance typically held among factions of the populace for the sake of the single antagonism. This mobilization is typically momentary and as history has repeatedly demonstrated, unpredictable. The uprising against Mubarak’s regime in January 2011 could be perfectly read along these lines.
It is also possible to think of revolution not as an event per se but as the adherence to an event as an idea. The historic event is an incomplete version of what is yet to come. Here revolution does not become simply a happening in the past but a moment to be concluded in the future and it is the afterimage of the revolution that keeps the notion of revolution alive as a valid political choice despite its ever-receding horizon. There is another name for that: messianic. Messianic prophecies whether in politics or religion have managed to survive against the odds of objectivity. Like religion, it is impossible to demarcate the perimeters of revolution by objective means.
Revolution is an ideology rather than an event. And like all ideologies it comes with its edifice of narratives and interpretive strategies which are indispensable and to which there are two premises: the totality of the people and the articulation of an incontrovertible antagonist. It is hard to think of a revolution that did not invoke both. Yet, if the antagonist is always incontrovertibly articulated and identified (be it Mubarak, Morsi or the Tzar), the notion of the ‘people’ is much looser. The people are not a population, the latter is the statistical count, but instead, they are a semiotic function, a signifier that is always less than the sum of the parts. There is always a portion of the population that will not be counted in the totality of the people. It is a counting strategy, but not the actual numbers.
The difference between the overwhelming sway of a population and the substantial portion between people and faction is not analytical, but discursive. Did the army’s intervention come as a response to popular demand or was it merely favorable by the majority of the population? The difference is that the former situates the people as the subject of statistics while the latter endows the people with the agency of a cohesive solid entity. Stress the latter and it becomes a revolution. The former articulation renders it a coup.
Much of the current political conflict in Egypt involves a battle over the right to these two notions: people and revolution. What happened on June 30th was a revolution in the second sense of the word. It was a revolution not in terms of its mobilisation force, but in terms of its appropriation of the idea of the revolution and the invocation of the idea of people as a unity. Morsi’s opponents have no doubt that what took place was a true revolution. There were over twenty million who have signed no-confidence petitions against Morsi, a large portion of whom took to the streets demanding his resignation.
The image of the people filling Tahrir Square conjured up memories of the 2011 evolution. Such symbolism gave credence to the claim that it was a second revolution, but also masked the fact that there is a sizable chunk of the population, albeit a minority, that took to the streets in support of Morsi. The opposition did not just ignore their numbers but more importantly their right to be counted as the people. Instead, they were best described as a faction.
Successful revolutions have the capacity bundle up different political factions under the same revolutionary banner. The Tamarod (Rebel) campaign was successful because it was inclusive; people from different political strands could sign to the simple request to take Morsi out of office. It included those who still harbored some sympathy towards the old regime alongside radical factions in the revolutionary camp. It is impossible to know whether those who signed and later went to the streets did so because they were troubled by the Muslim Brothers’ Islamism or because they had lost faith in Egypt’s prospect civic governance and longed for the law-and-order ethos of a military institution. Like all successful revolutions the campaign suspended—or rather, evaded—ideological difference between factions and totalized the everyday hardship of Egyptians as anti-Morsi sentiment. To claim that it was a set of principles that mobilised the masses is unfounded. To claim that it was in support of liberal opposition is simply untested.
Another challenge to the revolution narrative is that the events of June 30th were to some extent anticipated if not even orchestrated. The prelude of attacks against the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators and offices across the country by unknown mobs in the absence of any intervention by the police (compared with the swift array of arrests and judiciary acts against the Muslim Brotherhood after the ousting of Morsi or the gasoline and power crisis that reached its peak during the week before June 30th only to miraculously disappear afterwards) does not speak of a popular uprising but a surreptitious attempt by the deep state to undermine Morsi. All came to add the finishing touches to a vicious anti-Morsi, anti-Muslim Brotherhood discourse that has dominated the liberal media over the past year[1].
The bottom-line is that 'revolution' is too loose a category by which to describe what is happening in Egypt. No matter in which narrative it operates, it can equally be endorsed by an opposing faction. The real fight is not between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces but between different strategies that lay claim to the idea. Let us not forget that supporters of Morsi see themselves as the true defenders of the revolution stolen from them by means of a military coup.
If revolution has managed to neutralise a coup and render it popular, it is probably not a reliable pivot for politics. Indeed, revolution is a post-hoc situation. It comes after the real politics have been done: the demonizing, wrong-footing and deal cutting. Those who came out on the winning side will find it easier to claim a revolution.
But that is just in the short term, for it is more congenial to associate revolution with the underdogs. Those who have their leader held in an unknown location under military detention will sooner or later find better use of the term. This is not good news for Egypt’s secular camp as epitomized in the National Salvation Front. They have invested too much in their image as the true revolutionaries, a category that can be readily usurped by their opponents when conditions are opportune. The popularity of figures such as el-Baradei has never been tested. They have become completely dependent on the army, and most critically, their pendulous politics might have cost them much of their credibility.
Over the past two years Egyptians have elected a largely inexperienced (and arguably incompetent) president and sent their generals to overthrow their first elected president all under the same label: revolution. Now it is time for Egypt’s liberals (and indeed all political factions) to move beyond the revolutionary rhetoric and into a more mature and less ideational dialogue, a time for all parties to think of ways to compromise and reach consensus. However, this cannot be done under the antagonistic dynamics of revolutionary discourse and should also seek to avoid any acrimonious sentiment towards the Americans and Qataris.
Whether this one was revolution or a coup, it was definitely a democratic setback. Now it is time to situate the revolution where it belongs: in the past as an event.
Time to move on.