"We’ll Choose Military Fascism": Threats and Alternatives in Revolutionary Egypt

• In Event: Remodeling Authoritarianism: Conceptual Approaches with Empirical Foundations

Abstract

Over the last decade, scholars have identified threats as key drivers of authoritarian politics. Threats influence coercive institutions (e.g. Greitens 2016; Talmadge 2015, 2016; Weeks 2018), distributive policies (e.g. Albertus 2015, Albertus et al. 2018, Hertog and Eibl 2023), and much more. In influential formal-theoretic works, holistic analyses begin from the observation that dictators face both elite and mass threats (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005, Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). In most of these accounts, what matters is not the objective existence of a threat, but an autocrat’s perception of a threat. Yet such perceptions are notoriously difficult to study, due (depending on your preference) to secrecy, deception, or the unreliability of the human mind. Scholars therefore often fall back on “objective” threats, assuming that authoritarians (and their coalitions) are reasonable assessors of threats around them.

Unfortunately, the psychological and international relations literatures on threat perceptions caution that very few of us are reasonable threat assessors: people drastically underestimate some threats and obsess over things that do not, in fact, pose much of a threat at all (Mueller 2006). Threat perceptions are shaped by our backgrounds, our experiences, and our histories as much or more as they are by “objective” indicators (Goodwin et al. 2005, Rousseau 2006).

The authoritarianism literature needs a solution to this problem. We know threats are important, but we lack a rigorous approach to measuring them. In this paper, I argue that one way forward lies in interpretive and ethnographic methods, which are well-equipped to observe how phenomena are socially constructed to seem more (or less) threatening.

To illustrate how such an approach works, I turn to the formation of an authoritarian coalition in Egypt in 2013. On June 30—just two years after the massive uprisings of 2011—millions of Egyptians poured into the streets to demand an end to their country’s short-lived democratic transition. For many people, both ordinary and elite, Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi posed a threat that could only be managed by bringing the entire democratic experiment down. To these segments of society – artists and intellectuals, “revolutionary” organizers, business elites, the institutional Coptic Church, the police and civilian security apparatus, the media, and the military itself – any threat posed by the return of the military to power paled in comparison to that posed by the Muslim Brotherhood under democracy As many Egyptians said at the time, “if we have to choose between military fascism and religious fascism, we’ll chose military fascism.” Most accounts stop here: the MB was threatening, so authoritarians made a move. With the benefit of some distance, however, it becomes clear that the MB threat was overblown. The group was flailing, incompetent at both governance and politics, and essentially powerless, since the machinery of state remained largely outside their control. This wasn’t “religious fascism;” it was a bumbling transitional government perched atop a persistently authoritarian state. Why, then, did key actors perceive it as the most pressing threat to the country’s future?

I argue that the MB was perceived as threatening because of the way it had been constructed as a threat over time. Dominant framings of the MB in 2012-2013 shared four claims: first, that they preyed upon the “ignorant” poor to achieve electoral success; second, that they specialized in backstabbing, betrayal, and doublespeak; third, that they had secret cells pursuing a secret agenda; and finally, that the group had transnational rather than national allegiances. None of these claims is clearly, “objectively” true; they were, I argue, socially constructed facts. Only by understanding such socially constructed facts, however, can we explain what happened in Egypt.

My conclusions are based on ethnographic observations (I was in Cairo for the entirety of Morsi’s presidency), readings of a variety of Arabic-language primary sources and histories of the Muslim Brotherhood in both English and Arabic. I recreate the atmosphere of looming threat, documenting its appearances in offhand comments, newsroom jokes, rumor, and satire alongside more traditional political texts. Such an approach is not meant to supplant dominant methodological positions; instead, I suggest that dominant methods can only take us so far. When we need to understand how ideas come to be, we must turn to methods that take those ideas seriously and independently of their relationship to “reality.”

Author

• Sofia Fenner, Colorado College