I have very few words tonight for how things are going in Egypt. From the reports available in the U.S., the hundreds of thousands of protesters have resisted Mubarak's thugs and the temptation to lash out in society-wide violence… thus far. Reporters said the rumors that Mubarak would step down tonight had sustained a jubilant air in Tahrir Square.
And then Mubarak spoke, and I am now more despondent about the future of Egypt and the Mideast than I have in many years. Being an historian gives me no special access to human nature, just a visceral sense of contingency. Early this afternoon, I was speaking with a colleague raised in North Africa about our hopes, but they are now dashed, at least for the moment. From outside Egypt, the world is watching history unfold, and I can barely imagine that Mubarak's reign ends quickly and without widespread violence. If it does so, it will be primarily due to extraordinary restraint and judgment of its people.
Today’s story in the WSJ (2/11/11) was about Egypt’s street demonstration — the big one that served as a tipping point.
From interviews with its organizers, it appears to have been carefully planned and part of an ongoing battle of wits with the police force — no surprise, then, that the day chosen to demonstrate was the national holiday of the police force. Twenty locations were identified beforehand for cells of ten to meet at, but one site was not publicized beforehand. The other sites were decoys, and the expected police cordons meet them there. However, one person in each cell knew that the real meeting site was to be in a working class neighborhood not known for its Facebook usage.
The chief aim, the challenge, was to amass outside police surveillance, in this neighborhood, and to galvanize the denisons into mobilizing and joining, and then head out, picking up participants as it went. And this is just what happened. (British football hooligans are also meticuous planners in this regard.)
All this is very Collinsian: a neighborhood mobilized by 200-300 demonstrators escaping the police, defying the police — the emotional energy must have been truly exhilarating, a sense of liberation, of celebration, of — ah! — newborn solidarity in the street — and then becoming thousands! You can almost feel the quantum leap of energy when other groups appear out of nowhere, to join in the march, to feed the frenzy — it must have been amazing, and judging from its continuation these past few weeks, it still is.
Once a critical mass was created, the marchers were able to easily overwhelm the police meant to curb them, by their sheer numbers. Now THAT must have been something to see — the balance of power in the streets of Cairo suddenly, momentarily, shifting away from the police, toward the people. (No wonder the question of the loyalty of the military is so important. Certainly, no one wants this to turn into a blood bath.)
Maybe part of this is my own experience marching with a million others in NYC on a summer day. But it also answers the puzzle of what the demonstration was about, what started it. Whether this kind of collective action, with its own macro-dynamics, can morph into political action, or be coopted by the Muslim Brotherhood, over the longer term, is entirely another matter. You can see how focused the participants are on Mubarak stepping down — as if their collective action needs to accomplish something concrete. And how easy it is to demonize him (Durkheim’s moral solidarity).
But the point is, in terms of what its planners intended, it already has. They were able to evade the police, reach critical mass, both emotionally and in numbers, without being stopped, overwhelming the opposition. The feed-back and feed-forward loops involved — those created by the media and the internet — are central to this next stage, I think. However, all this is only an emotional platform, it is not a political one. Dramatic demonstrations of solidarity do not — of themselves — solve collective action problems as complicated as Egypt’s political ones; they may, in fact, create more problems in the long run.