EU Aid to Egypt ‘well intentioned but ineffective’

Adding to my occasional series of posts on democracy support…

The European Court of Auditors has just issued a report on the EU’s efforts to support reform in Egypt in the period since 2007 (press release), the bottom line is that programme (involving €1Bn) has been ‘ineffective’.  This programme had two main strands providing budget support to selected bits of the Egyptian state and grants to civil society organizations.

Reading between the lines the Egyptians have been taking the money and not worrying too much about the EU agenda of transparency, anti-corruption and human rights while obstructing grants to CSOs.  While there are some differences between the Mubarak, military government and current periods the continuities are more obvious.  In return the European Commission and the European External Action Service have failed to insist on conditionality and to use their leverage against the Egyptians.  My reading is that in dealing with multiple programmes applying conditionality is just too difficult, further I suspect that a calculation was at work that continuing the dialogue was more important than applying pressure.

The full report also contains a spectacularly defensive paragraph by paragraph rebuttal by the Commission and the EEAS.  Technically the report is into the management of the programmes and the response is concerned with showing that the Commission and EEAS did a good job ‘in the given circumstances’ which included ‘continuous resistance from the Egyptian side’ on some issues.  Where the Auditors point out aspects of a programme have been ineffective the response is that as the programme still has some time to run there’s still room for progress to be made even though there’s no sign of it. I particularly enjoyed the phrase that occurs at several points ‘this file has been closely monitored’.  The best though is the abbreviation of budget support to BS hence ‘future BS operations’.

In the end the report and the rebuttal are operating within a relatively narrow bureaucratic discourse and  I’m left with a bigger set of questions about these programmes.  Essentially the EU is attempting to generate change in a foreign country that doesn’t want to (or can’t) change; was there any realistic prospect for success? If this type of programme is unlikely to succeed are there alternatives? Is it possible to effectively use complex, multifaceted, technical programmes, executed through mediating organizations as an effective tool of influence – this doesn’t just apply to the EU but to large parts of contemporary statecraft.

Egypt and Russia Against Democracy Promotion

I’ve raised the question before of how countries try to limit the impact of what they perceive as unwelcome PD activities so I just that I’d connect two recent stories.

Firstly, the announcement by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in in Egypt that they will prevent a number of foreigners from leaving the country while they are investigated for interfering in the electoral process through the work of foreign funded NGOs.   In particular the case of Sam Lahood the head of the Egyptian office of the International Republican Institute has attracted attention.   The IRI gets funding from the US congress via the National Endowment for Democracy which originated with Ronald Reagan’s  Project Democracy.  The Egyptian regime sees foreign funded NGOs as a threat is making an effort to restrict their activities.  Given that the NGOs have been operating in a legal limbo they have plenty of scope to do so.

Secondly, there’s the ‘warm‘ welcome the new US Ambassador in Moscow, Michael McFaul received.  On his second day in the job state television accused him of wanting to foment revolution in Russia and suggested that opposition figures who were visiting the embassy were there to receive instructions.  McFaul is reported as saying that the previous day he had had a warm welcome from Russian officials.  Thus it looks like the media reaction was directed at the public diplomacy element of the job.

In both cases it is the US commitment to democracy promotion activities that drives an element of conflict with the regime.  In the Egyptian case legal harassment is the tool and in Russia the state controlled media becomes a weapon to try and delegitimize foreign PD activities.

There is a broader question of how states manage foreign PD.   The US has the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) passed in 1938 it was intended to regulate the operations of foreign propaganda offices as the Second World War approached.

US Public Diplomacy: What Problem Part 1.

Here in the public diplomacy blogosphere there seems to be some doubt about US public diplomacy…but these doubts aren’t universally shared.  Apparently all of that PD2.0 that I periodically express scepticism about works just fine and is behind all of the upheavals in the Middle East says this press release from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK.  James Glassman please stand up and take a bow.

More on Twitter Revolutions

I’ve been meaning to post a link to this post by Deen Frelon at the University of Washington.  I think this does a nice job of identifying the different types of claims that are being made about technology and I’ll be interested to read the next posts in the series.

My own position is that digital technology has added to the mobilizational resources available to the protesters.  But social movement theory (not to mention historical studies of revolutions) tell you that the ability to mobilize is not the whole story without paying attention to the political opportunity structure and the strategies open to the two sides.  It’s usually splits in the elites that open the way to movement success and at the moment the regime seems quite solid and is playing a game to defuse the situation with some concessions and a strategy of delay.  Hence by only focusing on the technological dimension we are missing the bigger picture.

Looking at this through the lens of social movements or revolutions several issues come to mind.  There are a lot of unhappy people in Egypt who agree that Mubarak must go.  But beyond this to what extent does the January 25 movement actually have a political programme that can sustain it?  Focusing on Mubarak is an excellent way to maximize the size of the mobilization but what comes after this? The normal lesson of revolutions is that organized minorities trump disorganized masses so the real challenge for the January 25 movement is not whether they can bring people onto the streets but whether they can produce a functioning political organization that can provide leadership beyond the immediate crisis.  Can technology allow the development of a programme and and organization that can defeat the existing political groupings?  While the focus is on Mubarak at the moment the real priority should be to create the political space that will allow the organization of new political parties.

While I’m thinking revolutions I’ll also raise the question of the extent to which wired secular young people (eg Ghonim) are actually going to be able to lead.  To put it in Gramscian terms is this class going to be able to establish a hegemony over Egyptian society?

So to conclude I think that ‘technology’ does make a difference but you can’t abstract it from the broader elements of the situation.

Theorizing Twitter Revolutions Part 2: A Short Introduction to Social Movement Theory

In Part 1 I made the point that you can’t separate technology and the social so looking for an independent impact of technology is problematic.

In this post I wanted to point to the analytical framework that social movement theory (SMT) provides for making sense of situations such as Egypt. I think that this is useful because at a minimum it provides a guide to how we look at the case.  What follows is drawn from Sidney Tarrow’s Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics.

The starting point for SMT is that the existence of grievances are insufficient to generate action. The emergence of a movement is dependent on the opportunities and constraints offered by the environment of groups with grievances.  This is termed the ‘political opportunity structure’.  Although elements of this will quite stable, for instance state strength and modes of repression opportunities can emerge from a variety of sources.  Tarrow points to new routes of access into the political system, changing political alignments, divisions among elites, and the emergence of new allies as shifts in the political opportunity structure that can facilitate the emergence of new movements.

Emerging movements need to develop repertoires of contentious behaviour and framings that will allow them to mobilize support.  Framing is not a neutral process as certain framings will tend to support the formation of particular coalitions while obstructing others. Movements face the challenge of developing ‘mobilizing structures’ – which translates into organizational modes that will allow them to maintain the support they need to confront their opponents.  The requirements of organization give rise to a characteristic set of issues for social movements: how do they sustain themselves over time?  What is the role of leadership? To what extent should the movement compromise with their opponents? Movements tend to endure tensions between bureaucratization and radicalization. For instance movements may spin-off groups that see the leadership as hopelessly compromised and violence as the only solution.

I think one of the attractions of SMT is the effort to recognize both the importance of structural factors but also of agency.  In historical perspective it is clear how particular choices have had huge impacts on the success or failure of particular movements.

So how do ‘technologies’ fit in with this?  An obvious route in is through the impact on mobilizing structures.  The claim that is made by techno enthusiasts is that communication technologies allow an easier resolution of the challenges of mobilization and leadership. It can also be argued that technology affects the political opportunity structure through inhibiting the use of repressive violence. They can also spread framings more easily but they don’t resolve the issue of which framings to use.  These technologies certainly have an effect but I think that the value of a SMT perspective is that it recognizes the importance of political context.  Technology doesn’t resolve the political problem of how Egyptian protesters should act in relation to discussions between political parties and the regimes. One important point that Tarrow makes is that one of the consequences of a social movement is its impact on elite politics – something that seems to be happening in Egypt.

The important point in these two posts is that technology shouldn’t be treated as something that operates autonomously and deterministically any analysis of democratizing protests has to take account of the political and cultural context.

Tilly, C. (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, [Mass.]: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

McAdam, D. (2001) Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McAdam, D., J.D. McCarthy, and M. Zald (1996) Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tarrow, S.G. (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Theorizing Twitter Revolutions: Part 1 There’s no such thing as technology

Having been reading Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion on my recent travels and getting home in time for the Egyptian upheaval I thought that I’d just throw in a couple of comments about ‘Twitter revolutions’ and ‘Facebook uprisings’ etc. I’ll post part 2 tomorrow morning.

The psychologist Kurt Lewin made the comment that ‘there’s nothing more practical than a good theory’ and of course Keynes observed that ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’  My thought here is that in trying to make sense of what Twitter, Facebook, SMS etc have done in Egypt it’s useful to flag up the way that thinking about these questions have been developing in Science and Technology Studies.

One of the basic thrusts of science and technology studies over the past couple of decades is that on close inspection the society/technology distinction doesn’t hold up. ‘Technologies’ have been conceptualized as systems that mix material and ideational elements in social practices. Bruno Latour has developed a particularly radical take on this and argues that precisely what distinguishes humans is that they have always and everywhere co-evolved with their technologies hence trying to define ‘the human’, ‘the social’ and ‘the technological’ as distinct essences is mistaken and just gets in the way of understanding what is going on. This has been parodied as the view that ‘things are people too’ – but as an example of this mode of thinking take how people in modern societies deal with time. There is a universal system of abstract time measurement, we carry watches – which we could set for any time we like but don’t – we have been inculcated with a sense of time management through the way that this abstract system of time is embedded in everyday practices like how long a university class is. Time needs clocks, people, ideas, collective practices mixed together. For this reason Latour and others of a similar ilk prefer to talk about ‘actor-networks’ or ‘technosocial assemblages’. The take away from this is that ‘technologies’ are never just technologies they are actor-networks that may or may not grow to involve more components (including people).

The point here is any attempt to set up an opposition between technological and social explanations of the upheaval in Egypt is ontologically flawed. All revolutions have a ‘technological’ or ‘media’ component but at the same time they all are ‘social’ phenomena. In the case of Egypt the question is more about the emergence of actor-networks that were in part at least constituted around ‘technologies’ . If we recognize that ‘technologies’ are not ‘objective’ ‘autonomous’ entities but are co-constructed by their users we are taking a big step away from naive technological determinism and towards an understanding of the possibilities and limits of ‘technologically’ driven change.

Latour, B. (2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford: OUP Oxford.

Morozov, E. (2011) The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. London: Allen Lane.

Tomorrow: Part 2 A short summary of social movement theory.