The year 2011 marked a pivotal moment in the politics of the Middle East, interpreted as no less than “revolutionary,” as populations across the region sought the overthrow of their abusive and authoritarian regimes. Though the revolts started in Tunisia, the events in Egypt, particularly in Tahrir Square, came to symbolize the aspirations of millions across the Arab world for political agency and the right to political participation. The events were inspirational not just across the region but also internationally as the world witnessed the iconography of Tahrir Square played out in anti-globalization occupations and protests. Here was an understanding that the dynamics of inequality and the potential for transformation were intricately bound up with the global forces of a neoliberal order.

Sara Salem provides an insightful investigation into Egyptian politics and the historic trajectory of a postcolonial state that emerges from a defining anticolonial struggle and whose leaders, in the aftermath of colonialism, sought to constitute political community in terms of independence and self-determination. Using the trope of a conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon as a framing device, Salem draws on core concepts from each— hegemony, the historic bloc, the interregnum, and haunting from Gramsci, and stretching theory and the dependent bourgeoisie from Fanon—to take the reader through Egypt’s postcolonial political history. This is a history, as Salem rightly observes, that emerges at the intersection of local political dynamics and global constellations of power shaped by the structural inequalities constitutive of the colonial international.

Hegemony is the lens through which Salem analyzes the crucial interplay between consensus and coercion during Egypt’s postcolonial history, from Nasser’s anticolonial revolution in 1952 through to the 2011 revolution, with the “interregnum” defining the Sadat and Mubarak regimes. How hegemony relates to this constitutive balance is one of the strongest features of Salem’s book, both analytically and empirically, and will be of value not just to Gramscians but also to state theorists more widely conceived. Also of value, particularly to critical and postcolonial state theorists, is the Gramscian assumption of the co-constitution of the ideational and the material: this approach stresses the values, norms, and symbolic discourses of legitimization and a vibrant public sphere, and their entanglement with the means of production, exchange, and accumulation. This is a major departure from conventional approaches that, as applied particularly in the Middle East, reduce the complex politics of the region to the actions of what are defined as authoritarian regimes, with their populations largely depicted in often orientalist terms as lacking political agency or even political culture.

In an impressive and convincing analysis, we witness a postcolonial state engaged in a modernizing and developmental drive negotiated at the intersection of domestic politics and an international political economy premised on the hierarchies and inequalities of a continuing colonial order. The hegemony of the Nasserist project was generated from its manifold investments in a newly constituted public sector, including health, education, land reform, and industrialization to a scale not seen before, combined with a political program that sought to legitimize what in effect was a state capitalist project. The emergent “historic bloc” included not only the officers around Nasser but also the military, the expanding technocracy, and the intellectuals who saw in Nasser the path toward building a new Egypt, one informed by the twin secular notions of pan-Arabism and Arab socialism.

The state played a pivotal role in this modernist and modernizing project, not through a politics of authoritarianism but through hegemony, whereby consensus—and through it, legitimacy—was seen to derive from all who had a stake in the project. Political entities that expressed opposition to the project, particularly members of the Muslim Brotherhood but also “communists,” were subjected to a panoply of coercive measures, including incarceration. At the same time, and as Salem highlights, the Nasserist project acquired legitimacy internationally, where Nasser was seen as the architect of an emerging Third World alliance based on anticolonial solidarity, first at Bandung and then by the Non-Aligned Movement. What is largely missing from the analysis is an investigation of the extent to which this internationalist perspective was drawn on as a resource in the legitimizing discourses that enabled hegemonic politics domestically; this question has wider significance, particularly in internationalizing Gramsci’s concept of hegemony beyond its international political economy applications.

The question of how international politics affect a hegemonic project domestically has to remain a core issue to theorists of the postcolonial condition. Salem’s diagnosis of the demise of Nasserism points to the failed 1967 war with Israel, but places emphasis on the fact that Nasserism was a state capitalist project that, despite its anticolonial and socialist claims, failed to enact the redistributive measures that would entrench Nasserism into the future. The diagnosis is given credence as we witness a dynamic applicable across the postcolonial world; specifically, its remarkably rapid integration into a global neoliberal economy based on deregulation, privatization, and the diminution of the public sector. In Egypt’s case, as Sara Salem reveals, these dynamics were sustained by increasing reliance, by the Sadat and Mubarak administrations in particular, on coercion as a mode of rule, itself a sign of hegemonic failure. The turn to Fanon and his concept of the “dependent bourgeoisie”—the self-interested business class that came to dominate key political positions–is also seen as a key factor in the failure of hegemonic politics in the post-Nasser era. The Nasserist project itself is seen as beset by “internal contradictions” (p. 148), being at once both anticolonial and reliant on a “colonial epistemology” (p. 150) informing its state capitalist program.

The turn to Fanon is instructive in that it is through Fanon that Sara Salem begins to internationalize Gramsci. The conversation works in structuring the narrative, yet the tensions are revealed in the diagnosis of hegemonic failure. What Fanon makes clear—indeed, what he invites from scholars of international relations in particular—is a conceptualization of what we can refer to as the “postcolonial international.” I would suggest that here we see not a “contradiction” but a paradoxical relationship between the postcolonial state and the international—that the moment of independence is both self-constituting and constituted in the structural continuities defined by an ever-present colonial legacy. It is in this sense that the dynamics of international politics must enter the frame, conceived not only as constraints but also as productive and generative. It is also in this sense that the Nasser era and its continuing “afterlife” in Egypt are so revealing for any scholar of politics and international relations.

Sara Salem’s book makes a highly significant contribution to Marxist and postcolonial theories in politics and international relations. It is of particular value to scholars of the postcolonial state and its distinct articulation in the context of the Middle East. It not only succeeds in challenging conventional approaches to the region but also makes an invaluable contribution to scholars interested in the intersection of the ideational and the material in international politics.