What’s at stake? Revolution, counter-revolution, and Egypt

The debate on the nature of the Egyptian revolution – or rather, whether the events of 2011–13 can be considered a revolution – exposes a wider problem in the study of revolutions: in particular the erasure of international counter-revolution from the story of why revolutions succeed or fail. One side of this debate relies upon Theda Skcopol’s classic definition of social revolutions as ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures … in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’Footnote ⁶ – to claim that Egypt did not witness a revolution, thereby preserving the hard border of sovereignty between ‘domestic’ and ‘geopolitical’ phenomena. This view follows the conventional perspective in IR, in seeing international counter-revolution as possible only against a revolutionary movement that has already seized sovereign power. The international aspects of counter-revolution in a case such as that of Egypt are thus ruled out of discussion. On the other end of the debate, proponents of a more open definition of revolution identify a revolutionary situation in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 but have yet to incorporate the international into their accounts of the counter-revolutionary closure of that situation.

Advocates of the first view, such as Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masud and Nathan Reynolds, explicitly draw on Skocpol to reject the notion of an Egyptian because Egyptian society has not been transformed nor, despite the mass protests, did the protestors take power.Footnote ⁷ In this argument the ‘revolution of 25^th January’ 2011 represented only the opening ‘breakdown’ phase of an expected transition from authoritarian to democratic rule: a discrete event leading to an eventually failed transition process.Footnote ⁸ The continued predominance of the Egyptian military at the heart of the state before and after 2011 has led political economists such as Robert Springborg to downplay the significance of the 25 January as a ‘brief moment of mobilization’ in a ‘few urban areas’:Footnote ⁹ echoed in the claims of Joel Beinin and Sean McMahon, that an Egyptian revolution has yet to occur – on the Skocpolian grounds that revolution means the building of a new social and political order brought about by mass mobilisation.Footnote ¹⁰ Jason Brownlee’s history of the US-Egyptian alliance extends this perspective to the international level. Having demonstrated that by 2011 the US had effectively become part of the Egyptian ruling coalition, Brownlee describes the Egyptian events of 2011 as an ‘uprising’ rather than revolution, precisely because they did not produce a ‘radical overhaul of state and class structures’.Footnote ¹¹ Here again the outcome determines the process: the Egyptian revolution failed because it did not succeed.

These arguments rely upon, and reinforce a broader structure of understanding about revolutions in IR. Contrary to an oft-repeated claim,Footnote ¹² there is no shortage of scholarship on the topic of revolution emanating from the discipline.Footnote ¹³ The core proposition of this literature holds that international relations and inter-state competition are both vital to understanding the origins of revolutions, and that revolutions reshape international order.Footnote ¹⁴ IR scholars have situated the Arab uprisings in the broader context of revolutions and IR theory.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, notable by its absence, and particularly pertinent to the paradox of widespread revolutionary uprisings with few transformative results, is a sustained treatment of counter-revolution.Footnote ¹⁶ This absence reflects exactly that model of revolutions as historically closed, transformative events that underpins the scepticism discussed above about the idea of an Egyptian revolution.

The relevant criteria of revolutionary transformation for IR scholars, at least in the realist and English School traditions has been the seizure of sovereign state power by revolutionaries. This approach reflects the ‘basic methodological disjuncture’ in the discipline separating domestic-social from external-geopolitical forms of explanation.Footnote ¹⁷ Mainstream IR accounts of revolution preserve this boundary, rendering counter-revolution an inevitably secondary, reactive phenomenon. In these accounts – most significantly that of Stephen Walt but echoed in the work of Martin Wight, David Armstrong, and Robert Jervis – counter-revolutions represent the response of sovereign states to revolutionaries who have already seized power in another sovereign state.

Sovereignty then changes from being a preserver of stability to an undermining factor, as the revolutionaries pose unpredictable threat both to their neighbours and the international system as a whole.Footnote ¹⁸ Since revolutionaries – being revolutionary – reject the legitimacy not only of their own rulers but that of the surrounding states, ‘revolutionary power is morally and psychologically at war with its neighbours all the time’.Footnote ¹⁹ The dialectic of revolutionary-counter-revolutionary war then permits a calibration of the accurate level of threat, until the revolutionaries are socialised into the existing norms of the international system.Footnote ²⁰

In the prevailing accounts of counter-revolution in IR, just as in the arguments surveyed on the Egyptian revolution, it is again a requirement of the definition of revolutions that they be successful, in that they found a new sovereign order. Counter-revolution then becomes a conceptual impossibility. A counter-revolution can only occur against a revolution – but if a revolution is reversed then it drops from its former revolutionary status and the thing that reversed it can therefore no longer be considered a counter-revolution. The same logic underpins the argument that neither revolutions nor counter-revolution occurred in Egypt – or the wider Arab world – after 2011.Footnote ²¹ In effect, this defines away the very contest and conflict that characterise revolutions, since the object of study becomes only the revolutions that succeed.

This view of revolutions, rooted in Skocpol’s work, has been both theoretically and empirically challenged – the case of the Egyptian revolution providing one such instance of critique. The ‘fourth generation’ of scholarship on revolution widened Skocpol’s definition to study failed, defeated, or aborted cases of revolution, albeit without significant attention devoted to counter-revolution.Footnote ²² To do so requires some means of distinction of ‘revolutionary’ from non-revolutionary periods: a distinction offered by Tilly’s notion of a ‘revolutionary situation’. Such a situation holds with the appearance of ‘at least two distinct blocs of contenders [who] make incompatible claims to control the state, and some significant portion of the population subject to the state’s jurisdiction [that] acquiesces in the claims of each bloc.’Footnote ²³

This perspective informs the work scholars such as Brecht De Smet, Maha Abdelrahman, Neil Ketchley, Mathijs van de Sande, and Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi who argue for the revolutionary nature of the Egyptian uprising.Footnote ²⁴ In their understanding, revolution is seen as an open historical process rather than a closed outcome: a period in which popular mobilisation effectively contests the sovereignty of an existing regime, even if that contest is unsuccessful. As De Smet notes, to define revolutions by their endpoints implies a form of ‘selection on the dependent variable’: for if we only analyse successful revolutions how can we know why revolutions succeed or fail?Footnote ²⁵ In this view, the 2011–13 period in Egypt represented a revolutionary process, even if the outcome was the return of the military to power.

With this definition in mind, the Egyptian revolution becomes much easier to grasp. Not only did a ‘significant portion of the population’ acquiesce in a challenge to the control of the state, they mounted it themselves. From 25 January 2011, a heterogeneous popular subject – al-sha’b, ‘the people’ – contested the sovereignty of Husni Mubarak’s regime.Footnote ²⁶ Contrary to many portrayals of the uprising as a non-violentFootnote ²⁷ and ‘middle-class’Footnote ²⁸ affair, its hard core consisted of concerted, violent, collective action against the security apparatus and the ruling party particularly by the youth of poor neighbourhoods.Footnote ²⁹ This collective violence drew out the security forces’ power and permitted much larger marches.Footnote ³⁰ A spreading strike wave then precipitated the defenestration of Mubarak by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) on 11 February 2011.Footnote ³¹ In other words, the ‘18 day’s uprising presents a rather classic example of the Skocpolian ‘class-based revolt from below’, which opened a revolutionary situation that lasted for nearly two-and-a-half years.

Understanding the experience of the Egyptian revolution sharpens our understanding of what it is that counter-revolutionaries counter, and therefore enables us to distinguish counter-revolution from quotidian repression. Egypt in 2011–13 saw not just a stumbling process of democratic transition, but a nationwide – if uneven – revolt against perceived injustice, hierarchy, and oppression of all kinds. This period was distinguished from the era of Mubarak that preceded and that of Sisi that succeeded it by a retreat of the regime and the achievement, in practice of revolutionary demands, that permitted the imagination of more fundamental transformation. Revolutionaries degraded the security apparatus, won the effective exercise rights of democratic assembly and political and economic organisation, and ‘cleansed’ public institutions of their old regime managers.Footnote ³² Workers refused the authorities of their bosses, women rejected the domination of men, and Coptic Christians defied both state-sponsored sectarianism and the acquiescence of their clergy with it.Footnote ³³ This experience transformed both the collective and individual outlooks of those who participated in it, infusing them with a new sense of ‘connection, solidarity and equality’.Footnote ³⁴ From this perspective, as argued by van de Sande, revolution becomes not an outcome, but a practice.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘republic of Tahrir’, as many of its participants referred to the occupied square in central Cairo, in this view should be seen not as a series of demands whose success or failure, victory or defeat can be judged after the fact but rather a ‘prefigurative’ laboratory of a different kind of social relations.Footnote ³⁶

If the revolution is prefigurative, and historically open, how then to understand its closure and defeat – and the role of the international in that defeat? Advocates of the revolutionary nature of the Egyptian uprising nonetheless repeat the sparse treatment of the subject of counter-revolution in IR as a whole and therefore tend not to address the phenomenon directly. Thus Corinna Mullin notes the thorough integration of the Egyptian regime into global systems of neoliberalism and security state cooperation: characterising these as ‘neo-colonial’,Footnote ³⁷ however, misses the vital role played in the Egyptian counter-revolution by anti-colonial developmental nationalism in rehabilitating the Egyptian neoliberal security state in 2013. Reem Abou-El-Fadl, while acknowledging the importance of Nasserist nationalism for the counter-revolution,Footnote ³⁸ nonetheless directs our attention towards the Muslim Brotherhood, Gulf states and the US conceived as a unified counter-revolutionary bloc rather than to the counter-revolution of the Egyptian military that eventually succeeded in 2013.Footnote ³⁹ De Smet does highlight the important popular underpinning that the Nasserist ideological heritage gave to the 2013 military coup.Footnote ⁴⁰ De Smet considers that coup both a ‘counter-revolution’ and a ‘Caesarist’ ‘passive revolution’.Footnote ⁴¹ As Anne Alexander and Sameh Naguib note, the usage of the latter term to describe the Egyptian military coup of 2013 stretches the concept in unproductive ways.Footnote ⁴² ‘Passive revolution’ typically refers to the attempt, both impelled and mediated by geopolitical competition, for ruling classes to neutralise threats to their domination by reorganising social relations ‘from above’.Footnote ⁴³ Yet Egypt has witnessed no such reorganisation, but rather the defeat and repression of the threat: a counter-revolution, albeit one with a degree of popular support. The conceptual lacuna around counter-revolution reflects not a weakness of this – otherwise exemplary – scholarship on Egypt but rather an absence of tools to address counter-revolution in IR. The Egyptian case therefore provokes a rethinking of the place of counter-revolution IR, which I undertake in this article.

Conceptualising counter-revolution in IR

Conceiving of revolution as both outcome and practice leads to a similar rethinking of counter-revolution, one that undermines the conventional IR view of the phenomenon as purely the reaction to revolutionary sovereignty. If revolution involves the prefiguration of different forms of society and polity, counter-revolution serves precisely to eradicate this experience of prefiguration, to close the period of experiment, and expunge its memory with brutal violence in order to prevent its reoccurrence. As Mohamed Bamyeh notes, counter-revolutions, just like revolutions display both an institutional and an affective aspect.Footnote ⁴⁴ To succeed, the Egyptian counter-revolution had to re-erect that ‘barrier of fear’ that characterised pre-revolutionary life, by means of violence both supererogatory and indiscriminate.Footnote ⁴⁵ Naomi Head and Vivienne Matthies-Boon demonstrate how counter-revolutionary violence has been used – mostly successfully – to ‘“break the people”’ and their ‘social embeddedness’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Seeing counter-revolution in this way, as both outcome and practice, allows us to delineate when a counter-revolution has indeed occurred without falling into the trap of defining a revolution solely by its outcome.

A revolutionary situation, such as prevailed in Egypt between 2011 and 2013, is thus one in which new forms of social life are prefigured, and a wide variety of outcomes are possible. A new social order may be instituted – a social revolution – or the erstwhile power-holders may regain full control, a coalition of old and new rulers may be established, or the confrontation may only be resolved by civil war.Footnote ⁴⁷ Revolutions being radically transformative moments, dependent on the interactions of millions of actors in equal states of ignorance, these outcomes are impossible to predict.Footnote ⁴⁸ They do, however, display a common precondition: what John Chalcraft calls ‘hegemonic contraction’, in which support for the existing rulers has fatally narrowed.Footnote ⁴⁹ The task of counter-revolutionaries, if they are to succeed, is to reverse this process.

This reversal requires the rebuilding of a political coalition capable of carrying out and supporting coercive repression. Counter-revolution should therefore been seen not merely, as for example in John Foran’s survey of defeated cases, as revolutionary failure but as its own form of success.Footnote ⁵⁰ Counter-revolutions represent, in the concise definition of Slater and Smith, ‘collective and reactive efforts to defend the status quo and its varied range of dominant elites against a credible threat to overturn them from below’.Footnote ⁵¹ Fred Halliday offers a similar conception – ‘a policy of trying to reverse a revolution, and by extension … to prevent revolutionary movements that have already gained some momentum from coming to power’.Footnote ⁵² Nick Bisely likewise expands the category of counter-revolution to cover both ‘efforts to overthrow a revolutionary state’ and to attempts to prevent such a state from emerging.Footnote ⁵³ Counter-revolutions are one element within the broader revolutionary process, uniting disparate forces to influence the outcome of that process: they involve both consciously pursued policy (from above) and movements (from below) that support such a policy. We can then build on these to offer the following definition of counter-revolution:

How does the international impinge here? The tactical methods of international intervention – divided by Nick Bisely into military, financial, diplomatic, and logistical means – are well understood, as is the chronological advantage enjoyed by external counter-revolutionaries who learn from the example of their less fortunate counterparts at the beginning of a revolutionary wave.Footnote ⁵⁴ The need for counter-revolutionaries to reach a mass base of support, and therefore to mobilise social groups, is also well established in the literature.Footnote ⁵⁵ The difficulty comes in uniting the two accounts of counter-revolution, social and international, even in works addressing this problem such as those of Lee Jones and Nick Bisley. This difficulty reflects the place of the international, or what George Lawson calls ‘the inter-social’ in accounts of revolution: ‘the logics through which differentially located, but interactively engaged, social sites affect causal pathways’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hitherto, even if the international tends to play a short-term counter-revolutionary role, it exerts a secular pressure towards revolutionary outcomes in the sense of profound social transformation. This view derives from the classical period of European, and then anti-colonial revolutions between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, a quite different configuration to that experienced by the Egyptian (and other Arab) revolutions.

During this earlier period, revolutionary processes were embedded in the unfolding, uneven, and combined development of the interlinked systems of capitalist accumulation and sovereign state competition.Footnote ⁵⁷ This uneven and combined development produced attempts at ‘catch-up’ by the ruling classes of those polities threatened by states dominated by the new (capitalist) social relations: these attempts produce revolutionary crises due to intra-ruling class conflicts, military defeat, or insolvency: the revolutionary victors of the ensuing crisis, even if they face initial external opposition, in the long-run succeed to the extent that they adapt the state to the more successful example of its competitors.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the short-run, the international produces counter-revolutionary intervention, but in the long run, revolutionary transformation. Counter-revolution, in effect, remains at the level of tactical geopolitics, revolution at that of long-term social change.

The Egyptian, and other Arab revolutions, present a problem for this account because no such long-run is knowable: even if much (far from all) of the revolutionary impetus derived from an aspiration to the political freedoms and economic prosperity enjoyed by Euro-Atlantic states, these both still remained within the fundamental context of capitalist social relations. Nonetheless, previous studies of counter-revolution provide an initial analytical framework to understand the Egyptian counter-revolution as an ‘inter-social’Footnote ⁵⁹ phenomenon. Mayer, seeking to explain the rise of European counter-revolution and especially fascism in the early twentieth century, presents a central argument about the ‘anti-revolutionary triad’ of reactionaries, conservatives, and counter-revolutionaries. Reactionaries (typically concentrated, for Mayer, in the landed aristocracy and its associated intellectuals) seek a ‘retreat back into a [feudal] world both lost and regretted’, whereas conservatives seek the preservation or moderate amelioration of the status quo.Footnote ⁶⁰ Counter-revolutionaries, by contrast, revolutionise the content of reaction by adopting the methods of revolution: insurrectionary and plebeian, they actively seek a mass base among the déclassé and declining economic strata.Footnote ⁶¹ The rise of revolutionary movements, embodied for Mayer in increasing workers’ organisation and the spread of socialist and communist ideas, forces these three elements together, giving most initiative to the dynamic counter-revolutionaries.

The basis for this counter-revolutionary coalition was the persistence of European pre-capitalist classes and institutions down to the twentieth century.Footnote ⁶² This claim, leaving aside its validity for European history, does not fit an Egypt in which the power of landed aristocracy (as opposed to financial speculation in real estate) had long passed, and wage-labour formal or informal been long established as the means of reproduction of the majority of the population. What Mayer does offer, however, is the link between the international and the social in counter-revolution. The attempt to ‘catch-up’ provides the basis on which counter-revolutionaries found a mass base, rooted in a vision of the nation as under threats a threat that could be countered only by the organic unity of an imagined past.Footnote ⁶³ This ‘inflamed truculent nationalism’ in the European context solved the dilemma of how to rebuild mass support for an order that had collapsed.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the same time, policies of developmental catch-up incorporate ‘external’ ruling classes into the social order threatened by revolution in a particular state – for example, the imbrication of Western, especially French, investment capital with the pre-1917 Tsarist regime, which provided part of the motive for external intervention in the Russian civil war. Thus social relations provide the basis not just for revolutionary movements but for counter-revolutionary ones, by incorporating external ruling classes into the social order threatened by revolution in a particular state and by producing narratives of national threat that serve to bind the counter-revolution from above and below.

In the remainder of this article I demonstrate how international counter-revolution, as delineated above, played a central in the outcome of the Egyptian revolution – contra the predominant IR arguments that see counter-revolution as a defensive security measure against revolutionaries who have already seized sovereign power. I illustrate how this international counter-revolution worked in the two ways outlined above: the political and ideological inheritance of the Nasserist period of ‘catch-up’ national development serving to build a popular counter-revolutionary coalition around the armed forces, and the regionally and internationally integrated ruling class that had developed in the post-Nasserist period financing and coordinating the counter-revolutionary strategy. Nonetheless, this ruling class was not united in its response to the revolution, with a US-Qatari fraction favouring counter-revolutionary cooptation by means of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a Saudi-GCC faction favouring outright repression. The latter was eventually successful.

Tracing the Egyptian revolution and counter-revolution

The Egyptian revolution developed through three broad phases. The first of these was the ‘18 days uprising’ itself: the mass uprising that produced a fundamental fracture in the polity. Encouraged by the success of the revolutionary uprising against Zine Abedine Ben Ali in Tunisia, the ‘25^th January Revolution’ built upon a decade of both popular contention and democratic activism in Egypt, albeit infused with a vast, new, and in the end overwhelming constituency.Footnote ⁶⁵ On 11 February 2011, following the popular revolt described above, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) sensing that only Mubarak’s removal would stem the tide of revolt, and assured of the support of its major foreign backer, the United States, announced the resignation of the president and a plan for constitutional reform and parliamentary and presidential elections under military tutelage.

The removal of Mubarak thus opened a new phase, a revolutionary situation a la Tilly, in which the concern of the ruling SCAF was to manage the crisis for fear that a popular ‘stampede’ might issue forth from the years of poverty and oppression, with unknown consequences.Footnote ⁶⁶ This fear was well founded, as both mass protests and strike waves continued – in the case of the latter, expanded and deepened to include demands for the ‘cleansing’ of Mubarak-era managers – in this period.Footnote ⁶⁷ SCAF found an initially willing partner in the Muslim Brotherhood, who had thrown their crucial weight behind the latter stages of the 18 days revolt, but who now stood ready to play the role of moderates in a classic ‘transition pact’, restraining any remaining revolutionary energies and directing them into parliamentary form.Footnote ⁶⁸ The result was a fracture in the ‘negative revolutionary coalition’, as those who sought a continuing revolution, and the overhaul of the Egyptian state including SCAF, regarded the Brotherhood’s strategic alignment with SCAF and electoral orientation as both betrayal and power-grab.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Brother’s bargain seemed, initially, to have paid off as they won both parliamentary elections in November 2011, and the presidential election of June 2012: in the latter case, supporters of the divided ‘revolutionary’ candidates who failed to make it through to the second round reluctantly supported the MB candidate Muhammad Morsi against the feloul (Mubarak regime remnant), Ahmed Shafiq.

Morsi’s – narrow and ill-tempered, but nonetheless, democratic – victory opened the third, and final phase, of the Egyptian revolution, which was to culminate in the coup of July 2013 and the reversion to military authoritarianism, pur et dur. Rebuffed by those revolutionary figures to whom he offered cabinet seats, appointed as defence minister the man who would come to overthrow him, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood overplayed a worsening hand. A constitutional declaration in December 2012, assuring the presidency greater legal powers than those enjoyed by Mubarak confirmed the division in the ‘negative revolutionary coalition’ as pro- and anti-MB protestors clashed at the Presidential Palace, with allegations of MB militias torturing their opponents. The strike waves continued. An opposition ‘National Salvation Front’, comprising not just the Leftists, Nasserists, and liberals of 2011 but also old regime figures such as Amr Moussa were formed to oppose the declaration. The opposition to Morsi increasingly drew together those who thought the revolution ought to continue – whose demands he would not meet – with those who thought it ought to be reversed – whom he did nothing to disable. This was the terrain on which an alliance between counter-revolution from above and below, drawing in part of the rhetoric, practice, and support of the previous revolutionary coalition, was built. Its main, though far from sole, instrument was ‘Tamarrod’,Footnote ⁷⁰ a petition to remove Morsi that led to a sizeable demonstration on 30 June 2013. Proclaiming obeisance to the popular will, SCAF again seized power on the 3 July, installing El-Sisi as effective (and later de jure) ruler of the country, supported by an appointed cabinet headed by the economist Hazem Beblawi.

The coup against Morsi, and the initial violence directed against the Muslim Brotherhood, was followed by a more thoroughgoing policy of counter-revolution to close the revolutionary situation. In opposition to the coup, the MB and their supporters organised a sit-in in the months of July and August 2013 at Rab’a al-Adawiya square in Cairo. The renewed military regime under Sisi dispersed this camp with extreme violence on 14 August, with human rights organisations documenting approximately almost 1,000 deaths among the protestors.Footnote ⁷¹ The MB itself was outlawed and its leadership – including former president Morsi – arrested or exiled.Footnote ⁷² The regime relied upon a mixture of direct violence, claiming some 754 victims in 2016, juridical repression and incarceration to erase the legacy of the 25 January revolution.Footnote ⁷³

The intent, and the effect of this counter-revolutionary policy were to decapitate and disorient the revolutionary movement, to remove it from the streets and leave its presence only in bitter memory: to end the revolutionary situation and eradicate the hopes it had aroused.Footnote ⁷⁴ Despite two presidential electoral victories of questionable legitimacy in 2014 and 2018, the Sisi regime continued to rely on exemplary repression without any policies to address the popular discontent that sparked the initial uprising.Footnote ⁷⁵ Protests and strikes, most often around economic demands, continued.

Nonetheless, if we take the Egyptian counter-revolution as a specific policy directed against the gains of 25 January, the exemplary violence and incarceration did produce an effect. Where 2011–13 had seen the de-fanging of the security apparatus and the effective winning of freedoms of speech, assembly, and political contestation, the Sisi regime codified and made permanent the repressive ordinances of Mubarak’s ‘state of emergency’. The ‘Protest Law’ (law 107/2013) outlawed protests except with the express permission of the police or interior ministry and, reflecting the importance of mosques as revolutionary assembly points, banned ‘any political gathering in houses of worship’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This ordinance was later augmented by the ‘anti-terrorism law’ (law 65/2015), issued directly by Sisi in a presidential decree, and rendering a capacious range of activities punishable by ten years’ hard labour.Footnote ⁷⁷ Between the coup of July 2013 and the passing of the protest law in November of that year, Egypt witnessed the highest daily level of protests since 2011, 107.5 per day: after the passing of the law this number decreased by 52 per cent.Footnote ⁷⁸ By 2017 the rate of protest had decreased tenfold to roughly four incidents per day.Footnote ⁷⁹ The reimposition of a state of emergency in that year brought an even wider dragnet of repression.Footnote ⁸⁰ Whereas strike waves had played a central role in the end of Mubarak, by 2017 a major strike in the labour movement stronghold of Mahalla El-Kubra saw workers’ leaders rounded up on ‘security and anti-terrorism grounds’.Footnote ⁸¹ The net result of this repression was the physical removal of politically active Egyptians from the streets. In 2011 Egypt had 43 prisons: in 2016, 62 – with only three of the increase having been built before the 2013 coup. In 2011, Egypt held 60,000 inmates: by 2016, 106,000 approximately 60,000 of whom were political prisoners.Footnote ⁸² One Cairene citizen, on the occasion of a rise in metro fares that sparked (swiftly repressed) protests, summed up the situation thus: ‘[e]ither go to jail or starve to death, either of which will be very soon.’Footnote ⁸³

By the time of his second election victory, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s counter-revolutionary regime may not have been stable but was at least partially successful. The threat of elected politicians exerting any control over the Egyptian state and the military at its core, still less profound social transformation, had been thwarted. The rights of free assembly, speech, and the withdrawal of labour that Egyptians won in practice in 2011–13 were again eliminated. The feloul (Mubarak era-remnants) were assured control of their factories and investments, their managers no longer at risk of being ‘cleansed’. A sizeable proportion of the mass of protestors, who had created the prefigurative experience described above as the ‘republic of Tahrir’ were incarcerated, exiled, or killed. In short, the revolutionary situation of 2011–13 had been closed. Were a new one to erupt, it would be distinct and different from that of 2011. At first sight, this successful counter-revolution appears a domestic phenomenon without international origins or consequences, just as the mainstream IR accounts surveyed at the beginning of this piece would lead us to expect. As I demonstrate in the following section, however, the success of the Egyptian counter-revolution was crucially dependent on cross-border social relations in two ways. The first of these was the legacy of developmental nationalism, the inheritance of the Nasserist postcolonial period, which provided the ideological binding between the policy of counter-revolution from above and the movement of counter-revolution from below. Neither movement nor policy could have been successful without a second set of trans-border relations, emerging rather from the post-Nasser period: the incorporation of the Egyptian ruling class into Gulf financial, and US security networks. This incorporation rendered the Egyptian revolution a threat to international as much as domestic interests and led to the financial and diplomatic support for the Egyptian counter-revolution that was vital to its success.

Nasserism and the building of a counter-revolutionary coalition

The revolutionary situation that prevailed in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 was thus closed by a counter-revolution with a dual international aspect. The counter-revolutionary coalition that supported the postcoup Sisi regime had its roots in ‘the logics through which differentially located, but interactively engaged, social sites affect causal pathways’,Footnote ⁸⁴ just as much as the revolution itself. More than just direct counter-revolutionary policies of intervention – which were nonetheless crucial, as I demonstrate below – the international played a central role in binding together the strategic policy of counter-revolution from above pursued by SCAF, with a movement from below to support that policy, even incorporating part of the former revolutionary coalition. This link between counter-revolution from above and below, as identified by Mayer in the different context of nineteenth-century Europe, was forged from the political inheritance of national development that attempted to ‘catch up’ with competitor states.Footnote ⁸⁵ Counter-revolution is built partly by portraying revolution as an external threat that could be countered only by the organic unity of an imagined past. In the case of Egypt this political inheritance, central to the counter-revolutionary project, derived from the immediate postcolonial period under Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The origins of Nasser’s rule, and the project of national development that evolved over the span of his regime, lay in the 1952 coup by the ‘Egyptian Free Officers’ that overthrew the sclerotic, pro-British regime of King Farouk. By this point, Egypt had suffered nearly sixty years of British colonial rule. The country, under the rule of a narrow elite of notables formed the centre of a system of Arab states based on an alliance of landowners and merchants severely circumscribed by the persistence of elements of the colonial state: especially the continued British control of the Suez canal. Egypt was embedded in social relations that extended beyond its borders, the most important of which was the position of the country in the world market as a cotton exporter.Footnote ⁸⁶ The lot of most Egyptians was agricultural labour to feed this demand: extra-economic coercion of peasants by landlords and their agents was not uncommon.Footnote ⁸⁷ A growing workers’ movement in the first half of the twentieth century nonetheless challenged both colonial rule and local management.Footnote ⁸⁸ In Cairo, a cosmopolitan and often non-Egyptian elite presided over both the wealth of the intermediary trade between the Egyptian countryside and the global market and a swelling mass of the poor and disinherited.Footnote ⁸⁹

At the top of the system, the liberal-nationalist politicians of the Wafd party linked together the monarchy, the British, and Egyptian landowners and businessmen. For those excluded from this conclave, the sense of national humiliation was deep and grounded in experience. This was particularly the case for the so-called ‘new effendiyya’ of civil servants, salaried and technical employees who, despite acquiring a ‘modern education’, found their path to professional advancement blocked.Footnote ⁹⁰ Army officers formed a particularly acute case of this group: at the time of the Palestine war in 1948, two thirds of Egyptian army officers were (like Nasser) the sons of salaried officials, and the remaining third the sons of upper or middle peasants yet not a single officer hailed from any of the one hundred largest landowning families.Footnote ⁹¹

The Free Officers, the secret organisation behind the coup of 1952, welded together this class and national resentment into the political project that eventually became Nasserism. The traction of this form of politics, uniting the an ideology of national dignity with a corporatist view of the nation centred around the military, persisted long after Nasser’s death and the adoption of quite different policies: an influence evident in two slogans prevalent in the 2011 revolution, ‘irfa” rasak fou’, inta Masrii’, ‘raise up your head, you’re an Egyptian’ and ‘al-gaish wa-l-sh’ab yiid wahid’, ‘the people and the army are one hand’. The origins of the Free Officers’ regime lay in the generalised political crisis that began with mass revolts against British domination –and landlord exploitation – after the end of the Second World War and was then exacerbated by the failure of the Egyptian and allied Arab forces to prevent the loss of Palestine to the new Israeli state in 1948.Footnote ⁹² The crisis reached a high point in January 1952 when, following the killing of fifty Egyptian police who refused to surrender to British authority in the Suez Canal zone,Footnote ⁹³ mass violence broke out in Cairo particularly directed against British and foreign-owned institutions. Six months later, earlier than their original plans, the Free Officers seized power from a monarchy evidently unable to govern the country.

The initial objectives of the Free Officers, whom the British did not intervene to oppose, were threefold: the final evacuation of the British (and therefore Egyptian control of the Suez Canal); building a strong Egyptian army; agrarian reform to weaken the landowning elite who diverted export revenues away from the investment needed to achieve a modernised military apparatus.Footnote ⁹⁴ This linkage between Egypt’s military inferiority in relation to both the Western powers and their local ally Israel and Egyptian dependence on the world market led to a more thoroughgoing ‘revolution from above’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Gamal Abdel Nasser, having pushed out his rival and initial leader of the Free Officers, Muhammad Naguib in 1954, embarked on what was to become the paradigmatic project of ‘populist authoritarianism’ in the region.Footnote ⁹⁶ Although displaying a great degree of flexibility throughout his rule, at the core of Nasser’s project lay a single aim: to establish an economically and militarily independent Egypt, as the hegemonic centre of a pan-Arab order, that would catch up with and compete with the former colonial powers and their superpower successors.Footnote ⁹⁷ This strategy entailed – successful – confrontation with the old European powers of Britain, France, and Israel in 1956 over control of the Suez Canal, and the – disastrous – war with Israel in 1967. The pan-Arab element of Nasser’s strategy, embodied in unity with Syria during the failed experiment of the United Arab Republic of 1958–61 and the draining war against the Yemeni monarchy, foundered but he retained a remarkable degree of popularity within Egypt, the other Arab states and the wider postcolonial world. The basis for Nasser’s policy lay in the particular conjuncture of the Cold War: the ‘long boom’ between 1950 and 1980, and the ability to manoeuvre between the US and Soviet blocs in order to obtain foreign aid.Footnote ⁹⁸

On the basis of this international configuration, Nasser embarked on a recomposition of Egyptian class structure that – for a time at least – improved the situation for urban waged employees and the rural middle and upper peasantry, producing the basis for later popular identification with the military.Footnote ⁹⁹ Despite the regime’s self-characterisation as ‘socialist’, Adel Rifaat and Bahgat El-Nadi sum up the Nasserist transformation well: between 1952 and 1967 ‘the ruling coalition of big landowners and their urban capitalist affiliates and Western European imperial capitalists (especially British) was replaced by an indigenous bourgeois coalition dominated by the state bourgeoisie’ propped up by Soviet wheat imports and export credits.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Two rounds of land reform, in 1952 and 1961 ended the dominion of the large landowners and redistributed productive land primarily to middle and wealthy peasants.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The ‘socialist decrees’ of 1961 were also accompanied by social welfare provision for workers, guarantees against dismissal and provision for worker’s representation on company boards.Footnote ¹⁰² Half of the seats in the – largely powerless – National Assembly were reserved for ‘workers and peasants’, although in practice this came to mean trade union bureaucrats, businessmen, and agricultural entrepreneurs.Footnote ¹⁰³ Nasser sought a degree of independence from the military institution to which he belonged, but the military formed the institutional spine of the state itself, occupying an unavoidable place in the everyday life of the country.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Nonetheless, the memory of this era served both to condemn the neoliberal regime that followed it and to offer an alternative model. The Nasserist attachment to the state, and especially to the military, therefore provided fertile ground for counter-revolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

What changed? By the mid-1960s, the Egyptian elite had thus been recomposed around a state bourgeoisie – with the military at its heart – attempting import-substitute-industrialisation and accepting passive popular support, or at least acceptance. The basis of this support was unstable: still reliant upon cotton exports and external aid to cover the import of basic necessities, Egypt faced a chronic balance of payments crisis. The prestige of the regime, if not Nasser himself, as a defender of national and Arab dignity against Israel was shaken by the disastrous defeat of 1967. In response, Nasser had intimated a change of course with a series of austerity measures already in the late 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Only after his death did Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat mount a full volte-face in the policy known as ‘infitah’, or ‘opening’. Sadat reversed the policy of state-led development in favour of privatisation and free-market policies in an early instance of what would come to be known as neoliberalism: concomitant with these domestic policies, Sadat turned towards international alliance with the United States, expelling Soviet advisors and making a separate peace treaty with Israel. The latter led to his assassination by an Islamist militant in 1980. Sadat’s successor Mubarak in turn only deepened the policies of US alignment and neoliberal economics, however, producing the combustible social situation that ignited in 2011.

The 25 January revolution was thus in large part directed against the developmental model pursued by Mubarak and Sadat. This model had indeed produced GDP growth but also a marked degree of inequality within the state and foreign policy subordination to the US outside it: the opposite of Nasserist aspirations. The core ruling group, by the middle 2000s, consisted of the Mubarak family – especially the dictator’s son and presumed heir, Gamal ‘Jimmy’ Mubarak – and their business associates such as the steel magnate Ahmed Ezz.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The implementation of an IMF/ World Bank Structural Adjustment Plan in 1991 had accelerated the infitah process, providing for a wave of privatisations, especially in the mid-2000s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Private, as opposed to state, capital came to predominate in the Egyptian ruling class, albeit with those private businessmen occupying key positions in the state apparatus, concentrated in ‘two dozen family conglomerates’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It was largely these Mubarak-era businessmen who would come to be known as feloul, ‘remnants’, after 2011. The military was not marginalised, however, but rather adapted to the new dispensation, acquiring substantial interests in energy, infrastructure, and real estate.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Benefiting from infitah economics, but outside the political power structure, lay the Islamist bourgeoisie. Excluded from the patronage of the regime, these pious industrialists developed their own commercial networks attracting the support of small businessmen and professionals.Footnote ¹¹¹ The leading members of the MB (such as Khairat al-Shater, their desired presidential candidate in 2012) were themselves wealthy entrepreneurs and the organisation derived its funding from donations and external states.Footnote ¹¹² To keep the Muslim Brotherhood out, and the rest of society down, Mubarak greatly expanded and multiplied the internal security agencies, accompanied by an increasingly brutal auxiliary corps of baltageya (‘thugs’) to police the politically and economically dispossessed majority.Footnote ¹¹³ This apparatus presided over an economic landscape of increasing inequality and unemployment: by 2010, 40 per cent of the population lived at or below the poverty line of $2 per day,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and youth unemployment, in an overwhelmingly youthful population, reached 42 per cent.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The revolutionary insurrection of 2011 being a result of these dire conditions, how was a restoration possible? Why would the business elites of the infitah period go along with a coup decked out in ostensibly Nasserist colours? The answer lies in the role of Nasserist politics, and the inheritance of his national developmentalist project, in producing the vital bond between counter-revolution from above and below. The revolt against the neoliberal dispensation of the Sadat-Mubarak era posed the question of which alternative order ought to replace it: the two such alternatives endowed with organisational strength and popular recognition were that of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamically inflected neoliberalism on the one hand, and a return to Nasserist national developmentalism on the other.

Popular Nasserist themes were already strongly embedded in the revolutionary movement in 2011. The ‘Nasserist language of dignity and social justice … was now reworked to critique what many saw as a neo-colonial dynamic between external support and domestic tyranny.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ The 25 January revolution was frequently identified with previous national movements against colonial power, including both genuinely popular revolts such as that of 1919 as well as the Free Officers’ coup of 1952.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Pictures of Nasser were prominently displayed in the protests and the (post-1979) national anthem sung in Tahrir Square.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Keenly attuned to the power of such cultural identification, state radio and television channels broadcast the patriotic songs of the 1960s throughout the days following the fall of Mubarak.Footnote ¹¹⁹

To turn this nationalist inheritance into a support for strategic counter-revolution would require a much more organised form, one that could win over even part of the revolutionary movement itself. In the initial attempts at counter-revolution, the Mubarak regime and then SCAF relied heavily on the despised baltageya, such as were deployed in the ‘Battle of the Camel’ in early February 2011.Footnote ¹²⁰ These forces were too few in number, too associated with the Mubarak period and their violence too obvious to be effective. Only with the coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012 did the potential for unity between SCAF, the feloul and parts of the former revolutionary coalition emerge. Central to this unity was the enduring influence of the politics of Nasserism, particularly on the leadership of the independent workers’ union and youth movements, reflecting thereby the deeply generative effect of the history of attempts at international developmental ‘catch-up’ on the Egyptian counter-revolution.Footnote ¹²¹ Two organisations played a crucial role in creating ties between the mass movement and SCAF: the National Salvation Front, and Tamarrod.

Tamarrod was formed after the NSF, but its political composition and relations with the state were both closer and more revealing of the dynamics of counter-revolution than its forerunner. Founded in April 2013, with a young Nasserist activist, Mahmoud Badr as its public face, Tamarrod made no secret of its support for the Egyptian military or of its reliance on SCAF to remove Morsi.Footnote ¹²² Badr, and the rest of the leadership of Tamarrod, emerged from the ‘Kefaya’ pro-democracy movement, and the Nasserist current that formed its mainstay.Footnote ¹²³ Couched in the language of fealty to the revolution, Tamarrod’s campaign nonetheless established close links with both the army and the Ministry of Interior, which put aside their differences to cooperate against the MB presidency.Footnote ¹²⁴ Badr’s brother, Ahmed, confirmed that ‘of course we knew the police were on our side’, a relationship confirmed from the other side through retired state security officials.Footnote ¹²⁵ Leaked conversations, purportedly of Sisi himself and chiefs of the navy, police, and defence ministry, seem to reveal relationships of direct financial support from the Egyptian state (and the United Arab Emirates) to Tamarrod.Footnote ¹²⁶ The eagerness with which Tamarrod sought the protection and aid of the military alienated many activists who shared its opposition to Morsi, but who thought him too close to, rather than too far from, the security apparatus.Footnote ¹²⁷

The reaction of that apparatus to the mass demonstrations of 30 June 2013 marked a stark contrast with the confrontations and collective violence of the ‘18 days’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Not police stations, but Brotherhood facilities and governorate offices left unguarded by the police, were destroyed.Footnote ¹²⁹ Security officers called for citizens to attend the demonstrations, and did so themselves en masse, and in some cases in uniform.Footnote ¹³⁰ The military coup that followed these protests on 3 July led to the formation of a rival protest camp, insisting on Morsi’s legitimacy. After an initial sally on 8 July, the newly installed government of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi called a protest of its own to ‘defeat terrorism’ on 26 July, symbolic anniversary of the Free Officers’ coup some 61 years before.Footnote ¹³¹ Tamarrod and the National Salvation Front supported both this mobilisation, and the attack on the pro-Morsi sit in that followed in on 14 August.Footnote ¹³² In a statement on the attack, the NSF saluted the ‘police and military forces’ and ‘firm leadership of the armed forces and the collective will of the people’ in ‘the dispersal of the sit-in’.Footnote ¹³³

Salvation Front brought together most of the non-Islamist pre-2011 opposition together with elements of the old regime feloul. More politically heterogeneous than Tamarrod, the NSF did not initially call for the end of Morsi’s presidency but only for the rescinding of Morsi’s constitutional plans and the calling of a constituent assembly. The constituent parts of the National Salvation Front were embodied in its most prominent personalities: Mohammed El-Baradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and standard-bearer of Egyptian liberalism; Hamdeen Sabahi, the longstanding firebrand of the Nasserist Left and close contender in the first round of the 2012 presidential election; and ‘Amr Moussa, former Mubarak foreign minister, identified with the more liberal end of the old regime.Footnote ¹³⁴ The NSF also embraced a large part of the Egyptian Left, including the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. Participation in the Front together with elements of the old regime split the latter organisation: after supporting the coup of July 2013 the NSF itself declined into political incoherence. What had welded these elements together was the shared view, reflecting a common trope of the Nasserist period, of the Muslim Brotherhood as a conspiratorial foreign entity threatening the Egyptian state.Footnote ¹³⁵ The participation of former opposition figures in Tamarrod and the NSF thus reflected a Nasserist politics focused on the state, and especially the military, as bearer of a project of national development in a hierarchical international order.Footnote ¹³⁶ It was this experience that gave Sisi’s counter-revolution popular traction: an appeal that the participation of such figures helped to spread wide and deep.Footnote ¹³⁷

This participation endowed the counter-revolutionary regime with an initial degree of legitimacy. At the core of the postcoup regime lay, of course, the military and their considerable economic interests, allied with the sprawling state security apparatus and its connections to Mubarak-era business networks.Footnote ¹³⁸ In a sure sign of counter-revolution, the former dictator Mubarak was pardoned of his role in the suppression of the uprising and pre-2011 corruption and his sons released from prison, while the elected president Mohamed Morsi was sentenced to death. Other ancien régime figures such as were granted similar leniency under a specifically drafted ‘reconciliation law’.Footnote ¹³⁹

The Sisi regime’s relationship with the private businessmen who had dominated the late Mubarak era was contradictory: defending business interests, for example by repressing strikes and encouraging (again in Nasserist language) workers to drop their ‘sectional interests’ and press hard on the ‘wheel of production’, Sisi also sought to tap private capital to fund a promised plan of neo-Nasserist national development.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Where Nasser had in fact confronted and nationalised private capital and landholdings, however, Sisi pursued no such course. To the extent that this regime differed from the pre-2011 dispensation, it reversed the relationship between the military and the repressive apparatus of the interior ministry, with the former now in a commanding position. This change implied no slackening of internal repression: quite the opposite as noted above. The position of the military did allow, however, for an explosion of popular sentiment in support of the regime drawing upon the image of the army as defender of national unity.Footnote ¹⁴¹

By these means, the postcoup regime relied upon a wider zone of support, in which Nasserism was the dominant identifiable political colouring. The committee charged with drafting a new constitution assembled a cast of such figures, including the head of the Nasserist party, the head of Karama (Hamdeen Sabahi’s neo-Nasserist party), and Mahmoud Badr himself. Hossam Eissa, a prominent Nasserist was appointed to the position of deputy prime minister and minister of education; more significant was the designation of Kamal Abu Eita, leading Left Nasserist and perhaps, as one of the founders of the Egyptian Independent Trade Union Federation one of the most famous trade unionists in the country, as minister of Labour.Footnote ¹⁴² Prominent intellectuals of the Nasserist Left and liberal centre alike declared the necessity of closing the national ranks in the fight against the ‘fascists’Footnote ¹⁴³ and ‘terrorism’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ of the MB. As the Sisi regime became more embedded, the circle of repression widened, and the absence of a revived economic plan became apparent, it increasingly shed these figures.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The Egyptian counter-revolution, then closed a revolutionary situation of contested sovereignty that resulted from a mass, class-based revolt from below. To succeed, that counter-revolution had to unite a part of the revolutionary movement together with the ruling cadres of the state, building popular support for the repressive policy of counter-revolution. At first sight this appears to confirm the domestic nature of the phenomenon: however, even in this apparently national process, the ‘logics … of differentially located, but interactively engaged, social sites’ played a role through the prominence of Nasserist politics in building this alliance. This heritage of ‘catch-up’ nationalism, deriving from the real experience of Egypt in a hierarchical international system, nonetheless provided a social base for counter-revolution. Yet there was a further way in which cross-border social relations impinged on the Egyptian revolutionary process before any revolutionary sovereignty had been established: the direct financial and security intervention emerging from the Gulf states and the US, which had been incorporated into the Egyptian ruling class in the post-Nasser period. This regional and global counter-revolutionary alliance funded, and shielded from diplomatic pressure, the counter-revolutionary regime detailed above.

Neoliberalism and the social relations of cross-border counter-revolution

The creation of an alliance between the strategic core of the old regime and a mass base, based on the politics of national unity in a hierarchical international system, forms a crucial element of counter-revolutionary success. The practices of counter-revolutionary intervention, through financing, diplomatic isolation and alliance, and even direct military means, are a more familiar mode of international counter-revolution. As I demonstrate below in the case of Egypt, contrary to the claim that revolutions only become internationally significant once revolutionaries have won sovereign power, counter-revolutionary intervention was both continuous and consequential from the ‘18 days’ onwards. Moreover, this intervention was not simply responses to conditions of international anarchy but reflected cross-border social relations: in particular the deep interlocking of economic and security interests between Egyptian, Gulf, and US elites.

The states making the intervention thus comprised the strongest allies of Mubarak’s ancien régime: the US, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, most of all Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Qatar. However, these states were neither united in their approach, nor were their short-term policies towards the Egyptian revolution divorced from the longer-term effects of the neoliberal era discussed in the previous section. The policies of that era had brought a close integration between the ruling strata of the Gulf states and Egypt, embodied in shared economic interests, secured by military cooperation with the US. The Egyptian revolution then split this conclave over the necessary strategy in response: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE favouring a hard-line opposition to any democratic opening, with Qatar – largely a minority investor in Gulf ventures in Egypt – favouring its allies the Muslim Brotherhood as the channel into which revolutionary energies could be safely diverted. The US initially favoured the former approach, backing Mubarak’s picked successor Omar Suleiman as guarantor of an ‘orderly transition’, then turned to the latter only to return again to open support of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi once a decent interval had elapsed after the coup that brought him to power.

The closeness of the relationship between Cairo and Washington, and more especially between the military establishments of both countries, meant that the Egyptian revolution could never have been treated as a matter of small interest to US policymakers. Egypt’s alignment with the US since Sadat’s turn away from the USSR in the early 1970s – the counterpart to domestic infitah – was the lynchpin of American strategy in the Arab world. The Camp David Accords of 1980, and subsequent Egypt-Israel peace treaty brought the most populous and central Arab state into stable, if cold, normalisation with Israel and placed Egypt firmly in the US camp. To cement this turn away from Nasser’s dirigiste pan-Arabism, the US provided aid in cash, kind, and training, to the Egyptian military and, increasingly after the end of the Cold War and perceived rise of an Islamist threat, cooperation with the internal security forces. US aid to Egypt reached an annual average $1.3 billion in military aid per year between 1987 and 2013 – ‘all of which finances the procurement of weapons systems and services from US defense contractor’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This sum includes funding for ‘International Military Education and Training’ of the Egyptian officer corps.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The Egyptian counter-revolution thus reaffirmed Egypt’s post-Nasser status as a strategic security partner of the United States, especially in prosecuting the ‘Global War on Terror’ of the 2000s, and in managing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. Both the origins and prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’ were intertwined with Egyptian politics: the local Islamist insurgencies of 1980 (in Asyut in upper Egypt) and the 1990s (mainly in the impoverished Imbaba district of Cairo) produced both the cadres and the leadership of al-Qaeda including Ayman Al-Zawahiri. The consequent Egyptian expertise in repressing Islamists made the Mubarak regime ‘the best choice’ for outsourcing the practice of torture under ‘extraordinary rendition’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The central node of this relationship was Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s intelligence chief, who also managed Egypt’s relations with the Palestinian Authority and Israel – a brief that involved the failed attempt to overthrow the Hamas government in Gaza in 2006.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

When the ‘18 Days’ began, the US therefore initially expressed a preference for an ‘orderly transition’ that would maintain these personal and financial bonds through Omar Suleiman as the favoured successor.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Once Suleiman had proved unacceptable to the revolutionary street, and the lesser-known Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi ascended to the leadership of SCAF, the US nonetheless kept up the accustomed pace of financial support to that unreformed institution: amounting to nearly $1.6 billion in 2011, and the same again in 2012.Footnote ¹⁵¹

While providing aid to the military institution that was engaged in suppressing the ongoing revolutionary uprising, the US nonetheless continued to seek interlocutors for an ‘orderly transition’. The electoral success of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their willingness to enter into a compact with SCAF, presented such an interlocutor. If chary about the Brotherhood’s Islamism, and potential stance towards Israel – President Obama describing Egypt as neither ally nor enemyFootnote ¹⁵² – the US was eager to promote bounded transition that threatened neither the underlying economic order in Egypt nor the role the country’s regional stance. This position, which was nonetheless to unravel after coup of July 2013, placed the US closer to Qatar than its more familiar allies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE.

This split in the GCC, pitting the supporters of outright reversion to military authoritarian rule against those who sought to change the revolution into a limited and managed transition, reflected the results of the neoliberal infitah period. The Egyptian economy had become both financialised and regionalised, fusing together the upper echelons of the state – including the military and the security apparatus, local business interests and Gulf capital.Footnote ¹⁵³ The predominant players were Kuwaiti, Emirati, and Saudi investors, either members of, or closely linked to the ruling families of these monarchies. Gulf investors participated in 37 per cent, by value, of Egyptian privatisations between 2000 and 2008.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Gulf interests, mainly Kuwaiti, dominated Egyptian agribusiness, and by 2010 ‘Gulf capital groups and sovereign wealth funds were major shareholders or directly controlled nine out of twelve of the largest Egyptian commercial banks.’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Gulf private equity, in partnership with Egyptian investors closely linked to the Mubarak regime, took controlling stakes in the management companies responsible for Egypt’s privatised infrastructure, and scooped up great swaths of the Egyptian real estate market as hitherto public lands were auctioned off.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

The Egyptian revolution not only removed from power the capstone of this lucrative relationship – Hosni Mubarak and his immediate family – it challenged the interests of these investors themselves. This was true both in a general sense, in the threat posed by demands for a maximum wage, an end to temporary contracts, and the widespread labour unrest of 2011–13, and in specific struggles to renationalise enterprises or land sold off to Gulf investors. The struggles of the Egyptian revolution directly reached Saudi policymakers when in 2012 protestors in Cairo forced the temporary closure of the Saudi embassy and the recall of the diplomatic mission.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Reversing this process of contention – in other words promoting a counter-revolution in Egypt – therefore became a policy priority for the GCC states, wherein the separation between executive power, inherited wealth, and private investment is at most paper thin.

Where the GCC majority preferred a hard-line of support for SCAF and full rollback of any democratic gains, Qatar sought to cultivate its existing ties with the Muslim Brotherhood: both the likely victor of any democratic election and a force committed to ‘ceasing unnecessary protests and strikes’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This policy marked something of a shift: Qatar had in fact been strengthening its ties to the Mubarak regime immediately before the uprising of the 18 days, and initially called for ‘stability’ in Egypt.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The success of the uprising in deposing Mubarak led to a changed Qatari stance. Al-Jazeera, the Qatari-based news network, opened an Egyptian channel that provided favourable coverage to the Muslim Brotherhood and, following his election, Mohammed Morsi.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born cleric long a feature on Al-Jazeera, reached an increasing audience to promote the Brotherhood’s view of the meaning and opportunities of the Egyptian – and wider Arab – revolutions.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Qatar hosted Muslim Brotherhood leaders, such as Khairat Al-Shater, and offered free exports of natural gas to ease the economic pressures on Morsi’s presidency.Footnote ¹⁶² In this vein, the emirate also proffered financial aid to Egypt under Morsi, eventually pledging a sum of $3 billion: curtly returned after the coup of July 2013.Footnote ¹⁶³

Qatari courtship of the Brotherhood as beneficiaries of a revolutionary uprising, and with it the implication that popular sovereignty had some role to play in the affairs of the region, was anathema to the rest of the GCC. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE adopted a hardened counter-revolutionary response from the outset of the Arab revolutions: the al-Sauds offering asylum to deposed Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, and advertising their willingness to do the same for Mubarak.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The Saudi ulema denounced the revolutions as fitna (discord) while state media pursued a Burkean fascination with the violent disruption associated with the uprisings.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The main method of intervention, however, was a financial one – strengthening and utilising the pre-existing relationship between the Egyptian military and SCAF, and the GCC countries. This form of intervention was visible in the pattern of Saudi aid to Egypt: ‘first starving the Morsi government of funds and then increasing payments to unprecedented levels’ after the July 2013 coup.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Even before the fall of Mubarak, the Saudi king reportedly offered to replace US funding with Saudi subventions to keep the dictator in place.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

The financial contribution of these GCC states to the Egyptian counter-revolution increased sharply after Morsi’s overthrow. The same recorded conversations that appear to indicate direct coordination between Sisi, the various military chiefs, and Tamarrod also appear to reveal UAE funding of that coordination. In a remarkable exchange, reportedly recorded between Sisi’s Chiefs of Staff, Abbas Kamel and deputy defence minister Sedki Sobhi in June 2013, the former is heard to say ‘we will need 200 hundred [thousand Egyptian pounds] tomorrow from Tamarrod’s account, you know, the part from the UAE which they transferred’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ A later recording, apparently dating from Sisi’s presidential campaign in 2014, features Sisi demanding another ‘another 10 from the U.A.E., and an additional 2 cents to be put in the Central Bank’ and expressing incredulity at the sum of $30 billion as the total received from the GCC to that date.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The GCC, the man identified on the tape as ‘Sisi’ declares, have ‘money like rice’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

The public record backs up this blunt assessment. The governor of the Egyptian central bank was dispatched to Abu Dhabi in July 2013, following the visit of a delegation of senior UAE royals to Cairo scant days after the coup: an offer of $8 billion in aid from the Emirates and Saudi Arabia was then made.Footnote ¹⁷¹ According to the then minister of investment, between July 2013 and the beginning of 2015, Egypt received $23 billion from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.Footnote ¹⁷² The UAE also funded the lobbying efforts of the postcoup regime in Washington, providing $2.7 million for the purpose.Footnote ¹⁷³ The coup had indeed placed the US in a difficult position, having placed hopes in the Muslim Brotherhood as a partner in ‘orderly transition’: the Obama administration cancelled several large weapons orders and cash transfers in the autumn of 2013.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ However, Obama was careful to avoid using the word ‘coup’ to describe the events of July 2013.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ To do so might have infringed the ‘Leahy Act’, which would have required cutting off all aid to Egypt.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The partial, and muted, US response was short-lived, however: the suspended aid and weapons exports were resumed in March 2015.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

This renewed military financing, maintained under the Trump administration, formed part of a broader counter-revolutionary retrenchment: by 2015 Egyptian military import spending, on a variety of big-ticket items from France, Germany, and Russia as well as the US, amounted to $2.268 billion.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Part of this hardware was directed against the local ISIS insurgency in the Sinai, but also locked the Sisi regime into EU plans to ‘police the region and secure Europe’s southern border’, and into regional counter-revolutionary interventions with UAE and Saudi forces in Yemen and Libya.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

The financial support of the majority of the GCC, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the vanguard, thus played a vital role in consolidating the counter-revolution of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the Egyptian military. Qatar was left sidelined, but the US, after initial response of muted disapproval, soon returned to the fold. These financial interventions – the expectation that they would flow ‘like rice’ – played a vital role in the calculations of the counter-revolutionaries, demonstrating that counter-revolutionary intervention can successfully play a role before, and to prevent, the establishment of any long-lasting revolutionary regime. However, the success of such immediate policies of intervention was also dependent on an interaction with the emergence of a counter-revolutionary movement with roots in a longer timescale: the consequences of the decades-long era of infitah neoliberalism under Sadat and Mubarak, accommodating Egypt to US predominance and free market economics, and adopted as a response to the exhaustion of the Nasserist project of state-led development. That era both produced a reaction in the form of neo-Nasserist political forces that saw the Egyptian state and its armed forces as the appropriate vehicle of popular will, and transformed the political economy that that state defended, creating the unity of interests that the GCC countries sought to defend after the revolutionary explosion of 2011.