Imagined Empires (24 page)

In the 1890s, the bandit Ziyad al-Shaqi became a national legend, even though the nationalist cause was the furthest thing from his mind. News of his thrilling exploits in Qina Province and throughout Upper Egypt was met with great attention in Cairo. The press played a major role in creating and
perpetuating his legend. Cairo newspapers reported so many different—sometimes contradictory—accounts of his story that the truth was almost lost in the telling. Ziyad and his brother apparently led a gang of mountain dwellers that committed “horrifying major sins in Qina that the pen would fail to depict,” as one state official put it.
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The general police inspector himself, Justun Pasha, came from Cairo to execute a plan to capture Ziyad. Information about the operation was leaked to Ziyad, and so he fled with his fellows to the mountains in a neighboring province. The bandits hid in the mountains, but many undercover guards were vigilant day and night, awaiting their appearance. One evening, the gang went to fetch water from a village well and managed to return safely. Furious at their audacity, the next day Justun Pasha led two large forces to launch an assault on the mountains. After a fierce battle in which he was leading the gang from the very front, Ziyad fell to the bullets of the police. Justun Pasha victoriously carried Ziyad back to Qina, where he was interrogated and the gang confessed to all of its crimes.
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After the end of World War I, the Egyptian nation's project took a new trajectory. When the famous 1919 uprising took place in Cairo, under the leadership of the bourgeois men and women of the Wafd Party and the mobilized masses of the educated middle class, the British Empire granted the Kingdom of Egypt conditional independence. The Wafd was the delegation of upper-class Egyptians who went to the Versailles conference in Paris at the end of the war to negotiate national liberation. The colonial administration withdrew from many areas yet still maintained military occupation, and the Wafd Party formed a new cabinet and elected Parliament. The nation was officially born then, in the opinion of the northern bourgeoisie and conventional historiography of Egypt.

For the discontented subalterns of Qina Province, the romantic nationalism of the Cairene bourgeoisie was far from reality. The members of the Wafd Party running for parliamentary elections in the province were not received with the expected sentiments of patriotism. In 1949, Makram Pasha ‘Ubayd, the leader of the party in Qina, visited the province as part of his election campaign, but his visit ended in a bloody way. When he arrived at the train station, one local clan campaigning for him received him and drove him through town to collect voters' support. A large fight erupted between his entourage and the angry supporters of a rival candidate from a local notable family. The expanding fight reached the town's market, where several of the pasha's opponents were shot dead. The correspondent of the newspaper
Al-Ahram
was himself injured in the battle, and the story made it to Cairo's press; this embarrassed the Wafd Party, which claimed to be the only legitimate representative of the “Egyptians.”
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As their vandalism and assaults on state officials and properties increased, the bandits earned a new name from the national government:
matarid al-jabal,
or the fugitives of the mountains. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the most legendary bandit in Egyptian history appeared in Qina Province to disturb state security in the entirety of the south. Both true and mythical news of al-Khutt's exploits reached the king and the Wafd cabinet in Cairo, and he became the namesake of every other vicious bandit that appeared in Upper Egypt after him, up until today. In a private talk with ‘Aziz Abaza Pasha—the chief police commander of Asyut Province in Upper Egypt, a Wafd Party member, and originally a native of the Delta—King Faruq of Egypt alluded to the pasha that he knew of al-Khutt and had ordered his execution. The pasha immediately formed a highly skilled police crew and called it Team Death, ordering its members to get him al-Khutt's head, or he would take theirs.
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One day, as the legend goes, ‘Aziz Abaza Pasha went to a movie theater after he had become exhausted with looking for al-Khutt. He was trying to light a cigarette when he realized he had no matches, but a man sitting next to him kindly lit it. The next morning, the pasha received a letter, signed by al-Khutt, thanking him for the nice time they had spent together at the movies. Al-Khutt, née Muhammad Muhammad Mansur, was the blond, blue-eyed grandson of a famous shari‘a law scholar who memorized the Qur'an in the village of Drunka. His criminal career started early in his teenage years when he shot the son of a village shaykh, after this shaykh prevented him from grazing his sheep in a field and slapped him on the face. After killing nineteen other members of the same shaykh's family, al-Khutt ran away to the mountains with all of his brothers and formed the most fearless gang that the south ever witnessed. The police vigorously searched for him, but his tricks and wit always saved his life. When al-Khutt was finally captured and shot in 1947, a memorial photo was taken of his dead body lying on the ground among the many proud officers who murdered him.
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British capitalism had many success stories in different places in the modern world, where it unified local markets and assisted the birth of nation-states. But Upper Egypt has an alternative story to tell. It is a story of incompetent imperial capitalism and a nation that was never truly born. Colonial
attempts at collaborating with Cairo's bourgeoisie to create a unified market in Egypt through carrying British capitalism to the south utterly failed and ended with bailout crises. Moreover, as the British generated environmental catastrophes—the most apparent of which was the cholera epidemic—daily-life resistance of the subaltern classes in the south mounted and attempts at forging a nation were consequently aborted. Upper Egypt stands as but one case that testifies to the stumbling existence of world history's imagined empires.

EPILOGUE

America—The Last Imagined Empire?

On the eve of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the US administration was acting as another empire, a sole global hegemon, in the south and north of Egypt and most of the world. After the end of the Cold War, many theorists asserted that America functioned as an “informal,” “postmodern” empire that penetrated its dependencies with minimal to no military interference and invented nuanced discursive tools of soft hegemony in a globalized realm of action. In Egypt and elsewhere, American imperialism aimed to take place through the neoliberal dictum of the so-called Washington Consensus, or by pressuring satellite regimes to transform their economies from remaining socialisms to free markets. The United States assumed its market model to be like a holy scripture: applicable to all times and places. Once more, the empire's market failed, in the south and north of Egypt alike, and this failure created immense social disparities that are directly responsible for the outbreak of the 2011 revolution that Qina Province joined.

Like the other five world empires of the last five hundred years examined in this book, the United States extended its reach into the farthest places in Upper Egypt—Qina Province—and disturbed the order of things. As with every previous empire, Upper Egypt and Qina Province have a unique story to tell about myths of and rebellion against empire. This is a different narrative about US penetration and hegemony and how the province's youth and subalterns created their own Tahrir Squares and protested in the south.

During the early 1990s, the United States advocated one path toward economic development in former socialist countries: transformation to the market economy. During the 1960s, many postcolonial states in the Third World, including Egypt, opted for socialist systems, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the triumphant American capitalist model attempted to
reshape these states. US neoliberal economic principles were advanced in underdeveloped countries worldwide, through programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Transition to the market was supposed to go hand in hand with transition to democracy, or from single-party systems to pluralism. The United States designed a specific checklist for former socialist governments to follow, to withdraw from the economy and consequently achieve economic development. The principle items on this checklist were privatizing the public sector; eliminating farmers' subsidies; reversing populist land-reform laws in order to free rents (i.e., raise the ceiling on rents) and to return agricultural plots that socialist states had seized and distributed to small peasants to old elites; instituting deregulation; and other measures. Experts dispatched from Washington, DC, to former socialist states were very busy during these years, supervising the transition to the market in various places.

In 1992, the United States pressured Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt to liberalize the economy in return for debt rescheduling, aid, and strategic alliance. Mubarak ostensibly agreed. In Cairo, the Parliament and the government closely followed the checklist: they changed the socialist constitution and laws inherited from the Nasser period, privatized the public sector or sold the state-owned enterprises to the private sector, and eliminated subsides given to peasants, among other measures. Meanwhile, far away in Upper Egypt, the appointed governors eliminated farmers' subsidies but maintained state enterprises under their control. The ruling echelon also formed clientelist relations with a rising elite of corrupt business tycoons, and they collaborated to exploit the peoples of the south. The World Bank's reports that praised the successful transition barely noticed the state monopolies in Upper Egypt. At the same time, the provincial governors allowed the US Agency for International Development programs in the south to open offices and fund local NGOs that encouraged peasants to engage in insignificant experiments with market-oriented activities. USAID's “market missionaries” proclaimed they were having a significant impact, but as far as Upper Egyptian peasants were concerned their work had a trivial effect.

Such economic ambiguity between state control and the free market added to the impoverishment of Qina Province and pushed its youth to join fellow Facebook activists in Cairo in revolting against both the repressive state and the failed empire on the eve of the 2011 revolution. For example, while USAID was sharing cheerful “success stories” of Upper Egyptian peasants who embraced market ethics, the sugarcane cultivators of Qina Province
were protesting against the monopolies of the state-owned sugar factory over their harvest. The US Empire probably suffered another crisis of images similar to what the French Empire experienced in the late 1700s. American financial and business experts thought they could go anywhere on earth, quickly learn its language and understand its conditions, and then competently develop that place to make it better according to a US neoliberal viewpoint. In 1798, Napoléon Bonaparte's campaign arrived in Egypt and assumed it would be able to proficiently exploit local resources and bring about progress. But Napoléon was manipulated and deceived by cunning, dark natives. In the 1990s and first decade after the year 2000, one could detect another crisis of images in how the American administration dealt with the authoritarian regime of Egypt.

In what follows, this epilogue first engages in a discussion with the recent theoretical stances concerning the US Empire and its market. Then it moves to the situation in Qina Province a few years before the 2011 revolution, tracing how the province joined the Tahrir protesters to fight against the consequences of the failures of neoliberalism.

Early in the 1990s, when many viewed the United States as an imperial force on the rise upon the fall of the Soviet Union, Immanuel Wallerstein affirmed instead that it was already declining. Wallerstein, the founder of the world-system theory, explained that this empire had grown due to “God's blessings,” and God was apparently was taking his blessings back:

God, it seems, has distributed his blessings to the United States thrice: in the present, in the past, and in the future. . . . The problem with God's blessings is that they have a price. And the price we are willing to pay is always a call upon our righteousness. Each blessing has been accompanied by its contradiction. And it is always obvious that those who received the blessing were those who paid the price. As we move from today into tomorrow, it is time once again to count our blessings, assess our sins, and behold our reckoning sheet.
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Again, in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq, Wallerstein noted the US inability to act strongly on the global stage and recommended that the country's power not be overestimated: “We have entered a chaotic world. It has to do with the crisis of capitalism. . . . The United States government drifted in a situation that it is trying to manage all over the place and that it will be incapable of managing. This is neither good nor bad, but we should not overestimate these people nor the strength on which they rely.”
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When the US blueprint of transition to the market was not working as hoped in places such as Russia, Joseph Stiglitz, economist and author of
Globalization and Its Discontents,
debunked the myth of the market and pointed out the failure of US neoliberal domination from its onset. In 2002, Stiglitz wrote, “We have focused so hard on our own economic mythology, and on managing globalization to our short-term benefits, that we have been blind to what we are doing to ourselves and the world.”
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Adopting political economy theorist Karl Polanyi's refutation of the self-regulating market and relying on financial evidence, Stiglitz asserted that the collapse of some American big firms was primarily due to excessive deregulation. Therefore, he called on the state to play an essential role in running the economy—or to “bring the state back in,” as many other political economists have argued before him.
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Outside the United States, the Washington Consensus rhetoric promised long-awaited human and economic development—and then imposed unfair free-trade agreements and programs of structural adjustment that benefited Western economic interests. “Liberalization has thus, too often, not been followed by the promised growth, but by increased misery,” Stiglitz insists.
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From a postcolonial perspective, Timothy Mitchell also refutes US mythology surrounding the greatness of the market economy, and he looks at Upper Egypt in this regard. Mitchell investigates the discipline of economics as a Western discourse in itself, and he traces the genealogy of the making of the field in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Also referencing Polanyi, Mitchell shows how the market economy—the conventional wisdom in liberal and neoliberal theories of economics—was introduced to the colonized as a mythical “universal model” that never functioned in the ideal way that the empire claimed. Mitchell adds that in the past, under the British Empire, European experts, their modern technology, and self-regulating markets resulted in only human and environmental catastrophes. In the present, international institutions of US capitalism, mainly the IMF and the World Bank, still perpetuate this myth and generate more catastrophes in the societies where they insist on applying economic liberalization programs. In Egypt at large and Upper Egypt in particular, Mitchell illustrates that market capitalism has resulted in profound environmental crises and social disparities throughout the last two centuries.
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In
Empire,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist that traditional imperial expansion is dead and there is not a single nation-state today that can play this role alone. “
The United States does not, and indeed no
nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project.
Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.”
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They argue that, in fact, that a transition occurred from imperialism to empire, and they trace the genealogy of this transition from European to Euro-American global control. Whereas imperialism involved territorial expansion, empire has no territorial boundaries or fixed borders. The authors also investigate a transformation in the “paradigm of rule,” and they use Michel Foucault's notion of “the biopolitical” to understand this newly formed paradigm. For them, Western capitalism is a key part of the logic of the new empire, just as it had been a pivotal facet of old imperialism. Hardt and Negri argue that the control of production and labor have turned into a biopolitical process in which the body and the entire life of the citizen are disciplined toward economic goals. “Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior,” they write, “following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it.”
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They predict that the postmodern empire will decline because it carries within itself the seeds of revolution—which will be led by globalized social classes they call the “multitude.”
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Touching on the same topic, Gayatri Spivak—a founding figure in subaltern studies—recognizes US imperialism and contemplates subaltern resistance against it. Spivak indicates that in its early theoretical connotation, “‘subaltern' referred to persons and groups cut off from upward—and, in a sense, ‘outward'—social mobility” in colonial societies under European empires.
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However, Spivak explains that in the new context of imperial America and the invention of new means of soft penetration, such as NGOs and human rights associations, the subaltern today is highly connected and assimilated into the globalized structure of power. She adds that today's US-inspired and largely US-funded international civil society and NGOs act among subaltern individuals for the interest of global capitalism, through means such as women's microenterprise and pharmaceutical dumping. For example, today's subaltern “is no longer cut off from lines of access to the centre, as represented by the Bretton Woods agencies and the World Trade Organizations, is altogether interested in the rural and indigenous subalterns as [a] source of trade-related intellectual property or TRIPs.”
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The new subaltern is no longer isolated and voiceless; rather, s/he is reachable by forces of multinational corporations and affiliated NGOs that exploit her/his indigenous knowledge for global postindustrial capitalism.

All of the above theorization about US imperial domination through the market applies to Upper Egypt. Nevertheless, the empire's market did not
meet much success there, and the subalterns of Qina Province did manage to revolt against it.

On eve of the 2011 revolution, Qina Province lived in a mixed and confused situation between transition to the market and conspicuous state intervention. Upon applying an economic reform program in 1992, the authoritarian regime in Cairo allowed USAID officers, or “market missionaries,” access to Upper Egypt, including Qina, in order to fund many agricultural programs with local NGOs. These programs targeted both female and male peasants who owned small plots and aimed to convert their mode of production from “traditional” farming techniques addressing local needs to a “modernized” method that conformed to the international market. For example, a program called El-Shams (the Sun), started in 2003 and taught peasants how to cultivate green beans, cantaloupe, and charentais melons for exportation to Europe. The program claimed that it changed the life of thousands of farmers in Upper Egypt and improved the living standards of whole villages.
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One of the success stories it shared was about another program, AgReform: “Hasan Aly Shehata is a farmer from Dandara village in the governorate of Qena. He is married, with five daughters who are all in school, and a two-year-old son. Hasan is not well-to-do; he cultivates land in a village 40 kilometers away from his house. Hasan's family income and well-being have improved as he started cultivating cantaloupe (not a traditional crop)—a decision based on AgReform's technical support to Al-Waqf Farmer NGO (FNGO), of which he is an active member.”
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