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n March 2007 I was walking the tree-lined streets of Zamalek, an affluent neighbourhood west of downtown Cairo, to meet with Dr. Zahi Hawass, famous Egyptologist and former Director of the Giza plateau. In previous meetings I had to take a mini-bus to the eastern edge of the city where he worked from a small bunker a hundred meters north of the Great Pyramid. Now Hawass had a higher office, both literally and figuratively. As head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities he was charged with the preservation and management of all heritage sites in Egypt. He was no longer responsible for one monument site (which had its own formidable challenges), but for a bureaucracy. He did not wear plaid shirts and his trade-mark fedora (though it sat prominently on his desk), but a tie-less suit. Getting to his office was a short walk from the hotel, but it was in a profoundly less dramatic setting. Though admittedly I could do with less drama. A couple years back one of my interview questions provoked him into a heated diatribe. Preferring safer ground this time, I asked him about his personal background: what inspired him to dig, why he choose Egyptology, what lead him to study in America and most obviously, why he dedicates his life to governing, managing and preservingEgypt’s heritage. The latter was a topic he readily warmed to. ‘If you know your past very well,’ he told me, ‘then you will avoid what has happened in the past in the future.’ As he elaborated the point the rhetoric became more impassioned: ‘if the Americans knew the history of Iraq very well they would have never have invaded! They would never try and make a democracy in Iraq because there is no way that you can make democracy in Iraq! History shows that for anyone to rule Iraq you need a dictatorship!’ Then he paused and, almost as an afterthought, added the following: ‘with justice’.

Hawass had been pounding his desk. And then seemed to catch himself. There was a pause. A moment of some ambivalence or question, as if he saw where his statement led and felt the need to insert a caveat.  Hawass himself is a dictator. Over the past seven years he has passionately described to me the forces that threaten Egypt’s heritage: expanding villages, urban development projects, rising water tables, the vibrations from airplanes and traffic, the salty sweat off visiting bodies and the growing popularity of alternative versions ofEgypt’s history. For Hawass, these powers need to be met not with consultation and discussion but with an iron fist: ‘I am like a sword,’ he once told me, ‘I don’t visit anyone, I don’t talk to anyone, I am working for the benefit of the monuments – that’s it!’ For this he attracted enemies not only in the local population (due to his clamp down on unlicensed tourist activities), but in the powerful Ministry of Housing and Development where government officials and investors lost millions of pounds when Hawass stopped a road being built two kilometres south of the plateau. His job, he once told me, is to stop the chaos; to replace the rule of petty interests with the rule of law. And he does this from a commanding position of strength, presiding overEgypt’s monuments with sceptre and sword, bringing discipline to Egypt’s lawless sand.

Over the last few months this story has kept replaying in my mind. Perhaps it was Mubarak’s portrait staring over Hawass’ shoulder as he defended the necessity of dictatorship. Like Hawass, Mubarak justified his lack of democratic reform by constantly raising the spectre of chaos. A narrative he refined during the Bush administration – blaming instability in Syria and Gaza on neo-conservative rhetoric – and powerfully reiterated during his last few weeks in office. For Mubarak, the choice was between the order of a secular dictatorship or the chaos of religious fanaticism. And while the threat was ultimately disregarded, it was by no means unheeded. Indeed as the prevarications of the Obama administration reveal, there was something about Mubarak’s rhetoric that gave the White House pause. Like Hawass, Obama made a pronouncement of support followed by a hesitation; an expression of a position (we endorse democracy), followed by qualification (with an orderly transition). While the meaning of the pause was clear (the American government supports democracy as long as it does not embolden forces hostile to its interest), there is something about the pause itself that reveals the problem with promoting democracy. Indeed, democracy should invite pause. A pause that is not simply a hesitation or procrastination – i.e., a time for reflection, taking stock, collecting more information, garnering input or reviewing results – but a pause that comes from staring into an opacity.  A pause that appears in between the support that is stated (we support democracy), and the future that that statement situates on the other side of an abyss that one cannot see across. While I stifled a laugh at Hawass’ absurd idea of a dictatorship with justice, I also know that democracy provides no better guarantee. This is the problem with democracy, and the ultimate source of the pause: a post-facto realisation that the cause of democracy (a cause that all lovers of democracy are at pains to champion and promote) cannot be pre-entrusted to be a good, just or righteous one.

‘Bringing democracy to another people,’ Rancière (2007) tells us, ‘does not simply mean bringing it the beneficial effects of a constitutional State…it also means bringing it disorder (7).  Democracy, Rancière suggests, is chaos. The legitimacy of democratic rule does not reside in the fabric of representative institutions (an electoral system, a constitutional framework, a division of powers – i.e., all the things that signify an orderly transition) but in the principle that anyone has the right to rule. What we recognise today as our system of representative democracy is simply a rendering of how this principle is both enabled and policed: ‘democracy can never be identified with a juridico-political form’ Rancière states ‘the power of the people is always beneath and beyond these forms’ (54).  Democracy does not recognise any transcendental principal for conferring legitimacy. On the contrary, there is a presumed ‘equality’ between those that command and those that are commanded. In this sense, democracy is ‘simply the power peculiar to those who have no more entitlement to govern than to submit’ (47).

For Rancière, such a system invites two consequences: first, it means that democratic rule is always political, ‘politics is the foundation of a power to govern in the absence of foundation’ (49).  Politics here is the art of strategically pursing interests. It is the practice of tactically using the tools available (i.e., polling data, media, scientific evidence, collective action, law making and the various mechanisms for transgressing those laws) to promote and secure individual, tribal or oligarchic desires in the face of other political orders and the contingent situations in which they are secured. Politics, in other words, is the rule when anyone – any individual, society or faction – can rule. The fanatical the provincial and the stupid, have as much right (and as much chance) to rule, as the measured, the worldly and the wise. In this sense, democracy is predicated on an anarchic element. What separates ruler and ruled is not a constitution or an electoral process, but the contingent confluence of fortune and favour. Democracy is the rule of those who find themselves having advantages and assets (favour) befitting the present situation (fortune). The second consequence is that democracy must be policed. It is precisely because the legitimacy of democratic rule is predicated on the confluence of favour and fortune (on the possibility that anyone can rule), that its processes need to be curbed through institutional intervention. In this sense, the mechanics of representative democracy are as much about policing democratic politics as they are about enabling them. Policing is not democracy’s counter-force, but its consequence and corollary. It is how politics creates institutional arrangements that work to inhibit political possibility. This is democracy’s greatest paradox: as politics, democracy inevitably works to inhibit the processes by which it flourishes.

This is all to beg the question of what Obama wants when he calls for an orderly transition? In supporting democracy in Egypt, the Obama administration recognises that it is supporting a process that neither it nor the Egyptians can properly govern. It is possible the Islamic Brotherhood will come to power, it is possible that Egypt will begin a war with Israel and it is possible that Egypt will turn its back on American interests. But this recognition is denied as soon as it is breathed. While the politics of Tahrir square were met with admiration and praise from all those who love democracy, it is precisely the policing of these practices that mark an orderly transition. Indeed, it is only once the appropriate orders and institutions (parliaments, courts, property rights, etc.) of democratic governance are established that Americans will claim that democracy in Egypt has prevailed. As the title of Rancière’s book suggests, our love for democracy is by no means unconditional. But we shouldn’t be too cynical.

Democracy shouldgive pause. And while Rancière understands the anarchical element of democracy as something to celebrate rather than fear, it would be foolish to not be afraid. In this sense, we could read Obama’s call for an orderly transition in a different light. If the moment before the realisation that democracy equals disorder is characterised by a pause, then the moment after this realisation could be characterised by faith. A faith that tactics and providence can come together to serve up bread and love better than a despotic police state. A faith that politics can serve a purpose beyond individual, oligarchic or tribal interests. A faith that democracy in Egypt can exceed (and perhaps surprise) American ideas of what constitutes a proper democratic system.

In an interview with the BBC in the months following the protests, Hawass proclaimed his love for democracy:

“all of us of course agree with the people who are doing the marches asking for freedom and democracy, all of us of course would like that.”

At the same time, Hawass reiterated his faith in President Mubarak: “there is only one person who can make this transition to democracy with stability in Egypt, there is only one, President Hosni Mubarak.” Hawass, as ever, captures the paradox of democracy. While he says it is something all of us (of course) would like, he simultaneously states that it needs to be organised by a strong hand, i.e., by someone who will police its excess and insure its orderly functioning. Hawass’s faith is not in democracy per se, but in a particular modality of politics: the politics of police, of bureaucratic control, of institutional arrangement, of everyday violence and judicial management – the trademarks of an orderly transition. As any reader of Foucault knows, there is a long history to these techniques of institutional ordering and control. But Foucault also tells us that there is a faith to be had in politics itself: a faith that political orders are themselves always political. This is a faith affirmed by the January revolution, an event that captures the essence of democratic politics: Egyptians claiming themselves to be equal beings with equal right to rule. This is all to say that we should (pause) have faith in democracy, and linger in the hope and potential that the revolution marks, before we concern ourselves with how it will (ultimately and necessarily) be closed down through an orderly transition.

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References

Rancière J (2007) Hatred of Democracy. London and New York: Verso.