2011 has seen great political tumult along the banks of the Nile River, and it isn’t even half over yet. Elections in an untested system are coming, and those will be followed by deal making and compromise, both within the ranks of the newly elected as well as between them and the military officers who currently hold sway. In the meantime, people have to go on living, and, as The New York Times reported on Friday, that hasn’t been made any easier by all of the other changes. The disruption of the patronage systems and various economic endeavors used by the Mubarak government to buy off the populace have caused a great deal of short term hardship.
In one sense, this was just the almost inevitable “things didn’t get perfect overnight” piece that can be written about any place after a change in the political winds. In Egypt’s case, however, it may also be a precursor of greater, though not necessarily better, things to come. All the revolution and clean government in the world can’t change the fact that Egypt is a country up to its eyeballs in problems, and it’s far from the only one.
Like many countries in what’s often referred to as the “Global South”, Egypt is being caught in a planet wide squeeze that’s been decades in the making. Energy prices rise, food prices rise, climate change exacerbates both, and countries like Egypt, which have weak governments and comparatively limited ways to change, are hit the hardest.
Places like the U.S., Europe and Japan will also suffer from those same forces, but they have enormous amounts of money, deeply entrenched democratic traditions, and tend to have geographic advantages as well. Egypt has neither of the first two, and is wholly dependent on a single river which acts as drainage for an area that’s already arid and flows through some of the worst governed places on Earth. Countries with similar laundry lists of problems litter Africa and Asia, and they are the new frontier of global politics.
In previous decades, it has been the unspoken but relentless policy of the wealthier and better run countries of the world to ignore troubled places as studiously as possible. And while it can be hard to remember today, the original intellectual rationale for the Afghan War was that, in a time when nineteen men can kill thousands without firing a shot, “failed states” provided an intolerable threat to the political stability of the planet. And while Egypt is far from a failed state, if the incoming political order fails to deal with the mountain of dire problems it may begin to sink rather than swim. The same is true of places like Bangladesh, Nigeria, and several obscure Central Asian countries that end in “-stan”.
As the planet warms and the internet makes isolating people ever more impossible, it is the countries already on the margins that will be hit the hardest and be the most likely to teeter. The defining political question of the twenty first century is how the world deals with climate change, but the most pressing aspect is going to be the ability of the comfortable to ignore the rest. Egypt, strategically important and so close to Europe, is the leading candidate to be the crucial test case. How much economic support can it garner? How sympathetic will regional (and rich) democracies be? Most importantly, can outright catastrophes be headed off, or must they bloom before they become the focus of attention?
