 My name is Josh Stacker, and I'm going to be moderating this event today, which is going to look at the Arab Spring and the prospects for democracy in the wider region. While we were supposed to be talking about the wider region, there's been a little bit of rare consensus among the panelists that we're going to talk mainly about Egypt. So I'll be here mainly to kind of push them to kind of look beyond Egypt to see if we can find out. But as everybody is comfortable, I like to thank everybody for coming out on a very beautiful and cloudless day here in Williamsburg and on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as the Williamsburg Forum. Thank you for joining us today. As by way of sort of before I introduce her, but I just had a couple of quick things I wanted to go over in a way of framing the uprisings just because I know that we're dealing with a more general audience than what we're used to be dealing with. So if we think about the uprisings in the regional revolutionary activity that's taken place in the Middle East, which began in December 2010, it really has roots. And while the focus of this conference and this workshop have really been about Egypt, Egypt wasn't the first country to go through this. Many would say it was Tunisia that started this. But if you push back a little bit further, many would say that Iran also had an uprising in 2009. So we're dealing with a wider dynamic here. And so how do we understand what's happened and what continues to unfold in this region? Many social scientists, and I'm a political scientist, which I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's just it's there. We could focus on, and many of my colleagues have decided to focus on, many of the grievances that animated the protesters. So a lot of social scientists are trying to operationalize concepts like dignity. Or they're spending a lot of time looking at how people organize in protest tactics. Many are starting to look at the role of information technology, social media sites, and how that helps overcome a collective action problem. But I'm a sort of more old fashioned social scientist. I believe that the social and political structures under which a society is forced to operate tell us a lot more about explaining a situation because it helps us explain what's changed, what hasn't changed, there's continuity. And so rather than look at these very interesting aspects, I'd rather focus on what I feel are the three sort of key factors that help us explain what has been dubbed in the United States for better or for worse, the Arab Spring. And one, it seems that countries that don't have resource wealth, this seems to play a factor. And whether or not you experienced an uprising or a revolution, countries where there's a kinship tie that binds people, that seems to be a factor. And then thirdly, the degree of one's stateness, right? So this is an old concept that goes back to the 60s in political science. And it's how much of a functioning modern state do you actually have? And so if we bear those three factors in mind, and we talk about sort of 18 Arab cases plus Iran, that leaves us with 19 cases that we can think about. And if we bind the time period from 2009 to 2013, what we're looking at is out of these 18 cases, four leaders have been changed in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. And if you parse that out further, three of those leadership changes were really popularly inspired regime changes, whereas one was a foreign inspired regime change. And I'm speaking about the case of liberty because Libya, because there was outside Western interference in helping bringing down the Qaddafi regime. And then beyond those four leadership changes, you had three more violent confrontations take place in Syria, Iran, and Bahrain, okay? So out of 19 cases, we've had seven uprisings. Four have led to leadership changes. There are 15 cases where the incumbent remains and uninterrupted in its line of who rules the country, right? So just to give you an idea of the countries that we're talking about, Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates, right? So if we think about it in these ways, we can start kind of framing what has happened in terms of uprisings and changes. Now these aren't stagnant regimes. The ones that have experienced leadership change and the ones that haven't, none of them are stagnant regimes. All are ongoing reforms. And at this stage, what we can really tell from those three factors that I brought out is that if you're a non-oil-rich state, this is a sufficient condition for you to have an uprising. If you're a non-oil-rich state and you combine that with a non-kinship-based network in your state, that can lead to a real explosion, right? So that is where we see Egypt and Tunisia. Yemen doesn't fit that one, but many would argue that Yemen has more of a quasi-state in terms of how it functions with kinship ties, right? So that seems to be, from a social science point of view, the mixture that ignites these things. Now, just one more quick, really point of introduction. It's become very fashionable for people to ask one another in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Yemen, in the United States, particularly if you follow these things closely, where were you during the revolution, right? It's been also very fashionable to say, did the revolution succeed or did it fail? And I don't know that we're really at a point where we should talk about these events in the past tense. We're not watching the outcome of a process, we're watching a process, right? There is no formal ending. And what we see is the continuation of a social struggle that has deep roots before January 2011, and that are going to keep unfolding. The revolution isn't over, and there is no repressing one's way out of it, unless the elites of these various countries decide they want to take their countries down very dark paths. And so I think that if I can invite you to entertain the idea or think about what we're watching as a historical process unfold, I think it's a much better analytically way of thinking about it than if we think about it as an outcome. And then lastly to frame the struggle, social science has largely had this age old debate, the chicken under the egg debate in social sciences. Do structures matter or does agency matter, right? And what I'm trying to say is that what we're watching is we're watching the interplay of agency and structure, and that's why it's unpredictable, and that's why it's so dramatic when we see it, because political elites, it's debatable whether political science is a science, but there is one law, and that's incumbents do not give up power, okay? So incumbents are going to try to design a structure or a politics that favors their incumbency. And agency is the beauty that makes this overrun these structures. And so what we're actually watching is a bunch of mini outcomes that just reframe the struggle going forward. So in the spirit of those comments, that's where I kind of decided to frame this discussion. And we are joined today by a very illustrious panel. On my far right is Dr. Armahamzawi. He's a former member of parliament. He has a PhD from the Free University of Berlin. He used to teach at the Cairo University. He used to be working for the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace in Washington, DC between 2005 and 2009. He now is at the Public Policy School at the American University in Cairo. And he's someone that I've known for a very long time. I think we met in Berlin in October of 2000. So he's well qualified to talk about what's going on in Egypt. To my immediate right is Dr. Sami Ateya. And he is a member of the Freedom and Justice Party, which is the separate but affiliated party of the Muslim Brotherhood. He's a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and is in charge of the International Cooperation Coordinator. He has a PhD in management. And so he'll be speaking in from that point of view. To my left is Dr. Manaro Shalbagi, who I also know for a long time. She is an associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, where I got my master's degree many moons ago. And she is a specialist actually on American politics and has transitioned into also writing about Egyptian politics now. She served at a very high level. I can't remember the formal title. And the constituent assembly that drafted the constitution. But she resigned from that assembly over a lack of consensus on some issues. So she's someone that is, again, very plugged into the system in Egypt and will bring fantastic perspectives. She was my deputy. She was my deputy. Oh, began? OK, there we go. And then last but certainly not least, Dr. Ahmed who is also from the Freedom and Justice Party. He's also the secretary general of the Foreign Relations Committee. Inside that, he used to be the secretary general of the government of Giza for the Muslim Brotherhood. He was educated at Cairo University in engineering. He has a PhD from Purdue University, which is one of the top engineering schools in this country. And so he'll be speaking at us from a sort of more senior level membership of the Freedom and Justice Party. So without any further ado, I'd like to kind of give each panelist about eight minutes, maybe five to eight minutes to kind of give some sort of opening statement. And then I will cherry pick what they say and try to put them on the spot and make them feel uncomfortable. And after about 40 minutes or so, we're going to be collecting questions from the audience. And I will try to manage those collectors and sort of find a way to get your voices to ask the participants directly about what your specific concerns are. Dr. Hamzah, would you like to begin? Sure. Thank you very much, Josh. It's a pleasure to be here in Williamsburg. And thank you very much for coming on, as you rightly mentioned, on a cloudless, very pleasant day. Thank you very much for coming. And let me start by sharing an experience with which I recently had in Egypt to be specific in the city of Alexandria. On Monday, two days ago, I was in Alexandria giving a lecture at the University of Alexandria, a relatively good crowd of students, female and male students, and quite diverse in terms of their political outlook and in terms of their ideological preferences. And the one common question which they kept raising and increasingly critical manner is, are you satisfied with what you politicians are doing? Two days later, earlier today, in one of the sessions which we had in our conference, organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, some politicians, including myself, were pushed and pressured by entrepreneurs, by investors. In fact, raising the very same question, just like students in Alexandria, are you satisfied with what you are delivering as politicians, government and opposition alike? Well, facing the same question in Alexandria and in Williamsburg, facing the same question raised and put forward by students and by a different crowd in Williamsburg means that that is definitely one of the key realities we are looking at in Egypt of 2013. And let me start by saying that two years after the revolution and I continue to term it a revolution, not an uprising, of January 2011, Egyptian politics has not delivered to meet people's demands. People in Egypt or at least broad segments of our population took out to the street to demand dignity, social justice and freedom and end to human rights violations and end to limits and restrictions on freedom of expression and a space for them to articulate their demands and to be able to hold public officials elected and appointed public officials accountable. Two years later, politics has not brought Egypt or has not brought Egyptians closer to those demands and therefore one of the key realities we are looking at is a growing disenchantment with politics. And we can see it in numbers. If you compare the voter turnout in the parliamentary elections of 2011 or the presidential elections of 2012 to the last voter turnout in the constitutional referendum of 2012, we have a drop from around 50% to around 30%. So a 20% loss in voter turnout and that is definitely a reflection of the growing disenchantment with politics. Secondly, why are Egyptians increasingly disenchanted with politics? Let me name three major factors. Factor one is the very fact that politics and politicians have been primarily occupied with high politics and have ignored to a great extent the day-to-day management of politics and the day-to-day management of politics in a way which would address and tackle and account for people's needs. We have discussed for a very long time issues pertaining to the constitution. That is a Muslim Brotherhood's driven conspiracy to stop my argument on disenchantment. Because the second point would have been that the ruling party is responsible primarily. No, I'm joking. So... Well, politics has failed in the sense of addressing social and economic needs in moving beyond high politics and moving beyond debates on constitutional issues, how to get our legislative institutions democratically legitimated and so on and so forth and to bridge the gap between high politics and local politics. And that is definitely one reason for the disenchantment. Secondly, a second factor is the growing ungovernability of Egypt. Egypt is in a severe social and economic crisis. If you look at major indicators with regard to economic and social issues, the country is in a crisis. And you cannot ask people to be patient with politicians if they see their country being trapped in a severe crisis and if they feel that the crisis is impacting their daily lives and growing poverty rates, the growing unemployment rates and so on and so forth. The third and last factor for the growing disenchantment of politics is the fact that politicians, and here I come to differentiate between government and opposition, the third factor for the growing disenchantment is the fact that politicians, political parties have not been able to agree on a national agenda, to agree on a roadmap to transition Egypt to democracy. On January 25, 2011, as Egyptians took out the streets to demonstrate against the spotic rule of former president Mubarak, they were hoping that a national agenda, a roadmap of sorts will emerge with points of convergence and agreement between religious right-wing parties, liberal parties and leftist parties that has not been happening. So the third factor for disenchantment with politics and politicians is the fact that we have not been able to deliver with regard to agreeing on a roadmap, on a national agenda, how to transition Egypt to democracy and how to tackle the different questions which are related to that. And let me put as a caveat that it's not easy to agree on a national agenda, it's not easy to transition to democracy. If democracies are messy, functioning democracies are messy, as you all know, in the US and elsewhere, transitions to democracy are even messier. Transitions to democracy are even more tough on societies to tackle and to manage. But we have that growing disenchantment and those are the key factors, growing signs of ungovernability, failure to address people's demands in the day-to-day management of politics and lacking a national agenda. Third factor is, and here I differentiate between government and opposition, and of course when I refer to government, I'm referring to the government of the elected president, President Mohammed Morsi, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and who used to be the president of the Freedom and Justice Party. And the Freedom and Justice Party continues to be the strongest party in terms of its representation in the existing legislative council, the consultative council. And when I refer to the opposition, I'm referring to a variety of liberal leftists as well as some religious right-wing parties as well, quite a diverse spectrum. Now the government is, and the reference is to the last 10 months. Since July 1st, 2012, the day on which the presidential term began up until now. The government performance is characterized by three facts. Number one is, to my mind, an inefficient handling of social and economic issues. Secondly, an attempt to control state institutions and not to rationalize and reform state institutions. And thirdly, departing from early promises to build national consensus and to agree on a roadmap into a mode of hegemony building of dominating Egyptian politics. On inefficiency, I believe, if I'm not sure whether you are following Egyptian politics or not, but if you look at the performance of the existing government, of the cabinet, of the presidential team, I believe that Egyptians are not being given what they deserve in terms of tackling core social and economic issues. Secondly, with regard to controlling and not reforming the state in any country which is transitioning to democracy after decades of autocracy, the state bureaucracy needs to be reformed. There are reform projects which need to be put forward and promoted, introducing the impartiality of public service, introducing accountability and governance measures, introducing transparency. All of that continues to be lacking, two years after the revolution or 10 months into the presidential term of the elected president. Thirdly, and against earlier promises by the Muslim Brotherhood, which promised at the beginning not to run, not to feel the candidate in the presidential elections, in order not to dominate Egyptian politics, which promised after the president was elected, the existing president, Dr. Muhammad Morsi, who once again is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and used to head its party, or the party, the movement established, against promises to put forward national consensus and national dialogue, not much has been offered in reality. And what we are seeing is an attempt to take Egyptian politics in a direction which is to my mind, substantially undemocratic. Clearly, the ballot box is being respected. The results of the ballot box are being respected. Islamists, the Muslim Brothers, talk a great deal about institution building and I see where they are coming from. But whatever else belongs to democracy in terms of democratic procedures and values, building consensus and including opposition movements and creating a space room of maneuvering for different political actors to exist and to share responsibility, it's not out there. The opposition, and I'm going to end on that note, final and my fourth and last point, the opposition is not free of mistakes. I believe and I'm generalizing and of course I'm offering some self-criticism as well since I am acting within the opposition spectrum in a front which was recently established by the name of the National Salvation Front, composed of different liberal and leftist and nationalist parties. The opposition is not free of mistakes. I believe the opposition committed several mistakes in the last 10 months, in the last two years. Let me name four of them very briefly and end on a positive note. The four mistakes are number one, the opposition was willing to, not to compromise, but did not appreciate the value of building institutions to transition to democracy. Countries do not succeed to transition to democracy if they do not have strong and viable institutions and even if we have some doubts about the legality, the constitutionality of institutions, it's always good to have an institution than not to have an institution. And that was not appreciated by the opposition. Secondly, the opposition did not do a proper job in putting forward suggestions as to agree on a road map as well. So it was not only missing or lacking on the side of the governing Muslim Brotherhood, it was missing on the side of the opposition as well. Thirdly, the opposition did for a long time fall into the trap of playing politics in a very conventional manner which really does not correspond to people's needs. Opposition leaders used to and continue to do that. In fact, sit in closed rooms, issue statements, announce statements in front of TV cameras, and that's it. That is not the way you do proper constituency, outreach activities, you do proper constituency building, you reach out to people to convince them by what you are pushing forward. Finally, the opposition has yet to shape an alternative. And of course I'm not generalizing by asking the opposition liberal, leftist and far religious right wing to offer a joint alternative, but at least each one, each component of the opposition spectrum should offer an alternative on social economic and political issues and try to convince Egyptians that that is a more efficient and viable alternative as opposed to what the government is putting forward. To end on a positive note, against that background, against the disenchantment of Egyptians and against different troubling signs including sectarian tensions, including growing violence in different urban and rural areas, against that background, we have a vibrant public space. We have a public space which is debating politics increasingly in a rational manner, moving beyond that obsession with high politics, with the constitution, with election related issues and pushing politicians and parties to deliver on the day-to-day management of their lives, asking about what are you going to do socially, what are you going to do economically, and that rationalization of the public space and the diversity of actors taking place, young Egyptians, people organized and parties, people not organized and parties, different protest movements, that vibrant public space is one hope which we continue to have in a moment which is difficult socially, economically and politically. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Hamzawi, Dr. Atay. Okay, thank you, Joshua. Thank you for coming, joining us, and thank you for being interested in Egypt and Egyptian politics. Three years ago, some hungry and uneducated Egyptians went to streets demonstrating and asking for food and jobs. Some of the oppositions working against the country used those innocent young, needy Egyptians to step down President Mubarak, who was freely stepped down to minimize losses may happen among protestors. The people of Egypt, the people of Egypt, the people of Egypt, the people of Egypt, the people of Egypt, the people of Egypt, the people of Egypt, the political parties and groups ruled a country in the period in these three years' period were remotely directed from other countries working to fall down Egypt. No social justice was implemented. More poverty, less education, they even sold Egypt assets. Finally, the Egyptians realized that President Mubarak was a wise man and a great leader who protected the country from those traitors. They set Mubarak free, Egyptians, of course, and apologized to him, begging him to rule again. President Mubarak sent all these leftist liberals and Islamic leaders to jail, but refused to rule again. He said, people wanted change and we should implement their needs and assign President Gamel Mubarak for the presidency as a change to all the people's demands. This is the scenario. Some of us are very afraid to happen. And all of us are sure, we are all sure, that the counter-revolution in Egypt is working on it and working hard. This will never happen. What happened in 2011 is irreversible. As Dr. Khaled said this morning, it is irreversible. Why, I'm sure, I'm quite sure. Egyptians went to streets, 25th of January asking for bread, means money and jobs, freedom, social justice. Suddenly, we all became quite sure this will never happen, unless we free Egypt first. We had to free Egypt from dictatorship to get our needs, to get our demands. 28th, we changed the slogan and to people, Shabi-e-Reed, people who want to step down the regime and the Mubarak must leave. How am I am she? This is what we said, all together. Guess what? We weren't hungry and jobless. Most of us are highly educated, have jobs, some are businessmen. We were after Egypt, not ourselves. A lot of Egyptians died for this cause and much more are willing to die for the same cause. Egyptians will never let it happen. We'll never let it happen with us or without us, with our help or without our help. We have challenges, yes, we have economical and political challenges and Dr. Hamza, we said a lot of the challenges we are facing. We have adventures, yes, we have a lot of adventures. We had achievements, yes, not quite a lot, but we have achievements. Still, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It is there. Still having long trip together, yes, but we should be together to arrive. By the end of the day, we'll do it. And what is do it? What is it? We thought and allow me to be a little biased, but Egyptians are all biased to Egypt. We thought the humanity, how is civilization 7,000 years ago? We thought them how to start, how to stand peacefully against injustice and severe power. And we will teach the world how a great nation is Egypt and how we will lead again. We used to be leaders and we will lead again. And provide civilization to the world, new concept of civilization. We did it when we picked up Egypt rather than picking up sides as Dr. Sullivan said the first day we were here. We did it in Tahrir Square. We did it several times ago and we will do it again. What if we didn't do it? Egyptians will step us down and pick up others and they will do it, but Egypt, we will do it. Egypt will do it. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Ataya.