Among the diverse topics of political studies, civilian-military relations have become an attractive discipline that many thinkers, analysts and commentators have not resisted. On a regional level, various reasons have been behind the increasing importance of this topic, including the so-called fourth wave of democratisation, or Arab Spring, that has revived the debate on the subject. This is not to say that civilian-military relations have acquired their current centrality because of the ongoing transition phase with its related checklist of the best-practice reforms of which the reformulation of the civilian-military relationship has been one of the key issues. Rather, the relationship has been crucial to various different political systems regardless of their differential stages of development. For instance, US civilian-military relations have been a subject of intense study in as much as many of the leading scholars of the topic, such as political commentators Samuel Huntington and Janowitz, have used the US model as an archetype. Characteristically, the US model, particularly its cardinal doctrine of the exercise of civilian authority over the armed forces, has influenced many of the studies addressing the civilian-military relationship. Even the changing nature of the military as defined by leading scholars, from a profession/occupation to a form of constabulary, has been to a great extent reflective of the changes impacting the US military after the Second World War and considered as a blue print for such relations. However, the major factor behind the expansion of these studies has been the dominant role played by the militaries in Latin America with their long history of military interventions, coups and dictatorships. This has offered scholars a rich substrate for developing their own frameworks and approaches that can be used to study civil-military relations in other geographical regions with their own distinctive historical and sociopolitical features that have been different from the Latin American experience. The same theoretical underpinnings, generalisations and stereotypes have guided many such studies, however. The commentator Ozan O Varol, for example, has claimed that constitutional and political-science theorists “assume that militaries across the world are all of the praetorian mold, consistent in their composition, structure and motives across diverse nations”. What has been perplexing has been the endorsement of such theories by many actors, including in Western decision-making circles, a development that has upgraded such theories to become policy recommendations that have to be implemented rather than a theoretical framework that has to be tested. According to the commentator Kalman Silvet, “military coups are a regular, recurrent, normal part of the Latin American political process,” part of the region's profile that has had its local origins or substructure in features specific to its various countries. Yet, such a regional profile has spurred generalisation or extrapolation/ projection to many other geographical regions. These generalisations of military regimes and 60-year military dictatorships have to be challenged, as they are based on assumptions derived from contextually unrelated experiences that have limited resemblance to Egypt's historical realities, for example. Within the same vein, studies of transitions/democratisations have shared the same characteristic of one-size-fits-all theoretical approaches that have deliberately disregarded the particularities and specificities of different societies. What has been dubbed as military reform has thus become one of the important issues to be addressed in the transition phase, even if civilian-military relations in Egypt have not constituted a major impediment to a prospective democratisation process. It has been striking that such “mega-theories” of military reform and transition have been endorsed by many Western actors, though commentator Barbara Geddes, for example, has highlighted the fact that “explannations of transition developed in response to experiences in one part of the world, in which some particular kind of authoritarianism predominates, offer little leverage for explaining transitions in other regions where different forms of authoritarianism are more common.” Therefore, military dictatorships that represented the most prevalent/endemic forms of authoritarianism in Latin America may not necessarily be the same in other authoritarian regimes in other geographical regions, even as the stereotyping of autocratic regimes as military dictatorships and of their transition/democratisation as mere military reform has continued with the Arab Spring revolutions. Many commentators both inside and outside Egypt have endorsed such a flawed description of the former Mubarak regime as a military dictatorship and have started to promote a historically inaccurate slogan of “down with military rule,” thereby tarnishing 60 years of Egypt's recent history by describing them as decades of military rule. Two recent typologies of authoritarianism, those by Geddes, Wright and Franz (2012) and Michael Wahman, Jan Teorell and Axel Hadenius (2013), have revisited the definition of military regimes by highlighting that not all countries with a former military officer as heads of state should be automatically coded as military regimes, however. By the same token, Geddes, Wright and Franz have criticised a single criterion being used to designate a given regime, stating that “using the leader's identity as military as the only basis for identifying regime beginnings and endings would miss kinds of regime changes that are common in poor countries.” Egypt's history has become a victim of such stereotyping, or of this Latin American syndrome. That Egypt has been ruled by autocratic regimes is a historical fact that few can ignore. Yet, equally, what should be stressed is the fact that Egypt was not ruled by the army throughout the whole period of the post-1952 Revolution, save for the brief periods of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) after the 1952 Revolution itself and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) after the ousting of former president Hosni Mubarak. The military formed a great part of the ruling elite from 1952 to 1967. But a military regime of the Latin American type never existed in Egypt. Though former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser relied on the military in enforcing his developmental plans, the military did not constitute a ruling caste that directly or indirectly ran the state. Nasser's charisma almost excluded the need to rely entirely on any institution, and this was quite evident in the aftermath of the 1967 setback when he was able to continue his hold on power despite the military defeat. A purely military regime could not have survived the Six Day War with its devastating impact on the state and society. In fact, the post-War period witnessed the rebuilding of the army, a process that eventually resulted in its depoliticisation and increasing professionalisation. This process reached its peak under former president Anwar Al-Sadat, who completed the transformation of the composition of the ruling elites to include more civilian elements that helped him establish his own regime base. Al-Sadat further professionalised the army by exerting full control over its senior leadership. The ouster of general Mohamed Fawzi from the general command of the army during the May 1971 crisis is a clear illustration of the growing professionalisation of the military at this time, bearing in mind the political context of “no war, no peace” with Israel and the ambiguities surrounding Sadat's real intentions regarding launching a war to liberate Sinai from the Israeli occupation. Had Egypt really been a military regime, its army would have moved to remove Sadat instead of supporting him against its own leader who had been put in prison after being charged with treason. In contrast to this professional stand from the Egyptian military, one should remember how the Israeli generals behaved in the prelude to the 1967 War and how their collective moves shaped the events conducive to the Israeli strike on 5 June 1967. The Israeli commentator Ami Gluska says that former Israeli prime minister “Ezer Weizman was quoted as having said that Israel was never closer to a military coup than on the eve of the Six Day War.” In Egypt, other events such as the Food Riots in 1977, Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the subsequent peace treaty with Israel, and even Sadat's assassination in 1981 would have provoked the army to intervene had the army really played the praetorian role described by Huntington. Mubarak's long tenure in office was accompanied by basically the same trend of a professional army remaining strictly apolitical. A major event took place in 1986 when conscripts in the Central Security Force rioted, whereupon the army responded in a professional and efficient manner and returned to its barracks immediately upon the conclusion of the crisis. Save for a more prominent role of the army's economic enterprises that have been diversified to new civilian spheres, the military maintained its well-developed professionalism, even as the economic enterprises have become a subject of criticism. Once more influenced by Latin America, some scholars have started to view the economic enterprises of the Egyptian army through the prism of the economic activities of the military in Latin America. The commentator Kristina Mani has warned against perceiving military activity in the economy as negative at the outset, however, highlighting the need to question why the military in any given country has become entrepreneurial before drawing any conclusion about a potential detrimental impact on the democratisation process. In other words, there should be a close understanding of the contextual factors that have pushed the military to become economically active first. The neoliberal policies of the Mubarak regime, along with their resulting social inequalities, inevitably added more momentum to the growing role of the economic enterprises of the Egyptian military within the society and economy. Therefore, the criticisms of the economic role of the Egyptian military have mainly emanated from circles adopting such a neoliberal economic paradigm themselves, or from ultra-liberals pursuing the exclusion of the army from the public scene. Many of the theories discussing civilian-military relations have been almost exclusively based on the experience of a specific region in the developing world. This academic bias has been counterproductive in as much as it has stereotyped different militaries across the world. The Egyptian military has been subject to such stereotyping despite its obvious dissimilarities with other militaries in other geographical regions. The writer is a political analyst.
