In the absence of dialogue the acrimony sounded following the NDP's conference is no bad thing, argues Amr Hamzawi* The continuing polarisation between the NDP and opposition parties and other forces within civil society, the subject of much concerned commentary following the NDP's second annual conference, deserves less hand-wringing than it has elicited. The current climate, characterised by acrimony, serves at least to spotlight the corrupt core of the "democratisation in spurts" farce in which our rulers, and their intellectual apologists, have been playing the leading roles for nearly three decades now. It is corrupt because the system of power relations, and the legal- constitutional framework for relations between the state, society and the individual remain essentially unchanged: the ruling elite adamantly refuses to relinquish its absolute control over every instrument needed to shape the future, from the configuration of the political arena and the composition and functions of governing institutions, to modes of transferring power, especially those powers vested in the presidency. Last year, in response to regional and international circumstances, the NDP subjected itself to some cosmetic surgery. There was an injection of young technocrats well-versed in the rhetoric of democracy and human rights. The facelift led many to the impression that the ruling party was on the verge of radical change in its internal workings and, as a consequence, the way it interacts externally. The policies of the reformists circling around the president's son have, though, proved both fragile and in blatant contradiction to the demands of opposition parties and civil society organisations. This is now apparent to those segments of the public that have not been taken in by the new corporatism of the state and its national councils for everything from women to human rights to youth. The NDP has ignored the general consensus that exists outside its own constituency over the three reform imperatives needed to render the dream of democracy a realistic project in progress: amending the constitution; revising the selection process of the president, setting a limit on terms of office and redefining his powers as head of the executive; and, thirdly, amending the laws regulating (or, more accurately, obstructing) political party and syndicate life. The position papers adopted by the NDP at its second annual convention contained nothing beyond a set of token changes. More worrying, though, than the outward form of the NDP's platform on major issues such as the political party system and the exercise of political rights was its reversion, both in rhetoric and in policy statements, to the outworn mantra that economic reform and modernisation must come before political reform. The NDP appears to have assumed the mantle normally worn by majority parties in liberal democracies, having nominated itself as the only legitimate spokesperson for the Egyptian people. On what this legitimacy rests is anyone's guess. On the party's ability to gauge the mood of its grassroot members? The acute social sensibilities of its leadership? Or perhaps as a result of opinion polls the only thing about which anyone knows is that the results confirm a majority opinion that thoroughly approves of the party's positions. In resuscitating the economic before political reform line the NDP sounds amazingly like those apologists for restricted pluralism that dominated the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the only difference between Egypt now and then is that the ruling party's current strategists have some awareness of the importance of political reform in the long term. But the only possible outcome of the NDP's current approach to democratisation will be to set it back to square one. In the meantime any attempt to criticise the NDP for its lack of commitment to reform, or to develop alternative proposals, will be chalked down to one of two things: that the criticisms or proposals represent the demands of a handful of isolated intellectuals who have no understanding of what the masses really want, or that they represent a dangerous attempt on the part of radical Islamists to take over society and the state. It will all be depressingly familiar. The NDP's approach to economic reform is dominated by a neo-liberal terminology and discourse. The economic papers delivered at the conference fell into two basic categories. The first stressed the need to complete the transition to a market economy -- posited as the ultimate key to economic growth -- and, hence, to curtail state intervention in the economy. The second attempted to propel a number of subsidiary issues -- regulating competition, anti-trust laws and intellectual property rights -- to the forefront of public debate so as to confer on them a form of consensual legitimacy. Meanwhile, gross disparities in the distribution of wealth in Egypt, unemployment, poverty and the increasing marginalisation of the middle classes were conspicuously absent from any discussions. The neo-liberalism espoused by the NDP's reformists looks suspiciously reminiscent of that promoted during the heyday of Thatcherism in Britain, and in some Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Those countries, though, were all far more advanced than Egypt in terms of industrial and social development. And it is important that we remember that all these experiments in flagrant neo-liberalism, with their unquestioning commitment to reducing state intervention and reliance on market mechanisms, were ultimately phased out, either with the return of the left or with the creation of right-wing coalition governments that focussed attention on the state's responsibilities towards its citizens. In Egypt we cannot ignore issues such as the just distribution of wealth, equal opportunity and social guarantees if we want a reform programme that has the support of broad segments of the public and not merely that of governmental and non-governmental elites who draw up their plans in closed council and committee meetings. Such a grassroots base is essential if we are to reach a consensus over the balance that must be struck between the need for the state to relinquish areas of political control in order to make way for a plurality of participants, and the need for it to sustain its economic and social functions in cooperation with civil society. Without such a consensus the substance of reform will remain dangerously ambiguous. It will be in danger of becoming no more than a mechanism for the ruling elite to sustain itself, while sound governance is reduced to transparency in the relationship between governing institutions and a limited number of non-governmental groups over a handful of subsidiary concerns. The onus for countering this neo-liberalist agenda should fall on the Egyptian left. Unfortunately the left, in its various guises -- old and new, parliamentarian and non-parliamentarian, Marxist and Nasserist -- is not up to the task. It has lost contact with any grassroot support, in part because it has been co-opted by the state, in part because it lost control over traditional areas of activity -- workers and professional syndicates -- to Islamist groups, and in part because it lacks the contemporary political discourse that might enable it to appeal to the public on such issues as equality and justice. The left is, at best, highly marginalised, and at worst little more than a collection of organisations that exist on paper but which have no power to speak of. The beginning of the way out of the current predicament, then, most probably resides in the rediscovery of the left and the revitalisation of its role in politics and civil society. Towards this end the left must open themselves up in two directions -- to the global agenda of the movements opposed to globalised capitalism and its neo-liberal rhetoric, and to those domestic forces with which it has hitherto refused to deal. I refer, here, specifically to moderate Islamist forces. The current state of polarisation is in reality no more than a manifestation of the contradictions prevalent in Egyptian public life; indeed, it is an inevitable and necessary phenomenon in the process of formulating policies and positions in a society in which democracy is lacking. No harm can come from discord given the absence of any effective framework for dialogue between the NDP and other social forces, a framework that requires the former to relinquish what are essentially totalitarian claims in favour of acknowledging the pivotal importance of reaching consensus over reform and its priorities. * The writer is a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University.
