As part of China Matters’ campaign to rectify names, most
recently marked by the classification of current Japanese foreign policy as “Japan’s Military Restoration” I hereby decree that events in Egypt, Thailand, and the
Ukraine are not revolutions—they are putsches.
A revolution, as its name implies, involves the overturn of
an existing system of rule, usually authoritarian, in favor of a newly
constituted system of rule, usually more democratic.
A putsch, on the other hand, involves a vociferous group
using street action to overturn an elected government it finds disagreeable.
Egypt 2013 was a putsch against an elected government by a
critical mass of people in the streets and barracks who didn’t want the
inconvenience of waiting a year or two for their crack at power through the
ballot.
This ugly state of affairs has caused a certain amount of
brainhurt for people infatuated with the vision of heroic, democracy-loving,
and reliably liberal masses overthrowing authoritarian regimes.
Juan Cole is trying to sell the overthrow of the Morsi
presidency in Egypt as a “revocouption”, shoehorning a certain measure of
legitimacy into the military’s coup by declaring it a continuation of the
original revolution thanks to the street demonstrations against Morsi and the
writing of a new constitution (and thereby writing the MB’s role in the
overthrow of Mubarak out of the revolutionary official history). No sale, oh mighty promoter of the Libyan intervention,
which I suppose can rebranded as the “fuckupalotaboomboom” with that nation’s
descent into chaos.
Currently, the popular mandate for the putsch against Morsi
leans upon the rather slender reed that about 5% more Egyptians voted in the 2014
constitutional referendum boycotted by the MB (which passed by a Saddam Hussein-worthy
98.1%) than voted in the 2012 referendum boycotted by the anti-MBs.
A similar situation obtains in the Ukraine, where the opposition
has decided a putsch is preferable to waiting for another election, especially
when the West is unapologetically pitching in on behalf of the anti-government
forces. The bias of Europe and the
United States for advancing their geostrategic interests at the expense of even
paying lip service to the electoral process would be almost comical, but for
the fact that some unsavory neo-nationalist outfits are being used as shock
troops in order to soften up the shaken Ukrainian government. It will be interesting to see how far observers
go in oohing and aahing over apocalyptic cityscapes and Molotov-cocktail tossing/mace-wielding
“activists” going up against The Man, as Belle Waring did in a cringe-worthy
post (subsequently caveated) at
Crooked Timber, if there is a prospect that such scenes might be re-enacted in
their countries.
As for Thailand, the Yellow Shirts specifically want to a)
bring down the government b) foreclose the possibility of a new election they
would almost certainly lose and c) convince the army to intervene on their side. Doesn’t get more putschy than that.
When I went to school in an admittedly naïve and optimistic
period of history, I was taught that respect for the electoral process by both
winners and losers was paramount, because if the process was not respected then
the country would just go to hell in a handbasket, just as is occurring in
Egypt, Ukraine, and Thailand (and, for that matter, the United States in 1860).
Although I considered corrupt the entire process of the 2000
presidential recount, from the obvious finagling of the Florida Secretary of
State to Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, once the Supreme Court had
spoken I considered the case closed and I’m glad that Al Gore didn’t exhort me
to take to the streets with my construction helmet, rebar club, and bottle of
gasoline mixed with dish detergent to
overturn the outcome (though understandably the millions of people victimized
by Bush’s reign of error, starting with the citizens of Iraq, might feel
differently). A few years later, the
Democrats got their president, he got a chance to f*ck things up in his own
special way, and agitation for an anti-government putsch still seems to be
something of a fringe obsession inside the United States.
Overseas, it’s a different story. The current trio of putsches has not elicited
a lot of impassioned “gotta respect the electoral process” harrumphing from the
US government or punditocracy. In
Ukraine, the US avidity for anti-government mischief is palpable; in Egypt, we
don’t want to tick off the army and endanger the Egyptian pillar of Israel’s
security arrangement; and in Thailand I don’t know what; maybe we’re just
interested in staying on the Army’s good side over there.
At the bottom of it all, I suppose, is the idea that it
doesn’t matter if it’s a color revolution or a putsch; local political unrest
is just another potential tool for advancing and protecting US interests. But it also gives some ammunition to the PRC
government in arguing that the US is not interested in democracy (I might point
out that the US is a republic, not a democracy, a distinction that 200 years of
protection of wealth and property rights and de jure and de facto limits on popular sovereignty
has shown to be non-trivial—relax, Tom Perkins!) or even elections; it’s just
interested in getting its way.
49 comments:
Post a Comment