International Dimensions of Authoritarian Persistence in the MENA Region: Revisiting US Foreign Aid to Egypt in the post-2011 Arab Uprisings Era/MENA Bolgesinde Otoriter Kaliciligin Uluslararasi Boyutlari: 2011 Arap Ayaklanmalari Sonrasi Donemde Misir'a ABD Dis Yardimi Uzerine Yeniden Dusunmek.

• Author: Ratrout, Eman

Introduction

Representing the second-largest recipient of US foreign assistance in the world, Egypt has been supplied with 80 billion USD in economic and military aid in the last four decades. (1) Not withstanding that American aid to Egypt, inter alia, embraced democracy promotion, Egypt has not, up to now, conformed to the parameters of democratic transition. With the onset of the Arab Uprisings in 2011, Egypt has been rather characterized by authoritarian stability or upgrading. (2) In this regard, the 2021 Freedom House report records that Egypt's score for civil liberties is 12 out of 60, and 6 out of 40 in political rights. Egypt's overall rank is 18 out of 100, which puts the country in the category of "not free". (3) For Hawthorne, despite a 28-billion-USD economic investment in Egypt since 1975, the US surprisingly has not managed to encourage a more transparent, participatory, and responsive government in the country. (4) Moreover, politics rather than the development agenda has become the main motive behind donor decisions hitherto. The dramatic change in the behaviour of international and Arab donors towards Egypt in the post-2011 era is clear evidence supporting this statement. (5) In this article, the post-Arab Spring period will be explored with the aim of illustrating the extent to which American aid had continued direction in light of the lessons learned from the 2011 uprisings, or has continued in the former directions of prioritizing military aid over economic aid to Egypt, combined with decreasing aid to democracy support. The question of "What accounts for the willingness of aid donors to exert pressure only on some recipients?" (6) occupies a central place in foreign aid literature. As stated by Thomas Carothers, the political survival of "useful non-democratic regimes allied with the West" has been more central than democracy promotion in those same regimes. (7)

Within this context, this article does not neglect or undervalue the existing literature that explains the democracy deficit of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region through internal factors; however, it will attempt to analyse the impact of foreign aid in sustaining authoritarian regimes since the 2011 Arab Uprisings specifically during the Trump administration, using Egypt as a case study. As the corollary of this aim, this article makes the argument that, with the help of US foreign aid, the role of the military has been calibrated in post-2013 Egypt and the country has shifted from a hybrid 'semi-authoritarian' regime type towards authoritarianism under Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi. This research draws its main data from the existing literature on the impacts of foreign aid on Egypt, as well as international and US donor reports and records on this particular case.

Theoretical Framework: Foreign Aid as an External Dimension of Authoritarian Persistence

Many scholars have discussed the reasons behind the democracy deficit in the MENA region. The key factors named for the lack of or weak democratic institutions (liberalized autocracies) in the region have primarily been political and economic dimensions and mechanisms of re/making authoritarian persistence and upgrading, (8) along with socio-cultural characteristics in the form of neopatrimonialism (9) or Oriental despotism. (10) Notwithstanding these explanations, generally speaking the reasons why the regimes in the MENA region exhibit authoritarian forms of governance and/or a democracy deficit can be sorted into four categories. The political culture perspective that gives attention to the region's patrimonial and patriarchal structure, as well as its colonial past, has mostly dominated the literature of the authoritarian myth in the MENA region. In this regard, this perspective that takes the nature of Islam as essentially "fixed and uniform" (11) treats the region as culturally authentic and peculiar as compared to other regions. For instance, according to Elie Kedourie, for two of the protagonists of this group, "Democracy is alien to the mind-set of Islam", (12) and for Yahya Sadowski the civil society in the region is not the harbinger of democracy, but instead of authoritarianism. (13) Secondly, the economic factors have also found resonance in exposing the (semi-)rentier states, and also the implications of the economic relations established between extra-regional actors such as the US and the incumbent authoritarian regimes. (14) The international context and the policies of the external actors--primarily the US and USSR/Russian Federation--have also demarcated the democratization attempts of the MENA regimes. (15) Needless to say, the political and socio-economic environment that has arisen in the post-World War II era, shaped and limited by the persistence of the protracted Arab-Israeli Conflict and subsequent inter-state and intra-state wars in the MENA region, was not favorable to democratization either.

All in all, authoritarian persistence in the MENA region has been explained as a matter of a weak middle class in an environment of predation, (16) patrimonialism, and clientelism. (17) Development specialists in democracy promotion took these assumptions to heart and began to work on civil society-building, training of technical electoral specialists and civic education trainings. (18) The Arab Spring has explicitly unpacked this phenomenon and illustrated that while training provided activists in the region with tools, (19) by and large, these popular revolts erupted to the great surprise of both donors and politicians. (20)

Even though Egypt can look back on a comparatively long history of political institution development, informal, personalist or neo-patrimonial processes have limited the extent to which such institutions have structured political dynamics. Today, despite the Arab Uprisings, for instance, it has become evident that authoritarian regimes still persist in the region. In the case of Egypt, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi did not build and calibrate his autocratic rule with a 'mass' political party, as the previous Egyptian leaders had (during the Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak eras), which is a sign of authoritarian upgrading. As argued by Bader and Faust, neither foreign aid nor democracy aid prop up political transformation, but "their effectiveness depends on the particular survival strategy of the recipient country's political regime". (21) Given that aid is a fungible resource, the recipient country's endogenous factors also matter. In light of the aforementioned theoretical framework, foreign aid as a tool does not offset all the factors that favor authoritarianism in the region, but rather it evolves as an important factor that has not been taken deeply into consideration by many scholars in the post-2011 era. Thus, besides the factors mentioned above, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, it is foreign aid that has helped the situation move towards authoritarianism in the specific case of Egypt.

As Raymond Hinnebusch argued, a paradoxical relationship exists between global powers' efforts in the region and the outcome of targeted democratic consolidation. Accordingly, a state becomes more accountable to transnational capital and less to its citizenry. (22) Thus, the external powers of the core, guided by neoliberal trends, determined the fate of democracy in the periphery by impeding the economic rights of the people and supporting trade pacts based on rivalry, which may not ask for democracy or human rights. (23) In this regard, the case of Egypt illustrates that this local pact includes the business community, the army and the media monopolies. The political parties benefit from this system; therefore, they are not part of the powers of change, which are left to unorganized and non-united social factors in consideration of the sharp rift characterizing Egypt between al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular groups. In this context, global and regional aid to Egypt targeted the mentioned pact with the aim of preserving stability rather than democratization per se.

The modern history of Egypt since the 1952 Free Officers Revolution--during Abdul Nasser's era--has been one of "army-led authoritarianism". (24) This civil-military bureaucracy has continued until today, with the exception of 2012-2013, when President Mohammad Morsi was popularly elected for the first time in the country's history. During this period, some aspects of competitive authoritarianism (25) were seen in Egypt, including holding periodic elections in which parties under control participated. In light of these developments, this article argues that external aid is an important dynamic in promoting authoritarianism in Egypt under Al-Sisi rule. This shift has taken place since the 2014 modification of the Constitution, which allowed President Al-Sisi to stay in power until 2034. The concept of Sultanistic regimes (26) was primarily used among those regimes which build relations with their citizens on the basis of personal and patron-client relations, rather than fostering institutional ones. Moreover, Al-Sisi's rule sustained its authoritarian character by increasing the amounts of grants and loans that the regime receives particularly from the US and the Gulf countries. This makes Egypt more accountable to these donors than being accountable to Egyptians themselves.

Historical Trajectories of US Aid to Democracy in Egypt

The first phase in analyzing US aid to Egypt traces back to the period after the Second World War, which basically covers the end of the monarchy and the rule of Nasser. (27) The amount of aid covers the period between 1946 and 1967. During this period, the US provided Egypt a total of nearly one billion USD in economic assistance, with the bulk of it provided through the Food for Peace Program, including 772,801,000 dollars in economic assistance during the period of 1953 to 1967, with Nasser continuing until 1970...