Local Imperialism: The Failure of Economic Reform
This is one of those where I write about way too much at once, so bear with me - I'm still relearning English.
One major reason I decided to work in economic reforms in Egypt was that it was a sort of back door into the workings of political reform, since any meaningful economic reform would have to require improving governance in a broader sense and changing institutional cultures and all that good stuff - which is exactly what political reform is all about. And while there was obviously no chance of meaningful political reform in the sense of democratization, I thought there might be a chance of meaningful economic reform, given the excitement over Egypt and other "emerging markets" at the time.
I came away from that experience having noticed a pattern with nearly every economic reform attempt I came across: that they all seemed blindly imposed in a top-down fashion. This was such a consistent pattern that it nearly drove me nuts, while at the same time I never had access to enough evidence to really be able to make an argument in this direction. A new Carnegie Endowment Report on the Political Economy of Reform in Egypt finally makes a very similar case in a systematic, articulate way. It's the best piece on economic reform in Egypt I've read in quite some time, and it draws the connection between economic reform and the building of grassroots representative organizations (i.e. democracy) - you can't have meaningful economic reform without involving all the economic stakeholders in the reform process in a way that defines the rights and responsibilities of each. This requires both confronting classism and developing effective means and institutions for information flow throughout the country, which are both certain prerequisites for meaningful democratization.
I just want to add a few things, drawing from my personal experience here.
The top-down nature of these new projects - committees, initiatives - was despite the fact that these projects generally only involved the government, the business community, and international financial institutions - excluding a majority of the private sector and civil society and basically most of the economic stakeholders in the results of this reform. The end result, unsurprisingly, was the widespread implementation of "systems" without any clue what these systems were supposed to do, which of course means that these systems won't achieve anything.
Governments have imposed top-down projects onto their people for a long time, with predictable results. For just one example (admittedly extreme), I arrived at the Aswan train station last year at 5:45pm with a ticket for the 6pm train to Cairo. The next Cairo train came at 7pm, so I tried to get on, but they didn't let me on because this was the 3pm train. The 6pm train would probably come at 9pm.
Governments impose onto their people, with ridiculous results. Nothing new. What's strange about the top-down nature of the recent economic reforms is that the government wasn't involving the people at all; it was imposing blindly onto itself. It was directly importing institutions from the EU - and doing that part fairly well, I might add - without the slightest consideration of how Egypt's economy is radically different from the EU's.
Welcome, friends, to the foreigner complex, which pervades everything about Egypt to the point where it imperializes itself.
One major reason I decided to work in economic reforms in Egypt was that it was a sort of back door into the workings of political reform, since any meaningful economic reform would have to require improving governance in a broader sense and changing institutional cultures and all that good stuff - which is exactly what political reform is all about. And while there was obviously no chance of meaningful political reform in the sense of democratization, I thought there might be a chance of meaningful economic reform, given the excitement over Egypt and other "emerging markets" at the time.
I came away from that experience having noticed a pattern with nearly every economic reform attempt I came across: that they all seemed blindly imposed in a top-down fashion. This was such a consistent pattern that it nearly drove me nuts, while at the same time I never had access to enough evidence to really be able to make an argument in this direction. A new Carnegie Endowment Report on the Political Economy of Reform in Egypt finally makes a very similar case in a systematic, articulate way. It's the best piece on economic reform in Egypt I've read in quite some time, and it draws the connection between economic reform and the building of grassroots representative organizations (i.e. democracy) - you can't have meaningful economic reform without involving all the economic stakeholders in the reform process in a way that defines the rights and responsibilities of each. This requires both confronting classism and developing effective means and institutions for information flow throughout the country, which are both certain prerequisites for meaningful democratization.
I just want to add a few things, drawing from my personal experience here.
The top-down nature of these new projects - committees, initiatives - was despite the fact that these projects generally only involved the government, the business community, and international financial institutions - excluding a majority of the private sector and civil society and basically most of the economic stakeholders in the results of this reform. The end result, unsurprisingly, was the widespread implementation of "systems" without any clue what these systems were supposed to do, which of course means that these systems won't achieve anything.
Governments have imposed top-down projects onto their people for a long time, with predictable results. For just one example (admittedly extreme), I arrived at the Aswan train station last year at 5:45pm with a ticket for the 6pm train to Cairo. The next Cairo train came at 7pm, so I tried to get on, but they didn't let me on because this was the 3pm train. The 6pm train would probably come at 9pm.
Governments impose onto their people, with ridiculous results. Nothing new. What's strange about the top-down nature of the recent economic reforms is that the government wasn't involving the people at all; it was imposing blindly onto itself. It was directly importing institutions from the EU - and doing that part fairly well, I might add - without the slightest consideration of how Egypt's economy is radically different from the EU's.
Welcome, friends, to the foreigner complex, which pervades everything about Egypt to the point where it imperializes itself.
posted by Aatif at 9:58 PM
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