Egypt

IN THE twelfth year of revolution Gamal Abdel Nasser can claim measurable gains within Egypt and continued personal prestige in the non-Western world. Within the Arab world he remains unrivaled as a pacesetter for change. Among other heads of neutralist states he has gained in stature. Therefore, it matters more than it did twelve years ago where Abdel Nasser intends to lead his revolution and in what company.

None of the stereotypes of classic revolution or of development economics quite fits the evolving socialist, cooperative, democratic state in Egypt. There is to be no dictatorship of the proletariat and no open class warfare. Nor is it likely that Egypt will be ready for the magic moment of economic takeoff within Abdel Nasser’s lifetime.

There has, however, been a consistent, bloodless, and complete shift of power out of the hands of the extraordinarily rapacious merchant and landed pasha of the past. The hopes of the Egyptian peasant and laborer have been aroused. And the people have been promised that they will not be sacrificed to a doctrinal theory of eventual progress. During the past decade they have seen new schools open in their villages, along with the arrival of clean, piped water. Their death rate has dropped as rural health services have been extended. It is possible for them to eat better, and more of them have shoes. Recently some village clinics have included pills for birth control among their prescriptions.

Revolution by democratic methods

In Cairo it has been decided that another try must be made to build a constitutional base for the revolution. A single political party, the Arab Socialist Union, has signed up as new members some five million voters in good revolutionary standing. From these, 1500 representatives have been elected to the National Assembly, sitting for the first time this spring. Of the elected representatives 25 percent are farmers, 20 percent are workers, 15 percent are from the professions. They have been chosen in local elections in 175 districts set up on the basis of population and geography. It is their duty to debate and vote on national issues, including the budget. They may question ministers on the floor, and public ventilation of domestic problems will be encouraged. The government obviously regards this as a necessary stage in building a welfare state which will not break down when its present leadership is gone.

Similarly, there has been a distinct effort to decentralize government in the twenty-five provinces, or governorates, giving the local governors the status of vice presidents and making them responsible for local planning, budgets, production, and welfare. In this respect, the regime has broken new ground in the Middle East, where strongly centralized bureaucracies dominate government.

Gamal Abdel Nasser has written pointedly on this theme. “Administration commits a grievous error,” he says in the 1962 draft of the National Charter, “if it imagines its huge machinery to be an end in itself.” Further on in this revealing document he writes of the need for a scientific approach to government.

Nasser’s pragmatic attitude toward development explains the mixed and unorthodox character of Arab socialism in Egypt today. It is eclectic, full of borrowings from Sweden, from Portugal, from Poland, and particularly from Tito’s Yugoslavia. Thus all but 20 percent of business is now in government hands to ensure conformity to national planning and complete Egyptianization. Yet almost all agricultural land is in private hands.

Private ownership of land

The land reform itself has not been radical. The 1961 limit of 100 acres to a family has forced large landowners to sell or relinquish about 700,000 acres. (In time they are to receive compensation in the form of government bonds.) These acres have been distributed to peasant owners in small plots of three to five acres. Even so, less than 200,000 families have received land. Another important reform set a ceiling on land rents and required that they run for several years. This measure has reduced the tenant farmer’s traditional sense of hopeless indebtedness and given him a stake in the new order. Both the new owners and the tenants have been marshaled into some 3800 rural cooperatives, which provide the necessary credits, seeds, and services to make individual operation possible. The object here is the necessary one of maintaining production.

The significant aspect of Egypt’s land reform is its insistence on private ownership, not on sentimental grounds, but out of conviction that ownership and security are powerful incentives to production. This conviction has proved to be right. Yields in reform areas have increased. Peasant incomes have risen as much as 50 percent. It will not be surprising if the regime eventually tries to extend its reforms further.

There are agriculturalists who believe that even with its present high birthrate, Egypt could grow its own food. These experts point to inefficient methods of scattering seed, lack of adequate cultivation, and oversoaking of the soil, all of which limit crops. T he Egyptian farmer today still employs traditional methods and clings to traditional attitudes toward irrigation. He cannot know that scientific methods requiring less use of precious Nile water would work better. There is evidently a lag here inconsistent with the government’s insistence on scientific methods.

The drive for industry

In industry the drive for production and self-sufficiency is taking advantage of modern and Western methods to an extent unprecedented in the Middle East. A National Planning Institute is responsible for economic development. It is manned by Western-trained professionals and consults specialists around the world. A National Institute of Management Development gives specific training to industry executives. It employs a case method based on the teaching in American business administration centers, but adapted to Egyptian industries. Middle-management courses are also under way, along with time-andmotion studies to promote efficiency in manufacturing. Further down the educational ladder, some 100,000 young Egyptians attend vocational schools.

In its drive to catch up, Egypt has the great advantage of professionally trained engineers, economists, bankers, and senior managers who are dedicated to rebuilding the country on modern lines. These men, many of them graduates of European and American universities, provide the indispensable technical manpower which has made the economic revolution possible. In this sense Egypt is a “have" country, in contrast to the oil-rich desert states which remain backward for lack of technical manpower.

For decades, since Evelyn Baring, first Earl of Cromer, Egyptians have known how to operate their vital and intricate system of canal irrigation. More recently they have easily learned the management of railways and of the Suez Canal, and advanced textile and petroleum technology. In the last four years, under the forced draft of revolution and nationalization, they have achieved an increase in gross national product of 23 percent. In terms of human benefits, in spite of an increase of population of about 700,000 a year, economic development has kept 2 to 3 percent ahead of population growth.

Family planning

Of all the twentieth-century experiments being tried in Egypt the most potentially significant is its drive for family planning. Here President Nasser has mustered the support of Muslim religious leaders who have publicly sanctioned birth control. The great problem is in rural Egypt, where a large family is a matter of prestige and a means of ensuring farm labor. Rural unemployment is so widespread now that more and more young men migrate to Alexandria, Cairo, and Aswan to join the industrial labor pool.

This trend toward urbanization, plus free education all the way through university years, is expected to lower the birthrate. As education for girls also becomes the rule for the first time, an inevitable change in status for women is occurring. This is a conscious part of the plans for the welfare state. It is symbolized by the inclusion of a woman in the government as Minister of Social Affairs.

If Egypt can make family planning fashionable for modernists in Asia, it will have helped a whole region toward development. Educated Arabs who know their people best have pointed out that Islam is, alter all, rational, equalitarian, and positive in outlook. For this reason it is at least possible that Arab nationalism can evolve a pattern of modernization within the framework of its own beliefs.

The need for capital

Meanwhile, Egypt is obliged to rely on imports of grain to feed its 28 million people. About half of the wheat consumed in the country comes from American surplus sold for Egyptian pounds. This arrangement is the least controversial aspect of the present U.S. foreign aid to Egypt.

Other current forms of U.S. assistance include grants and loans for a number of purposes: the hiring of management consultants, agricultural-extension education, the erection of a power plant by Westinghouse, communications development, and the purchase of American diesel engines. An investment-guarantee agreement between the U.S. government and Cairo was signed in 1963, indicating the regime’s interest in attracting foreign investors; and Egypt has joined GATT.

By strengthening its trading links with the Western powers, Egypt seems to be freeing itself from overdependence on the Soviet bloc. Even so, some 40 percent of Egyptian cotton goes to the bloc; and Russian loans to Egypt include allocations of hard currency as well as credits for the High Dam at Aswan and for military equipment. Western loans have come from West Germany, Italy, and from private U. S. banks. The latter, however, lend at commercial rates on a short-term basis.

Involvement with the neighbors

Even with credit from this variety of sources, Egypt is hard-pressed. In its effort to achieve a great deal in a short time it has confiscated wealth, raised taxes, and enforced austerity to a degree unheard of in the Arab world. This year it is striving to raise a budget of a billion Egyptian pounds, of which a third is for capital investment. It is a question whether such a scale is possible, particularly in view of the financially costly political ventures being pursued by Abdel Nasser in Yemen and Algeria.

One fourth of the Egyptian army has been in Yemen for over a year attempting to sustain a republican revolt against the incredibly backward old order. By any kind of reckoning Egypt has spent millions it did not have, to support this operation. It has been evident for months that this has been costing Cairo more than can possible be gained in the Yemeni political morass; and that what is needed is a face-saving means of withdrawal from a country light-years removed from Egypt in outlook, aims, and capability. The difficult task of devising such a means of withdrawal has fallen, as usual, to the United Nations, whose representative continues to shuttle between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt.

In addition to the problem in Yemen, Abdel Nasser has felt obliged by Arab socialist brotherhood to send arms and troops to aid Algeria in its border quarrel with Morocco. Fortunately this is a more sophisticated quarrel, in which President Nasser need not assume great responsibility, having demonstrated his loyalty to republican Ben Bella as opposed to Morocco’s King Nassan.

The bitter issue of water

On the perennial Palestine quarrel. however, Abdel Nasser is obliged to play a more risky role. This year’s most bitter issue between Arabs and Israelis concerns the latter’s plan to withdraw Jordan River water to irrigate the Negev desert, which Israel plans to populate with future immigrants. The canals and pipelines for this withdrawal of water from Lake Tiberias within Israeli boundaries await only the final pumping installations, which will lift lake water to a point where it can flow southward some 150 miles by gravity.

Egypt’s role in this long dispute has been consistently cautious. In 1955 it sponsored an Arab technical study which reduced Israel’s proposed share of water but still recognized its riparian rights. Egypt has also refused to endorse desperate Arab schemes to divert Jordan headwaters in Syria and Lebanon. As a downstream user of the Nile, Egypt can scarcely encourage tampering with headwaters anywhere.

This spring, with Arab disunity more than normally exacerbated and rival socialists in Syria threatening to take reckless and hopeless military action against Israel over the river issue, Gamal Abdel Nasser has made one more daring gesture of leadership. The last thing Egypt can face today is war with Israel. The other Arab states are even more helpless against Israel. But their leaders are less restrained than the veterans in Cairo. By inviting the thirteen heads of Arab states to Cairo in January, and by insisting on a concerted nonviolent response to Israel’s watet plan. Abdel Nasser has proved again his talent for leadership.

Neutrality between East and West

In international affairs Abdel Nasser remains firmly nonaligned. The recent, somewhat unexpected visit of Chinese Premier Chou Enlai was not heralded or carried oil as a political triumph. The Chinese seem, in fact, not to have succeeded in winning the Egyptians over to their projected Afro-Asian conference. a second “Bandung” which would exclude the U.S.S.R.

An alternative meeting of nonaligned states, urged by Prime Minister Nehru and Marshal Tito, seems scheduled for Cairo later this year. Egypt’s immediate support of the partial test-ban treaty in 1963 indicates support for the detente between East and West rather than for Chinese atomic ambitions.

In North Africa Abdel Nasser is concerned lest Sino-Soviet rivalry upset the neutrals or force them into fixed positions. He is unhappy also over Cuba’s meddling in Algeria. If the nonaligned leaders do meet in Cairo this year, they will have new issues to ponder. Egypt’s aim is to maintain the pivotal role which geography and neutralism have given her.