Last night in Anthropology, my instructor mentioned the well-worn idea that no two democracies have ever gone to war with one another. Naturally, this sort of phrase leads you to think of exceptions and I eventually settled on wondering about the Yom Kippur War of 1973. My (perhaps mistaken) understanding is that Israel was under a democracy and, from what I can gather about Egypt, it was under some sort of democratic republic at the time.
Am I wrong about Egypt? It seems (from some Wikipedia reading) that they had a parliament which consisted of democratically elected officials who, in turn, elected a president. The way the president was chosen might be considered the spoiler since the citizens never directed voted on a president even through a means as convulted as our own electoral college system in the States.
I don’t pretend to be so clever as to have thought of something no one else has. So what’s the spoiler here? For that matter, are there other “exceptions which prove the rule” for the Democracies At War statement? Or do we hit a No True Scotsman barrier where any democratic government which goes to war with another wasn’t really a democracy?
My instructor, to his credit, said that my example was a good question and he’d be interested in finding out more.
Cecil commented on the democracy vs democracy issue in a column, but it doesn’t specifically address Egypt. I’m sure there’s been threads on the general topic in here or the Comments forum before. Generally it does seem to boil down to a No True Scotsman game of what is or isn’t a democracy.
There was the Cenepa War between Peru and Ecuador. I’m not sure how much of a democracy Peru was at the time under Fujimori, but I would say that they were as Democratic as Egypt was during the Yom Kippur War.
I think Sadat was the top of a 1 party political faction that ruled Egypt. I think I would classify the Egyptian regime in 1973 as an “Authoritarian Regime” or at least would say that was a better description than a Democracy. I would say that Egypt today is not a democracy and the current regime run by Sadat’s VP really, is not all that much different than the regime that Sadat left him.
The Corrective Revolution was the name of Anwar Sadat’s change of policies after assuming power in Egypt, after the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. His ascent to power began in October 1970 and the Corrective Revolution reached full bloom in early 1971. It involved purging anti-Sadat government members, often considered pro-Soviet and leftwing, and drumming up popular support by presenting the takeover as a continuation of the 1952 revolution, while at the same time radically changing track on issues of foreign policy, economy and ideology. The Sadat Corrective Revolution also included the imprisonment of other political forces in Egypt, including liberals and Islamists. The imprisonment of Islamists had a strong effect later on, as these Islamists were often members of the Takfir wal-Hijra movement and the Corrective Revolution marked the beginning of the crackdown that caused them to spread across the Middle East and Europe, ultimately resulting in the spread of radical political Islam in these regions and also the assassination of Sadat.
Egypt under Sadat could in no way be considered a democracy. While the 1971 Constitution provides for free elections to a bicameral legislature, freedom of speech and assembly and other niceties, these were only paper protections. In actuallity, nearly all of these protections have been waived under the three-decades old state of emergency that was declared in 1967. Even today, there are as many as 30,000 political prisoners being held in the country.