DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION THEORY AND CIVIL-MILITARY CONFLICT:
A CASE STUDY OF INDONESIA AND EGYPT
A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
BY JACKSON QUE ALLDREDGE
JANUARY 2015

© 2015 Jackson Que Alldredge

ABSTRACT
Countries undergoing democratic transitions experience a wide range of long-term outcomes. Depending on the initial circumstances of the transition, a number of factors can impact on the trajectory of a transitioning country. Factors regarding the organization of the civilian government and the military, which are determined by the history and social context of each country, affect they type of relationship that forms between the military and the government during a democratic transition. This paper focuses on the cases of Indonesia and Egypt as examples of successful and unsuccessful democratic transitions respectively. Egypt and Indonesia had similar initial circumstances at the time of their transitions from authoritarian to democratic modes of government, but each experienced different levels of conflict between the military and civilians. This paper examines how the interaction between factionalism in the military and the government affect the stability of the democratic transition. The presence of factionalism within the military and the elected government may help to reduce conflict throughout reform periods by enabling mutually beneficial political alliances to form between the military and the government.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jackson Que Alldredge is a graduate student at Cornell University, submitting this thesis paper as a partial requirement for completion of his Masters of Arts. He has been a member of the Southeast Asian Program (SEAP) since the fall of 2013. Before attending the graduate program, Jackson completed a Bachelors of Arts in History at Brigham Young University in December, 2011. During his undergraduate degree, Jackson spent 13 months in Semarang, Indonesia in 2007 and 2008, performing service while studying the language and culture of Indonesia. In 2009, he made trips to Thailand and Indonesia to work with the U.S. Army and foreign militaries on humanitarian build projects, including the construction of three infant health clinics. For his undergraduate senior thesis, he conducted research at Cambridge University on the causes of ethnic conflict after Indonesia’s political transition. Since then, he has participated in a number of research and work activities related to Southeast Asia. For example, in 2013, he presented research at a conference on the effect of media coverage on corruption in local governments in Indonesia. In the summer of 2014, he traveled to Jakarta to conduct research for this thesis on civil military relations in Indonesia. His research on Indonesia culminated in this thesis paper, which incorporates research on Egypt as well as Indonesia.
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DEDICATION To Saanya, my jaan e maan.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the process of competing this thesis, I have relied on help from a number of other researchers and organizations. The Einaudi Center for International Studies enabled me to travel to Indonesia during the summer of 2014 to conduct research for my thesis by awarding a travel grant. During my field research in Indonesia, I relied heavily on the resources and networking made available through the Freedom Institute in Jakarta. In particular, Pak Rizal Mallarangeng and Ahmad Bakrie were especially kind to allow me to use their facilities for my research. I am also indebted to Indonesian researchers on civil military relations, including Tobias Basuki at CSIS and Pak Salim Said, who provided valuable insights for my research. I am especially indebted to my graduate advisors, Drs. Keith Taylor and Thomas Pepinsky, who provided constant guidance and support throughout my stay at Cornell University.
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ABRI
CSIS DPR
FJP MB MPR
NDP NU PAN
PDI-P
PKB
SBY SCAF SCC TNI

LIST OF ABBREVIATED TERMS
Indonesian Armed Forces Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia Center for Strategic and International Studies People’s Representative Council Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Freedom and Justice Party Muslim Brotherhood People’s Consultative Assembly Majelis Persyawaratan Rakyat National Democratic Party Nahdlatul Ulama National Mandate Party Partai Amanat Nasional Indonesian Democratic Party – Struggle Patai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan National Awakening Party Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt Indonesian National Armed Forces Tentara Nasional Indonesia
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATED TERMS

ii iii iv v

DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION THEORY AND CIVIL MILITARY RELATIONS: A CASE STUDY OF INDONESIA AND EGYPT

Chapter 1. Introduction: Democratic Transition Theory Chapter 2. Democratization in a “Fragmented Society”:
Indonesia’s Transition Chapter 3. “Tyranny of the Multitude”: Egypt’s Experiment
with Democracy Chapter 4. Conclusion: Indonesia and Egypt Compared

1
17
33 54

WORKS REFERENCED

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TABLES Table 1: Interactions between civilian and military factionalism Table 2: Consequences of interactions for reform and intervention Table 3: Factionalism in Indonesia and Egypt

11 14 14

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I. Introduction: Democratic Transition Theory
In the “third wave” of democracy,1 many countries in the developing world emerged from decades of authoritarian rule to begin experimenting with electoral systems of government. While this trend has been encouraging, the scholarly community continues to have major disagreements about the actual causes of democratic transitions in countries with authoritarian governments. Recently a large number of transitioning countries have experienced setbacks to reform and have in some cases reverted back to an authoritarian mode of government. This prompts a question with growing importance about how new democracies stay democratic. In Indonesia, the long-term effects of authoritarian rule, such as government corruption and the politicization of the military, appear heavily entrenched. Despite this, Indonesia has had a relatively high level of success among Southeast Asian countries in consolidating its democracy during the past sixteen years. In Egypt, prior to the democratic transition begun in 2011 after the fall of the Mubarak regime, many factors concerning the authoritarian government and society appeared similar. However, Egypt’s transition to democracy ended shortly after it began with a tragic reversal of efforts to liberalize politics. What differences between these two cases help to explain their different trajectories? For a democratic transition to continue on a path of success, what factors must be present in the political process to prevent a coup by the military that halts the process of political reform?
In understanding democratic transitions, a comparative study will help to identify what are the most important factors affecting the long-term outcome. This paper compares political events in Indonesia beginning in May, 1998, and in Egypt from January, 2011. The study
1 See Samuel P. Huntington, 1991, The third wave: democratization in the late twentieth century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
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considers a democratic transition to be an event in which an authoritarian government transfers the powers of state governance to groups in civil society in order to hold elections. The success of a democratic transition is measured by the ability to hold free and fair elections and to grant legitimacy to a civilian-elected government without a return to authoritarianism. This thesis will analyze the level of internal factionalism in the military and in the civilian government to explain the development of conflict between them. It will argue that the presence of factions within the military and the civilian government produces a situation in which factions in the military are able to secure their aims through coordinated alliances with civilians without resorting to intervention. By contrast, low factionalism in civilian government and the military creates a combustible situation as a dominant civilian party in government excludes a solidary military, which compels the military to take greater risks in defense of its interests. In examining these two cases, the paper will incorporate aspects of several theories on democratization and coup prevention, including cultural, rational choice, and group-dynamic explanations to show that the presence of factionalism in the military and in the government contributes to different outcomes in each case. Case Selection: Egypt and Indonesia
First, let us consider the extent to which the two cases are similar. In the wake of Egypt’s Arab Spring in early 2011, a number of scholars came out with predictions for Egypt’s transition, using Indonesia’s past trajectory of democratic reform as a road map. Pointing out the similarities between the two countries after Egypt’s presidential election in 2012, Indonesian researcher John Sidel described a future for Egypt that follows Indonesia’s trajectory during the last ten years. He makes the following prediction:
The military establishment will cede formal power to a civilian government but continue to enjoy informal power and prerogatives for years to come.... Overall, the years ahead will
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see the entrenchment of an oligarchic democracy, one in which the politics of money and machinery predominate while the military continues to exercise considerable influence.”2
Sidel’s predictions rely on multiple assumptions that overlook important differences between Indonesia and Egypt. These include differences in Egypt’s relationship with foreign donors, the conditions of its economy, and the particular arrangement of Egyptian partisan politics. External factors differed in terms of the U.S.-Egyptian donor relationship, which had a more significant effect on events in Egypt than in Indonesia. The significant flow of aid money to Egypt from the U.S. in theory gave the U.S. government more power to influence the decisions of leaders in Egypt. By contrast, trade sanctions had already been imposed by congress on the Indonesian military, meaning that the U.S. government had less financial leverage on Suharto and Indonesia’s generals (Haseman 2009). However, external pressure for reform from international organizations such as the IMF on the regime in Indonesia would have had a comparable effect on Suharto as Mubarak, neutralizing that difference. The internal economic conditions of the two countries also differed in major ways. Egypt’s economy had not experienced the same level of sustained growth as Indonesia’s economy did beginning in the 1960s, although it had experienced modest growth rates since the 1980s. Also, in Egypt, a collapse in economic conditions did not become the instigator of popular revolts that led to a regime change as it did in Indonesia following the rapid devaluation of the Indonesian currency in 1997.3 However, economic grievances were similarly at the core of protesters’ demands in Egypt (Kuhn 2012).
The most important difference that has relevance to the argument of this paper is in the role of political Islam in these two cases. Despite the fact that both countries have large Muslim
2 John T. Sidel, “Separated at Birth: Indonesia’s transition to democracy can tell us a lot about the likely course of Egypt’s revolution. There’s good news and there’s bad news,” Foreign Policy, 15 February, 2012. 3 Dan Murphy, “Indonesia and Egypt separated at birth? No, just completely separate,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 February, 2012.
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populations with important consequences for national politics, the particular shape taken by
political Islam in each of these countries differs greatly. In Egypt, the Muslim brotherhood, the
most successful political party during the post-transition elections, does not have a corollary in
Indonesian politics. While it may be tempting to directly compare the role of the Brotherhood and President Morsi in Egypt with that of the Muslim group, NU4, in Indonesia, it would be a
mistake. Although the presidential candidate of the NU, Abdurrahman Wahid, had a strong
Muslim identity, he nevertheless openly opposed an Islamist agenda in Indonesia. By contrast, the Mohamed Morsi’s platform in the Egyptian case was explicitly Islamist.
While far from being “separated at birth,”5 however, neither are these two cases “completely separate”.6 A number of relevant similarities exist between the two cases that enable
comparisons of the transition process. For example, the fact that the transfer of power underwent
similar phases of negotiations between politicians and military leaders has greater relevance for
this question than the presence of largely Muslim populations in both countries. In both cases,
the pressures for democratic reform were directed at a well-entrenched military regime with an authoritarian leader. Although Indonesia had aspects of a “personalist” regime7 just before the
transition, both countries had long histories of rule by the military, which had become heavily
tied into national politics. In both cases, the military would play a central role in the transition
from the previous regime to a democratic system as it would hold all the power to either
guarantee stability or to crack down on civilian reformers with force. As a result, the senior
4 Nahdlatul Ulama. 5 John T. Sidel, “Separated at Birth: Indonesia’s transition to democracy can tell us a lot about the likely course of Egypt’s revolution. There’s good news and there’s bad news,” Foreign Policy, 15 February, 2012. 6 Dan Murphy, “Indonesia and Egypt separated at birth? No, just completely separate,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 February, 2012. 7 Barbara Geddes distinguishes between party, military and personalist authoritarian regimes in her study on the longevity of authoritarian regimes. Personalist regimes are typically the most volatile as the reins of power center on one leader. See Barbara Geddes, 1999, “What Do We Know about Democracy after Twenty Years?” Annual Reviews Political Science, Los Angeles: UCLA Press.
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officers in the military and a few influential leaders in civil society had an immense amount of power over the direction that the transition would take in each case. Coup Theory
The comparison of Egypt and Indonesia in this paper relies on several other theories both about the causes of military coups in the context of democratizing countries. Focusing analysis on the behavior of key actors in government, other theoretical models provide a useful framework for understanding motivation of military leaders to intervene. From Edward Luttwak’s depiction of the coups in Coup d’état: A Practical Handbook comes a segment of theory on military interventions around the concept of “coup-proofing.” James Quinlivan defines this as the “creation of structures that minimize the possibilities of small groups leveraging the system” to quickly seize power over the state (Quinlivan 1999, 133). However, while Coupproofing identifies factors that make a government more susceptible to military intervention and addresses ways of preventing it, the concept has limited scope. Quinlivan’s study describes the tactics of political leaders for increasing state control over the military in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, but all of these examples focus specifically on dynamics within authoritarian regimes. Much of the scholarly work on “coup-proofing” analyzes how authoritarian governments stay in power by containing the military, but it provides fewer analyses about establishing civiliansupremacy in fledgling democracies. The methods referred to in this concept, “creation of an armed force parallel to the military,” the “development of multiple internal security agencies,” or “exploitation of... loyalties for coup-critical positions,” (Quinlivan 1999, 133) are tactics for increasing authoritarian control, not for consolidating a democracy. These have little use in new democracies attempting to preempt a slide into authoritarianism and scholars studying this idea have pointed out its limited applicability (Pilster 2012).
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Cultural explanations about military intervention have focused on the values of military officers that shape their motivations. Some scholars in this line of thinking have identified a large flaw inherent to many theories about military intervention. Theories based on an opportunistic military in search of political power risk oversimplifying the motivations that drive behavior of military actors. Eric Nordlinger makes the following point about the interests of military officers who had participated in a coup: “Only a small proportion originally entered the military in the hope of attaining governmental offices. Many praetorians took up the reins of government with little enthusiasm. Most of them would probably have much preferred to remain in the barracks if their objectives, particularly the defense or enhancement of the military’s corporate interests, could have been realized from that vantage point” (Nordlinger 1977:142). Rather than being motivated by all kinds of political power, many military leaders are more likely to be interested in a more specific set of political issues. Policies that pertain to national security and the internal organization of the military, for example, have greater relevance to most leaders in a military tradition. In militaries with a high esprit de corps and a strong corporate interest, officers are especially protective of the internal command structure of the military, which forms the basis of its effectiveness.8 The analysis of military leaders in this paper will rest on the assumption that they are primarily motivated by these factors and will not necessarily seize power as soon as an opportunity presents itself in the form of contentious politics.
Several rational choice theories further analyze the decisions of military leaders about whether to stage a coup at the individual level. Barbara Geddes’ research on authoritarian regimes provides a useful framework for understanding officers’ behavior. Her “barracks game” models the choices of military officers as they decide whether or not to engage in a coup to

8 See Nordlinger

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replace the government. In a two-by-two matrix, the majority and minority factions face different payouts resulting from the decision to either have a coup or “return to the barracks.” In this way, rather than analyzing the behavior of individual officers, this model builds on the assumption that strong corporate interests drive their decisions. The model reflects a situation in which large factions within the military must coordinate with each other to produce the highest payouts. The best outcome for both groups results when they collectively engage in a coup or all return to the barracks. Conversely, the lowest payouts result from a half-way committed military. Whether the majority faction succeeds in a coup without the minority faction or the minority faction launches a failed coup, the integrity of the military is damaged, which is the least desirable outcome (Geddes 1999, 126).
In group dynamic theories that explain the interaction between civilians and the military, the concept of military professionalism appears frequently. It suggests that, by developing a professional culture in the military, the civilian government can establish more control over the military. With professionalism, officers become less interested in politics as they become more narrowly focused on military matters. However, rather than preventing coups from taking place, professionalism also could have the opposite effect of increasing the military’s interest in matters outside of war (Stepan 1971). Also, with its emphasis on the military, this theory overlooks other factors that could be crucial for determining the success of democratic transitions. In particular, it disregards the role that civilian actors play in ensuring their success. Recent studies have concentrated more heavily on civil society in democratic transitions and have identified this as a common weakness of civil-military relations theory (Mietzner 2009; Cottey et al. 2002). As a result, group-dynamic explanations of civil-military relations rectify this by analyzing the interaction between the military and civilians as the crucial element of the transition process.
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Examining Indonesian politics through this type of framework, Marcus Mietzner has emphasized the importance of civilian politics by incorporating it into his analysis. He makes a significant contribution to the literature by describing the impact of the interaction between the military and civilians:
First, and most essentially, key decisions on basic issues of governance – even if they seemingly do not relate to military affairs – cannot be analytically separated from the arena in which the quality of civilian oversight over the military is negotiated.... The collapse of a democratic transition and the return of military rule are more likely to be caused by the breakdown of intra-civilian negotiations on broader societal issues than by flawed military control systems (Mietzner 2014, 349-50). As he points out here, the success of a transition to a model based on democratic, civilian control over the military clearly depends on the quality of negotiations between the two. According to his argument, the interaction manifests itself in an inverse relationship between civilian solidarity and intervention by the military. Mietzner’s “intra-civilian conflict” thesis suggests that, as civilian parties become more contentious, military interference in politics will increase as it has more opportunities to intervene (Mietzner 2009). However, this thesis rests on two problematic assumptions. First, it presupposes that the military will always intervene simply because it has an opportunity to increase its political power. As previously discussed, this assumption risks oversimplifying the core motivations that drive military leaders’ decision-making. Instead of identifying points at which the military could intervene, it might be more useful to examine the factors that limit the options of military leaders, compelling them to intervene. Second, the theory sets as a condition for achieving democratic reform something that inherently contradicts the essence of a democracy. It suggests that disagreements between civilian parties will prevent military reforms from taking place, implying that a true democracy, one in which parties disagree over key policy issues in elections, cannot exist simultaneously with meaningful reforms. For
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more useful analysis of how democratic transitions succeed, the research must address how to achieve stability throughout the process of implementing democratic reforms.
Drawing inspiration from Mietzner’s work, this paper similarly attempts to analyze the interaction between military and civilian leaders. However, it differs in its approach by turning the “intra-civilian conflict” thesis on its head. Rather than showing a positive relationship between civilian disunity and military power, this paper contends that civilian political competition increases the stability of the relationship with military leaders during a transition period, thereby decreasing the potential for a military coup that terminates the new government. With the existence of multiple competing political parties, civilian leaders become more likely to enter into negotiations with military leaders rather than sidelining the military from the reform process. Conversely, as military leaders interact with civilian factions that have similar political interests, they are less likely to be unrepresented throughout the transition process. While military leaders may start out with no interest in civilian politics, they may increasingly see a coup their best option in dealing with a strong elected government that is unwilling to make concessions. This reflects a decision making process by leaders of the military that balances the high costs from a military intervention, such as international criticism, against the cost of civilian encroachment into the military through reforms. If a military has the option to protect itself from damaging reforms through some lower cost means, such as allowing an allied civilian party to halt or change the nature of reforms, it will choose not to have a coup. As a consequence, although a long-term objective of a new democracy after a transition should be to establish civilian control over the military, the process must take a gradual course in order to prevent a direct confrontation.
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Representing this adjusted model of civilian-military interaction, the table below identifies some possible outcomes of the interaction between military officers and civilians. Table 1 shows some of the new implications of a revised “intra-civilian conflict” theory by building on Mietzner’s description of the interaction between the level of cohesiveness in civilian groups and the military. In the table, this interaction is shown as occurring in both directions. The level of solidarity among civilian parties affects the stability of the transition, but its effect depends in equal part on the level of factionalism in the military. Factionalism is considered low if one group becomes dominant enough that it gains a majority of influence in decision making processes. Stability is understood as the likelihood of a coup by the military occurring. In the top left square of Table 1, a state of single party dominance combined with low levels of factionalism in the military results in a confrontation between the military and a civilian government unwilling to compromise with it because of its dominant majority. This represents the most unstable situation. The lower left square represents the interaction between low factionalism in the military and high levels of civilian partisan competition. The lack of a single dominant party creates a more stable situation, though with less meaningful reform, as a weak civilian government faces a more cohesive military organization. The lower right square represents the most stable and desirable outcome, in which civilian parties become more likely to negotiate and form alliances with factions in the military to pass reform agendas. This is the most desirable combination because a factionalized military with a factionalized government will enable some reforms of the military to take place without a high potential for a coup. In this case, some military factions may see it as worthwhile to allow limited reforms in order to dislodge a
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faction of more senior generals from positions of power.9 In the top right square, a dominant civilian party in government has much greater flexibility to implement its agenda without needing to negotiate with an internally weak military to accomplish its objectives. Initially, this outcome appears the most desirable because it allows a new government to follow a hyperreformist path, but several problems could arise. A dominant civilian party with a fragmented military has the potential result in another authoritarian government unchecked by the military, especially in the absence of constitutional checks on power. However, a single dominant party will likely interact with the factionalism in the military by driving it down, compelling officers to protect their interests against civilian encroachment by forming a united front.

TABLE 1

Military

Low Factionalism

High Factionalism

Civilian Groups

Low Factionalism
High Factionalism

Dominant party; Strong military
Multiple parties without a majority; Dominant military

Dominant party; Weak military
Multiple parties without a majority;
Weak military

At its core, this argument rests on the assumption that peaceful political exchanges between civilians and the military will take place in a situation of high factionalism, which will decrease the likelihood of a military intervention. Instead of confronting the military head on with a rapid pace of reforms, which dangerously provokes intervention from the military,
9 In the second chapter, the paper discusses the role played by younger officers in the Indonesian military in encouraging reforms that would weaken the entrenched power of senior generals in the territorial command system (Koter), thus clearing the way for them to occupy more senior positions (See Chandra and Kamen 2002).
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partisan competition in the civilian government will result in a slower and more stable pace of reform. Additionally, the argument assumes that a military will not generally seize political power the moment an opportunity presents itself in the form of a fragmented civilian government. Instead, the military has other types of political interests, such as its institutional autonomy, that figure more prominently into its cost-benefit analysis regarding the decision to intervene with force. Because of a reluctance of many military leaders to become negatively intertwined in politics and the potentially high cost to popular opinion of the military, a military will only resort to a coup after it has exhausted all other options.10 This becomes especially true for militaries experiencing high factionalism because the potential costs of launching a coup increase with the risk that some factions will defect. On the civilian side, the argument implies that negotiations between civilians and the military become much less likely when a single party has a majority representation in the government. In this situation, a civilian government has less need to form coalitions, either with other parties or the military, to secure its aims. A dominant party has no need for building consensus when it holds a majority in government. Consequently, although a dominant party may succeed temporarily in implementing a rapid pace of reforms, a military with low factionalism will have lower costs associated with the decision to intervene and will be more likely to do so when faced with an uncompromising civilian government.
This modified argument addresses the stability of the transition and not the overall pace of reforms. By reframing the argument in this way, the paper offers up some rather different implications from Mietzner’s original theory of intra-civilian conflict. Instead of arguing that low
10 Felipe Aguero makes this point in the context of Latin American militaries. In establishing civilian supremacy over the military, he explains that “a military finds it harder to push for non-democratic prerogatives and to resist government policies when the government is visibly backed by a wide array of electorally strong political forces...” (See Aguero 1995, 236).
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civilian solidarity leads to military interference, the paper will show that contentious party politics may actually have a positive effect on a democratic transition by creating stability and preventing a coup from taking place. In transitioning states, a stable relationship between civilian leaders and the military ensures the survival of a new democratic system in its early stages when it is most vulnerable to intervention by the military. To demonstrate this point, the paper will analyze two cases of transitioning state to demonstrate these different effects of factionalism and will proceed as follows: In the second chapter, it will examine the changing levels of civilian solidarity and military factionalism in Indonesia at the time of the transition from 1998 to 2000. In this period, high factionalism in the Indonesian military combined with competitive partisan politics to create a more stable relationship between military and civilian leaders. By 2000, the relationship began to shift as the military gradually recovered from the shock of the political transition and closed its ranks in reaction to reforms targeting the military. As a result, factionalism in the military became lower in 2000 while civilian parties remained fragmented, keeping the relationship stable, but less productive with reforms. In the third chapter, the paper follows Egypt’s political transition from 2011 to 2013. By contrast, Egypt’s military existed in a much less fragmented state at the time of the transition and was capable of maintaining a firm grip over the initial pace of reforms. It also managed to do this because of the high factionalism of Egypt’s political parties, which had not yet become organized enough to lead the reform process. However, the large Islamist bloc of Egyptian parties gradually consolidated its control over the elected government by 2012, which led to a situation of low factionalism in the government with factionalism in the military remaining low. This created a tenuous relationship between the government and the military as their interests began to polarize. Consequently, the military managed to stage a coup the moment it considered the civilian government to be
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crossing certain boundaries, ending the period of transition. Table 2 below details potential consequences for reform and intervention of each interaction and Table 3 shows graphically how Indonesia and Egypt fit into the model of this explanation.

TABLE 2

Military

Low Factionalism

High Factionalism

Civilian Groups

Low Factionalism
High Factionalism

Government begins rapid reform /
Military intervenes
Government unable to reform / Military
protects interests

Government able to reform / Military
unable to intervene; may shift to low factionalism
Government negotiates reform / Military marginally protects interests

TABLE 3

Military

Low Factionalism

High Factionalism

Civilian Groups

Low Factionalism
High Factionalism

Egypt (2012-2013)
Egypt (2011) Indonesia (2000)

Indonesia (1998-1999)

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These different scenarios reflect contrasting understandings of democracy and its purpose. A key difference between democratic governments with high and low factionalism is the centralization of political power into one party. This can be understood with the theoretical distinction between majoritarian and consensus-based democracies (Lijphart 1999; 2008). In a majoritarian system, the political ideology of the majority become the sole consideration of a government elected by the majority to represent its interests, often at the expense of minority groups. The majoritarian interpretation of democracy has become associated with negative outcomes in terms of policy effectiveness and the representativeness of government (Lijphart 1999). By contrast, consensus-based systems better accommodate heterogeneous societies with many conflicting political interests. The model presented in this paper demonstrates the different effects of majoritarian and consensus-based approaches to democracy during transition periods. The paper will show these differences in Indonesia and Egypt by analyzing evidence of low or high factionalism in the government and the military. In both cases, it will be difficult to clearly identify when low factionalism exists as opposed to high factionalism. Also, the conclusion that alliances existed at various points between military and civilian factions is hard to show definitively with the available information from these periods. However, while acknowledging this, I will attempt to use qualitative data in surveys and other research to convey a possible and likely narrative of the events in Indonesia and Egypt that support the theory presented here. In the case of Indonesia, the paper will argue that a high level of factionalism among civilian parties prevented any single one from becoming too powerful. In this case, alliance forming between civilians and members of the military enabled both groups to achieve their aims without experiencing a coup. Following this, the paper will follow Egypt’s transition to show how a different path to democracy contributed to lower stability in the process of reforming the
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government. Lower factionalism in the Egyptian government and the military contributed to the ultimate conflict between the two that ended Egypt’s democracy. In this way, the paper will show the importance of divisive, partisan politics in creating a healthy, functioning democracy.
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II. Democratization in a “Fragmented Society”: Indonesia’s Transition
Indonesia is a country known for its diversity. Historically, it had faced challenges to the survival of democracy given the competition between factions in the highly diverse landscape of political ideologies, ethnicities, and religions. Of the persistent obstacles to democratic consolidation in Indonesia, “the fragmentation of Indonesian society” may be the most significant (Said 2006, 218-9). During the New Order, high levels of social fragmentation became an integral part of the regime’s strategy for maintaining control. Because the Indonesian military presented the greatest threat to President Suharto’s power, this strategy of encouraging social divisions was most apparent in the military. As influence and wealth all emanated from the source of power in the regime, President Suharto, generals competed with each other during this period to gain his favor. Suharto stayed removed from this internal power struggle in the military by manipulating the competition between these groups for political influence and corruption (Mietzner 2009; Said 2006a; 2006b). This continued until 1997, when an economic crisis and social upheaval abruptly and dramatically reduced the popular legitimacy of the regime and allowed military factions to form other political alliances to oppose Suharto (Mietzner 2009, 101). Following Indonesia’s political transition in 1998, however, these divisions within the military and society would continue to have ramifications for the interaction between the new civilian government and the military. First, rather than preventing democratic change, the interactions between factions in the military and society enabled many positive reforms to occur while ensuring that the dominant faction in the military did not oppose the new government. Second, the alignments between military and civilian factions provided the transition with more stability, helping a major conflict between the government and the military to be defused without leading a catastrophic intervention by the military. High factionalism in the military and the
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Indonesian Parliament allowed mutually beneficial arrangements to occur between generals and politicians (Said 2006a). In turn, these alliances enabled resolutions that helped to reduce tension between the military and the government during the transition.11
In July, 1997, the economic downturn became the catalyst for Suharto’s fragile system to spiral out of control. Following the rapid inflation of the rupiah, large demonstrations appeared in the streets of Jakarta, demanding a change in government. The sudden protests prompted a number of different reactions from the military, demonstrating a lack of cohesiveness in the military hierarchy regarding how to handle the crisis. In this new environment of instability, which worsened until Suharto’s resignation on May 21, 1998, generals no longer needed to compete within the constraints of Suharto’s system of promotion.12 With the popular disapproval of the regime, various leaders in civil society also became emboldened in their opposition to the regime.13 While some generals continued vying for the favor of Suharto, others began reacting to the expectation of a possible regime change by showing limited support for the civilian opposition and engaging in activities to support the protest movement (See Mietzner 2009). At any given time, two major factions in the military opposed each other over the position the military should take vis-a-vis the government. The crisis increased the influence of civilian parties to the point that Suharto’s government could no longer control politics and the military factions could now form alliances with civilians for political leverage. Throughout the first
11 Despite the lack of direct evidence for this, the rest of the chapter will attempt to explain how this may have occurred using the available facts from this period. Again, this is an alternative explanation of how the transition could have unfolded with drastically different implications for democratic transitions. 12 Douglas Kammen and Siddhartha Chandra explain that one of the motivations for younger officers especially to support a change of power and subsequent reforms was that it could potentially clear the way for further promotions by reducing the number of years that senior officers occupied higher posts (See Kammen and Chandra 1999). 13 Prior to the regime change, the opposition leader Amien Rais created the organization for the Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN), or the National Mandate Party.
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couple years of the transition, arrangement of alliances between civilian groups and the most dominant faction in the military would set the course for the transition.
In early 1998, the two most influential factions in the military differed on two points: one, regarding the role the military should take toward the regime during the unfolding crisis; and, two, regarding the particular tactics that should be employed in responding to the crisis. The first faction consisted of some of many of the more reform oriented officers who disapproved of the heavy involvement of officers in civilian government, which they viewed as inherently damaging the integrity of the military (See Mietzner 2007, 106). These generals preferred to approach the crisis cautiously, providing security during the protests without using physical violence. While this first faction is characterized as reformist, many of the generals in this faction still had very conservative views about the role of the military in Indonesian society. These generals for the most part favored only limited reforms on the military following a regime change. Conversely, the second faction of generals favored a more reactionary approach, resorting to repressive tactics to keep the regime in power and rejected any proposal of reform (Cohen 1998). The reformers, following the lead of General Wiranto, the Army Chief of Staff in the late 1990s, consisted of generals with a range of different attitudes about the institutional role of the military vis-a-vis society. While Wiranto himself appeared reluctant to embrace the prospect of replacing Suharto prior to the transition, a group in the younger generation of officers with much more radical views on reform aligned themselves with this faction (Mietzner 2009). In this way, older, moderate officers and the younger, more radical officers in the military formed an alliance based on their mutual interest in a regime change.
Opposing the reformers at the opposite end of the spectrum were the conservative officers. While political stances within this faction varied, officers in this groups generally
19

opposed any type of reform and stood behind the regime. Led by General Prabowo Subiyanto, a fast rising officer in Kopasus14, the Indonesian military’s Special Forces branch, the
conservatives were united in their more traditional stance regarding the role of the military in society, favoring the New Order paradigm of the military “leading society from the front.”15
Unlike the moderate group of officers in the reformer faction, the conservatives supported the traditional role of the military as a so-called “functional group” or participant party in Indonesian politics.16 This term, originating from the Guided Democracy era of civil-military relations,
suggests that the military should take an active role in everyday governance and policy making.
In addition to their different attitudes toward the regime, the two military factions
differed in terms of their relationships with civilians and how they chose to handle the ensuing
crisis. While Wiranto favored a more cautious approach, Prabowo argued for harsh actions to be
taken to quickly repress the street demonstrations and restore order. However, once the crisis had
reached a point that it appeared likely a transition would soon take place, both sides more
aggressively sought support from civilian groups to improve their political position following the
inevitable regime change. Wiranto offered protection to important civilian opposition figures and
ordered security for peaceful protests. Prabowo, on the other hand, made attempts to gain the allegiance of conservative Muslims in Java.17 General Agus Wirahadikusumah explained this competition for support from civilians, stating, “in the past, an officer had to suck up to Suharto
to get promoted and have influence, but now it is much more complicated... the politicians must like you, the media must like you, only then you’re a winner.”18 Civilian leaders appeared
14 Special Forces Command (Indonesian: Komando Pasukan Khusus). 15 Paradigma Baru, 1999, "Markas Besar Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia," ABRI Abad XXI. 16 The term “functional group” (Ind. Golongan Karya) 17 Republika, “Umat Islam dan ABRI harus Bersatu,” Republika, 26 January, 1998; See Mietzner 2009, 114. 18 This is taken from an interview by Mietzner with Wirahadikusumah, Makassar, 23 February 2000 (See Mietzner 2009, 214).
20

similarly anxious to secure alliances with the generals. Civilian leaders were familiar with the
internal rivalries of the military and recognized the benefits of aligning with certain factions in
order to advance their political agendas. Previously during the New Order, the media had
regularly exposed the political attitudes of generals to the public and helped to shine light on much of the internal politics of the military, which at fed into Suharto’s strategy of manipulating
military rivalries (Said 2006, 216). As a consequence, civilian politicians became acutely aware
of the factionalism in the military and sought alliances with the factions that shared their political interests.19 For example, the opposition leader Amien Rais, who created the National Mandate Party (PAN),20 communicated in secret with General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a member of the reformer faction, about increasing public criticisms of President Suharto.21 Throughout the transition, civilian leaders and generals sought each other’s support to advance their political
interests.
Civilian parties could be broken down into three major social followings, the secular-
nationalist groups, Muslim organizations, and student groups. Prior to the spring of 1998,
secular-nationalist political leaders had already begun to voice their criticism of the regime. The government sanctioned opposition party, PDI-P,22 had led the way in organizing protests against
the regime after Megawati Sukarnoputri had been removed from her position as its leader. This
was one of the earliest manifestations of a conflict between civilian groups and the regime as Megawati had been openly challenging the control of Golkar, the government’s party, over the
19 In an interview with Marcus Mietzner, Jakarta, 18 October 1999, Abdurrahman Wahid stated, “you still can’t become president in Indonesia without the military... they’re still strong, and that’s why I will seek to get Wiranto’s support to become the president.” (See Mietzner 2009, 205). 20 Partai Amanat Nasional. 21 Amien Rais, “Kassospol Minta Amien Tetap Kritis,” Jawa Pos, 10 May, 1999, taken from notes in Mietzner 2009, 139. 22 Partai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party – Struggle).
21

elections. By contrast, the two primary Muslim organizations, NU23 and Muhammadiyah, were relatively divided in this period over their position toward the regime and the two military factions. In fact, the future president and leader of NU, Abdurrahman Wahid, avoided taking sides until very late (Mietzner 2009, 155), which may have weakened his ability to form effective political alliances with the important generals during his later presidency. Until he finally committed to cooperating with leaders such as Megawati and Amien Rais to call for Suharto’s resignation, he remained ambivalent. In December, 1997, he explained the relationship to a senior general, saying, “We work together, we have a similar vision.” When pressed about the existence of an alliance, he replied, “No, we have no formal alliance,” to which the general responded that the military would have “crushed it” if they had.24 Student groups gained the most media coverage of the civilian groups opposing the regime by staging protests. While the student groups had no experienced leaders to represent their vision of a democratic transition in formal negotiations, they nevertheless created the most uproar, drawing attention internationally and forcing party leaders to take a stance on the regime.
Because of the divisions between the civilian groups, several different alliances emerged between the military and civilians. As the reformers in the military anticipated the eventual fall of Suharto, they began to communicate with civilian leaders about how the transition would take place. Some of the younger generation of officers took an even more active role in speaking out publicly about reform. Officers from the graduating class of 1973, including General Agus Wirahadikusumah, published a book of essays after Suharto’s abdication about the new direction
23 Nahdlatul Ulama. 24 This comes from an interview by Greg Barton in 2002. See Greg Barton, 2002, Abdurrahman Wahid: Muslim Democrat, Indonesian President, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 229.
22

for the TNI25 outside of politics (Wirahadikusumah et al. 1999). Behind the scenes, other officers sought to work directly with civilian leaders to bring about the transition. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, also a member of the class of 1973, even encouraged leaders of secular-nationalist parties to continue their attacks on Suharto in his communique with Amien Rais (Rais 1999)26. Wiranto himself vocalized support for Wahid and other civilian leaders to prevent them from aligning with conservative generals. For his part, Prabowo belonged to the group of “green generals” that sought the support of more traditional members of the Muslim organizations. Prior to the transition, several of the more conservative Muslim organizations remained supportive of the Suharto regime and were supportive of harsher actions taken against the protesters (Barton 2002, 229).
The alliances between the reformers in the military and the civilian groups during the transition would set the stage for the subsequent period of reform. After President Suharto finally resigned on 18 May, his vice president, B.J. Habibie, began coordinating with the moderate reformers in the military to initiate a gradual process of reform that insulated the military from too much meddling. From the start of his office as acting president, Habibie responded to popular pressure to implement sweeping reforms in a number of areas. Censorship of the media was eliminated with the creation of a free press, a rather large number of new political parties were sanctioned, and elections for national legislative bodies, the DPR and MPR, were reformed to allow proportional representation. Furthermore, the powers of the DPR gradually increased in terms of its ability to implement reforms without the explicit direction of the executive
25 The TNI (Indonesian National Army, Tentara Nasional Indonesia) became the new umbrella organization over the combined armed forces of the military following the elimination of ABRI. This was the original name of the Indonesian military prior to Indonesian independence. 26 This communication between Rais and SBY was reported in the Jawa Pos on 10 May 1999. See Notes in Mietzner 2009, 139.
23

(Ziegenhain 2008). On the other hand, reforms in the military, one of the most demanded areas of change, seemed to be occurring slowly. As a known ally of Wiranto’s faction, Habibie
discussed with his chief of staff how reforms would take place in the military under the internal
supervision of the generals. Habibie allowed Wiranto to oversee reforms internally so as to protect its institutional integrity from civilian encroachment.27 This arrangement satisfied the goals of Wiranto’s faction by allowing only limited reforms under their control while
simultaneously ending the invasive politics of the Suharto regime. Subsequently, the military announced a doctrinal shift with the “Four New Paradigms,” based on a draft proposal written by
SBY prior to the transition, proposing a new role for the military with only an advisory role in politics.28 Although reform occurred slowly and left many civilian reformers dissatisfied, it
nevertheless marked a major improvement over the state of affairs in the New Order. As a result
of the negotiated transfer of power from the military to a civilian-led government, an open
dialogue between the civilian government and the dominant faction in the military created a
gradual process of reforms. The military, which still held the power to reverse all progress,
appeared temporarily committed to its alliance with civilian leaders in reforming the
government.
Nearing the elections of 1999, alliances between factions in the military and civilian parties shifted as the political scene changed. Habibie’s alliance with Wiranto weakened as his popularity waned due to his association with the regime.29 By contrast, several of the Muslim organizations had begun to perform well in the polls with the NU’s political party, the PKB,
27 Habibie proposed that the internal problems of the military should be left to the discretion of the general’s in a statement on 23 June 1998 in “Pangab: ABRI Harus Mereformasi Diri,” Kompas, 24 June 1998 (See Note 10 in Mietzner 2009, 244). 28 The new paradigms were also mentioned in a speech by Wiranto in March, 1999 (See Wiranto, 1999, “Paradigma Baru ABRI,” Kompas, March 9, 1999). 29 Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (The National Awakening Party).
24

securing the most votes. The well-known leader of the NU, Abdurrahman Wahid, became the forerunner in the presidential race ahead of President Habibie. At first, Wiranto had been aligned with Habibie out of political convenience because of they had both been connected to the previous regime. However, because of Habibie’s weakening position in the polls, Wiranto realigned himself with the PKB in an agreement with Wahid that guaranteed him a position in the new cabinet. As a result, Wahid temporarily acquired the support of Wiranto’s dominant faction in the military prior to his inauguration in October, 1999, giving him the backing he needed from the military to win the election. However, this political arrangement changed immediately after the election when Wahid abruptly turned against Wiranto and his inner circle of senior generals.30 After taking the cabinet position, Wiranto was subjected an investigation following allegations of his involvement in human rights violations in East Timor. Meanwhile, Wahid alienated Wiranto from his staff and, during with the investigation, Wahid appalled the other generals of Wiranto’s faction by revealing his plans of introducing extensive reforms directed at the military. In addition to Wiranto’s personal humiliation, Wahid justified the new reform agenda by publicly portraying the military as a hold-over from the regime that would require major restructuring. These actions by the presidency broke Wahid’s alliance with the dominant faction of the military on bad terms.
To pass his reforms, Wahid realigned himself with the more radical segment of Wiranto’s faction, consisting of younger officers who supported more radical reform. This smaller faction of radical reforms favored a restructuring of the military, which would allow them to dislodge
30 After entering office, Wahid took “measures to exert civilian control over the military and rein in the Army” by sacking the majority of the senior officers (See The Editors 2000, 126). Furthermore, he reduced their influence in the civilian government by alienating senior officers from the presidential palace (See McBeth 2000).
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the more senior, conservative officers from their entrenched positions in the command posts.31 In
their study of the 1998 regime change, Douglas Kammen and Siddhartha Chandra indicate that
the earlier policies had enabled the rapid rise of an older generation of officers to occupy longterm posts in the regional command system.32 Their analysis shows that reformer officers in the
graduation class of 1973 were disadvantaged before the transition by the older generation of
officers and would benefit from promotions with new policies directed at reforming the
command structure (Kammen and Chandra 2002). After removing Wiranto from his position,
Wahid selected officers from this group of younger officers to replace more conservative officers
in other important command positions. Most notably, he appointed army general Agus
Wirahadikusumah, who had drawn attention for his reformist credentials with his published essays addressing several important areas of military reform,33 to become the new commander of Kostrad.34 This decision appalled more senior officers in the military as the position had
traditionally been filled by senior in line for the positions of army chief of staff and ABRI chief. To the newly created position of TNI Chief,35 he appointed Admiral Widodo, a naval officer also
known for having reformist attitudes. Since the transition, Wirahadikusumah in particular had
taken a more active role in speaking out about military reform, appearing in front of the press to make incendiary statements about the “feudalistic” structure of the military (Said 2006). Older
officers in both the conservative and reformer factions looked disdainfully on this behavior as
going against the better interests of the entire military to serve individual political ambitions.
31 The majority of officers opposed removing the territorial command system because of the impact it would have on the off-budget revenue of the military. Thus, the more senior officers tied to Wiranto who occupied these position were in opposition to the younger, reform-oriented officers. (See Aribowo 2003, 117) 32 Komando Teritorial (Koter). 33 Referring to Wirahadikusumah et al, Indonesia Baru dan Tantangan TNI: Pemikiran Masa Depan, Jakarta: Pustaka Sinara Harapan, 1999, mentioned earlier on page 20. 34 Komando Cadangan Strategis Angkatan Darat (Army Strategic Reform Command). 35 The official name of the Indonesian military had been recently changed from ABRI to TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia).
26

Wahid had hoped to work with Wirahadikusumah to reform the military’s regional command structure, the Koter36 system, which had enabled the more traditional officers in the military to continue directly influencing regional politics. However, these reform goals proved too ambitious as they conflicted with the interests of the majority of the more influential officers. Consequently, the two major factions in the military by this point became the much more influential conservative officers, opposed to Wahid’s reforms, and the weaker faction of young, radical reformers allied to Wahid.
By aligning himself with the faction of radical reformers, Wahid hoped he could establish control over the military to advance his reform agenda. However, with this strategy, he underestimated the effect that such aggressive reforms would have on the allegiances of the majority of officers. Wahid’s political maneuvering antagonized a large portion of military officers led by Wiranto that had originally supported the new government. By appointing Wirahadikusumah, Wahid violated several precedents, bypassing several more senior officers in line for the post and by attempting to impose the types of reforms traditionally managed by the military’s leadership internally. Through this series of miscalculations, Wahid exceeded the bounds of what was manageable in exploiting the factionalism in the military and unintentionally drove factionalism in the military down as the majority of the officers sided with the conservative faction in the military in opposition to the tactics of the Wahid Presidency. As many of the officers in Wiranto’s circle felt excluded from the administration, they aligned more closely with the conservative camp. Wahid’s greatest blunder in aligning with the faction of radical reformers was in driving away the support of all of the more senior and influential officers who had the power to control a large faction in the military.
36 Komando Teritorial (Military Territorial Command).
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Meanwhile, the Wahid Presidency struggled to follow through with many of its aggressive reform policies because he lacked a strong coalition. As time passed since Wahid’s inauguration, his behavior in the presidency had gradually damaged the allegiance key political figures in other major parties in parliament. Although Wahid had won a considerable victory in the presidential election against Habibie, he had done so with a tenuous coalition built from a large number of political parties. The most important political parties with representation in parliament were made up of a number of other small Muslim parties, several liberal nationalist parties, and the military’s party, Golkar. To succeed in pushing his ambitious platform of reforms through the parliament, he required supporters from several of the other parties with large numbers of seats. Wahid had begun his presidency with a coalition between his own party and the largest of the liberal nationalist parties, the PDI-P, which was led by the charismatic political figure, Megawati Sukarnoputri. This alliance with the PDI-P and several other parties had bolstered his election campaign with Megawati as his running mate, but the relationship began to turn sour almost immediately after his election through a series of major disagreements.
Wahid alarmed other members of his coalition by showing little restraint in issuing controversial directives and sacking important political figures. Soon after removing General Wiranto from his cabinet position in 2000, he sacked several other members of his cabinet who had disagreed over certain policy decisions. Additionally, around the same time period, the president became embroiled in a scandal over corruption charges against several of his cabinet members, which implicated him as well (Barton 2002). Initially, Megawati remained supportive of the president’s reform agenda, but also came into conflict with the president when he excluded her from a number of key decisions and cabinet meetings. In March 2000, after Wahid had sacked two more members of his cabinet who had been calling for his resignation, Megawati
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herself began withdrawing herself from the president and aligning with the opposition in the parliament (Mietzner 2009; Barton 2002). Because of his reportedly high emotionality and his disregard for the advice of his cabinet members, he began pushing key political allies away and breaking up his coalition. Gradually, as he sensed a withdrawal of support from other civilian leaders, Wahid’s behavior became more defensive and erratic.
By the spring of 2000, disagreements between Wahid and a number of other party members led to open discussions in parliament about the possibility of impeachment. Because of the newness of the democratic system, impeachment was as yet unprecedented in the Indonesian government. The process for going forward with it seemed vague, yet the constitution clearly contained an impeachment clause. This allowed members of parliament to threaten the president with it if he continued to exclude other groups from the policy making process. In April, instead of directly calling for impeachment, the opposition leader Amien Rais led the parliament in a vote for an official reprimand to the president for exceeding the constitutional powers of his office. Then, Wahid responded with even more alarming behavior by implicitly threatening to call on his supporter base in the NU to coerce the other parties in parliament into submission by marching on Jakarta. Around the time of the vote, a group of 20,000 NU members organized in Surabaya and announced that it would come to Jakarta in support of the president against the insubordinate parliament, stating that they were “ready to die” for the president (Barton 2002, 355). While other cabinet members assured the press that President Wahid was trying everything to contain the grass roots movement, this conflicted with Wahid’s tendency of repeated referring to his supporters in press conferences in what seemed to be thinly veiled threats of violence. On the day that parliament voted on the reprimand, Wahid simultaneously issued a public statement, in which he remarked that he had 400,000 supporters “ready to descend upon Jakarta” (Jakarta
29

Post, 30, April, 2000; Barton 2002). Making matters worse, the president continued his struggle to gain stronger control over the military and the police by sacking General Bimantoro from the post of Chief of National Police when he refused Wahid’s orders to place military personnel at the parliament. In response to these activities, the head of Golkar in Parliament, General Akbar Tandjung, finally called on the floor for a motion on April 30 for a special MPR session for impeachment to be held on August 1.
In July, the conflict reached its peak as it became clear to Wahid that he was losing support from the most powerful factions in the military as well as the major civilian factions. He continued issuing threats against parliament, deliberately timing them with the hearings, and ultimately declared he would freeze parliament on July 20 to prevent it from continuing with the impeachment process. In an attempt to carry out this threat, he attempted to appoint one of his allies in the military to become the new chief of police even though Bimantoro had refused to vacate the position and issued orders to military commanders. However, Wahid’s absolutist handling of political power and his attacks on the military had reduced his influence in both parliament and the military and his orders to the military commanders were simply ignored. On July 20, as thousands of NU members began to congregate outside of Jakarta as a show of support for their leader, Amien Rais called for a flash session of the MPR to hold the impeachment proceedings in advance of the August 1 date. The decision coincided with sudden deployment of 40,000 troops around the capital, demonstrating the support of key military leaders for parliament and the level of coordination that must have taken place between them. Columns of tanks were deployed around the presidential palace, facing inward toward the palace to avoid the impression they were protecting it, and the heaviest security was concentrated around the parliament building to give security to the proceedings. If not for the fact that a
30

constitutionally legitimate impeachment process was taking place inside, the military’s sudden activity could easily have been interpreted as a coup. Had the civilian groups in parliament not been seeking to remove the president through institutional means, the military’s limited intervention might have become a coup.
The impeachment proceedings in the MPR session on July 26 revealed the extent of the factionalism in the parliament that had prevented Wahid from consolidating a strong power base. The parties opposed to the Wahid Presidency were the majority in parliament and became aligned with conservative officers in the military with the goal of removing Wahid. The largest bloc in parliament was led by the PDI-P, which had the most seats, as well as the National Mandate Party37 (PAN), led by Amien Rais. Although Golkar38 had become less popular following the collapse of the regime, it nevertheless continued to control a significant number of seats in Parliament so it too influenced the outcome of the vote against Wahid. While still serving as the vice president, Megawati ensured that the PDI-P and many of her allies in the military sided against the president. General Akbar Tandjung, the leader of Golkar in parliament, belonged to the faction of conservative generals and helped coordinate the impeachment voting process with Rais as well as the head of the PDI-P, Arifin Panigoro. Once Panigoro called the floor to vote on 20 July, the civilian factions in parliament had already decided along with allies in the military to act against the president and voted almost unanimously with 90% in favor of impeachment, those abstaining being from Wahid’s own party, PKB (Barton 2002, 360).
As evidenced by the impeachment process of President Wahid, coalition building between factions in the military and the government had a direct bearing on the outcome of
37 Partai Amanat Nasional. 38 Golkar is the regime party under Suharto and continued as the military’s party in parliament after Suharto’s resignation.
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Indonesia’s transition to democracy by preventing a coup. The effects of the factionalism in the military and the government were threefold: first, they determined the overall pace of reforms, which depended on the types of alliances created between civilians and military officers; second, they determined how successfully reforms would be implemented, depending on how much support they received from the military; and, thirdly, these interactions determined the overall stability of the transition. Despite the challenges associated with reforming a military, an inclusive relationship with the dominant faction in the military will allow the government to more successfully pursue a range of reforms with the support of the generals. Most importantly, this relationship also ensures that the military will not have a coup as long as the relationship enables the military’s own interests to be protected. For this to be realized, the civilian political landscape cannot be dominated by one group, but must present alternative options of alliances for the military if the existing one fails.. Although disagreements in a state of high factionalism prevent rapid reform from taking place in the civilian government, alliances between civilians and military officers reduces conflict by making resolutions possible between factions on both sides. As a model of “coup-proofing,” the constant negotiations that occurred between civilian groups and military factions in the Indonesian case enabled its democracy to survive the early stages of the transition. In spite of the negative impact on the speed of reforms, a negotiated reform agenda by a civil-military alliance is necessary to prevent a military intervention. After Indonesia’s government became a democracy in 1999, it has continued along the track of democratization without a relapse to authoritarianism and is one of the few Southeast Asian nations to successfully consolidate its democracy.
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III. “Tyranny of the Multitude”: Egypt’s Experiment with Democracy
In December, 2010, a series of protests against the Tunisian regime set off a chain reaction of political protests targeting authoritarian regimes throughout the region. Inspired by events in Tunisia, Egyptian crowds rapidly organized in Cairo in January, 2011, to protest the long-standing Mubarak regime. Following an unexpectedly quick victory for the protesters in Tahrir Square, an interim government was established and Egypt subsequently witnessed its first free election in over sixty years. With more than 84 million people (CIA World Factbook 2014), Egypt has the largest population in the Middle East and, like Indonesia, it contains an extremely diverse society. If the tide of democratization brought by the Arab Spring was to succeed in Egypt, it would need to overcome the serious disagreements found between the major political actors. Over the course of the next two and a half years, Egypt’s democratic transition quickly became mired in the historical divisions of Egyptian society and tragically ended early. Why did Egypt fail to achieve consensus in its new, elected government and consolidate its democracy? What factors drove the military to intervene in the summer of 2013? During the period following Egypt’s January Revolution, certain aspects of its social divisions contributed to the unresolvable tensions that eventually ended in conflict with an intervention by the military. These include the low factionalism in the elected government after 2011 with a single dominant civilian faction, a weak institutional framework for ensuring consensus in the new government, and low factionalism in the military, which enabled it to take action against the civilian government.
From the start of the protests in January, 2011, the military found itself in a difficult position. While it had a close association with the regime – the last three presidents had all come directly from military service – it had been largely sidelined from a central role in politics by President Mubarak in recent years. As part of his strategy to reduce the threat of the military to
33

his power, Mubarak maintained strong central control over the military without incorporating the military into the political structure. Senior generals and top ministers received appointments by the president, but generals did not take an active part in running the state (Ivekovic 2013, 174), as they did in Indonesia. The effects of this were two-fold: first, the Egyptian military had not undergone a process of politicization that commonly occurs in military regimes, preventing political divisions and keeping factionalism low; second, the fates of the generals were not clearly intertwined with the regime as they had been in Indonesia, leaving it freer to form new alliances. Thus, the allegiances of the military were not clear at the time of the revolution. At an earlier point in history, Egypt’s government could have been categorized as a military regime,39 but the military alignment had shifted away from the regime because of disagreements over divergent interests. Mubarak’s policy of economic liberalization had begun to threaten the military’s control over parts of the economy it directly managed. While the exact proportion of the economy controlled by the military is unknown, it directly manages the military industrial complex as well as several food-stuff industries (Ivekovic 2013, 176). Unlike Indonesia, the Egyptian military’s control over these industries was well documented, making them easily targeted by the civilian government for reforms (Mietzner 2014). Because of its weakened association with the regime and the threat to its fiscal interests, the military had incentives to withdraw itself at the moment of the crisis.
During the crisis, the military had developed a popular public image among the protesters as an organization distinct from the Mubarak regime. The military increasingly became seen as a third party in the contest between protesters and the Mubarak regime that could guarantee the
39 In a study on authoritarian regime breakdown, Barbara Geddes created an exhaustive dataset of authoritarian regimes according to a typology consisting of military regimes, personalist regimes, party regimes, and mixed regimes. (See Geddes 1999, 121-2)
34

success of either side if it was won over. A commonly heard chant of protesters in Tahrir Square was “the army and the people are one hand” (Tschirgi et al. 2013; El-Bendary 2013). During the uprisings, the commander of SCAF40 during the January Revolution, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, very carefully exercised restraint in regard to the protests. Although the military at first refrained from intervening to protect the protesters from the armed bands of state security, the regime’s internal security force, it eventually deployed troops on the streets to protect the protesters as it became more apparent that the regime was going to fall. With the writing on the wall, President Mubarak finally resigned on February 11, 2011, despite his earlier refusal to do so. The timing of the resignation suggested that the military’s ambivalence about the regime had a great deal to do with his sudden change in stance.
After Mubarak’s resignation, Egypt entered a period of careful negotiations between civilian groups and the military over the terms of the political transition. With strong institutional integrity, the military was able to maintain control over the pace of reforms during the initial period. The head of SCAF, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, immediately began a process of “national dialogue” meant to breach the gap separating the military from various political groups (Fahmy 2011). From the start, the military leadership faced serious difficulties in negotiating with civilian groups as it remained unclear who the representative leaders were. No single leader could claim to represent a majority of the groups involved in protesting the regime. Under the regime, only a small number of parties in the “tolerated opposition” had been allowed to exist within the official system, but these groups were hardly representative of the newly emergent student groups that led the protests. The political parties during the Mubarak regime had served no other purpose than to create legitimacy for the state (Blaydes 2008). To find civilian political

40 Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

35

allies that could be reliably controlled by the military, Tantawi turned to one of the only civilian
parties not directly associated with the regime, the Wafd Party, to find representatives for an
interim government. SCAF picked three Wafd Party members, one of which was a Coptic
Christian, to fill cabinet positions (Ivekovic 2013, 184). However, this strategy failed because it
excluded the new civilian political organizations that had a stake in the January Revolution. This
worsened the image of the military by aligning it with a weaker civilian faction that had been associated with the old regime.41
At this time, civilian political organizations spanned a wide array of overlapping and
conflicting ideologies. In the suddenness of the January protests, the various groups had not had
enough time to coalesce into effective party structures, but the groups could be broadly
conceived of as belonging to two blocs representing different political interests (Tschirgi et al.
2013, 5). In the first bloc were the Islamist organizations, consisting mainly of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists42. Because of its historical opposition to the regime, the Muslim
Brotherhood had long experience functioning outside of the formal political system and the
community networks through mosques gave the Islamist bloc a strong, integrated support base. It
quickly would emerge as the most effectively-run organization in post-Mubarak Egypt. The
second bloc, the secular-liberal political organizations, consisted mainly of students and urban
intellectuals. A few of the student organizations had been organizing in the years leading up to
the January Revolution, but even these were much less developed than the Islamist groups. A
large number of small student groups participated together in the protests, but had no clearly
41 This decision by SCAF to appoint members of the Wafd Party drew criticisms from many other civilian groups. Statements from SCAF discouraging “attempts to pounce on power” prompted the new student protests in Tahrir Square in July (See Amira Howeidy, 2012, “Unfinished business: timeline of a revolutionary year,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 1 February, 2012). 42 The Salafis were a religious sect following an orthodox interpretation of Islam popular in rural regions of Egypt. The following did not have a political organization as strong as the Muslim Brotherhood, but its members overwhelmingly favored the Brotherhood’s platform for establishing an Islamic state.
36

defined set of aims beside the removal of the Mubarak government. Several other liberal parties
emerged during this period of the transition, but these were so numerous and uncoordinated that an effective liberal coalition could not form.43 In opposition to both the Islamist and secularliberal blocs were the “secular-conservatives,” the remnants of the old regime that consisted mainly of the oligarchic elite with strong economic ties to the Mubarak’s presidency. These were
led by the National Democratic Party (NDP), which had been the main party structure of the
Mubarak regime.
The student groups of the secular-liberal bloc were the newest and least established without a strong party to unite them.44 These organizations emerged as a response to the
economic situation in Egypt at the time of the revolution. In spite of the rapid growth in the
economy, unemployment had steadily increased during the early 2000s due to the concentration
of economic power among those with connections to the regime. Simultaneously, a rapid
increase in the number of people with secondary and tertiary education had resulted in a growing
number of educated young people who could not find work during the 1990s and 2000s
(Ivekovic 2013, 177). Consequently, by 2011, 90% of unemployed Egyptians belonged to the
age cohort younger than 25, creating conditions for political activism among the youth (El
Bendary 2013, 5). This urban, educated segment of society began agitating for economic reform and the liberalization of the political system during the 2000s, culminating in the “bread riots” of
April, 2008, which concentrated on the issue of the growing income disparity between the
43 The secular liberal bloc consisted of a hodge-podge of parties aside from the student-led groups and were extremely numerous. They included the Popular Democratic Party, the Free Egyptians Party, the Egyptian Green Party, the Democratic Union Party, the Party of Social Solidarity, and many others (See Mohamed Abdel-Baky, “Liberal Uncertainty,” al-Ahram Weekly, May 5-11, 2011). During the parliamentary elections, the Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, as well as the Salfist Al-Nour Party would each win the largest number of seats. 44 A large number of student groups, such as the April 6 Movement, tried to gain the most influence, but failed to secure a large following (See Mohamed Abdel-Baky, “Liberal Uncertainty,” Al-Ahram Weekly, May 5, 2011).
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conservative oligarchy and the younger generation of Egyptians. By the time of the January Revolution, this bloc could be most clearly identified by its preoccupation with economic reform and it primarily attracted students, intellectuals, and some of the urban poor.45 However, these groups remained disorganized and highly fragmented by the time of the revolution. The ad hoc nature of the political movements meant that they spanned a number of unclear and conflicting political agendas. While the student bloc would field several different parties to compete in the elections, they never became cohesive enough in their structure to compete with the very solidary Islamist bloc.
Following the transition, the largest and most well organized group that had been involved in the uprising was the Muslim Brotherhood. By contrast to the student groups, the Muslim Brothers had emerged from decades of experience running their organization outside of the regime-sanctioned system and had continued to function effectively despite periodic crackdowns. Because of the strong network that existed through Muslim communities, the “uneven political liberalization under Sadat and Mubarak created a political system with a hollow core and a dynamic periphery,” (Wickham 2002) which resulted in a comparatively strong Muslim political organization. This posed a dilemma for the military junta led by General Tantawi as it was reluctant to negotiate with a group that it had historically opposed. However, the effective organization of the Brotherhood and its ability to acquire a following in many of the rural areas in Egypt enabled it to become a dominant voice in the process of creating the new government. It controlled a large volunteer structure through its network of mosques and had access to a vast line of financial support that extended beyond Egypt’s borders. Because the
45 Mohamed Abdel-Baky, “Liberal Uncertainty,” Al-Ahram Weekly, May 5, 2011.
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Brotherhood’s Islamic platform also reflected the interests of the other Islamic groups, such as the Salafist Movement, it also formed a coalition that could perform well in the later elections.
In the months after the revolution, the fragmented civilian groups competed with each other to gain the favor of the governing military council. However, as time dragged on without official plans for an election, a debate began around the timing of the elections and several of the student groups continued to protest to pressure the military establish a timeline. The debate centered on the issue of whether to hold the parliamentary elections prior to or after drafting a new constitution. In favor of holding immediate elections, the student led April 6 Movement organized ongoing protests in Tahrir Square against the slow pace of reforms under SCAF. By July, 2011, the issue had become highly contested after confrontations with the student groups had resulted in several dozen deaths. Though many of the politically moderate groups passively supported the cause of the protesters, others supported the military and regarded the protesters as agitators creating further disruption, “seeking to sow sedition by driving a wedge between the army and the people” (Heba Fahmy 2011). However, during the first part of this period, the Muslim Brotherhood had continued a strategy of remaining politically neutral, delaying a confrontation with SCAF until it had gained more political leverage. At this time, the leadership of the Brotherhood surprisingly withheld its usual rhetoric promoting an Islamic state. The public representation of the Muslim Brotherhood appeared calculatedly moderate during this period, which had the effect of softening the military’s position and drawing in support from groups on the fence. While this strategy had been effective at bringing the Muslim Brotherhood into the mainstream of civilian politics, the Brotherhood suddenly changed its stance in a coordinated move to join the protests on July 29. The sheer number of people who came to protest, at least two million, demonstrated the vastly superior organizational structure of the Brotherhood
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compared to the student groups. Its ability to mobilize large groups of supporters through informal networks placed the Brotherhood at an advantage over the other civilian groups.
In the July protests, the Brotherhood supporters also called for an election timeline, but instead pushed for the elections to be delayed until after a constitutional draft could be drawn. The Brotherhood raised these demands over concerns about whether the military would impose limitations on parliamentary elections in order to limit the power of the Muslim Brotherhood in the drafting of the constitution (El-Bendary 2013). The Brotherhood leadership believed that, if the constitution could be held through a referendum rather than in a military-controlled parliament, it would have greater control over the outcome. By holding the constitutional forum prior to the elections, it would preempt any action by the military council to create exceptions to increase its own power while limiting that of Islamist groups in the electoral system. As evidence of this, Tantawi had stated in the press that “supra-constitutional principles” should allow the military a “special role in protecting Egypt’s civil institutions and the equality of its citizens.” These issues were at the forefront of a “Consensus Conference” held by SCAF in June, prior to the protests by the Brotherhood. This debate reflected the latent tension that continued between the highly organized Islamist groups and the military that had not entirely gone away in the aftermath of the revolution. Many of the secular-liberal supported the inclusion of special provisos as a protective measure against “Islamists, such as the Brotherhood and Salafists, from adopting measures that would transform Egypt into a theocracy if they won the majority of parliamentary seats.”46 Despite the new, moderate stance presented by the Muslim Brotherhood, the secular-liberal bloc and the military leaders became aligned in their opposition to the Islamist bloc, regarding it with suspicion going into the elections.
46 Al-Ahram Online, “Egypt’s Consensus Conference Wants Military to Guarantee Secular Character of State,” AlAhram, 19 June, 2011. http://english. Ahram.org.eg/News/14608.aspx. (Accessed 01 November 2014).
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After the protests, SCAF appeared to give way to popular pressure as it announced a more definite timeline for holding elections, but it did so with some reservations. It scheduled Parliamentary elections to take place beginning in late November and the election of a new president to be held later in 2012. In the meantime, motions to draft a new constitution would be put on hold while SCAF could gain control over the process of forming an interim government. Recognizing the superior position of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) compared with other civilian parties, the military council established a number of constraints through amendments to the election process to prevent any single civilian group from acquiring a majority in either of the houses of parliament. In the upper house, the Shura Council, only 180 of the 270 total seats would be contested by civilian party candidates in the election. The remaining 90 seats would be subject to appointments by the military. Similarly, the amendment allowed SCAF to appoint up to 10 seats in the People’s Assembly (IFES 2011, 3). Through these limitations, the military hoped to prevent the Brotherhood from acquiring a solid majority in Parliament. Although the Islamist bloc failed to secure its original goal of a constitutional referendum in early 2011, its leaders remained confident approaching the first set of elections. The FJP had a clear advantage against other political organizations in the amount of experience it had in mobilizing large numbers of supporters.
Prior to the November elections, the rest of Egyptian society appeared to remain heavily divided between the Muslim Bloc and the less well organized secular-liberal parties. A wellknown Egyptian academic and reformer in the secular-nationalist bloc, Mohamed El-Baradei, identified the greatest challenge in the transition as the divisiveness in civil society, pointing out the numerous factions lacking in experience, not knowing “how to establish parties, how to engage...” (El-Baradei 2011). The student groups in particular lacked clear organization and
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leadership that would allow them to form an effective coalition in the election. Moreover, the other significant segment of the secular liberal bloc, the preexisting centrist and liberal parties in Egyptian politics, continued to be divided against the new wave of younger activists despite having similar attitudes about reform. In return, the younger generation of the liberal bloc viewed the Wafd Party, the largest of the preexisting liberal parties, with low regard because of its tainted reputation under the regime. Because the Wafd Party had been one of the “tolerated opposition” in Mubarak’s electoral system, it had become ineffective as a political machine. It had no real experience mobilizing voters and lacked a definitive political platform with which to unite support in the secular-liberal bloc. While the Islamist bloc centered on the much better organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, it also suffered from divisions between the Brotherhood and the more radical Islamist parties led by the Salafist party Al Nour. From these divisions, the military council expected “a highly fragmented political race with no one party or coalition coming close to a majority of the national vote” (IFES 2011, 3). However, these expectations proved false with the emergence of the Islamist bloc as the dominant faction in parliament. The highly fragmented state of Egyptian politics on the eve of the election resulted in significant advantage for the Islamist bloc because political influence among the Islamists was much more concentrated in the formal structure of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been able to mobilize large numbers of swing voters against the weak secular-liberal bloc. The outcomes of the Parliamentary elections signaled a shift from high factionalism to low factionalism in the elected government as power became concentrated in the Islamist bloc.
In the election for the People’s Assembly in November, the FJP had nearly won a majority with 47% of the seats, but secured a strong majority through its coalition. The second largest portion of seats had been taken by the more radical Islamist party, Al Nour, with 25% of
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total seats,47 altogether granting the Islamist bloc 70%. The largest winner of the secular-liberal parties had been the Wafd Party with only 8% of seats, leaving the remaining parties of the Egyptian Bloc alliance and the student organizations a miniscule number of seats. This left the already weak secular-liberal bloc at a severe disadvantage in the new government. The extent of this domination in the elections by the Islamist parties was the result of certain factors that benefited more experienced political organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, while leaving “smaller and less entrenched parties” at a disadvantage (IFES 2011). The low solidarity among the parties of the secular-liberal bloc left a political vacuum in the space normally occupied by the regime’s National Democratic Party. The absence of an effective party to mobilize voters on behalf of the secular-liberal bloc allowed several of the Islamist parties to seize large portions of undecided voters. While SCAF had previously predicted a disadvantage for the Islamist bloc to come from divisions between the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, this instead transformed into a major advantage. Because of the more radical platform of Al Nour and the weakness of the secular-liberal parties, many moderate voters considered the FJP to be the most feasible alternative to Al Nour. To draw in moderate voters, the FJP had been working to promote a more moderate image of itself and publicly touted the protection of civil liberties as one of its key agendas. Thus, in the absence of a viable party in the secular-liberal bloc, moderate voters began to embrace the FJP as a more liberal alternative to the Islamist platform of the Salafist alliance as long as the secular-liberal parties stood no chance of securing a majority. By the summer of 2012, the FJP had secured a solid majority in both houses of Parliament and Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood had become a clear frontrunner in the presidential election.
47 David D. Kirkpatrick, “Islamists Win 70% of Seats in the Egyptian Parliament,” New York Times, 21 January, 2012.
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As the Islamist bloc gained a secure majority in parliament, bargaining power in the civilian government became more heavily concentrated in the control of the majority parties. The rapid expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood in the new civilian government defied the military’s expectations of a fractionalized parliament and forced the military to adjust its strategy for controlling the transition process. After the Islamist parties had gained a solid majority in the upper house in early 2012, the Salafist party, Al-Nour, called for a snap presidential poll and for the formation of a constitutional drafting committee. In the absence of a viable candidate from the secular-nationalist bloc, SCAF fronted its own candidate in the elections, Ahmed Shafik, a former military cadre and prime minister in the Mubarak regime, who ran conspicuously as an independent. For the FJP ticket, Dr. Mohamed Morsi ran as the candidate supported by the wellentrenched Islamic bloc. Without a suitable candidate representing the liberal political ideology of the student protesters of the January Revolution, moderate voters once again found themselves supporting the FJP, throwing their support behind Morsi rather than backing a former member of the Mubarak regime. Even given those circumstances, the small margin by which Morsi won the presidential election48 revealed the level of reluctance that many moderate voters had in backing the Islamist candidate, even with such an unpopular alternative. Had the opposition candidate been a politician that was more representative of the secular liberal bloc in Egyptian society, the outcome of the race may have been rather different.
The election of Morsi as president and the subsequent actions to consolidate the political power of the Islamist bloc signified the complete transition of the civilian government to low factionalism with a dominant party. After gaining the presidency, Morsi and the Muslim
48 The presidential race ended with a much closer competition between the Muslim Brotherhood and their opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, who clearly represented the conservative political bloc of the military and the former regime. Morsi won the election by a 3% margin with 52% of the popular vote.
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Brotherhood began a series of actions that would further solidify their majority hold on
government. First, Morsi began by selecting cabinet members mostly from his own party or from
other parties in the Islamist bloc, with only a few exceptions. In the case of the exceptions, such
as a Coptic Minister of Tourism, the appointments gave an impression of inclusivity for the new
presidency, but later appeared to be purely symbolic as Morsi would continually exclude these
figures from important decisions. Although the FJP had appeared more inclusive during the
electoral race, it gradually became apparent that Morsi would advance the interests of the
dominant faction with little regard to the minority parties. Morsi’s most significant move came one month after his election when he suddenly fired
the entire senior military leadership in SCAF. It is important to note that, at the moment when the military’s top leadership would have had high motivation to take measures to counteract the new government, they refrained from doing so. In what the Egyptian press referred to as Morsi’s “August Coup,”49 General Tantawi and his senior staff quietly relinquished power after being
sacked. Morsi subsequently abolished SCAF, which was viewed as a residual institution of the
regime, and appointed a lesser known general, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, to the newly created
position of Minister of Defense and Military Production. This event indicated certain aspects
about the military that are interesting to note. Most importantly, the military would not
necessarily be led to take extreme measures to intervene in civilian politics to protect the power
of individual leaders as long as the core interests of the military were protected. The fact that the
military remained in the barracks during the August Coup suggested that the military as a whole
49 Morsi sacked Tantawi and his staff after a terrorist attack, which took place on August 12. However, this was commonly viewed by the generals as a purely opportunistic move by Morsi to completely consolidate his power over the military, which remained as the only major threat to his power. In addition to Tantawi, he dismissed Army Chief of Staff Sami Enan and the commanders of the Navy and Air Force (See Zvi Barel, 2012, “Egypt Security Officials: Dismissal of Army Top Brass Thwarted a Coup Attempt,” Haaretz, 15 August, 2012; Christian Science Moniter, August 12, 2012; Dan Murphy, “Egypt’s President Morsi Fires Senior General Tantawi, Asserting His Power,” Christian Science Monitor, 12 August, 2012).
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was willing to allow the democratic transition to continue on its current path, even if the political careers of individual officers were ended early. In this way, the August Coup demonstrated that other conditions would have to be met first before the whole of the military could be brought to intervene in civilian politics. The corporate interests of the military organization would have to come under threat before such extreme measures could be taken. However, in such an event, the low factionalism of the military would enable it to take this course of action with a lower risk of low commitment from some of its officers.
In the fall of 2012, the Islamist bloc in parliament began to more aggressively pursue the drafting of a new constitution while it maintained a strong majority. In late August, Morsi announced that the drafting of Egypt’s new constitution would be accelerated ahead of its previously established timeline to be completed by the end of September. The timing of the announcement coincided with the dismissal of the generals, suggesting that Morsi and the Brotherhood had needed to remove that obstacle before advancing with the creation of a constitution, which had been a central point of debate with SCAF. To ensure that he had complete power to push the process of the constitutional draft forward, Morsi also cancelled a decree issued earlier in the year by SCAF that limited the president’s powers. The Egyptian Constitutional Assembly of 2012 became the source of growing tension between the civilian government and the military. Crucially, because the Islamist bloc had secured such a solid majority in the legislative and executive branches of government, it rendered any institutional checks in the system curbing the power of the executive ineffective. The last branch of government outside of the control of the Islamists, the judiciary, was the last bastion of opposition to the Islamist majority in the Egyptian government. The Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) in Egypt had the sole legal right to interpret laws issued by the Legislative
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Authority and to determine the constitutionality of laws and decrees issued by the head of state. However, at that time, it had little power to enforce its pronouncements because of the Islamist bloc’s majority. When the SCC declared that the president’s decrees regarding the new constitution exceeded his legal powers, he simply issued an emergency decree to disband the judiciary to reduce its influence over the constitutional amendment process. Because of the dominance of the Islamist coalition in parliament, Morsi had greater leverage in the executive to disregard the last government branch outside of his control. In an interview after the decision to disband the SCC, Morsi remarked the following:
“I know perfectly what it means to have separation between three powers, executive power, legislative power and the judiciary. This is the main concept about a state based on institutions. The people are the original source of power. The president represents the executive power, and the president is elected by the people.”50
This statement reflects Morsi’s attitudes regarding the roles of the different branches of government in a democracy. While Morsi openly spoke about the importance of democratic checks on power, he based his position on a fundamentally different interpretation of these checks as something having more symbolic importance than a practical purpose in preventing authoritarian government. He interpreted his role in the presidency differently, as drawing its authority from the original, legitimate source of power the majority. In this way, he understood democracy as a system designed to serve the majority rather than to provide framework for reaching consensus with the minority.
The Islamist majority dominated the committees to draft the new constitution and the minority parties were excluded from the process despite Morsi’s statements to the contrary.51
50 Mohamed Morsi, “Transcript: TIME’s Interview with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi,” TIME, 28 November, 2012. 51 Non-Islamist cabinet members complained in retrospect that they had been simply ignored on all major policy issues and were marginalized during the constitutional drafting process. Ultimately, this prompted five government
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The minority members of Parliament viewed the accelerated pace of the amendment process with alarm because it would enable the Islamist parties to achieve their core objective of creating an Islamic constitution. Representatives in the opposition camp, including members of the Egyptian Bloc, the New Wafd, and the April 6 Youth Movement, challenged constitutional amendments that were based on Islamic law, drafted by the committees. In response to the protests of the political minority, President Morsi took another extreme step in October to speed along the process by temporarily freezing the houses of Parliament. Defending his actions, Morsi expressed the importance of the constitution, referring to the disagreements in Parliament as “some sort of misunderstanding from a few.”52 Throughout the process, Morsi worked closely with the committee to meet the tight timeline of drafting a constitution in two months. Although he insisted that the process was taking place without his interference, Morsi had personally issued the decrees, ordering Parliament to create the constitutional committees and personally took responsibility to present articles to the committees for review, all while Parliament itself had been disbanded. He appeared confident about his level of direct involvement, remarking, “Now we don’t have a parliament, so I am responsible for issuing laws...”53 By the time the constitution was held for a vote in the spring, it had already been drafted without seeking consensus from the minority parties of Parliament and contained numerous clauses that applied Islamic law. Without any other recourse, around 25% of the members of parliament, mainly consisting of the non-Islamist members of parliament, walked out of the session in protest
ministers to resign on July 1, 2013 (Al-Jazeera, “Egypt Ministers Resign amid Unrest,” 01 July, 2013; See ElBaradei 2012). 52 Mohamed Morsi, “Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi remains defiant as fears of civil war grow,” The Guardian, 30 June, 2013. 53 Mohamed Morsi, “Transcript: TIME’s Interview with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi,” TIME, 28 November, 2012.
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against the draft proposal. As a result, the vote only consisted of members from the Islamist bloc parties, giving the appearance that it had been near unanimous.
As the constitution was passed, opposition to the Islamist-dominated government continued outside of parliament because it had such a powerful majority in government. In the disorder of the secular-liberal bloc, yet another ad hoc organization came to the fore, this time to confront the Islamist constitution and the exclusive politics of the new government. The Tamarod54 Movement announced in June it would collect 14 million signatures by 29 June, which would call for Morsi’s resignation. The disorganized nature of the movement meant that it collected only around 8.5 million signatures, but it led a new wave of large protests that rivaled those of the 2011 revolution. By July, the numbers of protesters in Tahrir Square alone were estimated by the Ministry of the Interior to be between 14 and 17 million (Aljazeera 2013). Opposition leaders, which had been unsuccessful in influencing policies through institutional means began speaking out in the media to show their disapproval of Morsi’s methods. The prominent secular-liberal opposition leader and Member of Parliament, Mohamed El-Baradei, hosted an academic conference provocatively entitled “After the Departure” along with several other prominent opposition politicians.55 Various non-Islamist politicians within Morsi’s administration increasingly complained that they had been marginalized from key policy decisions and that their advice largely ignored by President Morsi. Sparking further controversy on July 1, five non-Islamist ministers resigned in protest against the Morsi administration (Aljazeera 2013). Meanwhile, Morsi appeared unconcerned. Reacting to the new protests, he insisted, “[Society] is not pulling apart. It’s not pulling apart. It’s a majority and opposition. I can
54 Rebellion (Arabic). 55 Mohamed ElBaradei, “IBA Annual Conference Opening Ceremony,” Aljazeera, 30 October, 2011.
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see it very clear.”56 In the perspective of the administration, because factionalism was so low in
government, it had power to pass new legislation without consulting with the minority political
groups.
While low factionalism in the government caused it to behave in a majoritarian fashion
with little regard for the political opposition, military leaders became increasingly concerned.57
Historically, the military had been aligned with the secular-conservative political bloc of the
Mubarak regime and remained ideologically opposed to political Islam. After eliminating SCAF,
Morsi had taken for granted that its leadership had come under control of the administration as
General Abdul Fattah el-Sissi had been a pious Muslim all his life and had been selected by the
administration to replace Tantawi in August 2012. However, the majority of the officers in the
military appeared to remain tied to the military’s traditional allies in the secular-liberal and
conservative blocs.58 While Morsi may have assumed the threat of the military had been
neutralized, its low factionalism meant that military leaders would give greater consideration to
the corporate interests of the military over personal political connections. During the Morsi
administration, revenues from industries controlled by the military were sinking due to an
economic downturn in the wake of the transition and Morsi’s policies received blame.59 In
addition, most officers in the military remained distrustful of the Muslim Brotherhood as did
56 Mohamed Morsi, “Transcript: TIME’s Interview with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi,” TIME, 28 November, 2012. 57 General Sissi stated retrospectively that he had attempted to council President Morsi numerous times throughout this period and that he had become concerned about the level of unity in Egyptian society (See Washington Post, “Rare Interview with Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi,” 03 August, 2013. 58 Following the transition, the military had continually showed a reluctance to work with the Muslim Brotherhood, preferring instead to appoint secular-liberals such as Mohamed El-Baradei and members of the Wafd Party, such as Coptic Egyptian, Fakry Abdel Nour, in the interim government. During the Presidential election, without a viable candidate from the minority parties, the military fronted its own candidate with no party affiliation to compete against Mohamed Morsi. 59 During this period, the value of the Egyptian pound had decreased by 20% and many people in the opposition and the military were increasingly upset by Morsi’s economic policies (See al-Jazeera, “Egypt Ministers Resign amid Unrest,” 01 July 2013).
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members of the minority parties in Parliament. As a result, they kept open channels of
communication with members of the political opposition throughout the Morsi administration. El
Baradei later admitted after these events that he had regularly spoken with el-Sissi about how to react to Morsi’s handling of the constitutional drafting.60 In this way, the military had continued
to be politically aligned with the minority opposition to the current administration. However, it
could not oppose Morsi through normal political means because its allied civilian faction had too
little influence in the government.
With the protests growing every day, achieving a turnout higher than the 2011 revolution,
El-Sissi encouraged Morsi to meet some of the demands of the opposition. However, Morsi
refused and continued to describe the protests as manifestations of the previous regime and the opposition “trying to rock the boat,” instead of considering them as legitimate participants in the
political process. He viewed it as his responsibility as the president to look into the actions of “whoever... doesn’t observe the benefit of the majority of the people.”61 As the military began to advocate for the demands of the protesters,62 Morsi and his administration continually ignored
the advice of the officers. Sissi later reflected that he had met with Morsi around three times in
the last week of June to persuade him of the need to become more inclusive of the minority political groups.63 However, after violence in front of the presidential palace in Cairo resulted in
7 deaths and 300 injured, Sissi withdrew from the President and began communicating
secretively with members of the opposition about the possibility of change in government and
60 Mohamed ElBaradei, “An interview with Mohamed ElBaradei, who hopes for reconciliation in Egypt,” The Washington Post, 02 August, 2013. 61 Mohamed Morsi, “Transcript: TIME’s Interview with Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi,” TIME, 28 November, 2012. 62 Patrick Kingsley, “Egypt’s army to step in if anti-Morsi rallies become violent,” The Guardian, 23 June, 2013. 63 General Sissi reportedly told El-Baradei around this time that he was repeatedly being ignored by Morsi and regretted that the president was not listening to his advice and taking the opposition seriously (Mohamed ElBaradei, “Interview with Egyptian Politician ElBaradei: ‘This Was Not a Coup,’” Spiegel, 08 July, 2013).
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urged “all political factions to reach consensus by the following Sunday.”64 This unwillingness to negotiate with military leaders who were allied with the opposition parties finally led to the confrontation that ended the Morsi administration in the following month. On July 1, Sissi publicly issued a statement giving an ultimatum to the President Morsi to give in to the demands of the protesters. In it, he remarked, “There is a state of division in society and the continuation of it is a danger to the Egyptian state and there must be consensus among all.”65 The military staged a coup on July 3, arresting president Morsi and disbanding the Islamist dominated administration, ending Egypt’s first democratically elected government.
With low factionalism in the government after the elections, the Morsi administration had developed a majoritarian stance that excluded opposition parties and the military from the constitutional amendment process. The low factionalism in the military placed it in a stronger position to oppose policies of the civilian government it disagreed with and enabled it to intervene if no other viable options existed for influencing policy. Because the political allies of the military in parliament had become so excluded by the dominant faction in government, the military was unable to have an impact on policy-making after the election. Thus, leaders of the military determined an intervention to be the only way of preventing an Islamic constitution in the absence of other options. The coup that ended Egypt’s democracy resulted from three important factors. First, the dominant organization of the Muslim Brotherhood ensured that other civilian political groups would become severely disadvantaged in the democratically elected government. Second, the lack of an institutional basis guaranteeing a consensus-based process for creating new policies enabled the dominant group with low factionalism to entirely exclude minority parties from policy making. Third, the failure of the government to produce consensus
64 Patrick Kingsley, “Egypt’s army to step in if anti-Morsi rallies become violent,” The Guardian, 23 June, 2013. 65 Patrick Kingsley, “Egypt’s army to step in if anti-Morsi rallies become violent,” The Guardian, 23 June, 2013.
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in parliament with the opposition parties prevented the military from using its connections with civilian leaders to resolve a conflict through regular political means.
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IV: Conclusion: Indonesia and Egypt Compared
The purpose of this paper has been to compare two cases of democratic transitions in to identify factors that influence their different outcomes. In my analysis, I have attempted to give greater attention to the role of civilians in the transition process, following the example of other studies of democratic transitions (Cottey et al 2002; Mietzner 2009, 2014). However, I have also concentrated on role of the military, regarding the military and the civilian government as equally important actors in the cases of Indonesia and Egypt. In this way, the analysis has focused more directly on the relationship between the government and the military, identifying factionalism as one of the principle contributors to the success or failure of democratic transitions. For this type of analysis to work, the selected cases need to be similar enough in the initial phase of the transition that they have a basis for comparison. Indonesia and Egypt meet this requirement as a number of factors during the initial transition period line up quite well. In both cases, the country had emerged from a several decades-long period of authoritarian government, which had had strong ties to the military. The previous regime in both cases had applied similar strategies to create legitimacy for the regime by controlling a limited number of parties in a “tolerated opposition.” As a result, civil society and the military were in comparable situations at the beginning of the democratic transitions in both societies. In this way the circumstances of the relationship between civilian groups and the military at different periods during the transition had an impact on the different trajectories in each case. Focusing on the groups with significant influence within the military and in civilian political parties, this paper has identified factors that affect the relationship between the military and civilians by creating or mitigating conflict. Different levels of factionalism in the military and the elected government
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shape the interaction between the two groups and consequently are a crucial factor affecting the success of democratic transitions.
Factionalism in the Military
In Indonesia and Egypt, the military establishments found themselves in crises as they had to choose between continuing to support an aging regime that was losing legitimacy and a new civilian political system that would be more difficult to control. Both the Indonesian and Egyptian militaries had vested interests in the regime and stood to lose power in the new government, but in both cases military leaders took calculated risks to support a political change because the old regime was unsustainable. In Indonesia, many civilian leaders had already begun to voice their intentions to reform the structure of the military in order to permanently reduce its presence in politics. While the Egyptian military had not become as heavily involved in the operations of government as the Indonesian military had during the Suharto regime, it nevertheless enjoyed a certain degree of political influence in Mubarak’s administration with the majority of ministry positions going to former officers. Although Mubarak maintained a strong system of top-down control over the military, Egypt’s military did not differ in this respect from the Indonesian military, which also received direct appointments and directives from President Suharto throughout the New Order Era. Additionally, the Egyptian and Indonesian militaries both had rather major economic interests as each controlled vast segments of important industries. Networks of corruption in Egypt and Indonesia allowed the military leaders to maintain access to revenues from military operated businesses. In this way, the Egyptian and Indonesian militaries had roughly similar interests at the time of the respective regime changes.
However, the militaries in Indonesia and Egypt took different courses of action to secure their interests from the rapid changes associated with the political transitions. These different
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trajectories resulted from important differences primarily in how the military structures were organized. The Indonesian military had become increasingly factionalized throughout the New Order period because of the extent of its involvement in national and local politics as well as Suharto’s particular strategy of dividing his generals against one another (Said 2006; Mietzner 2009). The doctrine of “dual function”66 in the Indonesian military had been used by the New Order regime to justify the direct participation of military members in civilian government. Unlike the Egyptian military, the Indonesian military allowed its members to retain their rank and status in the military hierarchy while simultaneously holding an appointment in a national civilian body, such as the Indonesian Parliament. Throughout its existence, the New Order regime maintained a sham electoral system, in which majorities in both houses of parliament and key minister positions remained filled by military officers. While this was true to a lesser extent in Mubarak’s Egypt, the Egyptian military did not follow the same organizational structure of the Indonesian military that allowed it to exist in a parallel format to local governments. The regional command system of the Indonesian military, originating in the pre-independence period during the 1940s, enabled it to maintain direct influence at every level of civilian government from the village administration to districts and regencies.67 The extent of the Indonesian military’s integration into civilian politics went well beyond the Egyptian military’s level of political involvement. Simultaneously, Suharto’s method of managing the military differed from Mubarak’s as it deliberately promoted competition within the ranks to create factions. This strategy of encouraging factionalism prevented any one of Suharto’s generals from acquiring too much influence to directly challenge him. Although this strategy eventually failed to protect the regime from collapse in 1998, Suharto’s political maneuvering had successfully produced

66 Dwifungsi. 67 Koter (Komando Teritorial).

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divisions that would raise the level of factionalism in the Indonesian military prior to Indonesia’s democratic transition. By contrast to the Indonesian military in 1998, Egypt’s military at the beginning of 2011 continued to enjoy very high organizational integrity and low levels of factionalism.
Factionalism in the Elected Government
Civil society in Egypt on the eve of the January Revolution mirrored Indonesian civil society in 1998 in many respects. In both countries, the previous regime had heavily restricted electoral systems and confined political competition to a small number of tolerated parties. In Indonesia, Suharto had limited the number of opposition parties to three, which existed only as a symbolic opposition in order to prop up and legitimize the regime. The most prominent opposition party, the PDI-P,68 had never been permitted to gain a majority in the militarydominated Parliament and only became a real challenger to the regime during the upheaval of the 1997 crisis. The regime party, Golkar, maintained a continuous majority in Parliament throughout the New Order Era as the official political party of the military. Following Suharto’s resignation, however, the number of registered parties in Indonesia increased rapidly. Similarly to Indonesia, Egypt under Mubarak had only a small number of parties allowed to compete in sham elections, in which the regime’s party, the NDP, maintained the majority of seats. As in Indonesia, the number of registered parties prior to the first democratic elections held in 2011 grew to an unprecedentedly large number. In both countries, the large number of newly created parties gave immediately following the regime’s collapse gave way to a heavily contentious political environment among civilian parties.
68 Partai Demokrat Indonesia Perjuangan (Democratic Party of Indonesia, Struggle).
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However, while the initial circumstances were comparable, the two cases diverged from one another during the elections to create the new civilian governments. In the case of Indonesia, civilian parties remained divided in the houses of Parliament between several smaller, weaker coalitions, which struggled to promote coherent policies. The high levels of factionalism in the Indonesian government meant that no single party or coalition of parties could create a strong enough majority to dominate all policy decisions. The post-transition presidency in Indonesia depended on a relatively weak political coalition in Parliament, which shifted the moment a major disagreement emerged. Consequently, the military reform agenda of the Wahid Presidency struggled to gain momentum as it gradually lost support from the other factions in parliament, which formed new alliances with members of the military. High factionalism in Indonesian civil society prevented Wahid from wielding power to the extent that he could exclude other groups from policy decisions. By contrast, Egypt’s election resulted in a large and highly organized political bloc that dominated both parliament and the presidency. In the wake of the revolution, the Islamist bloc had a significant advantage over the rest of civil society because it had already developed its support through many years of opposing the previous regime. While the secularliberal bloc of political parties consisted of a large number of disorganized groups, the Islamist bloc in Egypt was effective at organizing support and securing a great majority of the votes during the election. The Islamist segment of Egypt’s civil society different significantly from Indonesia’s as it had continuously functioned outside of the official system of tolerated parties under the regime and had emerged as one of the few experienced parties that was untainted by an association with the regime. In Egypt’s first free elections, the Islamist parties, consisting mainly of the Salifist Al Nour and the FJP, acquired an overwhelming majority in the parliamentary
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elections. In this way, the Morsi government had very low factionalism as it enjoyed support from a strong coalition of Islamist parties following the elections.
Different Outcomes
Although Egypt and Indonesia had similar circumstances surrounding their democratic transitions, the levels of factionalism of the military and civil society in each case differed dramatically. These differences in factionalism determined the type of relationship between the military and civil society and contributed to the different outcomes of the democratic transitions in the two cases. In the case of Indonesia, the high factionalism of the elected government within civil society rendered it incapable of effectively imposing its will unilaterally on various aspects of reform. Wahid’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies had driven an increasing number of civilian parties into the opposition. Simultaneously, the high factionalism in the military and its history of political alliances with civilians enabled various military factions to form a number of coalitions with civilian politicians. As a result, when President Wahid attempted to impose a series of rapid reforms targeting the military, factions in the military succeeded in limiting the power of the presidency through its alliance with the opposition parties. In this way, political alliances that existed between factions in the military and civil society enabled military leaders to secure their interests through civilian political channels. Thus, the ability of groups to negotiate with each other across the civil-military divide prevented a coup from taking place.
In contrast to Indonesia, Egypt after the 2012 presidential election witnessed the emergence of an unchallengeable majority in the elected government, consisting of the Muslim Brotherhood and its coalition of Islamic parties. In Egypt, the low factionalism in civil society enabled the elected government to begin unilaterally imposing its Islamist political agenda. In the absence of a constitutional framework that limited the power of the different branches of
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government, the Islamist political majority could begin to implement various aspects of its
platform without seeking consultation from the minority opposition. As a result, the military,
which had continued to retain its ties with politicians in the conservative bloc of parties including
the NDP, had no normal political channels through which it could have its own interests
represented. During this period, the military remained ideologically opposed to Islamist politics.
While many officers continued to adhere to the secular nationalist ideology of the Free Officers Movement,69 others simply disapproved of the government’s handling of the economy and the current political protests.70 By contrast to Indonesia, low factionalism in the military meant that it
could reliably count on its constituent parts to take a more committed course of united action
against the civilian government if it felt its interests to be significantly threatened. Leading up to
the July Coup in 2013, the Morsi administration continued to ignore pleas by opposition parties
and minority groups in civil society to incorporate the opposition into the process of drafting the
new constitution. Simultaneously, frequent warnings from the commander of the military, El-
Sissi, to pay greater attention to the demands of protesters continued to go unheeded by President
Morsi. In the days leading up to the July Coup in 2013, these circumstances created a
combustible relationship between the military and the government. The very low factionalism of
the civilian government under Morsi led the military to view the high costs associated with a
coup as acceptable because of its inability to influence politics through its political connections
with civilians. Given the low factionalism within its ranks, the military knew it could
successfully lead a coup with minimal costs to its own integrity and legitimacy. Thus, while the
69 In 1952, Gamal Abdel Nasser and a group of military officers abolished the monarchy and began the chain of regime succession in the military, which ended with the resignation of Mubarak. The military’s political ideology had been secular, with Nasserists promoting a socialist reform agenda, which viewed the Islamist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood as too narrow to encompass the Egyptian national identity. 70 General El-Sissi reportedly warned Morsi several times that he needed to respond with concessions to some of the protesters’ demands (See Abdel Fatah El-Sissi, 2013, “Rare Interview with Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi,” The Washington Post, 03 August, 2013.)
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Indonesian military never resorted to such extreme measures to influence policy in Indonesia’s transition, the Egyptian military chose to intervene in early July, 2013.
The differences between these two cases demonstrate the importance of the type of relationship that prevails between civilians and the military throughout a political transition. As these cases show, the stability of that relationship depends in large part on the level of factionalism in both groups. Higher factionalism in the military and civil society produces more stable outcomes because it enables consensus to form between factions on both sides. By contrast, new democracies based on rule by the majority create disagreements that are unresolvable through political dialogue as long as institutions that put limitations on the power of the majority do not exist. As the comparison of these two cases shows, the ideological basis for a new democracy can have a major impact on the potential for conflict, depending on whether the elected government bases its legitimacy on the presence of an overly strong majority. The high factionalism in civilian politics and the military in Indonesia allowed various political alliances to emerge between civil society and the military, allowing the military and the elected government to settle a major disagreement without a coup. In Egypt, low factionalism in civil society and the military reduced the potential for dialogue between military and civilian leaders, increasing the potential for conflict. Because of different dynamics between factions in the civilian government and the military in Egypt and Indonesia, two drastically different examples of democracy emerged with different long-term impacts for their political transitions.
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