MEMO FOR (Sanitized) FROM BOB AMES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP86B00985R000200230020-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 3, 2005
• Sequence Number: 20
• Publication Date: October 30, 1979
• Content Type: MF

MEMRIN
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between the perceptions of the USA Institute and those of high Soviet officials. If the in-
stitute has "access to the top echelons of power" (p. 163), as he asserts, we would like to
know why its writings "often differ considerably from the accounts on the same subject
appearing in the Soviet media" (p. 6). Schwartz raises the question of the extent of the in-
stitute's influence on Soviet policy but does not really answer it.
In a Moment of Enthusiasm: Political Power and the Second Stratum in Egypt
by Leonard Binder. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, 1978. 437 pp.
$22.50.
Both liberals and Marxists in recent years have had to reassess their earlier expectations
that rapid social and economic development in a predictable direction would follow the
national awakening of the new states of Africa. and Asia. In the Middle East, the collapse
of Lebanon has removed the liberals' primary model of democratic development in that
region, while the "new middle class" has often conformed more closely to the stagnant
and parasitic national bourgeoisie condemned by Fanon than to the standard-bearer of
modernization in which writers like. Manfred Halpern placed their hopes. At the same
time, a strong proletariat has failed to develop, and the. gap between the national and
social revolutions, which Nasser described in his Philosophy of the Revolution, remains
as wide as ever.
Leonard Binder's new book on Egypt is a significant academic response both to the
vagueness of earlier formulations of tradition, modernity, and the new middle class, and
to the realization that development is neither unidirectional nor necessarily very rapid.
Drawing on Gaetano Mosca's theory of the "second stratum," Binder demonstrates con-
vincingly that there has been, for over a century, a relatively quiescent and pliable
mediating class in Egypt without which the rulers have not been able to rule. This im-
pressive agent of continuity, comprising about 3 percent of the total population of Egypt,
or between 700,000 and 1 million people, is the rural middle class. By analyzing nearly
30,000 names in the register of Nasser's mass party, the National Union, Binder
establishes significant ancestral links between the contemporary rural middle class and an
earlier prerevolutionary agrarian notability whose members were represented in elected
assemblies as far back as 1866 under Isma'il Khedive. He further shows that this rural elite
has maintained its position and political influence throughout the country through suc-
cessive reorganizations of the Arab Socialist Union to the present day.
Binder's argument, however, is not that nothing has changed. The bulk of his book is
devoted to a rigorous internal analysis of the geographic, occupational, and political
characteristics of the second stratum and a series of detailed statistical correlations with
indices of modernization, agrarian development, and land ownership. From this data it
emerges that the rural elite is most prevalent in the more industrially developed districts
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and "traditional" occupations. These findings are somewhat modified by the greater con-
 566 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
centration of power,that remains in the hands of the less numerous rural elite in upper
Egypt. But overall, the correlation with the more highly capitalized agricultural sector
and the apparent shift by some segments of the class to more urban settings are reminis-
cent of Barrington Moore's description of the English aristocracy that gradually "commit-
ted decorous suicide" in transforming its economic base.
Binder's important study opens up several new directions for students of Egypt and of
the Third World. Historically, he has thrown new light on traditional interpretations of
episodes such as the triangular conflict between the Wafd, the monarchy, and the British
between the world wars. By showing that the Wafd and the king both needed support
from the rural middle class and in fact successively elected many of the same people to
parliament, Binder draws attention to a relatively consensual second layer of the political
elite that is missed by an exclusive focus on the top leadership. The test of continuity
must now be extended to Sadat's latest reorganization of the mass party which, while
superficially dramatic, may have produced no greater change of personnel than earlier
such reorganizations and changes of name.
Another direction suggested by Binder's work is a close examination of the relation-
ships between the rural elite and other classes such as the landless peasants and the urban
bourgeoisie. Although Binder indicates that the mediating task of the rural middle class is
performed by its integration into the peasant culture of the village, these links must be
empirically verified. And despite Binder's conclusion that there is "a significant hiatus
between the urban and rural political arenas" (p. 404), the economic and social boundary
between the urbanized elements of the rural middle class and the urban bourgeoisie re-
mains unclear. Similarly, Binder's discussion of the infighting among the top-leadership
before and after Nasser's death, while fascinating in itself, remains rather detached from
the earlier empirical evidence on the rural elite. It is the lack of adequate linkage with
other classes that makes the demonstration of a Marxist "moment of enthusiasm," which
gives the book its title, somewhat problematical. But that is a task for another book.
Meanwhile, the subtitle of this book, which better reflects its content, indicates a third
major direction to be pursued. Binder's historical and statistical analysis of one significant
class, not necessarily the most obvious at first sight, and his detailed internal differentia-
tion of the various segments of that class, suggest a focus and a methodology of great im-
portance for comparative analysis. Similar studies in countries like Algeria and India will
not only help "to break the epistemological barrier between area studies and behavioral
science" (p. xvii), toward which Binder aspires, but will also add an important dimension
to studies of modernization and development that could shed new light on many puzzling
aspects of Third World revolutions '~ _:,,*s5> N ~ti c ,;t cr a a?v c
elca2 1/1 ;QA..
RONALD COLMAN
State University of New York at New Paltz
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BOOK REVIEWS ` 567
Egypt's UncertainRevolution under Nasser and Sadat by Raymond Will
Baker. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978 290 pp.$
Baker's work is exceptionally, helpful for understanding Egypt's development during the
last quarter-century. A splendid sense of problem and scholarly judgment have produced
a volume that is filled with vivid and decisive facts and with analyses of turning points;
yet Baker presents it. all with impressive brevity, depth, and lucidity.. The book's material
is based primarily on Arabic sources. gathered during prolonged field study.
The story Baker tells is that of two leaders who have both based -their power on the
military and the security police. A docile technocratic caste, composed in largest plurality
of engineers, benefited under both regimes. Under Sadat, middlemen and entrepreneurs
also profit. But a new political community has not been created. Baker draws upon Egyp-
tian independent leftists, and at times on the independent-minded and very able--Soviet
scholar G. I. Mirsky, to make some of his most telling points. He sums up one Egyptian
critic this way: A genuinely new community "could not be realized by elite manipulation,
no matter how bold. Such a revolution could only mean the self-transformation of a peo-
ple. Such a self-transformation in turn necessitated supportive institutional and intellec-
tual structures. Judged by this standard, the rule of Anwar es-Sadat so far has been as
disappointing as that of his predecessor" (pp. 239-240). I share this judgment. Giving it
such space in this review, however, is a bit misleading. The~greatest nvirtue
reaof this obboo 5_
stems from its mores ecInc AIL Egyptian bureaucracy, the
failure in the hi 44 . - ' original military conspirators, the political organization, the agricultural coop attvQS
orientation to orei n oli The barriers to trans orma ion are s own to have become
deeper, in part because power as become both more personalized and more
bureaucratized.
Baker is right in illuminating for us a group of military conspirators moving toward
Nasser's coup of 1952 who were more united by personal ties than by explicit ideological
positions; more pushed by contingencies than by their own historical decisions.. Other
scholars (including myself) had not been able to ascertain these characteristics as clearly
in the early 1960s. He shows that these attributes have continued to mark the Egyptian
top elite's style right to the present.. This elite has also remained far more solicitous for
and dependent upon the army and secret police than on the rest of its people. Its greatest
payoffs and losses, even for its domestic development, have come from its investment in
a succession of foreign policies. 1 11 " .
This elite was correspondingly, wary of creating a revolutionary vanguard. For people
generally, therefore, "the primary motives for joining the mass parties [created by
Nasser] were the nonideological -even conservative-ones of protecting existing rights,
maintaining social prestige, securing redress of specific grievances, and possibly attain-
ing minimal qualifications for cooption into the higher echelons of the state" (p. 99). As a
result, the economy is bankrupt, but in Sadat's days the new wealth of "the survivors of
the old liberal bourgeoisie, the inherited state bourgeoisie, and the newly emergent
parasitic bourgeoisie ... has angered the mass of the Egyptian people" (p. 151). Sadat thus reinforced "pressures, especially class pressures, that one day may in fact bring more
169). ,..:
fundamental changes" (p.
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 568 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
There is, as yet, no reason to suppose that the fundamentally new society to come in
Egypt will also be fundamentally better. Baker's book informs us incisively why Egypt's
revolution has been not merely "uncertain," but certainly partial and halting at best. He
does not tell us what a transforming revolution requires. Nobody tells us that these days.
Most of us write about problems of improving order or overcoming disorder or even
more carefully on the relatively smaller problems of orientations and decision making.
We modestly wait for modern revolutionaries to provide us with empirical data about
revolutionary practice. But these leaders are of very little help. They may take a few
steps, but they do concentrate from the first day on consolidating the revolution. If there
is ever to be a genuinely transforming revolution somewhere, it will gain its first critical
and creative consciousness as it has always: someone will write a book. And the revolu-
tion will persist unless someone, once again, consolidates the book.
MANFRED HALPERN
eltw /& f4ei LOktt k &o6 Princeton University
Q!a~t Y I'
Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology by Gail M. Gerhart.
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. 364 pp. $14.50.
Since his death in police custody during September 1977, Steven Biko has become an in-
ternational hero, perhaps the most widely known South African black leader since Albert
Lutuli won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. As Gail Gerhart's impressive history of black
power politics in South Africa makes clear, it is insufficient to focus on Biko as a
courageous and compelling individual who sparked a new generation's revolt against an
intolerable system. Biko, and others whose names have not made the press, can best be
understood as the continuers and developers of one line of resistance to white domina-
tion, a line deeply rooted in South African black society.
This line of resistance, which Gerhart calls "black power" or "orthodox African na-
tionalism," has until the Soweto revolt commanded less attention than the "liberal" or
"multiracist" line espoused by Lutuli and the African National Congress (ANC). A
hallmark of the ANC has been its. "realist" perspective on action within a social and
political order dominated by a powerful white minority. From its beginning the ANC has
welcomed alliance with sympathetic whites (and Asians and Coloureds), so as to be able
to draw on their economic and organizational resources, and no doubt also on a certain
amount of protection from official and unofficial harassment. Inevitably, it has stressed
the liberal goal of a South Africa in which race would be a simple irrelevancy. Christiani-
ty has provided one powerful ideological underpinning for multiracialism; Marxism-
Leninism has provided another. As the South African government has forced the ANC
into clandestine and exile operations and closed off most hope for peaceful change
toward a multiracial society, the organizational, financial, and ideological resources of
the world's Marxist-Leninists have become increasingly relevant.
Black power has appealed not to the "realists" of South Africa, but to its "rebels," those
concerned less with the need for protection and less with the long-term goals for society,
and more with the means for bringing about a revolt of the African majority. For Anton