[Notes: this post is unwarrantied and unchecked; I'm in a cafe with my iPad and the dratted, awful WordPress app, so there are no links; my on-the-ground knowledge of the specifics of Egypt is nil; my entire expertise here derives from two years as an undergrad studying revolution, during which time my principle concern was the girl with the gorgeously tiny waist and the nose ring and whether she would go to bed with me if I was able to demonstrate sufficient grasp of the Critical Theory of Theodore Adorno; I wrote this mostly for myself and I welcome corrections; oh, and it's long. Caveat lector.]

The thing about revolution…

Sooooo… Egypt is in turmoil. If the Mubarak government falls – and this morning, every seems to be saying that is on the cards – the face of the region will change. The eternal optimism of the industrialised capitalist world seems to be in play again: the press narrative has been of plucky Egyptian democrats standing against oppressive regime coppers. And that may well be or have been the reality. However, a few words of caution are in order, lest we once again be disappointed by the outcome of a political upheaval and wrong-footed by the direction it takes.

In the background (until a few hours ago when it declared support for the protests) is the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s the largest single opposition group in Egypt, where, indeed, it was created. The product of the early part of the 20th Century and its ideological revolutionisms, the Muslim Brotherhood is a modern fundamentalist movement with aspects culled from Russian Anarchism and Marxism as much as from Islam. What it emphatically is not is an organisation which loves America, liberal values, and rock and roll.

This unrest may have begun as a popular democratic rejection of the Mubarak regime, but what will happen now is not clear. A coup d’état is a relatively simple business in which one person or group displaces another, but the system of government and social structure is largely unaltered. This isn’t going to be one of those. In one way or another, this looks set to be what Theda Skocpol called ‘rapid social change’ – or, more popularly, revolution. And revolution is fundamentally complex, even chaotic (in the mathematical sense) and its outcome is hard to predict and impossible to control.

Take a look at a few historical examples. Start with the one which is most often considered normative, in part because history claims the word was coined to describe it: the French Revolution. You had a social structure which was incompatible with its economic environment – an increasingly affluent middle class being denied status by an entrenched but largely unproductive aristocracy. Down below, the peasants class and the urban working class were, inevitably, getting screwed by everyone. The middle class went into rebellion – political, not physical – over voting rights and power. Their desire was not in the first place to destroy the monarchy or to smash the existing structure, but to join the elite. The lower classes, meanwhile, did not intend to usher in the new tyranny of The Terror or the rise of an empire. They wanted what peasants and workers almost always want from their government, and rarely get: food and personal security. But once the ball started rolling, no one could steer it. Consilient, contradictory forces generated outcomes which were painful for French people for decades. One can argue, in favour of the revolution, that the end product was a democratic republic – but that requires a selective slice through the history, a drawing of lines under one period and an assertion of beginnings and endings which I find a little arbitrary. Safer to say that the Revolution was a part of France’s journey to democracy, a turmoil in which the ideal was first expressed as the future of the nation, albeit with uncertain sincerity. But those ideas did not spring full blown from the revolutionary period and they were not actualised until after the period was over.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the same. The original uprising against the absolute monarch was a rejection of the state as it stood and of the social order. In the chaos, a small but extremely well-organised group of ideologues was able to take control of the popular discourse – but when they found themselves in power, the contradictions of their position became apparent. Their ideology was in conflict with the promises they had made. The system of distributed local government – of soviets – was destroyed and replaced b the centralised Party. The grass roots revolution became the soviet one, which was in turn displaced by a totalitarian group, and the White Tsars were replaced by the Red Tsars.

America, China, England, Spain, Portugal, and Iran have all engaged in revolution in the last four hundred years, some of them more than once, and on not one of those occasions has the outcome matched the expectation. England’s revolution was the first, and even now the aristocracy, the monarchy, and the Church of England retain an extraordinary if indirect grasp on power. Our present government is composed largely of men whose path through life would not look socially out of place in a history of 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th Century Britain.

So who are the players in Egypt’s drama? Sayyid Qutb, decades dead, is one: an angry young man sent from Egypt to America by friends who wanted him to loosen up, he underwent instead a kind of transformation. His journey through early 20th Century America as a man who was obviously not white, and who was inclined towards a conservative and faith-based perception, so appalled him that he crafted a synthesis of modern revolutionary ideas and Islam which effectively took the evils of capitalism as the evils of unrighteousness and substituted the deity for socialism or anarchy. That synthesis is one of the foundations of modern Islamism (and the Muslim Brotherhood), and of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Above all, their strength is in a clear, simple rhetoric and a pre-existing power structure.

Democrats, for sure: basic assumption is that they’re urban and educated middle class people, cosmopolitan in outlook and desperate for prosperity and gentle social progression (but not too much of it). A powerful, intellectual minority, but not a power base in and of themselves. And nuance plays badly in revolution.

The army, inevitably: classically the poorer and less well-educated people from rural and urban-poor backgrounds. Are they largely secular or moderate, or do they tend towards the Muslim Brotherhood? The officer class may have sympathies with the democrats or may be vested in Mubarak’s regime, depending on their own culpability and their assessment of the threat from within.

The rural and urban lower classes – farmers and manual workers. The ‘real people’. Historically – in other cases, which may or may not be similar – they know when they can’t take any more, and what they need – but which way will they break? Absent a charismatic and powerful leader emerging from this group and creating his or her own structures, they will be channelled by a nearby, compelling narrative. The slogan will be akin to ‘food, peace, freedom’, and the new regime will have either to delivery very fast or suppress the inevitable cries of outrage and betrayal. This is where the Russian February Revolution fell and the October Revolution changed the course of Russia from nascent distributed democracy to one-party state.

External forces – the US, EU, Israel, Pakistan, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the other Arab states. All or any of the above may seek to influence events and any such attempt will change what happens, but not necessarily in a predictable way.

So, yes, Mubarak’s regime is nasty. But given Egypt’s place in the world and the powers in play, it’s not clear to me that its fall is going to take us anywhere good. Given that it’s happening, of course, we will have to be in the mix, trying to get an outcome which suits us. The trouble is, again looking at history, our power brokers will prefer a strongman to a democrat vulnerable to being unseated by a religious ideologue. Someone, somewhere, is even now submitting a recommendation to back such a person over and above a genuine democrat, and if that course is followed we will yet again be in the business of supporting a monster for fear of a worse one, and the reputation of the developed northwest will sink further in the eyes of the Arab world – and, indeed, anyone else who’s paying attention.