5 - The Social Contract Broken Twice

Summary

During the oil-boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, the effendi social contract broke down in an unlikely period when the Egyptian state had regained resources that would allow it to sponsor this social contract as never before. This chapter, therefore, predates the breakdown of the effendi social contract, which is often associated with post-oil-boom economic retrenchment and the implementation of economic reform and structural adjustment (ERSA) programs in Egypt. At the same time, fast socio-economic mobility – the result of informal liberalisation of the Egyptian economy – saw the creation of a broad middle class or a middle-class society, despite the seeming demise of the effendi middle class in public discourse. In this discourse – in reality a discourse dominated by the upper-middle class – the effendi social contract broke down twice: first, as a vertical political agreement between citizens and the state and its accompanying moral economy, and second, as a horizontal social agreement among members of Egyptian middle-class society.

This chapter begins by exploring Sadat's Corrective Revolution, through an analysis of Egypt's new, 1971 constitution and the 1974 October Working Paper that officially launched the Open Door policy (infitah). In a rather paradoxical fashion, the notion of revolution here stood for preserving an existing political economy associated with Nasser and Arab socialism through its partial liberalisation by amendment or correction. The second part of this chapter, ‘Oil-Boom Populism’, further corroborates this argument by analysing growing state spending on various articles of the effendi social contract. The third part of the chapter shows that the 1977 Food Uprising enhanced the state's commitment to the provisioning of citizens. Finally, ‘Socio-economic Mobility and Its Discontents’ suggests that the effendi social contract broke down during the oil-boom era not as a result of the demise of the middle class but owing to the rapid expansion of that class – estimated to have constituted some 45 per cent of Egyptians by the mid-1980s – and the social unrest that this caused.

The Corrective Revolution

In the literature on political change in Egypt, Nasser's Arab socialism is often associated with populism, while Sadat's liberal Open Door policy is discussed as post-populist – an era in which the state retrenched employment, services and subsidies to citizens.