Great posts, folks. It’s gratifying as an analyst and an author when people really dig into your work, ask probing questions, and fill in implications. One of the great things about this exchange is that it brings into sharp relief something other authors have told me and that perhaps I did not fully understand. A book is never really finished. There are always new avenues of analyses to pursue, new questions to be asked, and new facts to be discovered.

I’ll take on Mona’s post first and then move into an exchange with Yasemin’s comments on Turkey. Finally, I’ll take the two J’s together since their comments are focused almost exclusively on Egypt. Jon, I hope posting in Munich did not make you late for your connection.

First I want to thank Mona for being the lonely voice on Algeria. Turkey has been in the news lately and Egypt is an interest (obsession?) of so many people that Algeria often gets lost in the mix. American analysts have in some ways abdicated study of the country to our French colleagues.

I may have been too flip when I stated that Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt is actually looking pretty good. Certainly Egypt looks better in comparison to Iraq, but not against a number of other countries in the region or even the Egypt of a few years ago.

Now on to Algeria. I believe Mona makes a good point when she questions my claim about stability, especially given the carnage of the 1990s and the very fact that a remnant of Algeria’s civil insurrection survived and has now morphed into al-Qa’ida of the Maghreb. Scary stuff. Yet, let’s look at it from a different perspective. In early 1992, the military felt threatened and took precipitous (and risky) action—nullified an election and ousted a president—to ensure the survival of their regime. The immediate result was a destabilization of the political system, but less than ten years later, after pulverizing the Islamist (and extremist) opposition, the Algerian political system remained intact. During the dark period of violence, the military and its agents went about rewriting the constitution to ensure that the explosion did not happen again. I am afraid that what we are left with is not necessarily the old Algeria, but an updated version of Algeria’s authoritarian system that responds better to challenges. This is precisely what I am talking about in RBNG when I refer to “institutional revision” or “re-engineering.”

While we are on the subject of engineering, let me turn my attention to Yasemin’s comments. It is abundantly obvious to me that Kemalism never achieved ideological hegemony in Turkey. In the Turkish political arena, Mustafa Kemal’s reforms have been under attack almost from the beginning from a variety of groups, notably conservative Muslims and Kurds. At the same time, it is abundantly clear for anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in Ankara. Yes, Anitkabir is very impressive and building-sized posters of Ataturk adorn many buildings, particularly during national holidays. Officials pay fealty to the principles of Kemalism publicly. Doesn’t this all have an artificial quality to it? After all, if Kemalism had achieved ideological hegemony, why all the elaborate paeans to the leader and his philosophy? Why would the keepers of the Kemalist flame need to literally patrol the political arena to guard against any deviation from orthodoxy?

Here is the bottom line: The once insular outpost on NATO’s southeastern flank is now becoming an economic, political, and diplomatic player in its own right. Turkey has become more complex and differentiated in recent years. It is well integrated in the global economy and a new elite is emerging. These developments make it extraordinarily difficult to enforce the drab conformity that Kemalism demands.

Turkey is just at the beginning of a national debate about many of the core issues of Kemalism—the relationship between religion and state, the role of the military, Turkey’s relationship with the West. The outcome of the July 22 elections and the machinations preceding them will determine much about the tone and timing of that conversation, but like or not, that discussion is going to happen and Turkey will be a much different place as a result.

Jason brings up a very interesting point and something that I try to elucidate in RBNG—how the “Egyptian system” works. As Jason points out, it is very much a symbiotic relationship between Armed Forces, Interior Ministry, National Democratic Party, and related groups that share their collective agenda. In the final analysis, as Jon alludes to in his post, the military remains the primary factor because it is the organization that can make or break a president and defend the regime. I also want to flag Jason’s insightful point about civilianization. This issue drove me crazy when I was writing RBNG. A decade of scholarship assumed that Egypt had been civilianized and thus must be on a trajectory of change after Marc N. Cooper’s 1981 article in the International Journal of Middle East Studies titled, “The Demilitarization of the Egyptian Cabinet.” As I point out in RBNG, counting heads misses the point of the elaborate institutional apparatus that ensures the prevailing regime and the officers’ place in it.

I deeply appreciate Jon’s comparison of contemporary developments in Egypt and Turkey. One of the main goals of RBNG was to highlight the differences among the three countries in order to demonstrate the decisive role of the militaries. The Turks, in particular, do not appreciate my comparison, but there is no denying that all three countries have historically shared similar political patterns and processes.