Security, Donors' Interests, and Education Policy Making in Egypt

In this essay I examine how the issue of national security has influenced Egypt's decision-making process in education policy and how types of foreign cooperation, interaction, and/or involvement in education reflect Egypt's foreign policy orientations and its stance on strategic security issues. I also explore definitions of national security, how and why education has always been considered a national security issue, and how national security is interpreted differently by domestic actors, the state, and foreign donors. I also examine the impact of Islamist fundamentalism on education policies throughout the past decade, as well as how territorial integrity and the Arab-Israeli conflict have influenced the education debate. I argue that containing the influence of Islamist fundamentalism on the educational system has been a major security concern for the Egyptian government and a decisive element in education policy making.

Education has always been used by the various regimes in Egypt as a source of legitimacy and an indication of patriotism and governmental commitment to the masses. It is such an important public opinion issue that the national Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, in its issue of 21 August 2000, accused the then minister of education, Hussein Kamel Bahaaeddin, of inflating the results of the secondary school exams in order to appeal to public opinion before the October 2000 parliamentary elections.¹ Public opinion has, for a long time, held that sovereign and competent governments are those that acknowledge free education as a basic social right for all citizens and provide it.²

Donors and Education Policy in Egypt

Egypt has topped lists of development assistance recipients since it signed the Camp David peace treaty in 1978 and has been second to Israel in receiving US Agency for International Development (USAID) funds. It also tops the list of recipients of European Union development assistance, at 5.5 percent in 1997–8.³ Development assistance to Egypt in 1991 amounted to US $4.6 billion, which represented around 10 percent of the total development assistance in the world.⁴ Large donors such as the United States, the World Bank, the African Development Fund, the EU, Germany, France, Canada, and others allocated considerable parts of their assistance budgets to basic education and recognized it as a fundamental element of human capital formation.

Area specialists explain that the education sector in Egypt has attracted large amounts of foreign development assistance because of Egypt's strategic importance and geopolitical position, proximity to Israel, key role in the peace process, massive population, and cultural influence on neighboring countries. All these factors render Egypt a central agent in determining the stability of the Middle East and southern Mediterranean area.⁵ Egypt is a key ally of the United States and Western European countries, and the Egyptian government also maintains cordial relations with other key powers in Southeast Asia and the Eastern European countries. Egypt played a very important role in repressing Hashim El-Ata's communist coup in Sudan, restrained the advancement of communism in Somalia, and confronted it at all levels in the Arab world.⁶ Moreover, it played a major role in driving several neighboring countries in the Middle East area away from Soviet dominion long before the end of the Cold War in 1989.⁷ Thus, providing development assistance and improving the living conditions of the Egyptians has been of major importance in maintaining a degree of political and economic stability in the volatile region of the Middle East and North Africa.

Another important strategic motive for providing development assistance to Egypt is the American and Western European desire to contain the militant Islamic fundamentalist movements, perceived as a major strategic threat to the interests of the West in the area. Such fears originated in the Iranian revolution of 1979 and were reinforced by the Algerian crisis in 1991 and more recently by the events of 11 September 2001 and the "preemptive" war on Iraq. Various studies have argued that among the internal problems stimulating militant fundamentalism in Egypt are slow democratization and the failure to promote sound economic growth with equity, as...