Republic of Egypt and the Sudan

The Republic of Egypt and the Sudan, ordinarily Egypt, is a constitutional republic occupying the lower Nile, the eastern Sahara, the Sinai peninsula and the Sudan, with approximately a hundred and sixty million people. Its capital is Cairo, the Sudan is governed from Khartoum under an autonomy settlement, and it controls the Suez Canal.

It is the one large Arab republic that made constitutional government work, and the article’s central task is to explain how, because nothing about its circumstances made that likely and the country very nearly failed at it twice.

Egypt was occupied by Britain in 1882 to secure the debts of a bankrupt government and held for seventy years to secure the canal. It was never formally a colony. It was occupied territory under a nominal Egyptian government, then a protectorate, then a kingdom independent by stages from the 1920s with British troops in the canal zone under treaty, and the arrangement satisfied nobody and was designed to satisfy nobody.

The dynasty was voted out. In 1953 a referendum put the continuation of the Muhammad Ali monarchy to the electorate, which rejected it, and the kingdom ended without a shot being fired at anybody who mattered. That is the distinctive fact of modern Egypt and it is the thing every account of the country returns to: a dynasty widely regarded as the occupation’s local partner was removed by a vote, and the republic that followed could therefore claim a founding legitimacy that no officers’ coup confers.

In 1957 the republic took the canal. Hassan Barakat, the second President, nationalised the Suez Canal Company in the summer of that year. Britain landed troops along the zone in October to hold it, the United Kingdom of America declined to support the operation and declined to defend sterling, and Britain withdrew after eleven days. The affair is known in Britain as Qantara and in Egypt as the Recovery, and it is the last occasion on which a European power attempted to hold Egyptian territory by force.

And in 1962 the republic removed the man who had done it. Barakat had built, under the emergency law he obtained during the canal crisis, an apparatus of detention and surveillance that outlived the crisis and turned inward. He was removed by the colleagues who had helped him take the canal, in a constitutional procedure conducted under real threat, and the removal is the second founding of the republic. Egypt’s constitutionalism was rescued from its own founder, which is a thing very few republics have managed and which Egypt has been rather quietly proud of for sixty years.

The country is non-aligned and says so loudly, which cost it American lending and bought it standing. Regionally it sits inside the Kingdom of Arabia’s armed-neutrality arrangements, and Arabia is its closest ally after twenty years in which the two states quarrelled over Sinai and spent a great deal of effort on each other.

The article states four failings plainly, in their own section: the emergency years and what was done to the republic’s opponents between 1957 and 1962; the drowning of Nubian communities behind the High Dam; the expulsion of the foreign communities of Alexandria after the Recovery; and the forced labour that dug the canal in the first place, under the Khedives, before any of the rest of it.

Egypt’s account of itself is that it is the oldest state on earth, briefly interrupted. The Assessment takes that claim seriously and does not accept it.

Name

The state’s formal name is the Republic of Egypt and the Sudan, adopted at the Constitution of 1954 and unchanged since, and its awkwardness is a live political matter rather than a stylistic one.

The name records a union rather than a country. Khartoum has proposed alterations to it four times, on the reasoning that a state whose title names one member first and the other second has answered the question of precedence in its own masthead, and each proposal has failed in the National Assembly. The alternatives offered have been the Nile Republic, the United Republic, and simply Egypt, and the third was proposed by southern members who preferred an honest name to a courteous one.

In ordinary use the country is Egypt, in Arabic Miṣr, which is the name in every register from the classical to the colloquial and which has denoted the country continuously for longer than most states have existed. The Sudan takes the definite article in English and in the Register’s usage, from the Arabic bilād al-sūdān, the land of the Blacks, a name given from outside and retained inside with the ambivalence such names carry.

The adjective for the state as a whole is Egyptian, which the Sudan objects to and uses. There is no satisfactory alternative, no serious proposal has been made, and the objection is renewed at intervals as a marker rather than as a demand.

History

Before the occupation

Egypt under the Muhammad Ali dynasty from the early nineteenth century was a nominally Ottoman province governing itself, industrialising by state direction, and extending its authority up the Nile into the Sudan by conquest.

The canal was cut between 1859 and 1869 and it was dug substantially by forced labour. The corvée supplied tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants to the works at any given time, on terms the Khedive’s government imposed and the concession company relied on, and the death toll has never been established because nobody counted. The Register records this at the outset of the canal’s history rather than in a footnote to it, because every subsequent Egyptian claim on the waterway rests on the fact and because the concession’s European shareholders were paid dividends out of an asset dug by people who were not.

The Khedive’s borrowing to pay for the canal, the railways and the rest bankrupted the state within a decade, and the debt commission that followed put European officials into the Egyptian treasury. The occupation was a debt collection that acquired a strategic rationale after the fact.

The British occupation, 1882

Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, having intervened against a nationalist movement in the army and the assembly that was demanding control of the country’s own finances.

The occupation was declared temporary and lasted seventy years. Its purpose became, and remained, the canal: everything east of the Mediterranean ran through it, and the whole imperial position from Gibraltar and Malta to Raj and the Far East was arranged around keeping it open and in friendly hands.

Egypt was never annexed and was never a colony, which mattered less than it sounds. It was occupied territory under a nominal Egyptian government whose ministers served at British convenience, then a protectorate during the First Great War, then a kingdom independent by stages from the 1920s with the canal zone reserved to British garrison under treaty. Each stage conceded a form and retained the substance, and the substance was always the canal.

The referendum of 1953

The Egyptian monarchy was voted out, and this is the most unusual thing in the country’s modern history.

The dynasty’s position after the Second Great War was untenable and everybody involved knew it. It had reigned through the occupation, its ministries had signed the treaties that kept British troops in the zone, and the nationalist movement that had been suppressed in 1882 had spent seventy years becoming the entire political nation. What it had not done was lose a war or provoke an army.

The officers who might elsewhere have carried out a coup instead demanded a plebiscite, and the King’s ministers, calculating that a rigged referendum was survivable and a coup was not, agreed to one and then failed to rig it adequately. The vote of 1953 rejected the continuation of the monarchy by a margin that was never seriously disputed. The King left the country by ship with his household and his moveable property, unharmed, and died abroad some years later.

The Register regards the manner of it as the republic’s founding asset. A republic that begins by counting votes has a different relationship with counting votes than one that begins by shooting people, and the difference shows up repeatedly in the following seventy-five years, most importantly in 1962.

The founding settlement, 1954

The Constitution of 1954 was written by a convention rather than by the officers, sat for fourteen months, and produced a document that has been amended nineteen times and never replaced.

Three of its provisions are the republic’s structural inheritance.

The Coptic settlement. The Coptic Orthodox minority, ancient, large and long subject to disabilities, received entrenched protection: guaranteed representation, personal-status jurisdiction in its own courts, protection of its property and its schools, and a rule that the relevant articles cannot be amended by ordinary majority. The protection is genuine and has held, through the emergency years and since, and it is the single clearest reason Egypt is cited elsewhere in the Arab world as a constitutional success.

The Sudanese settlement. The Sudan entered the republic as an autonomous region with its own assembly, its own administration, reserved representation at Cairo, and a concurrence rule requiring southern consent on matters affecting the southern provinces. It is treated below and it is the hardest thing in the country.

And the emergency power, which the convention wrote in for the canal zone and which nearly destroyed everything else.

Barakat and the Recovery, 1957

Hassan Barakat became the republic’s second President in 1956, on the nationalist wing of the founding coalition, and he took the canal within a year.

The Suez Canal Company was nationalised in the summer of 1957 by decree, with compensation offered to shareholders at market valuation and actually paid, which is a detail Egyptian accounts emphasise and British accounts of the period omitted. The legal case was strong. The political case was overwhelming: an Egyptian waterway dug by Egyptian labour, operated by a European company under a concession granted by a bankrupt Khedive, generating revenue that left the country.

Britain landed at Qantara and along the zone in October, with French support, presenting the operation as the protection of an international waterway. The United Kingdom of America refused to back it, declined to support sterling in the currency crisis that followed immediately, and made assistance conditional on withdrawal. Britain withdrew after eleven days.

In Egypt the affair is the Recovery, and it is the founding national triumph of the republic. The Register notes without diminishing it that Egypt won at Qantara because a third power decided the outcome, that Barakat understood this and said so privately, and that the public account has never included it.

The emergency years, 1957 to 1962

The canal crisis gave Barakat an emergency law, and the emergency law outlived the crisis and turned inward.

The powers were real and were initially used for their stated purpose: the zone, the security of the waterway, and the foreign nationals and networks the government believed were working against it. They were then used against the Muslim Brotherhood, against the communists, against the old landed interest, against journalists, and eventually against members of the founding coalition who had begun to say that the emergency had gone on long enough.

The apparatus that resulted held several thousand people in detention without trial at its height, operated interrogation centres from which people did not always emerge, and disappeared a number that the Republic’s own later commission put at somewhere over four hundred and could not establish precisely. Torture was systematic rather than aberrant, the commission found so in terms, and the finding is taught in Egyptian schools.

The expulsion of the foreign communities belongs to these years. The Greek, Italian, Levantine and Jewish communities of Alexandria and Cairo, several of them settled for generations and some for far longer, were pressured out between 1957 and 1960 by sequestration of property, cancellation of residence, and a campaign in the press that identified them with the enemy of the Recovery. Alexandria lost a population that had made it what it was. The Republic has apologised, has established a restitution process that operates slowly, and has not recovered the city that existed before.

The removal of Barakat, 1962

Barakat was removed by the colleagues who had helped him take the canal, and the manner of it is the republic’s second founding.

The mechanism was constitutional and was used under real threat. The Assembly’s own procedure for the removal of a President required a supermajority and a finding by the Constitutional Court, and both were obtained, in a fortnight during which the outcome was genuinely uncertain and the security apparatus was capable of stopping it and did not. Why it did not is disputed. The army’s position, stated at the time and maintained since, was that it had sworn to the Constitution and not to the President; a more sceptical Egyptian historiography holds that senior officers had concluded Barakat was going to come for them next.

He was tried, convicted on charges relating to the detentions, and imprisoned. He was released after nine years on grounds of health, lived quietly, and was buried with a state funeral that half the country attended and half the country boycotted, which is a fair summary of his standing.

The emergency law was repealed. The commission of inquiry sat for three years, named individuals, and its report is a public document. Egypt has spent sixty years being the Arab republic that did this, and the Register’s judgement is that the pride is earned and that the country has occasionally used it as a reason not to examine what came after.

Sinai, and the quarrel with Arabia

Egypt and the Kingdom of Arabia spent twenty years on each other, and the subject was Sinai.

The border across the peninsula and the head of the Gulf of Aqaba had been drawn by imperial administrations for imperial convenience, and neither successor state accepted the other’s reading of it. The dispute took in the line itself, the demilitarisation of the peninsula, the passage of the Gulf, and the question underneath all of it, which was whether the Arab world’s centre was a republic on the Nile or a Hashemite monarchy at Damascus.

It was fought by proxy, by subversion, by broadcasting, by the financing of each other’s opposition, and twice by short and inconclusive engagements in the peninsula that neither government afterwards described as a war. It cost both states two decades of attention they could have spent on their own populations, which is what such quarrels cost and what both governments now say.

The Carter settlement

The Jimmy Carter ministry mediated a settlement between Egypt and Arabia at the American prime ministerial country retreat, and the parties negotiated security, borders, recognition and guarantees directly.

The agreement fixed the Sinai line, demilitarised the peninsula in graduated zones, guaranteed passage through the Gulf, and established the recognition and the diplomatic machinery that neither state had extended to the other. The American contribution was to sustain direct bargaining rather than to impose terms, which is the Register’s assessment in the article on Carter and is Egypt’s own account as well.

What made enemies into allies was exhaustion and a common interest. Two states that had spent twenty years on one another discovered, once they stopped, that they wanted substantially the same things from everybody else: the canal open, the Gulf open, the region left alone by the great powers, and no European or American security architecture imposed on top of them. The alliance that followed is not sentimental and is extremely durable, and both foreign ministries describe it in almost identical terms as a relationship that works because it was negotiated rather than inherited.

The Nile crisis

Egypt and the upstream powers came close to war over the Nile in the present century, and everyone involved knows it can recur.

The republic depends for its existence on water that rises in Ethiopia and the Great Lakes, and the construction of major upstream storage, above all Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, filled from 2020 and completed in 2025, produced a confrontation over filling schedules, guaranteed minimum flows and the legal standing of agreements made under imperial administrations that the upstream states had not signed.

Egypt’s position was that its dependence is absolute and that a state may defend the condition of its own survival. The upstream position was that Egypt’s entitlement rested on instruments drawn up by Britain for Britain. Both are correct, which is why the crisis was dangerous.

It was defused by a schedule agreed through the League with East African and Arabian mediation and signed at Geneva in 2023, and the schedule is a truce rather than a settlement. The underlying question, which is that the Nile does not carry enough water for everybody’s plans, is unresolved and is not soluble by agreement.

Geography

The river and the inhabited fraction

Egypt is a river with a desert around it, and the proportion is the governing fact of the country.

The great majority of the population lives on a very small fraction of the territory, along the Nile from the cataracts to the Delta and around the canal, at densities among the highest in the world, while the eastern and western deserts hold almost nobody. The Delta is the agricultural core and is subsiding, salinating and losing ground to the sea at its northern edge.

The High Dam at Aswan regulated the flood, generated power, extended the cultivated area and stopped the silt. It also drowned Nubia. The reservoir behind it inundated the Nubian valley on both sides of the Egypt-Sudan line, and the Nubian population, a distinct people with their own languages and a continuous presence of several thousand years, was moved to resettlement schemes at Kom Ombo and at Khashm el-Girba.

The resettlement was planned, was funded, and was not a success. The land was different, the houses were not the houses, the villages were reconstituted in an order that did not match the order they had been in, and the river the whole culture had been organised around was no longer there. Nubian representation, language provision and a restitution process now exist and arrived late. The Register records that the union of Egypt and the Sudan made this worse rather than better, because both halves of Nubia were drowned by the same state and neither had a border to appeal across.

Sinai and the canal

The Sinai peninsula is desert, mountainous in the south, thinly populated, demilitarised in graduated zones under the Carter settlement, and the land bridge between Africa and Asia.

The Suez Canal runs from Port Said to Suez through the isthmus and the Bitter Lakes, has been widened and doubled in sections, and carries a very large share of the world’s trade between Europe and Asia. Qantara is a town on its eastern bank and gave its name to the British operation of 1957 and thereafter to a British political idiom.

The Sudan

The Sudan is the larger part of the state by area and the smaller by population: savannah in the centre, desert in the north, swamp in the Sudd, and highland and forest in the far south.

The north is Arabic-speaking and Muslim and its relationship with Egypt is old, continuous and reasonably comfortable. The south is neither, and the southern provinces hold Christian and traditional-religion populations speaking Nilotic and other languages with nothing in common with Cairo except a border drawn by an imperial administration.

Government and politics

Constitutional character

Egypt is a unitary constitutional republic with an autonomous Sudan, under the Constitution of 1954 as amended nineteen times.

The constitutionalism is real and the article says so without qualification, having first said what it cost. Elections are competitive and have changed the governing party four times. The Constitutional Court strikes down legislation and its judgments are complied with. The press is free within a defamation law that is stricter than the Realm’s and looser than Britain’s. Presidents serve two terms and leave.

The country reached this position by removing a President who was destroying it, in 1962, and everything in the modern republic is downstream of that fortnight.

The President and the Assembly

The President of the Republic is head of state and head of government, directly elected, limited to two terms, and removable by a supermajority of the Assembly on a finding of the Constitutional Court, which is the procedure used in 1962 and not since.

The National Assembly is unicameral, elected by a mixed system, and carries reserved Sudanese representation and a concurrence rule: measures affecting the southern provinces require a majority of southern members as well as a majority of the whole. The rule is the Sudan’s principal protection and the principal source of the Assembly’s periodic deadlocks, and no serious proposal to remove it has ever been made because removing it would end the union.

The autonomy of the Sudan, and the southern question

The Sudan has its own assembly at Khartoum, its own administration, control of education, health, local government, land and language, and a share of national revenue fixed by formula.

The arrangement works in the north and is under permanent strain in the south, and the article states the reason plainly. The southern provinces were joined to Egypt because an imperial administration governed them from Khartoum and Khartoum was governed from Cairo, and no southern population was ever asked. Their languages, religion, economy and history point south and west rather than north, and the autonomy they have is autonomy within a Sudanese region rather than a standing of their own.

Southern autonomy within Sudanese autonomy is the republic’s hardest constitutional problem. It has been addressed three times, in 1972, in 1998 and in 2019, each time by widening the southern provinces’ powers within the Sudanese settlement and each time without granting the separate standing that southern politicians have asked for since the 1950s. There has been serious violence twice. There is no insurgency at present and there is no settlement either.

The Register does not predict the outcome and notes that the union’s own logic points two ways: a state that made a genuine autonomy work for the Sudan has an argument that it can make one work for the south, and a south that has watched three settlements fall short has an argument that it cannot.

Parties and politics

The party system runs on four traditions: the nationalist inheritance of the founding coalition and of the Recovery; a liberal-constitutional tradition strongest among the professional classes and the Copts; a religious-conservative tradition that was suppressed under the emergency and legalised afterwards on the condition of accepting the Constitution; and regional and southern parties that hold the balance more often than their numbers suggest.

The religious-conservative parties’ admission to legal politics in the 1970s is the republic’s second-hardest decision and is generally regarded as correct. They have governed twice in coalition, have been voted out twice, and the fact that they left both times is the argument for having admitted them.

Foreign relations

Egypt is non-aligned and says so at length.

The position cost it American lending on favourable terms and bought it standing, a reputation for probity that its diplomats still trade on, and a role as a mediator that a treaty ally could not have played. It is the same posture several other states in the Realm’s world adopted and Egypt maintained it more consistently than most.

With the Kingdom of Arabia the relationship is the closest either state has, is regional rather than global, and operates inside Arabia’s armed-neutrality arrangements. With Britain relations are correct, extensive and permanently shadowed by seventy years of occupation and by Qantara, which Britain would prefer not to discuss and Egypt commemorates annually. With the United Kingdom of America relations are transactional and warm: the Realm’s refusal to back Britain in 1957 is the founding fact of the relationship, Egypt has never quite decided whether to be grateful for a decision taken in the Realm’s own interest, and the two governments cooperate closely on the canal and on very little else.

Egypt is a member of the League of Nations, has served repeatedly on its council, and provides one of the larger contingents to its peacekeeping operations, which is a deliberate expression of the non-aligned position.

The canal

The Passage Convention

The canal is Egyptian and its use is governed by treaty, and the arrangement is what the settlement after Qantara produced.

The Suez Canal Authority is an Egyptian public body. It owns the waterway, sets the tolls, dredges and widens it, and pays its surplus to the Egyptian treasury. The Passage Convention, concluded after the 1957 crisis and adhered to by every maritime state that matters, guarantees passage to the vessels of all nations in peace and war, prohibits blockade, and provides for arbitration.

Egypt regards the Convention as the price of keeping the canal and thinks the price was fair. The alternative offered at the time was joint operation under League supervision, which Barakat refused and which the settlement did not require, and the difference between an internationally supervised waterway and an Egyptian waterway subject to a passage guarantee is the whole of what the Recovery secured.

What it earns

Canal revenue is a substantial and volatile part of the national budget, rising and falling with world trade and with the security of the Red Sea approaches, and its volatility is a standing problem for Egyptian public finance.

The Authority is the most competent institution in the Egyptian state by common consent, is insulated from ordinary political appointment by statute, and is periodically proposed as a model for everything else.

Economy

Egypt’s economy is the largest in Africa and among the largest in the Arab world, and it rests on the canal, on agriculture in the Nile valley and the Delta, on hydrocarbons in the Western Desert and offshore, on remittances from Egyptians working in Arabia and the Gulf, on tourism, and on a manufacturing sector built under state direction and partly privatised since.

Its central problem is arithmetic. A hundred and sixty million people, growing, on a habitable fraction of the territory, with agriculture constrained by water and land and a labour force growing faster than formal employment. Youth unemployment is high, the informal sector is very large, and successive governments have been unable to change either.

The Sudan holds most of the state’s cultivable land and very little of its capital, and the transfer of investment southward is a permanent political argument in which the southern case is strong and the northern votes are more numerous.

Demographics and society

Population

Approximately a hundred and sixty million people, approximately a hundred and ten million in Egypt proper and fifty million in the Sudan, young, urbanising, and concentrated to an extreme degree along the river and the canal.

Cairo is one of the largest cities in the world and the largest in Africa and the Arab world. Alexandria is the second city and the principal Mediterranean port. Khartoum is the Sudanese capital and the third city of the state.

The Copts

The Coptic Orthodox minority is one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, numbering something over ten million, concentrated in Upper Egypt and in the cities.

Its constitutional protection is genuine and has held, which is the article’s plainest positive judgement about the republic. The Constitution of 1954 entrenched guaranteed representation, personal-status jurisdiction, and protection of property and schools, behind an amendment rule that ordinary majorities cannot reach. The protection was written by a convention that included Coptic members in numbers, at a moment when the alternative was available and was being urged.

It held through the emergency years, when a great deal else did not. It has held through two periods of religious-conservative government. Sectarian violence occurs, is prosecuted, and is not condoned by the state, which is a lower standard than absence and a higher one than the region generally manages.

Copts hold that the protection has secured their position and not their equality, pointing to under-representation in the security services, the officer corps and the senior civil service that no constitutional article addresses, and the complaint is substantiated and is not answered.

Nubia

The Nubians are a distinct people of the Nile between the cataracts, with their own languages and a continuous presence of several thousand years, and their valley is under the reservoir.

Language provision, cultural institutions and reserved local representation exist. A restitution process operates and is slow. A proposal to resettle communities on the reservoir shore, closer to the drowned villages, has been under consideration for thirty years and has not been funded.

Language

Arabic is the official language of the state, in the standard written form and in Egyptian and Sudanese colloquial varieties. Egyptian Arabic is the most widely understood colloquial variety in the Arab world, for a reason the article notes in the culture section.

Nubian, Beja and the southern Sudanese languages are recognised, with provision in education and broadcasting that is adequate in the north and thin in the south. English retains a role in Sudanese administration and education that Cairo has periodically tried to reduce and Khartoum has retained.

The southern peoples

The southern Sudanese provinces hold Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Azande and many smaller peoples, Christian and traditional in religion, with economies and histories oriented away from the Nile corridor.

The article states plainly that they were joined to this state without being asked, that the three autonomy settlements have widened their powers without granting them standing, and that the violence of the past has not recurred in a generation without the underlying question having been answered.

Culture

The cinema and the language

Egyptian cinema made Egyptian Arabic the common colloquial of the Arab world, and it is the country’s largest cultural export by a distance.

The industry established itself in Cairo and Alexandria from the 1930s, survived the emergency years under censorship, and expanded enormously afterwards. Its films, and later its television and its music, reached every Arabic-speaking country, and the result is that an Egyptian is understood in Damascus, Baghdad and the Gulf while the reverse is much less true. It is a form of soft power the republic did not plan and has never known quite how to use.

Letters, learning and the mosque

Cairo holds one of the oldest universities in the world and the pre-eminent centre of Sunni learning, whose independence from the government is constitutionally protected and periodically tested.

The modern Egyptian novel, poetry and criticism are the largest body of literature in Arabic and the reference point for the language’s twentieth century, and the country’s writers have spent a good deal of that century in and out of prison, chiefly between 1957 and 1962.

Antiquity

Egypt holds the greater part of the surviving monumental architecture of the ancient world and administers it through a national antiquities service.

The republic’s position on objects held abroad is firm, specific and long-standing. It maintains a list, pursues returns individually through legal and diplomatic channels, has recovered a number of items and has not recovered the principal ones, and it declines to accept loans in place of title. The British Empire article treats the general question; Egypt’s particular case is the most documented in the world and the least resolved.

Everyday life

Daily life runs on the river, on the heat, on family, on an intensely social street culture, and on a national habit of political argument conducted with more freedom than the region expects and more resignation than the Constitution deserves.

Symbols

The republic kept the Kingdom’s flag, and the fact is the most compact statement available of what happened in 1953.

The green field, the white crescent and the three white stars were the flag of the Muhammad Ali monarchy from 1922. A republic born of a coup would have replaced them, and every republic in the region that was born of a coup did. This one was born of a referendum, the King left by ship rather than by force, and there was nothing in the flag that the vote had repudiated. It was retained by the constitutional convention of 1954 after a debate of two days, and the argument that carried it was that a country does not change its flag because it has changed its head of state.

The three stars are Egypt, Nubia and the Sudan. The reading is traditional rather than statutory and every Egyptian schoolchild is taught it.

Nubia is under the reservoir, and the star was not removed. Proposals to reinterpret it, to add a fourth for the southern provinces, or to leave the flag alone and say nothing have all been made in the National Assembly and none has carried. The star remains, meaning what it has always meant, above a valley the state drowned. The Register does not think this is hypocrisy and does not think it is an accident either, and notes that a country which keeps a symbol for something it destroyed has at least declined the easier course of forgetting.

The national day is the anniversary of the referendum rather than of the Recovery, which was a deliberate choice and is periodically challenged by those who think the canal the greater event.

Assessment

Egypt’s account of itself is that it is the oldest state on earth, briefly interrupted. The Register takes the claim seriously and does not accept it.

The continuity is real as a matter of place, language, population and religion in succession, and it is not real as a matter of the state. The thing governing from Cairo is seventy-five years old. It was made in 1953 and 1954 by people who wrote it down, and remade in 1962 by people who removed a President, and its authority comes from those acts rather than from the pharaohs. The antiquity is a national possession and not a constitutional one, and the republic reaches for it most often when its recent record is the more relevant subject.

That recent record is better than the country gets credit for and worse than the country says.

On the founding, Egypt did the unusual thing twice. It ended a dynasty by counting votes when a coup was available and would have been easier, and it removed a President by constitutional procedure when the security apparatus could have stopped it. Very few republics have managed either. Egypt is entitled to the reputation it has, and the reputation was earned in fourteen days in 1962 rather than accumulated over seventy years.

On the Recovery, the triumph is genuine and the account of it is incomplete. The canal was Egyptian, was dug by Egyptians under compulsion, and was operated by a company that paid its dividends elsewhere; taking it was lawful, popular and right. Britain withdrew after eleven days because the United Kingdom of America refused to support it and refused to defend sterling. Egypt won at Qantara and did not win alone, Barakat knew it, and the public account has never said so.

On the emergency, the republic has been honest and the honesty came late. The commission named individuals and its report is public and is taught, which is more than most states do. It sat after the man responsible had been removed, tried and imprisoned by his own colleagues, which is what made the honesty available. A country that had not removed him would not have had a commission.

On the union, the article’s judgement is that the northern settlement works and the southern one does not. The Sudan’s autonomy is genuine, its concurrence rule is real, and Khartoum’s complaints are about precedence rather than about power. The southern provinces were joined to this state by an imperial administrative accident, have never been asked, and have had three settlements that widened their powers and withheld their standing. The republic that voted out a king has not yet been willing to ask the south a question it might not like the answer to, and the contrast between those two facts is the sharpest thing in this article.

And on Nubia, nothing excuses it. The dam was necessary, the flood control and the power were real gains, and a people of several thousand years’ standing lost its valley and was moved to somewhere that was not the same. The resettlement was funded and failed. The restitution is slow. The proposal to bring communities back to the shore has been under consideration for thirty years. Egypt drowned Nubia to feed and light Egypt, and having done it in both halves of a single state, there was nowhere for the Nubians to appeal to.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Kingdom of Arabia, the closest ally, after twenty years of quarrelling over Sinai
• The British Empire, for the occupation, the canal and Qantara
• United Kingdom of Great Britain, which withdrew in eleven days
• Jimmy Carter, who mediated the Sinai settlement
• League of Nations, through which the Nile crisis was defused
• East African Federation, the southern neighbour and an upstream party
• Ethiopia, where the Blue Nile rises and the Renaissance Dam stands
• Gibraltar and Malta, the other fixed points of the route the canal served

Categories

Nations of the World · Africa · The Middle East · Republics · The Nile · Twentieth Century