Democracy in Egypt

Yesterday a bottom-up movement for democracy in Egypt claimed victory over the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who came to power immediately after the assassination of Anwar Sadat and never relinquished the state of martial law under which he ruled for 30 years. Thus one of the world’s oldest civilizations is now poised to enter the circle of modern democracy. Let’s hope Egyptians can create a democratic government as effectively as they toppled Mubarak.

As sudden and surprising as this event seems, it is really part of a protracted revolution that has been sweeping the globe for more than two centuries. After two or three centuries of intellectual ferment, the American Revolution and the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century really got the democratic ball rolling. Since then dozens of nations have moved from aristocratic and dictatorial regimes to democratic forms of governance.

The connection between this large-scale historical trend and the practice of collaborative leadership is manifest. The word “leadership” itself did not exist in our language until the era of the democratic revolutions. It emerged because we needed a new word and a new language to describe a new thing in the world: a system of governance that required, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the consent of the governed.”

Modern democracies can only exist in a modern world where most people are reasonably well educated, reasonably well informed, and willing to act freely up to the point where their freedom interferes with the freedom of others. All real leadership is inherently democratic, since leaders and followers work together for shared goals. If the goals of the so-called leader conflict with the goals of so-called followers, then the process is really about naked power and dictatorship, not leadership. If that process goes on too long, so-called followers will become revolutionaries and so-called leaders will become ex-dictators just like Hosni Mubarak.

We can consider collaborative leadership to be hyperdemocratic because it doubles down on the concept of shared goals and collaborative behavior. Collaborative leadership generally takes a long time to develop because it depends so heavily on established relationships, which must precede any attempt to achieve specific goals. But when those relationships take root, collaborative leadership can work its magic very quickly, as we witnessed in the case of Egypt and Mr. Mubarak. Egyptians formed bonds of empathy with each other as they struggled for years under bonds of oppression. But when the opportunity to overthrow the oppressor emerged, they were able to organize and claim victory in just a few weeks.