As we have seen in my first post, Egypt is now at a critical juncture. I make this judgment not with enduring cultural patterns, civilizational characteristics, religious fundamentalism, and the like, in mind, but with some fundamental facts about regime change and revolutions.

Under a dictatorship in its modern form, revolutions rarely can bring about a democratic transformation. Either they , as mere coups, will usher in only governmental change, or old or new elites, enabled by transitional dictatorships, will be able to renew authoritarian rule in new forms, under new legitimating ideologies. Since 1989, an immense amount of literature has shown that it is negotiated transitions based on compromise among many actors that have the best chance of establishing the guarantees require by constitutional government, that represents the actual threshold of regime change beyond dictatorships. It is very important that in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the East Germany and South Africa oppositions demanded not the fall of a government, but comprehensive negotiations concerning regime change: its timing, rules, procedures, and guarantees. The fall of governments of Gierek, Kadar, Zhivkov, Honnecker and P.W. Botha, was only a first step in each, an inner ruling party affair.

In Egypt, while there were important opposition groups they did not demand to jointly negotiate with the government. Even worse, a couple of them negotiated one by one with Mubarak’s men (the Wafd Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, or the latter’s adult branch). The initially clever strategy of celebrating the military also backfired: it partially re-legitimated the regime. When Mubarak’s last speech surprised the crowds, leaders like ElBaradei openly called for a military coup without claiming any role for the opposition in the transitional arrangements.

Yet it is not impossible or too late even now to graft a negotiating process onto the revolutionary coup. This happened even in Iraq, where the attempt of the . . .

Read more: Revolution in Egypt?