264 Michael BoMMes, siMon FellMer and Friederike ZigMann
taking his political cue from the Soviet Union. His successors – Sadat and
Mubarak – maintained the authoritarian centralistic state, but inched
successively toward more-liberal, market-oriented and Western-inf luenced
policies, balanced in relation to both the other states of the Arab League and
internal opposition (Büttner & Ḥamzāwī 2007). The oppositional forces were
effectively precluded from any political participation, even if the Muslim
Brotherhood^10 had held up to 20 per cent of the seats in Parliament since 2005.
This was the political background for a policy of slow reforms while also
maintaining the status quo, with an eye toward the lower socio-economic
parts of the population, for example, by retaining costly state-sponsored
subventions for staple foods and energy. The regime’s problems, as in other
neighbouring states, are based on the lack of a mechanism for an orderly
transfer of power beyond the continuity of persons. These regimes have
always attempted to install a sort of succession, which inevitably failed in
the long run (most recently during the Arab Spring uprisings). In 2012, the
Muslim Brotherhood took over power, but was ousted from government
in July 2013 by the Egyptian army after weeks of mass protests against
President Mursi and his political party.
This short sketch of Egypt’s domestic and foreign policies serves, at the same
time, as a backdrop for the country’s security situation – terror attacks at regu-
lar intervals, particularly in tourist areas, the existence of militant-Islamist
movements such as the Islamic Group (al Jamaat al Islamiya) or Al-Jihad – both
of which had major economic repercussions when the tourists failed to come
or investors were scared away because of a loss of trust in the country.
A further factor is important here. The Arab Republic of Egypt has,
to date, not been at the centre of the migration-political focus of the EU.
The reason behind this is that, since the 1960s, emigration from Egypt
has mainly been directed towards the Gulf states – about two-thirds of
all Egyptian emigrants reside in the Gulf states and Libya, some 1 million
of whom live alone in Saudi Arabia. This migration was encouraged by
the Egyptian emigration authorities. Emigration, particularly of highly
qualif ied migrants, to other regions was concentrated largely toward the
United States and Canada and is – in contrast to the circular migration to
the Gulf states – as a rule, permanent (see also Zohry in this volume).
In Europe, currently, some 300,000 Egyptians have taken up residence,
most of them in the southern parts, in particular in Greece and Italy. Im-
10 The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the largest and oldest Islamic fundamentalist movements
in the Near East. It was founded in 1928 in Egypt, quickly spread throughout the region, and is
now present in many Arab countries.