By Rami G. Khouri 

I support enthusiastically the will of the Egyptian people, because in my book any citizenry that once worshipped cats and more recently removed two autocratic military and theocratic-thuggish regimes is a citizenry defined by wisdom and sensibility. But we still do not know really what is the will of the Egyptians. They are deeply divided and lack the institutions of governance that would allow for an orderly affirmation of majority and minority views.

Wasting time on whether the armed forces’ removal of President Mohammad Mursi was or wasn’t a “coup” is a fascinating but useless exercise. We should focus on the more decisive operative principles of power, governance and order (and the sentiments of more than 80 million Egyptians who will ultimately decide the outcome in Egypt). These principles I would define as legitimacy, participation and accountability.

The Egyptian democratic transition that was set in motion in January 2011 failed to unfold smoothly and reach the stable condition of a relegitimized democratic and pluralistic governance system that defined and affirmed those three phenomena. It allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to dominate and then monopolize the power structure.

They abused their thin mandate crudely, and sparked a massive counter-revolution, leading to this week’s removal of Mursi by a combination of massive street protests and emphatic intervention by the armed forces, keeping us ignorant of the true will of the majority in Egypt.

Such missteps in the early years of national sovereignty are pretty common, and should not be exaggerated by Orientalist crackpots around the world who look at the Arabs today and wonder if we are able to democratize. The United States itself – that beacon of democracy that for many decades only recognized the rights of white men who owned land, many of whom owned slaves – started life with its Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union from 1776 to 1789, which were a failure and had to be replaced by the U.S. Constitution in 1789.

Every democracy gets a second chance to get it right. Often – as we learn from Americans who do not tire these days from teaching us about democracy – the era between the first and second chances includes a civil war, genocide against indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism against blacks, and formal disenfranchisement of women, before a stable democracy emerges decades, or even two centuries, later.

So with a humble nod to history, how should we assess the Egyptian armed forces coup that removed Mursi from power? It raises the same political and ethical dilemma as the majority support in the United States for the invasion of Iraq in 2003: How do we judge or react to a situation where a majority of the population supports a criminal act? Is the crime still a crime when the majority approves it? Or does majority support transform the crime into a stirring affirmation of democracy?

The three principal actors in the Egyptian political arena today – the armed forces, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many supporters, and the citizens who took to the streets in their millions to oppose Mursi and the Brotherhood – will now engage in phase two of Egypt’s sloppy transition from a military-led autocracy to a military-guided transition to a full-fledged, civilian-based democracy. I suspect everyone has learned critical lessons during the past 30 months. All of the key actors today are very different from what they were in January 2011.

The citizenry is re-energized with the knowledge that its peaceful expression of its discontents on the streets continues to have force and bring about historic changes. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are humbled by the realization that their divine confidence is not enough to perpetuate their incumbency. Rather, they know that they have to govern well and act pluralistically to stay in power. The armed forces are also held in check to a large extent by the power of the populist legitimacy unleashed in the streets in January 2011 and again in June 2013. The armed forces sought, and needed, the endorsement of religious and civilian figures when they removed Mursi from office this week, but they felt no need for non-military Egyptians to stand with them when they assumed power 30 months ago.

Most significantly, in my view, the youth-led Tamarod movement that organized and mobilized for the June 30 demonstrations that ultimately triggered the end of Mursi’s presidency has learned important lessons about how to engage politically. These lessons will be crucial for when Egyptians engage constitutionally and electorally in the months ahead.

It is a mistake to judge the Egyptian military or any other of the key actors according to the rules of 1952 or 2009 or even January 2011. In Egypt, 2013 is close to the equivalent of 1789 in the United States, with new understandings of political efficacy, new appreciations for real populist constraints, and new sophistication in putting the two together to achieve the revolutionary promise of previous years.