ABSTRACT
Under the monarchy, successive cabinets and the king, in spite of generally limited ambitions, important external constraints, and considerable domestic challenges, managed to formulate and partly implement policies in a variety of areas. In the area of foreign policy, decision-makers succeeded in persuading their Arab counterparts to adhere to the League of Arab states and to abandon alternative projects. In the first Palestine War, Egyptian troops against all odds managed to stand their ground and took the Gaza Strip; as a result, King Abdallah of Jordan could not claim that he alone prevented Israel from occupying all of Mandatory Palestine. Internationally, the Nasser government negotiated full independence from Britain and for more than a decade avoided dependency on one of the Cold War camps. Following Mubarak’s departure, pervasive contestation including demonstrations and strikes affected the workings of state agencies which for the first time since the 1950s were held to public account.
