After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

Central to the stability of the world’s oil and gas industries and home to the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia and its five smaller neighbours—the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain—have long fascinated scholars, diplomats, and journalists. In recent years international interest in the ‘Gulf monarchies’ of the Arabian Peninsula has soared. Not only have they played a key role in the War on Terror—on both sides of the conflict—but they also now account for the lion’s share of the Arab World’s gross domestic product
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founded on ever-rising trade flows, financial zones, tourism, and even real estate sectors.

Since their formation and in some cases independence in the mid-twentieth century, the Gulf monarchies have remained governed by highly autocratic and—as many have argued—seemingly anachronistic regimes. Nevertheless, their rulers have demonstrated remarkable resilience despite having bloody conflicts on their doorsteps, fast-growing populations, and powerful modernising and globalising forces impacting on largely conservative societies. Obituaries for these traditional polities have frequently been penned—in some cases by leading commentators—but even now, well into the twenty-first century, these absolutist, almost medieval entities still appear to defy their critics. If anything, with the 2011and 2012 ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions that have been sweeping aside the region’s republics and accelerating the fall of other incumbent presidents, the apparently steadfast Gulf monarchies have, at first glance, re-affirmed their status as the Middle East’s only real bastion of stability. Even when violence and unrest erupted in some of their cities, this was largely contained, and the integrity of monarchy as a legitimate political system was ostensibly maintained. After all, as the lickspittle
spokesmen and legions of public relations consultants employed by the Gulf monarchies are usually quick to point out, these states are somehow different: they are not ‘dictatorships’ and should thus be immune from precipitate political upheaval.

The near future, however, is far less predictable for the kings, emirs, and sultans currently in power. Serious internal and external pressures have been accumulating in the Gulf monarchies, in some cases long preceding 2011. Although these have had an uneven impact on the region due to significant socioeconomic and political disparities, there are nonetheless important patterns and commonalities in these pressures which mean they will soon affect all six states. Indeed, a compelling argument can be made that these regimes are now, more than ever, only as strong as the weakest link in their chain. If an especially brittle monarchy succumbed to a popular revolution or fell into a state of anarchy, then a veritable ‘domino effect’ could unfold, as the erstwhile illusion of stability or invincibility that has distinguished the Gulf monarchies from the floundering Arab republics would be swiftly dispelled. In this scenario, if one Gulf state failed, then even the wealthiest and most confident of rulers would find their positions, or at least their legitimacy, under threat.

Some of the mounting pressures have clearly been recognised by the Gulf monarchies, but many others have been ignored, inadequately addressed, or left undiagnosed for too long. Thus, after considering the earlier, unsuccessful predictions of monarchical demise and providing an understanding of the emergence, development, and survival of these polities to date, this book’s primary purpose will be to identify better these contemporary pressures and demonstrate why they now matter so much. Against this backdrop I will assert that these pressures will soon lead to the collapse of the Gulf monarchies, or at least most of them in their present form. Although I claim that this collapse is inevitable—regardless of the Arab Spring and wider events—an argument is made that the revolutionary movements of 2011 and 2012 in North Africa, Syria, and elsewhere are undeniably going to serve as important, if indirect catalysts for the coming upheaval in the Persian Gulf. Not least because many of the pressures that had been building up in the Arab republics are now also manifest in the Gulf monarchies, even if sometimes below the surface.

The revolutions that never came

By the time the monarchies were all independent states in the early 1970s the threat of some sort of popular, Gamal Abdul Nasser-inspired Arab nationalist revolution reaching the Persian Gulf seemed to have petered out. As discussed later in this book former national front activists, especially in Dubai, Bahrain, and Kuwait, had long since been co-opted by their respective ruling families, often becoming successful businessmen with stakes in fast growing, oil-rich economies.
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The humiliation of military defeat by Israel in 1967 had also dealt a significant blow to the prestige of the Arab republics and their ability to project nationalist sentiments elsewhere, and the final nationalist revolution—Libya in 1969—served only to clear a path for Muammar Gaddafi’s military junta. Moreover, despite their non-revolutionary status and an ‘Arab Cold War’ between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the 1960s,
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by 1971 all of the Gulf monarchies had become full members of the Cairo-based Arab League,
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and, through their partial participation in the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel,
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they were increasingly tolerated by the Arab republics and perceived as playing a reasonably active role in countering Israel and other foreign interests in the region.

Instead, the most acute threat to the Gulf monarchies in the early 1970s was deemed to be some sort of sweeping socialist or Communist revolution, likely supported by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the People’s Republic of China. In 1962 restive tribes in Dhofar—the southern province of Oman—had formed a liberation front, which by 1968 had already adopted a Marxist-Leninist stance and had openly begun to receive Soviet and especially Chinese support in a bid to overthrow the British-backed sultan of Muscat.
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Furthermore, the following year a Marxist-Leninist wing of the South Yemen-based liberation front
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had seized power, eventually forming a Soviet, Chinese, and Cubanbacked People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen—right on the southern flank of Saudi Arabia.

Understandably, much of the scholarship devoted to the region at the time reflected these circumstances, often discussing the likelihood of further Marxist-Leninist rebellions spreading throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
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After all, the Dhofar Liberation Front had renamed itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, and was only finally defeated in 1975 following a series of British-backed counterattacks
on behalf of the beleaguered Omani ruling family.
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Published in 1974, Fred Halliday’s
Arabia Without Sultans
was based on extensive fieldwork in Dhofar during the early 1970s and remains one of the best perspectives on this period. Focusing heavily on Oman’s underdevelopment and the disenfranchisement of various tribes under the yoke of a traditional monarch supported by an imperial power, the book is vividly optimistic about the prospects of successful armed insurrection in the region. Although not explicitly attacking capitalist structures, Halliday nonetheless painted a grim picture of continuing misery and the deepening exploitation of the region’s indigenous population. He argued strongly that increased social conflict was going to be the major impetus for political change in the Gulf monarchies.
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But while Dhofar-like Marxist-Leninist rebellions were perceived as acute, short-term threats to the Gulf monarchies by some area specialists, those focusing on other parts of the Middle East were boldly claiming that longer term, intangible ‘modernising forces’ were also likely to lead to significant shifts in the political and social order, and eventually the demise of traditional ruling systems. Writing in 1958, Daniel Lerner had already predicted in his
Passing of Traditional Society: The Modernizing of the Middle East
that most of the region’s societies would pass through a series of distinct phases, beginning with urbanisation, proceeding through literacy and mass communication, and then eventually leading to political participation.
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By the early 1960s many more scholars had put forward similar arguments for other parts of the developing world, all essentially claiming that a combination of more modern social settings, especially cities, combined with new, modern technologies—especially relating to communications—would inevitably lead to the formation of some sort of educated, conscious, and better-connected middle class, which in turn would become increasingly unwilling to be governed by primitive, non-participatory political structures. Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, in his 1959 article ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’ and a volume that appeared the following year,
Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics
, had asserted that the wealthier a nation became, and the more its population was exposed to modernising forces, then the better was its chances of sustaining democratic institutions.
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Similarly, the following year Karl Deutsch packaged these forces and processes under his ‘theory of social mobilisation’,
stressing both their cumulative impact and their inevitable or extremely likely capacity to transform political behaviour.
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Published in 1968, Samuel Huntington’s
Political Order in Changing Societies
took ‘modernisation theory’ to a higher level. Questioning the smooth predictability of such political changes, he argued that incumbent regimes would resist strongly, often by developing short-term containment strategies, and possibly by resorting to violence. Nevertheless he still subscribed to the inevitability of new, modern social groupings eventually dispensing with traditional polities. And in one particularly celebrated chapter—‘The King’s Dilemma’—he even singled out traditional monarchs, stating that they would soon have to grapple with the dilemma of either suppressing modernising forces and thus facing mass rebellion, or instead allowing modernisation to occur and thus risk ceding absolute powers to a mobilised middle class.
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On the latter scenario, his claim that ‘…the monarchical parent is eventually devoured by its modern progeny’
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seemed particularly relevant for the Gulf monarchies, even if they were not explicitly mentioned, as at that time all were on the cusp of accelerating socioeconomic development. Oil revenues were beginning to flow to fledgling governments, populations were being urbanised as oil boom opportunities abounded in fast-expanding cities, literacy rates were increasing as more and more schools were being established, and mass communications was arriving in the region for the first time in the form of newspapers, transistor radios, and television. Thus, while Huntington would have also probably predicted an ‘Arabia without sultans’, he would have likely foreseen the demands for political change being led by a restless, newly-created middle class, rather than by Halliday’s exploited and insurgent proletariat.

Explaining monarchical survival

As the years and decades went by, it soon became apparent that both sets of predictions were wrong, at least with reference to the Gulf monarchies. Although at first glance seeming to have adopted capitalist modes of production, the Gulf economies never really spawned a proletariat—or at least not one that was interested in overthrowing the classes above it. Equally, although an urban, educated, and mass communications-literate population was undoubtedly emerging in the Persian Gulf—as per Lerner and Lipsets’ expectations—it hardly compared with the middle
classes of more developed democratic states and nor did it seem keen to press for the kind of greater political participation that Deutsch and Huntington would have expected. This ongoing apathy, or political demobilisation, and the concomitant endurance of traditional monarchies on the Arabian Peninsula, can largely be explained by the region’s unusual political economy, specifically the rent-based nature of the economic and political systems that emerged in all six monarchies following their first significant oil exports.

First discussed by Karl Marx in the 1860s, in the context of a decadent class which benefits from profit-income derived from renting out property and thus does not actually produce anything itself,
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‘rentier capitalism’ or ‘rentierism’ was then expanded in the twentieth century to include discussion of entire ‘rentier states’. These were originally understood to be those developed nations that could supply loans to less developed nations and thus charge interest,
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before Hussein Mahdavy’s 1970 article ‘The Patterns and Problems of Economic Development in Rentier States’ revised the definition to specify those states that received significant rent from ‘foreign individuals or concerns’. Moreover, with Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s oil-rich Iran as his case study, he made the explicit connection between hydrocarbon rents accruing to a government, and the formation of a new, rentier elite class.
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In 1987 Hazem Beblawi’s article ‘The Rentier State in the Arab World’ brought the debate even closer to the Gulf monarchies. Having also drawn on Marx’s views on class formation, Beblawi claimed that a rentier state was a one ‘in which only a few are engaged in the generation of the wealth, with the majority being only involved in the distribution or utilisation of it’.
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With their relatively small indigenous populations—which have themselves sometimes been used as a simplistic explanation for the durability of traditional political systems
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—and, by this stage, governments with ever-increasing rent from hydrocarbon exports, the Gulf monarchies appeared to have become the quintessential examples of Beblawi’s rentier states. Able to distribute rent to their citizens in the form of various economic benefits—whether direct transfers of wealth, services, or public sector jobs—and with vast numbers of expatriate workers being imported to the region to fulfil most labour requirements, the majority of the region’s indigenous population was increasingly being distanced from the forces of production and thus sidelined into becoming a rentier class dependent on government subsidies, rather than a distinct
proletariat or middle class. In this way political acquiescence was assumed to have been bought, as it seemed that most Gulf nationals would be satisfied as long as they benefited from a mode of production caught somewhere between feudalism and capitalism, in which traditional familial or tribal ties to a ruling family guaranteed access to wealth and economic opportunities. More recent Gulf-specific studies have added much weight to this analysis, with Steffen Hertog’s 2010 study on Saudi Arabia’s political and economic history,
Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats
, providing much evidence to show how oil income has often allowed the state to act independently of demands in society.
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