Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (2 page)

Historical patterns of state development across the Arabian Peninsula have long featured close alliances and interconnections between ruling families and other influential allies made-up of powerful clans, merchants, and foreign resident agents. With the introduction of oil economies and the growth of rentier arrangements, in recent decades these previously informal political alliances have assumed multilayered economic, commercial, and even political dimensions, therefore cementing the mutual links between ruling families, on the one side, and strategically located allies, on the other. Rentier theory has long seen merchants and the rentier classes as dependent on the state. In looking at Qatar, I maintain that the dependent relationship is a mutually reinforcing one, with the state often in need of support from dependent groups as much as is the case the other way.

A second feature of Qatar that makes it an interesting case study is the country’s hyperactive diplomacy. Small states have traditionally assumed certain specific roles and profiles in the international arena, many of which—as a prototypical small state—also characterize Qatar’s position in the international community. But Qatar has not been content with remaining in the shadows of regional superpowers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt or, for that matter, even global superpowers such as the United States. It has not shied away from irritating allies and foes alike through Al Jazeera; it has engaged in a number of successful mediation efforts across the Middle East and parts of Africa; it has taken on several high-profile showcase projects, most notably the 2022 FIFA World Cup, a world-class museum, and a global advertising campaign; and it has maintained close relations with such eclectic friends and allies as Iran, the United States, different Palestinian factions, and until 2008 even Israel.

There are several underlying causes for the nature of Qatar’s hyperactive, seemingly maverick foreign policy. First is an aggressive pursuit of “hedging” as a foreign policy tool, meant to maintain friendly relations and open lines of communication with allies and potential adversaries alike. Second, Qatar has embarked on an equally aggressive “branding” campaign, meant to give international recognition to the small country as an international educational, sporting, and cultural hub and a good global citizen committed to mediation and conflict resolution. Third, Qatar has been able to employ its comparative advantage in relation to other GCC states with great effectiveness. As starkly evident by the events of February and March 2011, Qatar is one of the few GCC states that continues to enjoy remarkable political stability. This political stability is rooted in the country’s comparative social cohesion (lack of sectarian tensions as in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia), its unitary polity and small size (compared to the United Arab Emirates and Oman), and a relatively apolitical, small national population (compared to Kuwait). These factors have combined to give the state relative latitude in pursuing foreign policy agendas it may not have otherwise been able to pursue. Finally, vast revenues derived from oil and natural gas have given the state the capacity and the financial resources to embark on projects and initiatives—such as Al Jazeera television or extensive mediation efforts—that have given it a relatively unique identity in the international arena.

A third significance in the study of Qatar lies in the broader lessons we can draw for international relations theory from the country’s international profile and its diplomatic initiatives. As discussed in chapter 2, small states are generally assumed to be on the receiving end of power rather than its originators. But Qatar, a small state, has managed to become a consequential, and in many ways influential, player on the international stage. What does this say about the evolving nature of power relationship in the international arena? More specifically, what kind of power has Qatar accumulated that accounts for its international behavior? Although Al Jazeera has enhanced the country’s international stature, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, Qatar is too small and its cultural products too limited and narrow to have bestowed the country with meaningful levels of “soft” power. Nor can the country be said to have amassed “smart” power, which strategically combines soft and hard powers for specific purposes. Qatar has accumulated its power through a track record of high-profile mediations, generous spending and commercially strategic investments across the globe, doses of soft power (through Al Jazeera), and a hyperactive diplomacy. Clearly, Qatar’s ability to do these things is significantly enhanced, if not made entirely possible, by the military protection afforded to it through the American security umbrella.

I posit that in Qatar’s case this new form of international power may best be conceptualized as “subtle” power, which is contingent on a combination of interrelated elements. To begin with,
military security
, guaranteed by the US security umbrella, enables the state to devote its attention to issues that are not strictly security-related and to instead pursue goals and strategies that enhance its diplomatic stature and strengthen its political economy both at home and abroad. Equally important is the state’s considerable
wealth
, which gives it enhanced domestic autonomy and leverage in co-opting domestic actors, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ability to pursue a wide array of international goals and strategies. For Qatar, many of these international goals and strategies have revolved around buying influence and using financial largesse to set or at least to influence agendas. A small state with little history, Qatar has sought to spend its way into a position of Arab leadership. But by itself money is not a sufficient ingredient of subtle power; how it is deployed is. Qatar’s leaders have a clear vision of their ideal role in the Arab world, namely as one of its most visible leaders and agenda-setters, and to make that vision a reality they seem to be sparing no expenses. In doing so they have adopted an aggressive global
branding
campaign aimed at portraying the country as dynamic, progressive, stable, and investment friendly. The ensuing visibility and the pursuit of a positive international image is reinforced by an
active diplomacy
meant to further enhance the country’s stature and influence. This active diplomatic profile, part of the state leaders’ carefully crafted vision, has been aided by the persistently tumultuous politics of the Middle East, ranging from the near-chronic instability of Lebanese politics to the reverberations of the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Levant, thus presenting Qatar with repeated windows of opportunity to interject itself into the regional political scene.

Fourth, Qatar’s very experimental nature as a country offers us insights into processes of state- and nation-building. Through the deployment of vast oil and gas revenues, the Qatari state is engaged in a frantic effort to construct an entirely new society. Although the emir’s
National Vision 2030
promises to navigate social and economic change while ensuring continued anchor in tradition, the pace of change is breakneck and its nature awe-inspiring. Can material culture change so rapidly and fundamentally while political values remain static and traditional? Can the state continue to delay political development while fostering profound social change? Given the small population base, and the nationals’ ever-increasing dependence on rent income despite state efforts to usher in a knowledge-based economy, is this model of development sustainable? How long can the Qatari varieties of high modernism and political antiquity coexist side-by-side?

In exploring these questions, I have adopted an integrated approach to the study of Qatar’s domestic and international politics, taking into account the importance of leadership and choices, the role of institutions, and the importance of context. As the arguments throughout this book make clear, agency and structure are both important. Neither institutions nor individuals alone have been responsible for making Qatar what it is today. Agency, contingency, and institutions have all gone hand-in-hand in the making of contemporary Qatar into a force to be reckoned with.

The Book’s Plan

I make three main, interrelated arguments in this book. First, I argue, there has been a steady shift in the regional balance of power in the Middle East away from the region’s traditional heavyweights and in the direction of the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Not that long ago, the political, military, and diplomatic centers of gravity in the Middle East rested in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. In their own ways, Algiers and Tripoli also sought to overcome their geographical remoteness from the region’s heartland and tried to shape the Middle East’s, or at least the Arab world’s, destiny as much as possible. Each might had its moment in history, but that moment is now over, at least for the time being, eclipsed by the combined effects of crumbling domestic infrastructures, mounting economic difficulties, and, perhaps most detrimentally, stale and increasingly reactive leaderships.

Not all states of the GCC have been immune to the maladies plaguing the larger Middle East, and, as the events of the Arab Spring have shown, the less wealthy states of the Persian Gulf—namely Bahrain, Oman, and even Saudi Arabia—have largely staved off its repercussions. Overall, it is the GCC states that are exhibiting a new economic dynamism and a new vibrancy that is turning them into the Middle East’s new center of gravity. Within the GCC, a series of comparative advantages have given Qatar a significant edge over the other states, not the least of which is the country’s huge hydrocarbon resources and its wealth in relation to its population, its comparative social cohesion and lack of sectarian and other political tensions, and, perhaps most important, its visionary and determined leadership. Agency is as important as the institutional constraints and opportunities within which states find themselves.

Mention must be made here of Iran and its position within the Persian Gulf region and in the larger Middle East. In recent years Iran may have achieved a number of successes insofar as its relations with the Lebanese Hezbollah and with Hamas, or its ties with certain Shia groups in Iraq are concerned. But the larger context within which the Iranians have been able to project power has steadily narrowed, increasingly constricting their ability to influence outcomes and to achieve their desired objectives. The Islamic Republic’s stewards, in fact, have repeatedly scored own goals when it comes to Iranian interests.
¹²
Tehran’s denials to the contrary, the United States has indeed succeeded in significantly limiting the circle of Iran’s friends across the Middle East and especially in the Arab world, Bashar Assad’s Syria left as the Islamic Republic’s only meaningful Arab ally. Iran’s relations with Qatar, discussed in chapter 3, is a prime example of a relationship characterized by diplomatic niceties but void of in-depth substance and cooperation. And Qatar tends to be friendlier to Iran than almost any of the other GCC states save for Oman.

A second, related argument has to do with the changing nature of power in the international arena in general and its utilization by Qatar in particular. In the twenty-first century, we can no longer conceive of power only in its traditional “hard” or “soft” varieties. Just as important as hard power projection or the allure of values is the power that comes with the combination of agility, dynamism, influence, financial resources, and the ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Neither hard nor soft power are obsolete, and, both separately and in tandem, they continue to constitute compelling forces in the international arena. But neither adequately captures the essence of the kind of power that Qatar is beginning to amass and exercise. To be certain, Qatar benefits from two key ingredients of hard power, namely military protection, provided by the United States, and money, and thus massive international investments, with which comes influence. But when agency is added into the mix, in the form of a leadership determined to carve out a place of influence for itself diplomatically and regionally, then we are no longer looking at a form of power that is strictly “hard.” In Qatar’s case, the country’s leaders try to maximize its powers by carving out for it a highly visible position of centrality in relation to regional peace and stability. This they have accomplished through aggressive branding and diplomatic hedging. I have labeled the new form of power that Qatar has carved out as “subtle” power.

The book’s third main argument revolves around the developmental capacity of the Qatari state. Underwritten by inordinate financial wealth, the state has enormous capacity in relation to its society. The particular way in which the state has employed its wealth has enhanced the depth and breadth of its relationship with social actors by making them beholden to its own developmental success. In the Qatari context this developmental success has meant undertaking rapid infrastructural growth and development—an ambitious, nationwide building project rivaled only by Dubai and Abu Dhabi—in which the state has brought in social actors as employees and shareholders in its lucrative enterprises.

The ensuing developmental state, although fundamentally authoritarian, exhibits remarkable stability due to the depth and apparent strength of its ties with actors across the social spectrum. Having thus incorporated large swathes of the population into its developmental projects, even in times of economic difficulty, were they to ever come, the state is unlikely to face serious challenges for the population. As the 2008 economic meltdown in Dubai showed, in the wealthy rentier states of the Persian Gulf, in times of economic difficulty social actors tend to continue to rely on the state to bail them out rather than to oppose and undermine it. In these polities, the state has long been a source of safety and comfort, a political and especially economic patron par excellence. Undermining it in times of crisis is self-defeating at best.

Chapter 1 traces the emergence of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula—and more specifically the states of the GCC—as regional and global powerhouses. The chapter begins with a survey of the international relations of the Middle East, examining the emergence of the GCC as a new center of gravity in light of the mounting economic and political problems faced by the Middle East’s traditional powers (e.g., Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran). The chapter concludes with an examination of the comparative advantages of Qatar in relation to the other GCC states, looking at the combination of political dynamics and economic resources that have facilitated Qatar’s rise in recent years.