Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (29 page)

With the flare-up of the Arab Spring, Qatar and Saudi Arabia quickly set aside their differences and began cooperating, each guided by a different motivation. Saudi Arabia’s octogenarian rulers were motivated by the imperative of regime survival, worried that the upheavals in Bahrain would stoke tensions in their own Eastern Province and may eventually even reach Riyadh. They hurriedly sent troops to Manama, pledged financial assistance to the stressed monarchy, and saw to it that the more accommodating elements within the Bahraini establishment, the most notable of whom was the Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad, were marginalized and lost their influence.

Domestically secure, Qatar saw the Arab Spring not as a threat but instead as an opportunity to expand its influence to those states crumbling under the weight of popular uprisings. But Doha’s leaders were savvy enough to realize that they could not do so without Saudi acquiescence. Through first the GCC and then the Arab League, the two countries coordinated their efforts in setting a series of common regional agendas: the monarchies had to be saved at all costs; Qaddafi had to go; and, later on, so did Assad. This presented Qatar with a host of opportunities, from expansive investments to more direct forms of influence. Most important, the removal of strongmen such as Qaddafi and Assad would literally change the political face of the Middle East, bringing even more directly to the fore polities and politicians like those of Qatar and the vision of the future they represented. Qatar, meanwhile, busily set out to turn Libya into its own sphere of influence. In so doing, it hardly encountered the resistance of any other Arab state. Similar dynamics unfolded in Syria, with Qatar once again on the forefront of the effort to topple its former ally Bashar Assad. In the meanwhile, Al Jazeera all but forgot there was a country called Bahrain.

Power accumulation has its risks for all international players, and Qatar is no exception. Giulio Gallarotti has identified several symptoms of what he calls “power illusion” and “power curse,” among the most notable of which are possibilities of overstretch, moral hazard arising from recklessness and a sense of limited vulnerability, and the trap of unilateralism.
¹⁴
Gallarotti warns of “hard disempowerment,” which occurs when “nations can become weaker by attempting to augment national influence with strategies that rely excessively on hard power.”
¹⁵
Power curse and power illusion can pertain to all nations intent on accumulating power, be they weak, aspiring, or dominant powers.
¹⁶
With Qatar throwing its weight around with increasing frequency, and in places where the mighty have fallen, craftiness and care will be needed more than ever before.

Ultimately, the issue of inadequate attention to the consequences of major state undertakings, both domestically and internationally, can be traced to the personalist character of the system. With national policymaking ultimately the preserve of the emir, based at most on advice from no more than a handful of individuals, and with a serious dearth of technical experts across the state machinery to provide input and advice upward, decisions are made without detailed study of their consequences. Instead, decisions are made based on their apparent prudence at the time they are taken. The same logic that led the state to get involved in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars—because it seemed like the right thing to do and at the urging of Western friends—had some years earlier resulted in US universities being invited to set up branch campuses in Doha. Neither decision appears to have been taken with much advanced planning and study. Will Qatar’s involvement in Libya and Syria turn out to be the right decision? Will Education City, home to American university campuses, turn out graduates who will begin questioning the legitimacy of the sociopolitical order that gave rise to them?

Paradoxically, the biggest challenge facing the Qatari system in the coming years has also been one of its biggest assets in the recent past, namely its personalist nature. The regime’s focused decision making has given it agility and flexibility. Sheikh Hamad, the balancer, has been a great navigator of his region’s troubled waters and his own family’s fractious past. Tamim has had on the job training for a number of years, since 2009–2010 assuming an increasingly more visible and active profile in decision making and diplomacy. But whether and how he and future generations of Qatari rulers will deal with the same challenges remains an open question.

Let us make no mistake about it. Regardless of its stewards and their vision and capabilities, Qatar’s power is underwritten by its wealth. And as long as that wealth continues, so is the likelihood that the sheikhdom will project a much larger image of itself than its size and abilities warrant. The length of the country’s current moment in history, and how long it can project a form of power that is by all accounts incommensurate with its size, history, infrastructure, and industrial and scientific resources, depend directly on how long and in what ways its wealth lasts and can be prolonged. The real challenge is for Qatar to carry on business as usual in the post-oil era. Until then, the country can rest reasonably assured of its place in the limelight of history.

N
OTES

Introduction

1
. Nazih N. Ayubi,
Over-Stating the Arab State
(London, 1999), 133.

2
. The most notable of these included Rosemarie Said Zahlan’s
The Creation of Qatar
(London, 1978).

3
. See, for example, Allen J. Fromherz,
Qatar
(London, 2012); Steven Wright, “Qatar,” in Davidson, ed.,
Power and Politics in the Persian Gulf Monarchies
(New York, 2011), 113–133; and my own articles on the country, “Royal Factionalism and Political Liberalization in Qatar,”
Middle East Journal
63, no. 3 (Summer 2009), and “Mediation and Qatari Foreign Policy,”
Middle East Journal
65, no. 4 (Fall 2011).

4
. Alanound Alsharekh, “Introduction,” in Alanound Alsharekh, ed.,
The Gulf Family
(London, 2007), 11.

5
. Qatar Statistics Authority,
Qatar, Social Trends 1998–2010
(Doha, 2011), 5.

6
. Jeremy Jones,
Negotiating Change
(London, 2008), 107.

7
. Aryn Baker, “Magic Kingdom: Is Qatar Too Good To Be True?”
Time
, 2 November 2011.

8
. Gulf Cooperation Council,
GCC, A Statistical Glance Volume II
(Riyadh, 2010), 44.

9
. The location of every speed camera is well known to all drivers, who slow down for the minimum required length of time and then resume their normal, and normally unsafe, speed.

10
. In November 2010, Crown Prince Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani signed Law No. 15, which bans groups of laborers from living in “family-designated areas.” The law, which took effect on November 1, 2011, binds all employers of “laborers” to move their workers out of their current residences and into “allowed areas.” The Ministry of Municipalities and Urban Planning has published a number of maps indicating the family-designated areas in Doha and Qatar’s other towns. See “Municipality Designates Areas for Bachelor Living,”
Alraya
(Doha), October 3, 2011, p. 24.

11
. There are more journalistic accounts of the conditions of migrant workers in Qatar (and in the rest of the Persian Gulf) than there are academic ones. For a multidisciplinary treatment of the topic, including studies of migrant workers in Qatar, see the collection of essays in Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar, eds.,
Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf
(New York, 2012).

12
. Shahram Chubin’s analysis in this regard is worth quoting at length: “Iran is not a marginal state like Libya or Syria, but neither is it a great power. It has few friends and fewer allies. By alienating the United States and Europe, Iran has increased its dependence on Russia for diplomatic support, nuclear and other technology and conventional arms. It has thus compromised its vaunted ‘independence,’ inhibiting the pursuit of its interests in the Caspian and Caucasus. Iran has neither hard nor soft power. It has leveraged US mistakes in the last few years as its principal source of influence in the region. Playing on regional frustrations and anger, Iran has positioned itself as a spoiler and given rejectionism a new fillip in the Arab street. But these are limited and wasting assets, dependent on continued US errors and the failure of peaceful alternatives for Palestine. Iran can offer a rejectionist ‘war option’ but not a solution; for that the Arabs must turn to others. Iran’s conventional military capabilities, especially its power-projection capabilities, are limited, even with respect to, or in comparison with, its immediate neighbours.” Shahram Chubin, “Iran’s Power in Context,”
Survival
51, no. 1 (February–March 2009), 179–180.

1. Setting the Stage

1
. Some of these arguments have been fleshed out in Mehran Kamrava, “Iran and Regional Security Dynamics.”

2
. Tammen et al.,
Power Transitions
, 193.

3
. Ibid., 22.

4
. David Lake,
Hierarchy in International Relations.
(Ithaca, 2009), 9–10.

5
. Hedley Bull,
The Anarchical Society
(New York, 2002), 71.

6
. Lake,
Hierarchy in International Relations,
62.

7
. Tammen et al.,
Power Transitions,
. 20.

8
. Ibid., 131, 58, 107.

9
. Ibid., 44.

10
. Lake,
Hierarchy in International Relations,
13–15, 36, 41, 30

11
. Ibid., 68–72.

12
. Ibid., 82–83.

13
. Tareq Y. Ismael,
International Relations of the Contemporary Middle East
(Syracuse, NY, 1986), 12.

14
. Louis Fawcett, “Alliances, Cooperation, and Regionalism in the Middle East,” in Louis Fawcett, ed.
International Relations of the Middle East.
2nd ed. (Oxford, 2009), 191.

15
. Ibid.

16
. Michael N. Barnett,
Dialogue in Arab Politics,
x.

17
. Ibid., 25.

18
. Raymond Hinnebusch, “The Middle East Regional System,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds.,
The Foreign Policies of Middle East States
(Boulder, CO, 2002), 41.

19
. Ibid., 49.

20
. Raymond Hinnebusch. “Introduction,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds.,
The Foreign Policies of Middle East States
(Boulder, 2002), 6.

21
. Hinnebusch, “The Middle East Regional System,” 50.

22
. George Lenczowski,
The Middle East in World Affairs.
2nd ed. (Ithaca, 1956), 417.

23
. Hamied Ansari,
Egypt
(Albany, NY, 1986), 236–239.

24
. Gregory L. Aftandilian,
Egypt’s Bid for Arab Leadership
(New York, 1993), 44.

25
. Mehran Kamrava, “The Arab Spring and the Saudi-Led Counterrevolution,”
Orbis
56, no. 1 (Winter 2012), 96–104.

26
. Vali Nasr,
Meccanomics
(Oxford, 2010), 5.

27
. Fawcett, “Alliances, Cooperation, and Regionalism in the Middle East,” 192.

28
. Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Raymond Hinnebusch, “Conclusion,” in Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, eds.
The Foreign Policies of Middle East States.
(Boulder, CO, 2002), 346.

29
. David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen, “The Transformation of the Gulf,” in David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen, eds.
The Transformation of the Gulf
(London, 2012), 8.

30
. Clement M. Moore, “The Clash of Globalizations in the Middle East,” in Fawcett, ed.,
International Relations of the Middle East.
2nd ed. (Oxford, 2009), 109.

31
. Held and Ulrichsen, “The Transformation of the Gulf,” 22.

32
. Giacomo Luciani, “Oil and Political Economy in the International Relations of the Middle East,” in Louis Fawcett, ed.,
International Relations of the Middle East
(Oxford, 2009), 99.

33
. Samer N. Abboud, “Oil and Financialization in the Gulf Cooperation Council,” in Bessama Momani and Matteo Legrenzi, eds.,
Shifting Geo-Economic Power of the Gulf
(Burlington, VT, 2011), 92.

34
. Bessama Momani and Matteo Legrenzi, “Introduction,” in
Shifting Geo-Economic Power of the Gulf
, 6.

35
. Kristian Coates Ulrichsen,
Insecure Gulf
(New York, 2011), 69.

36
. Luciani, “Oil and Political Economy in the International Relations of the Middle East,” 97.

37
. According to
http://www.globalfirepower.com
, based on some forty-five different factors, in 2011 Iran’s military strength ranked twelfth in the world. In a statement before the US Senate, the director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency maintained that “Iran’s military strategy is designed to defend against external threats, particularly from the United States and Israel. Its principles of military strategy include deterrence, asymmetrical retaliation, and attrition warfare.” The text of the statement, titled “Iran’s Military Power,” is available at
http://armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2010/04%20April/Burgess%2004-14-10.pdf
.

38
. Robert E. Hunter,
Building Security in the Persian Gulf
(Santa Monica, CA, 2010), xiii.

39
. Joseph S. Nye,
The Future of Power
(New York, 2011), xv.

40
. Ulrichsen,
Insecure Gulf
, 68.

41
. Held and Ulrichsen, “The Transformation of the Gulf,” 9.

42
. For an excellent historical account of the region, see Svet Soucek,
The Persian Gulf
(Costa Mesa, CA, 2008). See also Lawrence Potter, ed.,
The Persian Gulf in History
(New York, 2009).

43
. Ulrichsen,
Insecure Gulf
, 16.

44
. Luciani, “Oil and Political Economy in the International Relations of the Middle East,” 87.

45
. F. Gregory Gause, III.
The International Relations of the Persian Gulf
(Cambridge, 2010), 246.

46
. Ulrichsen,
Insecure Gulf
. 22.

47
. Hinnebusch, “Introduction,” 15.

48
. Gause,
The International Relations of the Persian Gulf,
9, 241, 86, 12.

49
. Ulrichsen,
Insecure Gulf
, 25.

50
. Ibid., 78–79.