Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (7 page)

There has been another critical issue that has facilitated the phenomenal economic growth of the GCC states, namely inexpensive and compliant labor. A proper treatment of this important topic is beyond the scope of the task at hand here.
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But brief mention must be made of the significant comparative advantage that politically pliant labor has given the GCC. Demographic limitations and labor shortages have long prompted the countries of the Arabian Peninsula to rely on imported labor for their economies. In the 1950s and 1960s, most migrant workers to the Persian Gulf were Egyptians, Palestinians, and Yemenis, many of whom had strong revolutionary and often antimonarchical sentiments and therefore became sources of political tension within their host societies. In the ensuing decades, culminating in the aftermath of Iraq’s ejection from Kuwait in 1990, across the Arabian Peninsula Arab migrant workers were steadily replaced by imported labor from South Asia, who came with no ideological baggage and who were far more easily segregated from the rest of the population. Since then labor migration has been used for purposes of both rapid economic development—through relying on relatively cheap and pliant labor—as well as political consolidation.
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Although there are still significant communities of migrant workers from the rest of the Arab world in the GCC states, many belong to the ranks of professionals, most are nonideological, and are more interested in commercial pursuits, and all depend on highly restrictive residency permits that make the risks of political activism outweigh any potential benefits.

Altogether, a combination of structural changes rooted in global economic currents, savvy domestic and regional investments, and careful planning have combined to result in the transformation of the GCC states into highly consequential—indeed in most cases powerful—global economic players. The continuing windfalls of the 2002–2008 oil boom, coupled with systemic flaws in the Western-led Washington Consensus of economic development, have facilitated the enhanced positions of the Arab Peninsula states, resulting in “Gulf policymakers’ increasing confidence in the international arena and greater awareness of their pivotal position within the global rebalancing of economic and political power.”
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More important, if present trends continue, and there appears no reason to believe they would not, the disparities between the wealthy, increasingly more powerful states of the Persian Gulf and the rest of the region are likely to grow.
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This largely positive analysis of the GCC states in general and their economies in particular is not to imply that there are no potential and actual signs of trouble in paradise. In fact, the GCC states face multiple challenges in areas of security, politics, and even economic development. Although Qatar is by no means immune to these challenges, I maintain that it is better positioned, both through the policies pursued by its leaders and though structural conditions with which they have had little to do, to deal with these challenges. Before elaborating on Qatar’s comparative advantages, I outline some of the more serious existing or potential security, political, and economic challenges with which the other GCC states have to contend.

Insofar as security challenges are concerned, Fred Lawson has identified four nearly intractable security dilemmas faced by the Persian Gulf states. The first is what he labels as “the classic security dilemma” in which states must choose whether or not to enhance their security in relation to another state. The second is “the alliance dilemma” in which states have to manage relations with allies and adversaries simultaneously. Third is the trade-off between relying on an outside power for protection and maintaining domestic political stability. Fourth is the “paradoxical choice between forging strategic partnerships with external patrons and keeping the region insulated from global rivalries and disputes.”
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Kristian Ulrichsen somberly asserts that “difficult challenges lie ahead for the oil monarchies of the Gulf.”
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He calls for attention to “non-military sources of potential insecurity”
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—ranging from environmental depletion to food and resource scarcity—which run the risk of upsetting internal social cohesion and are likely to “inject potent new sources of tension and sites of contestation into the intra- and international relations of the Gulf States.”
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The flood of expatriate workers, both skilled and unskilled, deepens “long-felt existential fears.”
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Given the rapid and profound processes of change underway across the Arabian Peninsula, there are often troubling questions about the perceived erosion of national identity and the pace and direction of the changes altering social norms and mores.
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These and other security challenges are likely to be more stark and more pressing in the era of globalization and especially in the post-oil era, and they are far more likely to revolve around issues of human security rather than on the state.
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For example, the increasing connections between two previously distinct regional security complexes, namely those of the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa, are likely to draw the GCC states closer to the ripple effects of chronic instability in Yemen and Somalia.
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In particular, if Yemen were to become a failed state, it could “expose the GCC to the multiple sources of human insecurity emanating from the Horn of Africa-Yemen nexus.”
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Perhaps no other development is as threatening to all of the states of the Persian Gulf as the very real possibility of running out of oil. Although the ruling elites have demonstrated remarkable adaptability and survivability, their ability to navigate the post-oil era without fundamental and far-reaching reforms is questionable. While the GCC states have shown a capacity to evolve and to survive, they have also demonstrated a persistent hesitation to implement much-needed reforms that might result in any loosening of political and economic control.
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The younger generation is unable to relate to the pre-oil era, or to comprehend the post-oil era. But the need for reformulating the current social contract is inescapable in the post-oil era. It is doubtful that the current cradle-to-grave welfare states of the GCC can survive into the post-oil era. Already, oil reserves in Bahrain and Oman are projected to run out by 2025.
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How the Omani and Bahraini polities react to such a development when it does occur is an open question.

Even in stable economic times, the phenomenal ascendance of the GCC is not without its problems or its unintended negative consequences. Uneven distribution of energy resources and therefore wealth across the Arabian Peninsula has led to the creation of “pockets of energy poverty” throughout the region.
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To the Omani and Bahraini question marks posed above one may add the resource-poor emirates of the UAE—especially Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain—and their coping mechanisms, or lack thereof, with the increasingly glaring discrepancies in their levels of wealth compared to Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Kuwait, and perhaps even Dubai.

Similarly, it is not clear who will live and work in the thousands of properties that are being built across the GCC at breakneck speed.
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From oil wells have sprung up gleaming cities, touching the skies with their high-rise towers and protruding into the seas with their artificial islands. Deserts have been transformed into green cities with millions of trees already planted and millions more planned for the future.
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But there simply are not enough nationals demographically to occupy the apartments in all the high-rises being built, with which, incidentally, their traditional housing preferences have little in common. There are also only so many wealthy Western expatriate professionals, and low-skilled migrant workers cannot afford luxury accommodations even if they were allowed to occupy them. After the Dubai real estate bubble burst in 2008, many construction projects across the GCC were scaled back in order to avoid a similar fate in the construction and the real estate sectors.
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But in almost all of the region’s major cities occupancy rates continue to remain low, while new high-rises continue to go up.
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Whether there is merit in the philosophy of “build it, and they will come” is another open question.

Politics is notoriously unpredictable, and Middle East politics is especially notorious. But the broader trends that I have outlined are hard to ignore. The Middle East’s center of gravity has shifted. The traditional power centers of the region—Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran, and Damascus—are being overshadowed by their much younger, smaller, and far more agile counterparts of Abu Dhabi, Doha, Dubai, and Riyadh. At a time when Egypt continues to be gripped with the aftereffects of its historic revolution, when Syria teeters on the verge of a civil war, when Iran preoccupies itself with picking fights with a West only too keen to bully it around, and when Iraq tries to finds its way after the hasty departure of its American occupiers, the countries of the GCC build new infrastructures and deepen existing ones, invite expertise from around the world to help them innovate and develop, plan incessantly for their futures, and concentrate on securing the health, wealth, and development of future generations. That much cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that they face real obstacles and challenges in making their lofty goals a reality, and even, closer to home, at times holding the present course steady as occasional opponents pop up. In Bahrain’s case we saw beginning in February and March of 2011, and before that from 1994 to 1999, the state’s opponents rise up more than occasionally. Qatar is not by any means immune to the prospects of these challenges or the many potential insecurities that Ulrichsen outlines. But it does benefit from certain comparative advantages that enable it to better meet and deal with emerging challenges and to more effectively project its power.

Qatar’s Comparative Advantage

Qatar’s comparative advantage in relation to its neighbors across the Arabian Peninsula can be traced to four distinct yet interrelated factors. The first has to do with the structure of regional politics and Qatar’s role and position within it. Kenneth Waltz’s caution some years ago that an international system should not be reduced to its constituent units applies very much to the rise of Qatar and its regional role and international profile.
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Surely Qatar’s ascent regionally and globally is not Qatar’s doing alone and is as much a product of systemwide changes as it is a direct result of the policies pursued by the Emiri Diwan. Earlier allusion was made to the preoccupation of the Middle East’s traditional powers with more existential issues—as is the case with Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, for example—and the decline of their regional and international influence relative to more agile and focused actors. The regional system has thus opened the space and the opportunity for Qatar to make its presence felt and to push forward its regional and international agendas.

Reinforcing this was the exponential growth in Qatar’s strategic importance for the United States following 9/11, the US military’s subsequent departure from Saudi Arabia and its relocation in Qatar, and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, during which Qatar became home to the US military’s Central Command and its largest forward operations base. As Robert Hunter points out, “Qatar—a country less subject to religious fervor than Saudi Arabia and also concerned about possible ambitions and intentions both of that large Arab neighbor and of Iran—became the primary locus for U.S. forces deployed on the ground in the region.”
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This did not mean that Qatar would automatically become a vassal or protectorate of the United States, or even bandwagon with it, but instead it embarked on a carefully calibrated policy of hedging whereby it ensured that it maintained open lines of communication with as many parties and actors as possible, even if they happened to be adversaries to one another. Raymond Hinnebusch correctly points out that there is a direct correlation between economic resources and security, on the one hand, and the ability and willingness of state leaders to “challenge or adjust the impact of external forces on the state,” on the other.
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This precisely explains Qatar’s ability to take risks that others cannot afford.

The reference to Waltz should not be taken as an exclusive endorsement of realist explanations of Qatar’s regional and international rise. Michael Barnett, the constructivist quoted earlier, sees, with some justification, inter-Arab politics as a constant struggle over determining “the norms of Arabism.” The primary motivator in Arab international politics, he claims, has not been balance of power but rather the competition to see who can “more deftly deploy the symbols of Arabism.”
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Power emanates not from the barrels of guns and tanks—the effective use of which Middle Eastern leaders have excelled at only against their own peoples and not the enemy afar—but from the ability to define and control the symbols that give meaning to surrounding realities. Leaders have sought to control their rivals “through strategic framing and symbolic exchanges.”
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This appears to be exactly what Qatar is trying to do—to define and to lead, both symbolically and factually, what Arabism means in the twenty-first century.