Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (4 page)

The early 2000s were no kinder to the vanishing Arab core. Egypt, the self-proclaimed “spiritual and political leader of the Arab world” as far back as the 1950s,
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had by the 1980s degenerated into a “stalled society” thanks to the immovable kleptocracy sitting atop its political system.
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Bids for the leadership of the Arab world notwithstanding,
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the next couple of decades did not necessarily see a noticeable rise in Egypt’s fortunes domestically or internationally. President Hosni Mubarak, like his equally unsavory Tunisian cohort Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, might have masked his own age thanks to hair dye, but he could not mask the ailments of his aging regime. Egypt tried once again to emerge as the Middle East’s undisputed leader, but there was little it could do to reverse or to at least slow the increasing penetration of the United States into the region and the spreading of American military “footprints” from Afghanistan to Morocco. For its part Iran sought to play a leadership role across the Middle East and the Muslim world, and for a few brief years former president Mohammad Khatami’s pleasant demeanor and smiles made some inroads among the chronically suspicious political elites in the Arabian Peninsula. But before long Khatami’s successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, managed to erode what appeal and soft power Iran had acquired. The country did manage to collect a series of strategic allies to countenance some of the combined pressures on it by Israel and the United States—Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraqi Shia leaders—but alliance-making with actors of dubious durability does not a powerbroker make. Iran’s desperate forging of alliances should not be mistaken for a sign of power and confidence. By the end of the 2000s, the region’s leader remained as elusive as ever.

But soon the states of the Middle East had bigger problems on their hands than not having a regional leadership core. In 2011, the Egyptian kleptocracy’s death was hastened by throngs of Cairians who, inspired by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, gathered in the iconic Tahrir Square and refused to leave until the dictatorship was gone. By the time Tahrir’s temperature was on the rise Ben Ali had already left for exile, in Saudi Arabia, so hurried in his departure that stashes of cash worth millions of dollars were left in one of his palaces. The contagion soon spread. Yemen erupted next, followed by Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. An Arab Spring got underway, reaching as far from its epicenter as the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and prompting its panicked reaction and calls for a counterrevolution aimed at reversing the tide.
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Colonel Moammar Qaddafi’s fall in Libya was perhaps the most emblematic of the tide sweeping across the region. When the Libyan uprising was first gathering steam, Qaddafi dismissed the protestors as “rats” and vowed to eradicate them with unmatched fury. Six months later, dirty and on the run, he was found by Libyan fighters hiding in a sewer pipe near the city of Sirte, begging his captors not to shoot him. They did not oblige. Tellingly, in a sign of broader trends across the region, on the day that Qaddafi’s palace in Tripoli fell to the rebels, the flag that was hoisted atop the building was that of Qatar, a sign, no doubt, of the tiny sheikhdom’s surprising reach and power. Qatar’s flag was soon replaced by Libya’s own new flag. But the symbolic importance of seeing the Qatari flag over Qaddafi’s one-time headquarters was hard to miss. A new regional power had risen.

This had been the result of the convergence of a number of factors. As Vali Nasr observes, it is “economics [that] has more to do with determining the pecking order in the Middle East than the region’s miasmic tumult of feuds, wars, and saber rattling would lead one to believe.”
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At the same time, throughout contemporary times, international regimes and institutions in the Middle East, such as those constructed by the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), have tended to be weak due to low levels of mutual trust among their constituent members, strong preference across the region for bilateral treaty arrangements over multilateral arrangements, low levels of economic interdependence and trade, and low levels of functional cooperation.
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This has in turn opened up space for the smaller and more affluent states to make their presence felt in regional politics.

Further, the critical role played by globalization cannot be denied. With the forces of globalization proving themselves difficult to stop even for the most insular of states, some states have found themselves better situated in the core-periphery structure to profit from interaction with and integration within the new global political economy.
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Globalization has its winners and losers; some, like Iran, are excluded from it by a combination of US policies and their leaders’ fears of the forces it might unleash, while others, like the UAE and Qatar, are positioned not just to embrace it but to ride its crest on their own terms and to their own advantage.

Slowly but surely the balance of power is shifting toward the Persian Gulf monarchies, whose wealthy, sophisticated private sector is leading the charge to integrate into the various currents of globalization. The GCC states are emerging as a “strategic and commercial pivot” around which tectonic shifts in the global balance of power are taking place.
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Although in many parts of the Middle East globalization is seen as a threat and an opportunity by the forces of the West for further exploitation of national resources,
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in the oil monarchies its financial and economic benefits are embraced and welcomed. The world is indeed witnessing the “multifaceted and dynamic participation of the GCC states within the processes of global change.”
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In the political economy of the twenty-first century, as Luciani rightly observes, it is these public and private actors who have a much better chance of success as compared to the rest of the region.
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One of the critical factors that sets GCC economies apart from those of the rest of the Middle East is the region’s increasing financialization, rooted in the precipitous growth of its financial capacity as a result of investments during the second oil boom.
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There is broad consensus that the states of the Arabian Peninsula are emerging as “new regional muscles” in the multipolar world economy and are not shying away from flexing their economic muscles.
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Today, the Persian Gulf is emerging as the new center of gravity of the Middle East because of its energy reserves and its financial resources.
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The region’s non-oil states have yet to come to terms with the new realities of regional politics and the ascendance of those they once so readily dismissed as irrelevant and marginal. “Simply put,” maintains Luciani, “the ‘historical’ Arab states have been unable to accept that the basis of power in the contemporary world has changed: not only are oil barrels more important than guns, but also money is more important than population size.”
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Luciani’s astute analysis was written before the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, following which the GCC’s relative immunity to the uprisings, with the exception of Bahrain, only further strengthened its comparative advantage over those Middle Eastern states racked by popular uprisings, the instability they endured, and their resulting preoccupation with reconstituting political order rather than furthering economic progress.

Luciani talks of the Arab states’ resentment toward the rise of the newcomers, but he might as well have included Iran also. By virtue of its size and geographic position—a 2,400-kilometer coastline along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, a number of deep-sea ports, and vast deposits of oil and natural gas—the size and apparent capabilities of its armed forces, and its comparative strategic depth, Iran assumes that it indeed is the dominant power in the Persian Gulf. And, insofar as brute force is concerned it may indeed be.
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Iran is, after all, “the most important country in the region in terms of the future of Persian Gulf security and stability.”
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But, as argued earlier, in today’s world hard power is a barely sufficient or even adequate instrument of furthering national interests. Along with the likes of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, Iran’s troubled relationship with the global economy, and its inability to come to terms with the dynamic currents of economic change and transformation swirling around it, are bound to drag it behind its neighbors to the south. Iran may be strategically important to the Persian Gulf, but it is rapidly running the risk of becoming an obsolete dinosaur amid a group of dynamic transformers.

Significantly, the ascendance of the GCC states in the global financial arena appears to be part of a broader realignment of global power away from the West and in the direction of the East. According to Joseph Nye, power in the world is distributed in a pattern that resembles a three-dimensional chess game. On top there is the unipolar military power of the United States, followed in the middle by multipolar economic powers such as those of the US, Europe, Japan, and China, capped at the bottom by a complex web of transnational relations that include both state and nonstate actors.
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But Nye would be the first one to agree that his pyramidal conceptualization of the world is far from static and that its configuration is bound to change soon, or perhaps is already changing. In fact, the states of the Arabian Peninsula appear to be “enmeshed in a transformative rebalancing of the global balance of geo-economic power from west to east.”
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As the West has been going through a period of profound financial distress and economic crisis since the late 2000s, the GCC states have been using their enhanced financial powers to buy up high-profile and iconic global brands (Harrods, Ferrari, and Porsche), recapitalize otherwise depleted Western financial institutions (Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Barclays Bank), and carve out distinctive niches for themselves in global interest areas (mediation and renewable energy).
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How did we get to where we are today? The international relations of the Persian Gulf have always revolved around controlling its strategic resources, be they safe passage, pearling, or oil. The region has thus received sustained attention from outside military and political powers dating back to the early 1500s, when the Portuguese first arrived on the scene.
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From the earliest times, there has been a dynamic interplay between internal and external factors across the Persian Gulf, helping shape the region’s state system.
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The twentieth century brought with it the discovery of oil, and, soon thereafter, the seemingly inescapable British. Oil helped shape the consolidation of the emerging fragile states and ensured their otherwise doubtful survival into the twenty-first century.
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Oil gave the region its strategic significance, but it also increased the likelihood of conflict. On rare occasions, it also facilitated cooperation among the regional actors.
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More frequently, however, it has drawn to the region the kind of attention it did not need.

When the British withdrew from the region, between 1961 and 1971, many of the fledgling states that dotted up and down the Persian Gulf were unsure of their survivability, and worried about the expansionist threats of Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. But, as fortune would have it, they survived, and, in fact, thanks to a boom in oil prices, thrived. Throughout the 1970s, amid a collective sense of unease and apprehension, state-building processes were set into motion across the Arab Peninsula.
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By the 1980s, their resilience proven, these small states were ready for a bigger stage.

State behavior is conditioned by the opportunities and challenges it faces, both internally and from the outside. Middle East states, especially the GCC oil monarchies, resort to omnibalancing in their efforts to maintain and enhance their legitimacy by simultaneously responding to pressures from below and from the outside.
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Gregory Gause maintains that the states of the Persian Gulf are prompted to action not so much by concerns over the distribution of power in the region but by perceived threats to their own domestic stability. The biggest of these threats, Gause argues, are the salient transnational identities that can be used by regional actors to mobilize support across national boundaries. In the hands of ambitious leaders, these identities can be a potent force for political mobilization and quite possibly instability, particularly for vulnerable states with questionable legitimacies. Earlier, the Iranian Revolution had ended the tacit agreement that had emerged among regional states not to interfere in each other’s domestic politics. A collective panic had set in that the revolution’s fury would reach the largely tranquil shores of the Arabian Peninsula. “It is,” after all, “at the intersection of ideational and material factors that we will find the explanations of the war and alliances we see in the Gulf.”
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It was these fears that in 1981 prompted the six oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula to set up a buffer against Iraq and Iran in the form of the GCC.