After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (8 page)

Responsible for most of the federal government’s decision-making is the Council of Ministers. Since its establishment in 1972 its composition has always reflected the relative power and influence of the member emirates. Although originally made up of eleven ministers in addition to a prime minister, the COM soon expanded to nineteen positions as the other emirates began to supply their contingents of appointees.
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The premiership was transferred to the crown prince of Dubai, before the
abovementioned constitutional crisis persuaded the ruler of Dubai to become prime minister as well as vice president. Abu Dhabi has always held the lion’s share of COM positions including the deputy premiership and ministerial posts for the interior, higher education, and public works. Today, the COM’s membership has increased to twenty ministers and four ministers of state, including four women. But it remains equally in favour of Abu Dhabi, with members of its ruling family now also controlling the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry for Presidential Affairs among other portfolios. In total, there are now five members of the Al-Nahyan family serving as ministers while other Abu Dhabi nationals serve as the ministers for justice,
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the economy,
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and energy.
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Moreover, at least two further ministers are de facto members of the Abu Dhabi contingent given their close ties to the emirate.

Operating beneath the COM, the Federal National Council is a consultative body made up of contingents from each emirate. Comprising forty members, including an internally elected speaker and two deputies, this chamber sits for sessions of two years at a time, and has several subcommittees. Much like the COM, the more powerful emirates dominate,
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with Abu Dhabi and Dubai each supplying eight members, while Sharjah and Ra’s al-Khaimah supply six, and the other three emirates supply just four.
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These contingents, which were originally all appointed, were often made up of senior representatives of non-ruling tribes or sections, and they now include women. As with the Qatari Advisory Council, in recent years there has been mounting criticism of the FNC, with many of its members and other citizens claiming it is largely ineffective. While it has been successful in petitioning ministers on rather banal subjects,
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it has been incapable of making more substantive interventions,
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and has often failed to elicit responses from ministers.
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In 2006 elections were held for half of the FNC positions, but these were widely ridiculed as only a few thousand UAE nationals were eligible to vote. A second round of elections should have taken place in late 2010 but were delayed until late 2011. As with Saudi Arabia’s 2011 Municipal Council elections, the latest FNC elections seem to have been used as a concession to the Arab Spring, as the size of the electorate was expanded to 80,000. Yet this still represented only a small proportion of UAE nationals—about 12 per cent
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—and the FNC’s powers have remained very limited.
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Embarrassingly for the UAE’s president—who had publicly called for a high voter turnout—fewer than 30 per cent of eligible voters actually participated.
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At the apex of the emirate-level governments are the private offices and courts of both the rulers and crown princes. Given Abu Dhabi’s much greater geographic size, it also has ruler’s representatives in both its eastern and western regions, and these also have their own private offices and courts. While it remains possible for unilateral decisions to be made by the rulers’ offices and then issued as decrees, as in other Gulf monarchies, in practise only Abu Dhabi and Dubai’s rulers still exercise this privilege, with most legislation now being crafted by the federal COM. Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah all have emirate-level executive councils, which tend to deal with most domestic matters. In many ways the Abu Dhabi Executive Council—founded in early 1971, before the creation of the UAE—is more powerful than the COM, as it presides over several Abu Dhabi-specific government entities including the influential Supreme Petroleum Council, three municipalities and three police forces (one for the capital and one for each of its two outlying regions), along with a score of recently established Abu Dhabi specific bodies including an education council, an environmental agency, and a tourism authority.

Sharjah’s executive council, although much smaller, operates along similar lines, but it is noteworthy that Dubai’s executive council is far less formal, with its meetings being arranged on a more ad hoc basis, often in the conference suites of business hotels. In some ways, the nature of Dubai’s council is supposed to reflect the emirate’s history as a dynamic business hub, with it often being referred to as ‘Dubai Inc’. Also at the emirate-level, at least in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, are national consultative councils which are supposed to operate in a similar manner to the FNC and have faced similar criticisms. The Abu Dhabi National Consultative Council’s usefulness is particularly questionable given that the Abu Dhabi Executive Council is not required to consider the recommendations that it receives. Moreover, after more than forty years of operation the ADNCC remains entirely appointive, and—incredibly—only three of its current members were first appointed in the last twenty years. None of the members are female, in contrast with the Sharjah National Consultative Council which now has 17 per cent female membership.
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In contrast to Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE’s constituent emirates, which were the last of the Gulf monarchies to achieve independence, Oman is actually the oldest independent Arab state. But by the mid-twentieth century its politics were almost equally dominated by Britain, which was not only instrumental in Oman ceding its Gwadar province
to Pakistan in 1958 and putting down the aforementioned Dhofar rebellion in the mid-1970s, but also played a central role in installing Oman’s current sultan, Qaboos bin Said Al-Said, in the midst of the conflict. With Qaboos’ father, Said bin Taimur Al-Said, struggling to unite the country, prevent mass emigration, and placate the rebels, Britain judged Qaboos to be the ruling family’s best hope. Thus, in 1970 a British-backed arrest team—claiming the consensus of the rest of the Al-Said dynasty—detained Said and, in something of a repeat of the arrest and removal of Abu Dhabi’s ruler in 1966, he was forced into exile in favour of his younger rival. Since then Qaboos has not faced a direct challenge, or at least not from other members of the ruling family, and after Muammar Gaddafi’s ousting and death in 2011, he is now the Gulf’s longest serving head of state.

After the 1970 coup, which is commonly referred to as Oman’s ‘awakening’ or Renaissance Day,
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the country’s state formation is best understood as a congerie of the strategies employed by its northerly neighbours. An initial attempt was made by Qaboos to share some degree of power following the appointment of his uncle, Tariq bin Taimur Al-Said, as Oman’s prime minister later in the year. However, unlike the rulers of Kuwait, Bahrain, and more recently Qatar—which all seem to have found benefit in institutionalising the position of prime minister—Qaboos soon took fright at the prospect of any coexisting authority and removed the office in 1971. Since then, in addition to being Oman’s undisputed ruler, Qaboos has been concurrently holding the positions of minister for foreign affairs, minister for defence, director of the Central Bank of Oman, and chief of staff of the armed forces.
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This meant that Qaboos’ royal court or
diwan
quickly became something of a ‘super ministry’ in Oman—responsible for most governmental matters connected directly to the national interest.
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Nevertheless, other ministries continued to exist under the umbrella of a Council of Ministers, and an appointed State Consultative Council was established, ostensibly to advise the government.

In 1990 an appointed Consultative Council or
Majlis Al-Shura
replaced the existing State Consultative Council. Each of Oman’s fifty-nine tribal districts or
wilayat
were to nominate three representatives to the council, one of which would be appointed by the sultan himself. And between 1993 and 1997 the system was refined further so that larger
wilayat
could nominate two candidates each (including women), while the smaller
wilayat
nominated one candidate. By 2000, with the sultan seemingly recognising the usefulness of having an institution which provided an appearance of representative government without actually having legislative powers, the electorate was greatly expanded. About 25 per cent of the adult population—approximately 175,000 Omanis—were eligible to vote. In 2003 it was expanded again, with full suffrage, and in 2007 another round of elections was conducted for its eighty-three seats. However, as with most of the other Gulf monarchies’ parliaments, the council has remained largely toothless, with its president still being appointed by the sultan, with an executive bureau overseeing its agenda and the activities of its five permanent committees, and with its members remaining unable to compel ministers to respond to questions.
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Moreover, since 1996 there has also been a State Council or
Majlis Al-Dawla
, which is supposed to operate in parallel to the Consultative Council and perform much the same duties. Its seventy-three members are entirely appointed by the sultan for four year terms, with most being retired senior government figures, military commanders, judges, and ‘anyone that His Majesty the Sultan deems fit’.
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As such, it effectively serves as a powerful counterweight to the elected body.

Perhaps the biggest distinction between Oman and the other Gulf monarchies is that Qaboos has never publicly named a crown prince or successor. Nonetheless, as with his neighbouring rulers, he has tried to use the state’s constitution to ensure the Al-Said’s dynastic longevity after his own death. An article of the constitution
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stipulates that a Ruling Family Council will be responsible for choosing as successor in the event of the throne becoming vacant, while a decree in 1975 clarified that the sultan is the ‘source of all laws’; since then all of the government’s legislation has been styled as a royal decree. This included the 1996 Basic Law of Oman, which not only specified that Arabic is Oman’s official language and that
Sharia
law constitutes the basis of all legislation, but also stated that Oman’s system of government should be that of a ‘hereditary sultanate… based on justice, consultation, and equity’. The 1996 law also provided further clarification on the sultan’s position, describing the postholder as being Oman’s ‘symbol of national unity, as well as its guardian and defender’, and stated that ‘respecting him is a national duty and that his orders must be obeyed’.
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Economic development trajectories

Since independence, or in Saudi Arabia and Oman’s case their modern state formation, oil and gas exports have undoubtedly played the leading role in the economic development trajectories of all six Gulf monarchies, albeit with some important variations. In Saudi Arabia’s case, oil was first discovered in 1938 in Dammam, close to the town of Dhahran. Given that the kingdom was, as described, beyond British control, the Al-Saud had been able to offer early concessions to American companies, with Standard Oil of California and the Texas Oil Company being joined by Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony-Vacuum Oil in the 1940s to form the Arabian American Oil Company or Aramco. Significantly, unlike the Arab nationalist republics, the Al-Saud were careful not to nationalise fully their oil industry in the 1950s and 1960s, preferring to maintain a close relationship with their American partners and benefit from the latest technologies and market access. Nevertheless, by 1973 the Al-Saud were under pressure within the region to change their stance, given the America’s support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. A 25 per cent government stake in Aramco was duly taken, before full nationalisation in 1980 and a rebranding of the company in 1988 as ‘Saudi Aramco’.

Kuwait’s first oil discoveries were also in 1938, although it was a British-backed company—the Kuwait Oil Company—that won the first concession. Further discoveries were made throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and in the years after independence oil exports massively increased. Similarly keen to avoid oil industry nationalisation, the Al-Sabah nevertheless also came under pressure, and in the 1970s terminated the British concessions and granted the Kuwaiti government full ownership of the Kuwait Oil Company. Of the Trucial States, Bahrain was the first to discover oil, with the wells at Jebel Dhukan being opened in 1934. Notwithstanding the Al-Khalifa’s various treaty relationships with Britain and their hosting of the British Political Resident, the Bahrain concession was initially awarded to Standard Oil of California, which had established the Bahrain Petroleum Company or Bapco some years earlier. Although the Bahraini government did take a 60 per cent stake in Bapco in the early 1980s, 40 per cent remained with the American firm Caltex—the successor company to Standard Oil. Significantly, at this time a new Supreme Council for Oil was established to oversee Bahrain’s hydrocarbon
industry, with the prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa, unsurprisingly assuming its chairmanship.