Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (21 page)

In this respect, the Qatari policymaking machinery is completely different in its composition and nature. Even by the highly personalized standards of political systems in the Arabian Peninsula, despite a proliferation of institutions in recent decades, the Qatari system stands out for its comparative lack of institutional depth and the continued centrality of individual personalities as the founts of power. The closest regional comparison to the Qatari system is the absolutist monarchy in Oman, where Sultan Qaboos has ruled since 1970. But even in Oman there have been moves to expand at least the superficial powers and responsibilities of various participatory state structures since the early 1980s, culminating in the inauguration of a parliament in 2001.
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In 2011, to abort the spread of protests that had shown surprising resilience in one town after another, the sultan gave the largely symbolic, consultative assembly some actual delegatory powers.
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But in Qatar the 1990s’ promises of political liberalization have come to naught so far, and, fifteen years into the emir’s reign, there are no indications that the fundamentally personalized modus operandi of the state is about to change anytime in the near future.
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At the same time, the system remains remarkably stable. No Arab Spring, no liberating revolutions of any kind, appear to be in the offing in Qatar anytime in the near future.

The second group of Al Thanis, also very senior and often with intimate ties to members of the ruling inner circle, are usually made up of highly skilled technocrats who occupy important positions within the state bureaucracy, especially in the Foreign Ministry (generally as ambassadors or other high-ranking diplomats) and in the oil and gas sectors. These Al Thanis tend to number in the tens—by most accounts around fifty to sixty—and often work closely with members of other key families, such as the Al Attiyah and the Al Kuwari, who have reached equally prominent positions within the state machinery. Although less powerful than the first tier, the key positioning of these members throughout the state apparatus ensures the ruling family’s presence, and therefore its information-gathering abilities, at the different levels of policymaking and implementation. Together with the top leadership, they help ensure the family’s continued dominance over the system.

The third and remaining group of Al Thanis are concentrated in the private and semiprivate sectors. Some may be occasionally asked to join a specific government agency or one of the ministries at relatively high levels. But most are interested in the pursuit of commercial interests and run their own businesses. Many own commercial and residential real estate, especially the towers and large residential compounds in and around central Doha in which Western expats live. Many also occupy senior positions in enterprises owned wholly or partially by the state, such as the Qatar Stock Exchange, Qatar Telecom, Qatar National Bank, Qatar Petroleum, Qatar Museum Authority, and Qatar Foundation. Of this latter group, many continue to pursue business interests on the side.

In addition to placing loyal and like-minded Al Thanis in key institutions of the state, Hamad set out to address two additional, important aspects of state formation that had hitherto remained neglected. The first, and by far the most important of the two, was to create a “civic myth,” a set of symbols based on Qatari tradition and heritage that justified Al Thani rule as a natural extension of the country’s cultural history and national tradition. In the 1980s, to compensate for and divert attention from mounting economic difficulties, Sheikh Khalifa had started to place greater emphasis on the regime’s normative socialization. But, during Khalifa’s reign, “no clear symbols were evoked for none were evocative. Qatar was sadly lacking a civic myth; it was a polity suffering from a severe shortage of symbols.”
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Sheikh Hamad started to address this exigency in a hurry, quickly giving rise to one of the region’s busiest and most prolific heritage industries. National symbols were dug up, some invented, and held up as symbols of Qatari pride and identity. Falconry and camel races were promoted as national sports with deep historical roots, and soccer tournaments named the Emiri Cup and the Heir Apparent’s Cup were launched with great fanfare. In 2006, in preparation for the hosting of the Asian Games, Doha’s old
souq
, known as Souq al-Farsi, or the Iranian Souq for the background of its merchants, was redone in traditional Gulfi style and renamed Souq Wakif. In 2007, 18 December—the day in 1878 when “national unity” was supposedly achieved under Jassim Al Thani—was declared the National Day, with state-sponsored nationwide celebrations that tend to become increasingly more grand and feverish year after year.
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In 2008, the world-class Museum of Islamic Art, headed by one of the emir’s daughters, was inaugurated. The following year, under the patronage of one of the emir’s sons, Katara Cultural Village opened with a purported endowment of $1 billion. In 2010, no doubt to Cairo’s bemusement, Doha was declared as “the cultural capital of the Arab world.” As the increasingly boisterous and spontaneous National Day celebrations show every years, under Hamad Qatar has developed a sense of identity and a heritage of its own. This emergent national identity has only been reinforced, and is continuously regenerated, by Qatar’s high-profile foreign policy and its active presence in the international arena.

Complementing efforts to bestow the regime with normative depth and symbolic legitimacy have been moves to enhance the institutional accouterments of the state. The first municipal elections were held in 1999. A draft constitution with 150 articles was presented to the public in 2002, approved in a 2003 referendum by 96 percent of the voters, and became effective in July 2005. According to official statistics at the time, out of a total of 650,000, the national population numbered 150,000, of whom 71,400 were eligible to vote.
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Given the small number of eligible voters, it is easy to achieve high voter turnout rates. Subsequent municipal elections were held in 2003, 2007, and 2011, with the last witnessing a voter turnout of 43 percent, or about 13,000 of the estimated 32,000 registered voters.
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The promised parliamentary elections of 2007 never materialized, with official explanations that the country was not yet ready.
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But in a speech to the Advisory Council in 2011, the emir made the following announcement:

From the podium of this Council, I declare that we have decided that [new] Advisory Council elections would be held in the second half of 2013…?We know that all these steps are necessary to build the modern State of Qatar and the Qatari citizen who is capable of dealing with the challenges of the time and building the country. We are confident that you would be capable of shouldering the responsibility.

In a sign of his awareness of his surroundings, he continued,

Moreover, we emphasise that the only guarantee for the stability of Arab States, in the short and long terms, lies in the adoption of continuous reforms to meet the aspirations of their people, for reality affirms that no country can isolate itself from the current political movement. The people have discovered their strength and their ability to claim their rights and to consolidate the values of freedom, dignity and social justice. This requires their courage to open channels of positive dialogue with their people in order to carry out the required reforms in a safe and gradual manner without upheavals.
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Michael Herb attributes the regime’s lack of interference in the country’s municipal elections to the pliant nature of the elected municipal council. The regime, he maintains, “probably will continue this tradition in the upcoming parliamentary elections, if only because the deputies will have little power to constrain the monarchy beyond using the parliament as a soapbox.”
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Significantly, the 2003 constitution stipulates near-absolute powers for the emir (Articles 64–75), who remains—as the head of state—the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, will draw up “the general policy of the State” and appoint the prime minister, and “may take all urgent necessary measures to counter any threat that undermine the safety of the State, the integrity of its territories or the security of its people and interests or obstruct the organs of the State from performing their duties” (Article 69). At the same time, the document outlines a parliament that has little actual legislative powers (Articles 76–116), with the emir ultimately retaining veto power over the laws it passes (Article 106.3). Of the body’s forty-five members, thirty are to be elected through direct vote, while “the Emir shall appoint the remaining fifteen Members from amongst the Ministers or any other persons” (Article 77). Even when Qatar does finally get its much-heralded parliament, there is little indication that its fundamentally autocratic underpinnings will be altered in any meaningful way.

This raises two related questions: exactly what kind of a political system does Qatar have, and to what extent is it politically stable? At the risk of stating the obvious, the Qatari system appears to be an archetypical form of traditional authority as conceptualized by Max Weber. According to Weber, authority can be justified on traditional grounds when it rests on “an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of the status of those exercising authority under them.” Weber places the person of the leader at the center of such an authority. “In the case of traditional authority,” he writes, “obedience is owed to the
person
of the chief who occupies the traditionally sanctioned position of authority and who is (within its sphere) bound by tradition. But here the obligation for obedience is not based on the impersonal order, but is a matter of personal loyalty within the area of accustomed obligations.”
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The Qatari system also fits in perfectly with classical definitions of
authoritarianism
. Juan Linz defines authoritarian regimes as those featuring a number of distinctive characteristics: limited political pluralism; devoid of a guiding ideology but with “distinctive mentalities”; relying on the political apathy and demobilization of the populace; and a leader or a small clique whose powers have “formally ill-defined limits but are actually quite predictable ones.”
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In lieu of an ideology or a cult of personality, these regimes feature “mentalities [that] are ways of thinking and feeling, more emotional than rational, that provide noncodified ways of reacting to different situations…. Mentality is intellectual attitude; ideology is intellectual content. Mentality is psychic predisposition, ideology is reflection, self-interpretation; mentality is previous, ideology later; mentality is formless, fluctuating—ideology, however, is firmly formed.”
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Although Linz distinguishes between monarchies that rely on traditional sources of legitimacy and modern authoritarian systems, which he sees as avaricious and arbitrary, his description of the prototypical authoritarian system bears close resemblance to Qatar’s:

The personalistic and particularistic use of power for essentially private ends of the ruler and his collaborators makes the country essentially like a huge domain…. The boundaries between the public treasury and the private wealth of the ruler become blurred. He and his collaborators, with his consent, take appropriate public funds freely, establish public oriented monopolies, and demand gifts and pay-offs from business for which no public accounting is given; the enterprises of the ruler contract with the state, and the ruler often shows his generosity to his followers and to his subjects in a particularistic way. The family of the ruler often plays a prominent political role, appropriates public offices, and shares in the spoils. It is this fusion between the public and the private and the lack of commitment to impersonal purposes that distinguishes essentially such regimes from totalitarianism. The economy is subject to considerable governmental interference but not for the purposes of planning but of extracting resources.
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More than just an authoritarian system, Qatar’s may be called, in the words of Daniel Brumberg, a “total autocracy.” Brumberg distinguishes between what he calls “liberalized” and “total” autocracies. Liberalized autocracies are characterized by “an adaptable ecology of repression, control, and partial openness,” whereas total autocracies feature hegemonic state institutions that seek to “absorb or repress rival political voices” and “spread the idea that the state’s mission is to defend the supposedly unified nature” of the nation and the community.
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Although total autocracies tend to be the exception rather than the rule,
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Qatar appears to fit the category neatly. The inner-circle of policymakers remains small and limited to a handful of individuals; even if and when a parliament is inaugurated it is likely to remain peripheral and devoid of much political meaning; and the mission of economic growth and enhancing wealth continues to trump all other preoccupations.

Despite its personalist and autocratic underpinnings—or perhaps because of them—the Qatari political system is remarkably stable. This stability is rooted first in the overall nature of Arabian Peninsula monarchies and, second, in the particular mechanisms of rule at the disposal of the Al Thanis in Qatar. In broad terms, the monarchical states of the Arabian Peninsula have been able to draw on a combination of oil revenues, tribal heritage and other traditional sources of legitimacy, and corporate family rule to portray themselves as natural extensions of historical and social dynamics that sustain them in power. This is in sharp contrast to the monarchies once found in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, where the state’s failed attempts at carving out a supportive “civic myth” on which it could rest its legitimacy resulted in its ultimate collapse.
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Along similar lines, Lisa Anderson has argued that given some of their prominent features—such as being centralized, personalized, and coercive—Middle Eastern monarchies are particularly adept at fostering and navigating through processes of state formation.
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The very personalism of these regimes is a source of strength. Especially in the early phases of state-building, when institutions are tenuous and there is uncertainty about their future prospects, personal networks and relationships enable states to better cope with internal and at times even external challenges.
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Once oil revenues flowed into the coffers of the state, and the pockets of the ruling family, state institutions became the personal fiefdoms of ruling family members, thus consolidating the ruling family’s dominance—in Qatar’s case monopoly—over state institutions. As a small polity with strong personal and kinship networks, politics can more easily be managed in a place like Qatar. “Such links and networks tend to take some of the edge off political conflict—arguably making for evolutionary rather than revolutionary responses to tensions.”
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