Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (3 page)

Chapter 2 provides an in-depth examination of the concept of power, critically analyzing realist and neorealist assumptions about hard power as well as Joseph Nye’s concepts of “soft” and “smart” powers. None of these notions, the chapter argues, have lost their relevance in contemporary world politics. But it cannot be denied that countries such as Qatar exercise a form of power and influence that is not adequately described by any of these categories. Qatar’s influence may be more accurately attributed to “subtle” power, rooted in its effective mobilization of circumstances and developing opportunities to its advantage, its enormous financial wealth, and its strategic use of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, as well as its carefully calibrated foreign policy of hedging.

Chapter 3, on foreign policy and power projection, examines “balance of power,” “bandwagoning,” and “hedging” as foreign policy alternatives, at times pursued in overlapping fashion, and looks at Qatar’s adoption of hedging as a deliberate, carefully crafted option. Hedging involves taking a big bet one way, as with security and military alliance for example, and smaller ones another way, as with friends who can be dispensed with if need be. For Qatar this has meant seeking shelter under the US security umbrella while at the same time maintaining cordial relations with Iran and Hamas. Qatar’s relationships with the United States and Iran in particular, and also with Hamas and Israel, are emblematic of its hedging. Its employment of Al Jazeera for foreign policy purposes, subtle and indirect as it may be, its mediation efforts, and its spearheading of several world-renowned showcase projects all combine to enable the country to project a power that is incommensurate with its small size and is far beyond traditional practices in the Middle East region, or, for that matter, expectations within the theoretical literature.

The storms unleashed by the Arab awakening of 2011 did not reach Qatar. Chapter 4 examines the root causes for the stability of Qatar’s benign autocracy. The Qatari political system remains sultanistic and personalist, with a handful of individuals making all of the major policy decisions. State consolidation occurred in the context of weak organizational mobility on the part of potential contenders for political space, such as merchants or religious classes, thus enabling the Al Thanis to monopolize politics and emergent state institutions early on, buttressed in time with oil revenues, used to buy off any potential opposition. The chapter chronicles attempts by Sheikhs Ali (r. 1949–1960), Ahmad (r. 1960–1972), and Khalifa (r. 1972–1995) to consolidate their own personal power as the country’s rulers and within their own large and bitterly fractious family. Success was often elusive, and for much of their reigns they had to contend with plotting brothers, sons, or cousins. Shaikh Hamad’s reign, however, has been remarkably transformative in finally putting an end to the bitter rivalries within the Al Thanis and for achieving an unprecedented level of political consolidation resulting from the centralization of power within his own household. In the process, benefitting from seemingly endless oil revenues, he has reignited a frantic process of state-building that had remained sclerotic under his predecessors. Part of the process of transformation in Qatar, and reinforcing it, has been a recrafting and reigniting of state-centered politics, with the emir and his new—and now uniformly loyal—inner-circle of coteries as its central core.

The system remains remarkably stable not so much because of its inherent authoritarianism but because of its popular legitimacy among an overwhelming majority of Qatari nationals. The regime remains intolerant of any signs of dissent. But at the same time it enjoys considerable legitimacy rooted in a deep nexus between society and the state, or, more accurately, between society and the ruling family. By all standards, “Qatari society” remains small and thus relatively easily governable. This has enabled the state to provide for the welfare of the national population with extensive, cradle-to-grave social benefits. The stability of benign authoritarianism in Qatar is rooted in a highly robust rentier political economy and in the state’s deepening roots in society.

These deepening roots are the subject of chapter 5, which looks specifically at the state’s attempts at enhancing its developmental capacity, on the one hand, and its efforts at implementing projects of “high modernism,” on the other. These two endeavors have reinforced and strengthened one another. Thanks to massive financing by the state and its publicly funded corporations, Doha continues to expand and to grow, vertically into the air and horizontally into the sea. Massive profits are made in the process, even if through frequent state intervention, thus solidifying private capital’s continued dependence on the state. High modernism, meant to catapult the county into the modern age, is inadvertently serving to maintain in power a political system that is a relic of the past.

The concluding chapter comes back to the question posed in this introduction, namely the riddle of Qatar’s power and permanence. One of the questions asked frequently by academics and policymakers alike is whether or not the Qatari model is viable? Equally important is the question of the state’s ability—or lack thereof—to effectively manage the unintended consequences of several of the dynamics that it has currently set in motion. Diplomatically, is Qatar taking on more than it can handle? Domestically, what will the state do about the growing chasm between its rhetorical support for democracy and its authoritarian underpinnings? How will it handle the social consequences of the profound changes it has triggered in Qatari society, the most notable of which is the invitation of Western universities whose graduates are now entering into the workforce and the social mainstream?

I do not claim to have the answers to these and other similarly important questions. But these are indeed the questions on which the future of Qatar rides. As the volume makes clear, Qatar’s present—its foreign and domestic politics, its social and cultural rhythm, and its economic development—has been deeply and profoundly shaped by the force and personality of its current leader, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Hamad has created new institutions, and has injected vigor and discipline to some and dispensed with others. But he has been the driving force behind the changes, institutional and otherwise, that Qatar has witnessed in the past decade and a half. Even after he departs from the scene, there is no reason to believe that the force of personalities—agency—will play any less of a determining role in Qatar’s foreseeable future.

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ETTING
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TAGE

The strategic map of the Persian Gulf has been undergoing a steady change over the past three decades. This shift has been punctuated with major, tectonic shifts that have fundamentally altered the balance of power in the strategic waterway every time they have occurred. First, beginning in 1978–1979, Iran’s Islamic revolution removed from power the self-ascribed “gendarme of the region” and an unquestionable ally of the Western powers. In the 1980s, with Tehran’s Ayatollahs accused by the West of having turned Iran into a global pariah and an exporter of revolutionary radicalism, it was Iraq that emerged as the Persian Gulf’s dominant power. At the time Iraq was underwritten by Saudi and Kuwaiti funds in its war against Iran, Western technical advice and material support, and moral as well as financial cheerleading by the Persian Gulf’s various Arab states weary of Iran’s Islamic revolutionary impulses. All of this changed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in October 1991, with Saddam Hussein now universally portrayed as “the butcher of Baghdad” and a threat to regional stability and peace. Throughout the 1990s Iraq was seen by virtually all states of the region as a dangerous bully, its injuries from war and sanctions making it unpredictable and prone to extraterritorial acts of violence.

The September 11 attacks once again changed the equation, leading the United States to lump Iran and Iraq into an “Axis of Evil” along with North Korea, giving America’s crusading president an excuse to invade and occupy Iraq, maintain unrelenting financial and diplomatic pressure on Iran, and, as much as possible, courting the other Arab states of the region to join Washington’s “war on terror” and to endorse its unilateralism and hegemonic approach to the larger Middle East.

After the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East became subjected to a full-blown Pax Americana. But beneath this larger umbrella, one shaped and defined by US military presence across the region, the regional balance of power was far from certain. Iraq, once feared and begrudgingly admired by its Arab brethren for having stood up to Iran, was in tatters and slipped in and out of civil war for at least the first five years of its occupation by the Americans. Iran was squeezed and isolated, headed, from 2005 to 2013, by a populist president determined to revive the revolutionary slogans of thirty years earlier, even if it cost the country whatever international gains it had painstakingly made earlier among its leery neighbors. I argue later that despite seeming gains in Iraq and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan, from 2005 on the strategic position of Iran in the Persian Gulf has declined steadily through a combination of domestic, regional, and international factors, most of which revolve around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ill-fated presidency.
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Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf’s other power, meanwhile, is in no position to project its influence across the region, confronted with its own brewing problems with fundamentalists, Sunni-Shia sectarian tensions, and a string of octogenarian kings and heir apparents with ill health and uncertain tenures in office. Apart from the United States, an extraneous power, after 2003 the Persian Gulf has not had any regional superpowers that can cast a definitive shadow over the region.

Providing the larger regional context within which Qatar’s ascendance has been made possible, I argue that there has been a steady shift in the center of economic and diplomatic power in the Middle East away from the region’s traditional powerhouses and in the direction of heretofore marginal players, namely the comparatively smaller sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf. For one reason or another, the “big and powerful” regional actors that once dictated the course of events in the Middle East—Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and, if we stretch the analysis a bit, Libya—all witnessed steady declines in their relative power and influence in the region. At the same time, new players, with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) chief among them, began making their presence increasingly felt. In Qatar’s case, it was more than merely a question of having the small sheikhdom be seen and heard. Qatar sought, and is seeking, to project power far beyond its small borders. Within a relatively short period, Qatar has emerged as one of the region’s most consequential players.

I begin with a quick survey of the international relations of the Middle East and the strategic role that the Persian Gulf has played in regional politics. Historically, the Persian Gulf has been an area of intense attention by regional and global powers, with the United States having long maintained a presence there both indirectly, through proxies, and directly through its own military forces. The chapter then zeroes in on the Persian Gulf itself, and particularly on the states of the Arabian Peninsula, examining the dynamics that have facilitated their increasing emergence, especially after the second oil boom of the early 2000s, as regional powerhouses both across the Middle East and beyond. I focus specifically on the role and attention of the United States toward the region in military and security terms at a time when the Persian Gulf has found itself increasingly closer to Pacific Asia in areas of trade and investments.

Ascendance is not without its risks, and many deep-seated structural limitations impede, or altogether threaten, the meteoric rise of the Middle East’s newest heavyweights. I argue that in many ways Qatar is immune to many of these risks and limitations, and, insofar as its international profile and power-projection abilities are concerned, it has therefore been able to stand above the rest of the pack so far. This unique rise of Qatar is facilitated by a combination of factors that are both structural and contextual, in relation to its neighbors, and agency related—that is, its own resources and its employment of those resources and its agendas for purposes of power projection. The chapter ends with an examination of the context within which the rise of Qatar has been facilitated.

This is not to imply that the “Qatar model,” if there is one, is not without its problems. By virtue of being a personalist system with a narrow ruling circle, Qatar faces significant uncertainties in its long-term political trajectory. These uncertainties in the domestic arena, discussed in chapter 5, are bound to have consequences for Qatar’s international relations and power-projection abilities in the long run. For now, however, the stewards of the Qatari state have successfully managed to keep the surfacing of structural shortfalls and contradictions in check. How long and to what extent they can keep doing so remains an open question.

The Persian Gulf in World Politics

An inescapable feature of the international system is the rise in the powers of newly emerging nations and a concomitant loss of ground by the great powers. By nature, both the preponderant regional hierarchies and the global hierarchy are dynamic and changeable.
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Such power transitions within the international system, whether on a regional scale or bigger, are often accompanied by a fair amount of friction and, potentially, conflict.
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The international system is comprised of a series of hierarchies in which subordinate states relegate certain components of their sovereignty—usually defense and security—to more powerful, dominant states.
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Along with balance of power, international law, various diplomatic mechanisms, and war, hierarchies are part of what Hedley Bull called “the managerial system of the great powers” in maintaining international order.
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Sovereignty, as David Lake claims, is divisible, “and has been divided between authorities at different levels, including between states.”
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Within hierarchies, a nation may achieve parity with another, coming close to possessing the resources of the dominant power, or it might overtake it, by surpassing the resources of the previously dominant state.
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International hierarchies change not only through wars and other coercive means but also through steady changes in access to power resources in general and to economic power in particular. According to this perspective, “differences in rates of economic change among national resource potentials” are the most important drivers of shifts in global hierarchies. International economic relationships are inextricably tied to power relationships.
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While not all challenges are successful, those that are bring with them “a major transference of power and privilege from the dominant nation and its supporting coalition to the challenger and its supporters.”
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More often, subordinate states resort to under-compliance or over-reaching, thus exposing themselves to the risks of discipline and punishment by the dominant power. Today’s international hierarchies tend to be “more constrained or attenuated” as compared to the past because of the dynamic, evolving relationships that characterize them. This is not to imply that hierarchies are always resented or resisted by those in the lower rungs. In fact, through the provision of incentives and benefits on which subordinate states come to depend, dominant states often ensure that hierarchies become more robust and more legitimate.
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Within the international system, particular kinds of hierarchies are noticeable. The most visible tend to be security hierarchies, signified by military alliances and cooperation between a subordinate and dominant state, and economic hierarchies, the best indicators of which are levels of monetary policy autonomy and trade dependence.
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The United States tends to control multiple, and multidimensional, international hierarchies built on security and economic pillars.
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Two of these overlapping and reinforcing hierarchies have been in the Middle East, one for the larger region and another in specific relation to the Persian Gulf. Making matters more complicated have been shifting hierarchies within the Middle East, transferring regional centers of gravity from Cairo steadily eastward, ending up, most recently, in the Arabian Peninsula. The core of this center of gravity currently resides in Qatar.

From the earliest days of its formation in the 1950s, the modern Middle East state system has been in a state of near-constant flux and transition. A number of factors have combined to result in this dynamic impermanence of the regional power structure, one of the most important of which is the limited power and autonomy that Middle Eastern states have historically been able to exercise within the international system. According to Tareq Ismael, “as relative newcomers to an old international game, the states of the Middle East are forced to operate under rules and within parameters not of their own making.”
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On the whole, Middle East states have been weak hegemons and poor balancers due to the absence of a strong and durable hierarchy, the presence of entrenched and powerful identities, and the pervasiveness of external influences.
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The international relations of the Middle East are constantly reshaped by often overlapping and reinforcing, local, regional, transnational, and international pressures. It is not surprising that a number of Middle Eastern states have vied for regional leadership at one time or another, eclipsing the others with shouts and promises of spearheading a liberation around the corner, proclaiming a milestone of epic proportions here, another one there. None, however, has been able to construct a regional order of its liking, limited by a combination of its own regional isolation, external dependence, and domestic structural shortcomings.
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Looking at the region through unabashedly constructive lenses, Michael Barnett saw changes in the international relations of the Arab world as “conversations” and “moments of normative contestation,” of which, he argued in the early 1990s, there have been five: from 1920, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, to 1945, the year the Arab League was established; from 1945 to the founding of the Baghdad Pact in 1955; from the 1956 Suez Canal War to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; from 1967 to the 1990 Persian Gulf War; and from 1990 on.
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The political landscape of the Arab world, and also that of the larger Middle East, continues to be hotly contested by divisive debates and competing narratives.
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If Barnett were to update his timeline, he would surely add distinct periods in inter-Arab politics before and after the 11 September 2001 watershed or the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In either case, the Middle East has changed dramatically in its contemporary history, and there is no reason to believe that such dynamics will subside anytime soon.

For a brief period in the early 1970s, an informal “Arab Triangle” of the largest Arab state (Egypt), the richest (Saudi Arabia), and the most Pan-Arab (Syria) emerged and sought to forge an Arab consensus around issues of war and peace.
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But soon the effort fell victim to distrust among the leaders involved and their increasingly divergent priorities. The ensuing paralysis lasted well into the 1990s with a paralyzed Arab League not meeting even once between 1990 and 1996.
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The narrow leverage that some regional states had been able to carve out diminished once the Cold War ended, narrowing their autonomy even more and facilitating unchecked US hegemony.
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The result, expectedly, has been the steady erosion of the bargaining power of the Arab states in the international system. “The Arab core,” one observer went so far as to say, has been dissolved, making references to “an Arab world” seemingly “obsolete” and meaningless.
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