The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  The elections were held as the oil-fuelled boom was taking off in earnest. Dubai, then the poster child of a new economic and political model that sought to attract labour and capital from all corners of the world, was nearing the height of its breakneck growth. Despite the twenty-four-hour construction work that had become the thudding soundtrack to life in the city, the emirate was struggling to build quickly enough to keep up with the influx of new arrivals. Apartments viewed in the morning would be snapped up by lunchtime, and prices were rising so swiftly that the authorities imposed a series of caps on annual rent increases.3 Both Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the UAE's capital and its largest emirate, were bursting at the seams.

  Some Emiratis struggled to adapt to the pace of change in a country where the older generation could remember living in palm frond shacks. A few privately expressed alarm about a development policy that saw them become a tiny minority in their own country within three decades of its formation in 1971. But they were arguably the biggest beneficiaries of the boom, receiving a generous selection of financial benefits from the cash-rich government while state subsidies shielded them from the worst effects of rampant inflation. Working largely in the public sector, Emiratis enjoyed job security and high salaries that were regularly upped to keep pace with the soaring cost of living. A government survey in 2009 found that the average annual income for an Emirati household in Dubai was $210,400, compared to $150,000 for Europeans, $89,100 for households of other Arab nationalities, and a mere $6,800 for ‘collective labourers’, the hundreds of thousands of migrant construction workers.4 Emiratis might not have enjoyed many political or media freedoms, but few openly demanded change.

  A month before the polls, at a meeting with Anwar Gergash, the UAE minister of state in charge of organizing the elections, the disdain for the Arab world's efforts at introducing democracy was palpable. His media advisor froze, eyes dropping to the exquisite Persian rug, when the minister was asked if UAE nationals would ever be able to vote out their ruling families. ‘We are not talking about democracy. What we are talking about is political participation,’ said Gergash, a mild-mannered former politics professor and the scion of one of Dubai's big merchant families. ‘I don't see the process in any way moving toward political parties or fundamentally questioning the dynastic nature of the state.‘5 He motioned to the enormous window that framed the hubbub of Dubai's cranes and concrete. Why would the UAE want to exchange this for the painful experience that other Arab countries have had with multi-party or, for that matter, one-party politics? Why would the UAE want to be like Lebanon or like Iraq, where sectarian, ethnic or tribal loyalties consistently trump policy considerations at the ballot box?

  Why indeed. Monarchies around the region had long pointed to case studies in troubled Arab democracy, like Iraq, Lebanon or the Palestinian territories, to remind the world and their own nationals of just how good they had it. They could point to how the removal of kings in Egypt, Iraq, Syria or Libya ultimately gave rise to military regimes coated in a veneer of republicanism and iced with leaders like Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Hosni Mubarak who all hoped to create their own dynasties. Political repression, mass jailings and heavy-handed surveillance had failed to protect those men from the upheaval of 2011, providing more evidence for Arab ruling families to argue that their islands of stability, for all their restrictions, were preferable to the frothing sea of sectarian strife or military republicanism that surrounded them.

  Yet absolute monarchs are an increasingly endangered species in the twenty-first century. With so few examples outside the Arab world, it is difficult to imagine that these families, as well as those who rely on their patronage, cannot feel vulnerable to the winds of change. In most cases, too, the states they control have existed for but a fleeting historical moment. The Al Sauds forged their kingdom through twentieth-century conquest, Jordan was a European colonial creation, and only Morocco and Oman can trace a much older heritage of continuous family rule over a territory still in existence today.

  The eight kingdoms or emirates in Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had all survived 2011, but things had clearly changed. The sight of Mubarak in a courtroom cage and Gaddafi's rotting corpse on display to the snap-happy masses offered a gory glimpse of what might await them if revolution spread to their shores. Each faced different internal and external challenges that the Arab Spring and its aftermath had exacerbated, activating grievances that might otherwise have remained subdued and forcing them to respond. The uprisings would also encourage the Gulf dynasties, particularly those of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to pursue more proactive policies in the wider region rather than rely on Washington's lead. Aware that they could not push back the tide of change, they sought to harness it to serve their own interests.

  Whether these ruling families can retain their grip on power in the midst of a turbulent regional and global climate will hinge on a number of factors, including their reserves of legitimacy and goodwill, the strength of domestic demands for change, the depth of their pockets, the external pressures they face, and how the new-look republics shape up. Like all the authoritarian regimes that fell in 2011, the Arab monarchies suffer underlying social, economic and political imbalances that have the potential to tip over into serious upheaval unless handled with the utmost care.

  Some countries felt compelled to make political concessions in 2011, allowing freer and fairer elections or transferring extra powers from kings to elected parliaments and thereby deflating, for now, the swelling demands for change. Others used money and fear to suppress unrest, but have done little to deal with bottled-up tensions that threaten to detonate violently in the future, just as they did in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in 2011. In the short term, all the Arab monarchies look well placed to avoid revolution. But in some, a storm is brewing on the horizon, and the Arab Spring has only blown it closer to their shores.

  Buying Stability

  In the decade before 2011, most Arab ruling families had tweaked their political systems to give the public more of a say in policymaking. At one end of the spectrum was Morocco, which permitted political parties and held elections for a parliament with some, albeit limited, powers. At the other was Saudi Arabia, whose only experiment with voting had been a 2005 poll for municipal councils in which women were not allowed to participate. In the absence of any unified and broad-based opposition movements, reform everywhere was hesitant, cautious and initiated from above rather than pressured from below.

  2011 changed all that. Inspired by the success of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and the wave of change that appeared to be spreading across the region, youths and intellectuals began to air their demands. Protests broke out not just in Bahrain (discussed in an earlier chapter) but in Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and even Saudi Arabia. For the most part, these were mild in intensity. They were largely peaceful and their participants were unarmed. They called not for wholesale revolution but for political reform and economic concessions. None snowballed into mass uprisings or threatened to topple the ruling families. There were few fatalities and, in most cases, little of the brutality that could have triggered much more serious unrest. Like the initial round of protests in Egypt and Tunisia, the protests did not have a religious bent, although Islamist demonstrators did take part, and the most vocal and active groups were often hastily-organized youth movements with no clear hierarchies.

  Yet these were unusual levels of domestic unrest for the Gulf, and in the context of the revolutionary fervour that had gripped the region, they were serious enough to prompt major financial concessions. Meeting the economic expectations of their citizens will be crucial if Arab monarchies are to sap the momentum of any future protest movements and limit the depth of political reform that ruling families could be forced to implement. But the Arab Spring has already been a pricey affair for all the monarchies, though some have much deeper pockets than others.

  Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE are in the strongest financial pos
ition to provide high living standards for their citizens. From their very emergence as independent states, several common traits have enabled their ruling families to maintain power.

  The first is their tiny populations. A census in 1970, a year before its independence, counted just 111,133 permanent residents in Qatar, of whom less than half were classified as Qatari nationals.6 Dubai's first-ever census in 1968, three years before the formation of the UAE, recorded just 58,971 residents, with another 74,880 across the five northern emirates and 46,375 in Abu Dhabi. Kuwait was more populous, with 321,621 residents at independence in 1961, and also had a sizeable Shi'ite population.7

  From the start, these minuscule constituencies meant that ruling families could physically consult with their subjects, maintain personal contact with the patriarchs of local families and, if they chose, pursue a relatively democratic rule simply by virtue of regular consultation and without the need of institutions to represent popular opinion.

  By 2011, Qatari nationals made up around 15 per cent of a total population of 1.7 million, Emiratis barely 13 per cent of 7.3 million, and Kuwaitis roughly 30 per cent of around 3.5 million.8 While the greater numbers of nationals created difficulties for the old form of personalized rule, which lacked the institutions to channel popular will to the government, their minority status meant that they could effectively be moulded into an elite that received a rich host of benefits that were denied to the majority of the population, made up of foreigners. These countries exhibited huge rich-poor divides, but the local populations, whose support was vital to the ruling families, were on the favoured side of that divide. Unlike nationals of Egypt, Tunisia or Libya, there was little reason for Qataris or Emiratis to complain about inequality or marginalization.

  This divide was made possible by energy resources that in the space of a few decades had allowed these sheikhdoms to move from primitive economies based on pearling, fishing and trading to become some of the richest countries in the world, in per capita terms. In 2010, Qatar's hydrocarbons sector earned the equivalent of $281,593 for each one of its citizens.9 In Kuwait, income from crude oil sales was equivalent to about $57,677 per Kuwaiti.10 Energy wealth provided the ink for a long-established ruling bargain in which the rulers provided for the ruled, but in return demanded loyalty and political acquiescence.

  Governments made little or no other demands on their citizens. None of the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) imposed personal income tax, and most nationals receive free housing, education, healthcare and soft loans. When inflation soared in 2007, the Dubai government increased its public-sector salaries by 70 per cent, while the Qatari government approved a series of pay rises throughout the late 2000s, plus another of 60 per cent in September 2011.11 Ostensibly to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of independence in 1961 and the twentieth anniversary of liberation from Iraqi forces in 1991, Kuwait's emir granted about $3,500 to every Kuwaiti national in February 2011 and announced that basic items of food would be free until March 2013.

  The way these countries manage their oil and gas revenues is still riddled with corruption, inequality and wastage. None is yet properly equipped for the post-oil era. But they have nonetheless used their natural wealth to provide significantly higher living standards than some other energy-rich regimes, not least that of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Their spending patterns are not sustainable in the long run, but high oil prices in the 2000s have provided a comfortable cushion for now. That is more than enough to meet the economic demands of local populations while ensuring that any political reform went at a speed comfortable to the ruling families, and that any minority voices calling for a quicker pace of change could be sidelined.

  In March, five Emiratis, including Ahmed Mansour, a member of the Middle East advisory committee of Human Rights Watch,12 and Nasser bin Ghaith, an economist and lecturer at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Sorbonne University, had drafted a petition to Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE president, urging greater freedoms. They referred to the country's original 1971 constitution, which called for ‘progressing by steps towards a comprehensive, representative, democratic regime in an Islamic and Arab society free from fear and anxiety’.13

  The document acquired the signatures of more than 130 Emiratis and was described by one local political scientist as ‘probably the first ever political petition in the history of the UAE’.14 But it crossed a red line. Its authors, later to be dubbed the ‘UAE5’, were arrested and put on trial, accused of ‘instigation, breaking laws and perpetrating acts that pose [a] threat to state security, undermining the public order, opposing the government system, and insulting the leadership’.15 In November, they were sentenced to three years in jail after a trial that was described as ‘grossly unfair’ by independent observers, but were pardoned by Sheikh Khalifa one day later.16

  Any other signs of an ‘Emirati awakening’ were nipped in the bud. Media censorship, already strict, tightened further. The government made clear that any political safety valves would be opened at their own pace. Despite raising the number of Emiratis selected to vote from 7,000 to 129,000, or about 12 per cent of all UAE nationals, turnout for the second-ever FNC elections in September 2011 was a miserable 28 per cent, suggesting that most Emiratis were either not interested in political participation or considered the advisory body to be meaningless. It was a similar story in Qatar, where in May turnout was just 40 per cent in the first elections for its twenty-nine-member Central Municipal Council, a consultative body with very limited powers. But the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, surprised many in November by announcing that in 2013 he would hold universal elections for a new council with legislative powers. Although there was no obvious domestic pressure for such a move, it sent a clear message that the ruling family would be the ones in control of political reform.

  The other Gulf monarchies face more challenging situations. Oman, which is expected to drain its remaining 5.5 billion barrels of crude some time in the 2020s, must prepare much sooner for a post-oil era.17 High energy prices in the 2000s and better-than-expected production have postponed the problem. The Sultanate sold its crude at an average price of $77 per barrel in 2010 compared to $57 a year earlier, helping to cut down its budget deficit and keep comfortable financial reserves.18 But oil and gas still accounted for four-fifths of state earnings and exports in 2010, while government expenditure had jumped by 61 per cent since 2006. And the measures that Sultan Qaboos enacted after the 2011 protests added another $2.6 billion onto an annual budget that was already expected to be the biggest ever.19

  Providing jobs will be the pre-eminent challenge. Since 2007 more Omanis have been employed by the private sector than by the state, but its labour markets remain deeply skewed: 84 per cent of private-sector workers are expatriates, while 86 per cent of all public-sector workers are Omanis. Copying the Emirati or Qatari model of a privileged national elite is far more difficult in Oman, where only 28 per cent of the population are foreigners, and where unemployment and inflation could be disruptive if the state lacks the money to feather its citizens’ nests.20 Lacking the funds and facing a looming succession crisis, Oman was also forced to make political concessions.

  The Sultanate's advisory body, the Shura Council, was granted additional powers in 2011 after protests in February saw roads blocked, shops burned and rallies held in several cities.21,22 The complaints aired by protesters focused on high unemployment, rising prices and corruption by unaccountable ministers or officials, and were met mainly with economic measures, like a 43 per cent rise in minimum private-sector wages and a promise of 50,000 new government jobs.23

  But Sultan Qaboos, who celebrated his seventy-first birthday in 2011, also sacked many members of his cabinet, including the powerful ministers of the interior and the economy, and pledged to give legislative powers to the Shura Council, the only elected body in the country. He also promised that, for the first time, some of those elected from the council would be appointed as government ministers. T
hese were not insignificant changes in an Arab monarchy where power is theoretically more personalized than in any other.

  The sultan has no children or full brothers, and tussles over succession and power could become messy. Old religious tensions could emerge. It was only in the 1950s that the conservative interior of the country was ruled by a religious imamate. Omanis seem in no rush to remove their leader and his succession may be smooth, but underlying conflicts that remained latent during his rule risk erupting with his death, especially in an era of declining oil revenues.

  Oil-poor Jordan and Morocco are even more financially pinched. Jordan's outstanding domestic debt had reached 35 per cent of GDP in 2010, compared to 23 per cent three years earlier, and its finances have continued to be heavily reliant on foreign aid.24 Desperate for income, the government had reduced food and fuel subsidies as part of a wider free-market push aimed at reducing a record budget deficit of $2.1 billion in 2009.25 In 2010, it had raised taxes on mobile phones, border crossings, gasoline, tobacco, hybrid cars and coffee, among other things.26 But the 2011 protests forced a change of direction, with large-scale spending to cover the new concessions pushing the budget deficit far above initial targets. Signs of disquiet were already rearing up before 2011 as economic growth faltered, inflation jumped to 5 per cent, and unemployment remained stubbornly high.27 Strikes were on the increase, while small-scale demonstrations had protested against elite corruption and called for the resignation of the prime minister. The Arab Spring stepped those up a gear.

  Lacking the cash to offer endless handouts, Jordan's King Abdullah is caught between allowing greater political participation by his six million-strong population as a means of easing unrest, but in the process raising the ire of his traditional supporters. The Islamic Action Front, the political wing of Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood, boycotted the most recent parliamentary elections in 2010 and said it would only participate in 2012 vote if its long-running demands for freer and fairer polls are pushed through. If they are, and the electoral playing field does become flatter, then it will be an Islamist party that gains the most from post-Arab Spring concessions. But while the IAF might be the single most popular opposition group, many of the youth movements are disconnected from the old political parties and new forces will emerge in the years ahead. The Arab Spring accelerated that process and in Jordan, as with elsewhere in the region, the role of religion is one element in a more complex web of social, political, economic and demographic dynamics.