The United Arab Emirates

Power, Politics and Policy-Making

Kristian Ulrichsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317603092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios regionales

Led by Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the UAE has become deeply embedded in the contemporary system of international power, politics, and policy-making. Only an independent state since 1971, the seven emirates that constitute the UAE represent not only the most successful Arab federal experiment but also the most durable. However, the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath underscored the continuing imbalance between Abu Dhabi and Dubai and the five northern emirates. Meanwhile, the post-2011 security crackdown revealed the acute sensitivity of officials in Abu Dhabi to social inequalities and economic disparities across the federation.

The United Arab Emirates: Power, Politics, and Policymaking charts the various processes of state formation and political and economic development that have enabled the UAE to emerge as a significant regional power and major player in the post Arab Spring reordering of Middle East and North African Politics, as well as the closest partner of the US in military and security affairs in the region. It also explores the seamier underside of that growth in terms of the condition of migrant workers, recent interventions in Libya and Yemen, and, latterly, one of the highest rates of political prisoners per capita in the world. The book concludes with a discussion of the likely policy challenges that the UAE will face in coming years, especially as it moves towards its fiftieth anniversary in 2021.

Providing a comprehensive and accessible assessment of the UAE, this book will be a vital resource for students and scholars of International Relations and Middle East Studies, as well as non-specialists with an interest in the United Arab Emirates and its global position.

1

Introduction

Led by Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has become deeply embedded in the contemporary system of international power, politics, and policymaking. In possession of the seventh-largest oil reserves in the world and strategically located at the southern end of the Gulf, the UAE has developed a global footprint in trade, financial flows, aviation, and logistics, as well as a trans-regional significance in labor migration and remittance flows. Long tied to the Global South through the generous provision of overseas development assistance, in the 2000s the UAE began to participate actively in the broader rebalancing of geo-economic power between West and East. Moreover, as a founder and active member of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and an integral cog in the regional security architecture of the Gulf, the UAE has, since 2011, engaged heavily with states impacted by the upheaval unleashed by the “Arab Spring.”

This book charts the processes of historical and state formation and political and economic development that have framed the rapid emergence of the UAE as a regional power with truly international reach. Only an independent state since 1971, the seven emirates that together constitute the UAE represent not only the most successful Arab federal initiative but also the most durable. An incremental pattern of nation-building has gradually grafted a common Emirati identity onto the seven emirates that, over time, has taken deep root, although differences do persist both in political outlook and economic prospect. Moreover, the impact of the 2008–2009 financial crisis and its aftermath illustrated continuing imbalances between Abu Dhabi – home to 90 percent of UAE oil reserves, Dubai, and the five smaller northern emirates. Meanwhile, the post-2011 domestic security crackdown that targeted members of an Islamist group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood highlighted the sensitivity of senior officials in Abu Dhabi to the potential for politicization of social and economic disparities across the federation even as the UAE emerged at the forefront of regional attempts to shape the direction of post–Arab Spring transitions in North Africa.

An extensive literature has developed around the emergence and growth of the UAE. Early volumes in the 1970s and 1980s constitute significant historical sources informed by participant accounts of many of the initial processes of state-formation and subsequent consolidation. Donald Hawley, a British diplomat who served as Political Agent in Dubai from 1958 to 1962, penned a historical account of the Trucial States that appeared in 1970, the year before the creation of the UAE itself.¹ Seventeen years later, Abdullah Omran Taryam published a detailed history of the formation and formative years of the UAE that drew heavily on his own experiences in the first Cabinets of the UAE (as Minister of Education and Minister of Justice) and remains one of the most important first-hand accounts of the period available in English. Taryam’s work constitutes an indispensable guide to the troubled early years of the federation when its later durability was by no means assured, or even predicted.²

Other important early works on the UAE by Mohammed Morsy Abdullah,³ Ali Mohammed Khalifa,⁴ and Rosemarie Said Zahlan⁵ were followed in the 1980s by Malcolm Peck⁶ before a surge of publications in the 2000s that included a detailed volume edited by Ibrahim al-Abed and Peter Hellyer,⁷ Frauke Heard-Bey’s voluminous study of the UAE,⁸ Christopher Davidson’s trio of books,⁹ and Jim Krane’s highly accessible study of Dubai’s meteoric rise.¹⁰ More specific volumes on diverse aspects of UAE policy include Hassan Hamdan al-Alkim on foreign policy,¹¹ Khalid Almezaini on foreign aid,¹² Hendrik van der Meulen¹³ and Andrea Rugh¹⁴ on the role of kinship ties and the political culture of leadership respectively, Karen Young on the political economy of, and formal–informal linkages in, energy, finance, and security,¹⁵ Ahmed Kanna¹⁶ on the intersection of cultural and political forces in the shaping of Dubai, works by Syed Ali,¹⁷ Pardis Mahdavi,¹⁸ and Neha Vora¹⁹ on migrant labor, and Michael Herb’s important comparative analysis of economic, political, and business development in the UAE and Kuwait,²⁰ to list but a few.

The United Arab Emirates: Power, Politics, and Policymaking offers a full and frank assessment of the UAE in historical and comparative perspective, political and security orientation, and economic globalization. The book adopts a comprehensive approach that covers, among others, the fields of political science and comparative politics, economics, the theory and practice of globalization, aspects of international relations and international political economy, and security studies. Further, the book strikes a balance between narrative and analysis in order to document both the factors that have propelled the UAE to regional and international prominence as well as the underside of that growth. Along with GCC neighbor Qatar, the rise of the UAE has challenged the existing academic literature on the role of small states in the international system. Opportunities for small states to make their voice heard have proliferated in today’s intensely globalized environment where concepts of power and influence are projected through multiple channels and are less reliant on territorial or population size than ever before. With the UAE having become a major player in the post–Arab Spring reordering of Middle East and North African politics, and remaining the closest Arab partner of the US both in military and in security affairs, an analysis of the factors that propelled the UAE to this position is both relevant and opportune.

Key Themes

A number of key themes outline the intellectual and analytical core of this book. Together, these themes help to outline how the political and economic challenges that faced the new federation of United Arab Emirates in the 1970s and 1980s were overcome and subsequently paved the way for the liberalization and internationalization of the political economy of the UAE in the 1990s and 2000s. The first is the blend of traditional and charismatic political authority exercised during the early years of the federation by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Ruler of Abu Dhabi between 1966 and 2004, and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the Ruler of Dubai from 1958 to 1990. The relationship between the two leaders was not without tension during the formative years of the UAE, particularly when their opposing positions over the degree of centralization within the young federation precipitated a constitutional crisis in 1976 that lasted until 1979.²¹ This notwithstanding, Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid succeeded in maintaining and updating political order in the face of the transformative period of socio-economic change that accompanied the onset of the oil era and the passage to statehood in the 1960s and 1970s.

The importance of personalized top-down leadership was magnified by the difficult and, at times, fractious task of aligning policies and expectations among the seven constituent emirates – and their individual rulers – which finally cohered on February 10, 1972, when Ras al-Khaimah joined the union of the other six former Trucial States that had been proclaimed on December 2, 1971.²² The success of the federation was far from preordained in 1971 and its subsequent durability contrasted sharply with nearly all of the other federal “experiments,” such as the short-lived Federation of South Arabia, that dotted the Arab political landscape around that time. In December 2011, the lavish celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the UAE’s founding illustrated the extent to which an initially top-down program of nation-building gradually was grafted, at times uneasily, onto the individual narratives and “localisms” of the constituent emirates to impart a distinctive “Emirati” national identity.²³ More than a decade after his death, aged 86, in November 2004, Sheikh Zayed remains revered, even mythologized, throughout the UAE as the nation’s “founding father,” and an aspirational standard of reference for all public figures in the country.

The gradual creation of “national” (i.e. federal) institutions provides an illustration of the second element to consider when analyzing the formation and subsequent evolution of the UAE, which is that the federation is a collection of seven constituent emirates with individual ruling families and interests that have gone through periods both of convergence and divergence. Indeed, writing in 1997, shortly after the UAE commemorated its quarter-century, US diplomat Hendrik van der Muelen observed that “tribal and kinship considerations dominate the internal struggle for political power in the UAE” both at the federal and constituent emirate levels.²⁴ The process of state formation and nation-building in the UAE therefore is as much one of identifying and strengthening the integrative mechanisms among the seven emirates as it is about transforming “traditional” patterns of tribal legitimacy into political and bureaucratic institutions. What is today the UAE is a symbiosis of the principle of hereditary rule alongside sophisticated areas of integration into global economic structures, as well as the translation of the initial charismatic political authority of the nation’s founders into a “legal-rational” bureaucratic, albeit authoritarian in places, form of rule.

Tables 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate the disparities in territorial size and list the ruling families of each of the seven emirates that constitute the UAE (an additional “emirate,” Kalba, received British recognition as a separate Trucial State in 1937 but this proved short-lived and in 1951 Kalba was reincorporated into Sharjah). The emirate of Abu Dhabi is dominant within the UAE both in terms of land mass and oil reserves and accounted for some 95 percent of total UAE crude oil production of about 2.9 million barrels per day in 2014.²⁵ Notably, it was Abu Dhabi as an individual sheikhdom that joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1967, four years before the creation of the UAE and the transfer of membership to the federation.²⁶ Abu Dhabi was initially represented at OPEC by a former Iraqi government minister, Nadim Pachachi, who was appointed an Advisor on Oil Affairs in the sheikhdom.²⁷

Table 1.1 List of Emirates by Territorial Size

Emirate	Land Mass (square miles)
Abu Dhabi	26,000
Dubai	1500
Sharjah	1000
Ras al-Khaimah	650
Fujairah	450
Umm al-Quwain	292
Ajman	100

Source: information compiled by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen.

Table 1.2 Ruling Families of the UAE

Emirate	Ruling Family	Ruler (2015)
Abu Dhabi	Al Nahyan	Sheikh Kh...