The Foreign Policy of Smaller Gulf States

Size, Power, and Regime Stability in the Middle East

Máté Szalai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000452716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique du Moyen-Orient

This book studies how smaller Gulf states managed to increase their influence in the Middle East, oftentimes capitalising on their smallness as a foreign policy tool. By establishing a novel theoretical framework (the complex model of size), this study identifies specific ways in which material and perceptual smallness affect power, identity, regime stability, and leverage in international politics.

The small states of the Gulf (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates) managed to build up considerable influence in regional politics over the last decade, although their size is still considered an essential, irresolvable weakness, which makes them secondary actors to great powers such as Saudi Arabia or Iran. Breaking down explicit and implicit biases towards largeness, the book examines specific case studies related to foreign and security policy behaviour, including the Gulf wars, the Arab Uprisings, the Gulf rift, and the Abraham Accords.

Analysing the often-neglected small Gulf states, the volume is an important contribution to international relations theory, making it a key resource for students and academics interested in Small State Studies, Gulf studies, and the political science of the Middle East.

1 The four types of state size and the foreign policy of small states

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158288-2

The size of political communities – let them be states, city-states, empires, and so on – has always been a widely discussed topic in social sciences. Since the notion is unavoidable in several disciplines – including political science, International Relations (IR), sociology, and economics – the exact meaning and the conceptualisation of size has varied to a surprisingly great extent. In consequence, one cannot provide a complete, exhaustive overview of all literature related to the size of states, only a general framework in which the major traditions of thought can be included. This framework will be called complex model of size (CMS), and it includes the most relevant conceptualisations of smallness and the contours of behavioural patterns built on them.

Most of the ways in which scholars of IR have interpreted state size can be grouped into four distinct categories; these follow the four sociologies of IR, a framework put forward by Alexander Wendt (1999, pp. 22–39). These four schools of thought differ in their answer to two major IR questions – whether they deal with material or immaterial variables, and whether they focus on the state-level or the systemic-level. When it comes to state size, these two questions can be translated thus: Is size a purely material phenomenon that can be measured through identifying the available specific resources, or it is a construct that is shaped by norms and perceptions? Should we investigate state size in the context of a single state, or should we interpret it in an international comparative context? Based on these questions, the CMS recognises four different types of state size (see Figure 1.1):

• absolute size is the quantity of specific resources solely in the context of the state itself;
• relative size is the relative quantity of specific resources and a state’s share in the distribution of such resources in a system;
• perceptual size is the perception of one’s own size by the state or its society;
• normative size is the perception of one’s size by the international community.

Figure 1.1 The basic framework of the complex model of size.
Source: Compiled by author, using Wendt, 1999, pp. 22–39.

The four different kinds of size affect decision-making, power, and independence in various ways, and are connected to different traditions of political science. Researchers focusing on absolute size usually focus on questions of self-sufficiency, (dis)economics of scale, the proportional size of various resources, and so on. Relative size, which is the mainstream concept of IR, allows us to compare a state’s role in a regional or global system. Perceptual size, a constructivist notion, affects how a state’s identity is shaped by its own size and how the elite or the society interprets its own role. Normative size, which is also taken into account by constructivist researchers and a few representatives of the English school, determines the leverage of a state and its ability to build relations with other actors of international society.

I now offer a non-exhaustive literature review with the aim of separating the different ideas related to the four distinct traditions, setting up their research agenda and identifying their main conclusions on the definition and behaviour of small states.

Absolute size and absolute small states

In search for the optimal size

Analysing the absolute size – the available quantity of specific resources and the effect of such resources on the political community – can be regarded as the first endeavour in the study of smallness. Greek and Arab philosophers, among others, expressed the idea quite early that bigger is not necessarily better and that there are (or should be) some limits to the growth of a political entity. Searching for the “optimal size”, they set the scale differently: Plato argued that 5,040 heads of families is enough, whereas Aristotle was a little more permissive with accuracy, claiming that citizens in the ideal political community should be able to maintain face-to-face relationships with each other (Beer, 1993, pp. 88–89).

Naturally, their argumentation was more interesting than the actual number they proclaimed. In Plato’s The Republic, state size is connected with morality and self-sustainability. Socrates argues that the size of a state is healthy if it provides the “bare necessities” for its population and nothing more. If it remains as such, its smallness encourages “intimacy and friendship”, “sobriety and moderation” (Owen Arthur cited by Henrikson, 2007, p. 50). Nevertheless, if a state overstretches, it will turn into the immoral entity of the “luxurious state” that starts wars with others in its “pursute of unlimited wealth” (Plato, 2004, pp. 55–57).

Besides Plato, Arab philosophers also differentiated between the two categories. In al-Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldoun (1967) makes the distinction between the Bedouins (al-Badw) who “restrict themselves to what is necessary in their conditions (of life)” and sedentary people (al-hadar), who “concern themselves with conveniences and luxuries in their conditions”. ¹ Al-Farabi also describes the “necessary city” (al-madina al-darariyya) as a type of city in which “the people’s aim is restricted to what is necessary for the subsistence of the body in (the way of) food, drink, habitation and sexual intercourse and to cooperation in obtaining these (things)” (Pines, 1971, p. 128), but he does not connect it with moral superiority (Pines, 1971, pp. 134–135).

Aristotle also favoured smaller entities; however, he did not build his argumentation on morality of self-sufficiency but, rather, on governability. In Politics, he argued that if a state is too large (both in terms of population and territory), it can only be governed badly. He echoes Plato’s argument about the importance of satisfying the needs of the population, but he goes further and proclaims the importance of defence (Aristotle, 1998, p. 44):

there should not be so much property on hand that more powerful neighbours will covet it, and the owners will be unable to repel the attackers, nor so little that they cannot sustain a war even against equal or similar people.

His argument translates into a premodern security dilemma, according to which growing is necessary to protect oneself but growing too large can actually provoke others to attack the community. While, generally, Aristotle accepted that wealth has beneficial effects, he set the “best limit” for the optimal size as the state in which “those who are stronger will not profit if they go to war because of the excess, but as they would if the property were not so great” (ibid.).

The aforementioned classic philosophers set the tone for modern understanding of smallness for millennia. Political theorists of the last centuries built upon their ideas, constructing five main research programmes related to absolute smallness.

First, the questions of self-sufficiency and morality were reborn in the literature on sustainability, degrowth and the criticism of over-consumption (DeWesse-Boyd and DeWesse-Boyd, 2007). Acclaimed authors such as Ezra Mishan (1967) and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1977) criticised the “growth mania” of mainstream economic thought –the belief in the possibility and the necessity of “continuous material growth”, embedded in what E.F. Schumacher (2011, p. 51) calls the “idolatry of giantism”, the implicit assumption that bigger is always better. From their perspective, being small is not a negative fact of life; a “non-problem” (Schumacher, 2011, p. 54).

Second, historians tried to undertake empirical investigation of the developments that shaped the size of modern states (Alesina, 2003, p. 303). They were somewhat critical of classic philosophers’ admiration of smallness, arguing that their ideas “were not realistic. History did not follow [their] advice” (Gottmann, 1980, p. 220). Accordingly, in history, small states have not been morally superior communities but, rather, “economic jokes” (Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 286). To understand states’ size, one has to follow historical developments such as nationalism or modernisation, and not moral dimensions. “Nation-statehood”, argues Thomas Nairn (1997, p. 144) “was configured by the pressures and constraints of development […], and these ensured that only entities above a certain threshold of scale had any chance of surviving, or of attaining independence – or indeed, the right to do so”.

This brings us back to the question of the necessary size for self-sufficiency, or “viability” as Nairn puts it. The bar for this was set by the emerging competitive capitalism as the “first-wave industrialisation had to emancipate itself both from the confines of the city-state (where capitalism had always been at home) and from the bureaucratic hierarchies of the ancient empire-state” (Nairn, 1997, p. 147). Thus, the model for the ideal size of a nation state was set by France, a “medium-to-large nation state, capable of constructing a distinguishable political economy of its own, the range of cultural and administrative institutions needed for managing this, and an army capable of defending it” (Nairn, 1997, p. 133).

Third, debate surfaced in political science regarding the connection between governability and size (Beer, 1993; Anckar, 1999; Alesina, 2003; Posner, 2012). While many writers, including Niccoló Macchiavelli, Montesquieu, James Madison, Robert Dahl and Edward Tufte, agreed with Aristotle that large size contribute to ineffective governance due to growing diversity, others defied this correlation. According to the critics, there is no empirical evidence that ethnic or religious diversity is larger in bigger states but, even if it is, that cannot be directly translated into hostility or conflict.

Fourth, some economists also tried to calculate the optimal size of states. In one of the most comprehensive attempts, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore (2005) argued that the size of states is “due to trade-offs between the benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity of preferences over public goods and policies provided by government” (Alesina and Spolaore, 2005, p. 3). Growth produces advantages and disadvantages (e.g. growing costs of governability, the multitude of interests and preferences) simultaneously, which balance themselves out. Alesina and Spolaore (2005) presupposed the existence of an “equilibrium size”, in which the costs of largeness are minimal and the benefits arising from it are maximal.

The exact equilibrium size of a state is determined by international economic conditions, especially the country’s integration into the world economy and the prevailing trade regime. In a completely autarchic and protectionist environment, the size of the population is the same as the market for national companies, which enlarges the disadvantages of smallness. On the other hand, in a completely liberalised environment in which all states are equally and fully integrated, the size of the market is (at least, theoretically) the same for everyone. Therefore, the “benefits from country size are smaller the larger the degree of international openness, and, conversely, […] the benefits from openness are smaller the larger the size of the country” (Alesina and...