Reflecting on the GCC Crisis

Qatar and Its Neighbours

David B. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032172170
• eBook ISBN: 9781000547924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt (the quartet) enacted a diplomatic, economic, and physical blockade of Qatar. Gulf politics has always been fractious, but this stunning political gambit took everyone – Qatari leaders, scholars, the international community – entirely by surprise. The quartet assailed Qatar with a litany of charges mostly relating to its support of a motley array of sub-state actors across the Middle East. However, few out with the quartet thought that Qatar's purported crimes warranted such a unique and all-encompassing punishment. The blockade ended in January 2021 just as it began – out of the blue – without any obvious instigating factors.

The puzzle of the Gulf blockade and its myriad impacts are examined in this volume, which benefits from certain distance. It builds upon early analyses to offer a range of crisp, insightful reflections, many based on new primary sources. The chapters take a multidisciplinary and diverse theoretical approach to the crisis. In this way, the blockade is evaluated from multiple novel angles presenting the most rounded analysis of one of the most surprising and impactful events in the contemporary diplomatic history of one of the world's key strategic crossroads.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Arabian Studies.

Ontological Security and the Gulf Crisis

DAVID B. ROBERTS

Abstract: Ontological security speaks to a kind of identitarian security and argues that actors need to have a surety and certainty in who and what they are in order to enjoy settled peaceable lives. As a furrow of international relations theory, it argues that states must attend to ontological security needs just as they are concerned about physical security needs. Applied to the Gulf context, analysis of ontological security concerns provides a set of coherent rationales explaining why ontological security pressures play in an exaggerated way on the United Arab Emirates and why, in this context, Qatar is a uniquely problematic Other. As such, uncovering these deeper, abstract security drivers provides a compelling explanation to explain the bitterness and animosity inherent to the UAE’s surprising decision to lead the 2017 blockade against Qatar.

1Introduction

Ontological security reveals how crises that garner the attention of states challenge their identity. As the disparate behaviours of states illustrate, identity needs compel them to pursue actions that are seemingly irrational — yet such behaviour must have made sense to the state agents who decided upon that course of action at the time.¹

The depth of the animus felt between the Gulf monarchies of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) remains a curiosity. That there are differences of opinion among elites, contrasting foreign policies and clashing worldviews are widely known, but this is hardly unusual. Most Gulf elites dislike Oman's closeness with Iran and tended to be uncomfortable with its willingness to openly host Israeli politicians. Indeed, states frequently have issues, sometimes serious ones, but few resort to policies as unusual and as far-reaching as the blockade of people, goods, services, and airspace as wrought on Qatar in 2017. Many might agree that the differences between Qatar and the UAE are more salient or broader in scope than other regional divisions, but few fully understand what led the UAE to act as a cheerleader for the blockade against Qatar. The explanations offered by the UAE and its blockading allies Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are a list of powerful gripes and real differences. Nevertheless, the confused reaction by the international community to the blockade signaled that vanishingly few states bought into the claims ranged against Qatar. Only states financially or politically dependent upon the quartet joined in the blockade. All other states wrinkled their collective brows in befuddlement, retained relations with Qatar, and sought to mediate a solution to a disagreement they found unfathomable.

Emirati leaders are not irrational. On the contrary, they have handmaidened the growth and emergence of one of the most dynamic and successful states in the Middle East. They have been endowed with vast material wealth, but this is hardly a guarantee of success as the citizens of Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela will attest. The UAE today remains one of the beacon countries of the Arab world, with the Dubai model being deeply attractive around the region. None of this has come about by chance; rather, smart leadership has strategically driven the UAE to this point. The decision to launch the blockade remains puzzling, however. This is why the opening quote from Brent Steele is so important. The launching of the blockade defies obvious explanation and is “seemingly irrational” to many, but, as he said, it “must have made sense to the state agents who decided upon that course of action at the time”.² This precisely describes the Gulf blockade. Steele’s focus on ontological security to reveal such “seemingly irrational” underlying issues is exactly what is required in this case; a new, as yet unused, analytical tool that holds the promise of a level of explanatory power not seen in the literature when examining the Gulf blockade.

This study focuses on the Qatar-UAE relationship. The UAE is often seen as critical in precipitating the blockade against Qatar with the state’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, taking the leading role engendering Saudi Arabia to follow.³ Bahrain and Egypt are universally seen as followers, not leaders, in the blockade. Though the nature of elite decision-making remains opaque, it is not surprising to see Mohammed bin Zayed cast in such a role. As the de facto leader of the UAE, he has reshaped the state’s foreign policy profoundly and given the country a real military edge.⁴ Not willing to leave intervention to other actors, under his rule, UAE forces initiated the 2015 war in Yemen and actively supported politically preferred clients in Libya. These two policies are evidence of a profound change in UAE policy; never before has the state — or any Gulf monarchy ­­— so actively led a military coalition with such far-reaching consequences.⁵ Moreover, since the Arab Spring, the UAE and Qatar have emerged on different sides of an ideological war, with Qatar’s frequent support of Islamists, and the UAE backing forces (often nationalist ones) specifically ranged against Islamists.⁶ Not all of the federal states in the UAE entirely support this Abu Dhabi-driven approach, but other UAE leaders have minimal obvious influence on the country’s foreign policy.⁷

2 What is ontological security?

The esoteric sounding concept of ontological security is one of the newer theoretical tributaries flowing into international relations theory. The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing first coined the phrase in his 1969 work, The Divided Self, to refer to an individual’s sense of “integral selfhood and personal identity”.⁸ But it is Anthony Giddens, the British sociologist, who is the intellectual forefather of ontological security in its contemporary usage with his 1991 work Modernity and Self-Identity, which has garnered over 43,000 citations so far.⁹ Though Ontological Security discussions have moved on,¹⁰ it is important to start with Giddens to set the scene.

Giddens sought to understand and explain how an individual’s self-identity is shaped and affected by the contemporary world. He argued that today’s “late modern age” is qualitatively and quite profoundly different from preceding eras. With the radically changed nature of daily life from traditional ways and habits to a new kind of social order of exponentially increased interconnectedness amid globalization, Giddens argued that modernity shapes our self-identity.¹¹ In our world of profound flux, individuals struggle and strive to secure their ontological security. This means that individuals seek ways to make stable their intrinsic understanding of who and what they are, of their self and of their self-identity to “bring uncertainty within tolerable limits”.¹² As such, this means:

Ontological insecurity refers to the deep, incapacitating state of not knowing which dangers to confront and which to ignore, i.e. how to get by in the world. When there is ontological insecurity, the individual’s energy is consumed meeting immediate needs. She cannot relate ends systematically to means in the present, much less plan ahead. In short, she cannot realize a sense of agency. Ontological security, in contrast, is the condition that obtains when an individual has confident expectations, even if probabilistic, about the means–ends relationships that govern her social life. Armed with ontological security, the individual will know how to act and therefore how to be herself.¹³

Typically, strategies to secure one’s ontological security focus on minimizing background uncertainties, creating a “cocoon” of stability of one’s self and one’s identity. To this end, on a subconscious level, Giddens argues that a “basic trust system” is forged via routines, which are critical in allowing individuals to operate and to understand who they are and what they are doing without the need to consistently reflect upon them.

It is here where Jennifer Mitzen parlays ontological security discussions into international relations theory and as a cause shaping state decision-making. She defends this leap in two ways. First, traditional international relations scholarship makes an analogous logical leap, anthropomorphizing the state as a body that needs defending and as an entity that makes decisions.¹⁴ Second, she argues that states seek ontological security in the sense that individuals will become attached to stable social identities, which are in themselves forged and maintained via routinizing relations with other nearby groups. As such, interstate routines:

help maintain identity coherence for each group, which in turn provides individuals with a measure of ontological security. From here it is only a shor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Ontological Security and the Gulf Crisis
• 2 Society and State in Post-Blockade Qatar: Lessons for the Arab Gulf Region
• 3 Nationalism and Identity in Qatar after 2017: The Narrative of the New National Museum
• 4 European Policies Towards the Gulf: Patterns, Dynamics, Evolution, and the case of the Qatar Blockade
• 5 The Regional Implications of the Gulf Crisis
• 6 The Blockade Against Qatar: A Blessing in Disguise?
• Index