Energy Kingdoms

Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf

Jim Krane

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231548922
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

After the discovery of oil in the 1930s, the Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Bahrain—went from being among the world's poorest and most isolated places to some of its most ostentatiously wealthy. To maintain support, the ruling sheikhs provide their subjects with boundless cheap energy, unwittingly leading to some of the highest consumption rates on earth. Today, as summertime temperatures set new records, the Gulf's rulers find themselves caught in a dilemma: can they curb their profligacy without jeopardizing the survival of some of the world's last remaining absolute monarchies?

In Energy Kingdoms, Jim Krane takes readers inside the monarchies to consider the conundrum facing the Gulf states. He traces the history of their energy use and policies, looking in particular at how energy subsidies have distorted demand. Oil exports are the lifeblood of their political-economic systems—and the basis of their strategic importance—but domestic consumption has begun eating into exports while climate change threatens to render the region uninhabitable. At risk are the sheikhdoms' way of life, their relations with their Western protectors, and their political stability in a chaotic region. Backed by rich fieldwork and deep knowledge of the region, Krane expertly lays out the hard choices that Gulf leaders face to keep their states viable.

1

BEFORE OIL

The ruling sheikhs of the Gulf, with their perfumed headscarves and gold-trimmed cloaks, can seem like exotic anachronisms in this age of global standardization. But the enduring trappings of old Arabia go beyond dress; they also include a successful brand of tribal politics. Today’s reigning sheikhs and their families arose from ruling lineages that extend back millennia.

Oil, of course, plays a big part in the politics of the Gulf. But oil’s role is a recent one. Before oil, there was isolation. This isolation was protective and rewarded toughness and specialization. It incubated a unique society and a political culture that remains surprisingly relevant today. For most of its history, the Arabian Peninsula drifted in an eddy of time, close to but apart from the main historical currents that convulsed the neighboring lands of the Arab and Persian Middle East.

Nearby Mesopotamia was the site of the first highly advanced human society, which coalesced around the bountiful waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers some five thousand years ago. The seas, isthmuses, and caravan routes of the Middle East lay at the center of the Old World, funneling travelers between Asia and Europe. From 3000 BC until the thirteenth century, the Middle East was the cultural, economic, and often political center of all humanity west of India and China.1 But despite the grand sweep of Middle Eastern history—the Silk Road trade, the advent of Christianity, the great civilizations—the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula languished outside this current. Most of the action took place elsewhere, in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt, where plentiful fresh water enabled food surpluses and the construction of great cities.

For two distinct periods, however, the Arabian Peninsula played a central role in human history. The first dates to 622, when the Prophet Muhammad founded the Islamic faith. The formation of Islam launched the golden age of the Arabs, enshrining the Arabian Peninsula forever as the geographic and cultural heart of the Islamic world. By the thirteenth century, Arabs had conquered much of the known world and spread their faith from Spain to China. For four centuries, Arabs led the Western world in philosophy, science, medicine, and poetry, even preserving European knowledge during the medieval “dark age” that gripped that continent.

But as Islam spread into more temperate lands, its command centers followed. In a paradoxical turn of fate, the glories of the Arab Empire largely bypassed Arabia. The western Arabian cities where Muhammad began preaching, Mecca and Medina, remained holy shrines of pilgrimage, but after the prophet’s death in 632, most of the Arabian Peninsula sank back into isolation. The caliphates were administered from faraway capitals: Damascus, Cordoba, Baghdad, and Cairo. Punishing geography mired Arabia in a thousand-year time warp. Human settlement was deterred by the endless dunes and jagged wadis (canyons), the searing climate, the dearth of fresh water, and the limits of sea navigation.

The second golden age of the Arabian Peninsula is the one this book focuses on: the age of oil, which unfolded on Arabia’s Persian Gulf coast 1,300 years after the Prophet’s death. The birth of this new era is the focus of chapter 2.

Between the two golden ages of Islam and oil was a long epoch of isolation. Elsewhere in the world, global empires rose and fell, and civilizations were transformed by conquest, colonization, and technology. The Arabian Peninsula’s geographic quarantine allowed the sheikhdoms of the Gulf to develop traits that remain relevant to this day, including a robust tribal culture and distributional autocratic rule that has its basis in the earliest forms of Arabian societal organization. The Gulf’s inaccessibility also secured a mineral-rich realm for a small number of distant ancestors of the early Arabs. The meager size of the population ensured that, once resources were discovered, the size of the bounty relative to the size of the populace would bring prosperity.

IMPERIAL INTRUSION AND THE FOUNDATION OF HEREDITARY RULE

Early breaches of the Gulf’s historical sequestration came in the form of contacts with European and Ottoman military delegations in the early 1500s. The Portuguese arrived first, maintaining a nominal but brutal presence until fading away in the mid-1700s.2 The British and Ottomans were the most influential of the interlopers. Although neither empire spent much blood or treasure defending interests on the Arabian Peninsula, their authority had two lasting effects. First, since the imperial powers were unwilling to send their own citizens to colonize these lands formally, they instead concentrated power in the hands of preexisting tribal ruling families. Second, they pushed the Arab tribal leaders to define the boundaries of the territories they controlled. Many of these boundaries later became international borders.

The Ottomans and British regarded their Arabian territories as buffer zones that could shield more important possessions from enemy inroads. From the early 1500s until their empire dissolved during World War I, the Ottomans held superficial control over the peninsula’s Red Sea coast, including the trading and pilgrimage cities of Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. The Ottomans also maintained a tenuous grip on parts of eastern Arabia: Kuwait, Qatar, and the al-Hasa Oasis in today’s Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Istanbul used its Arabian presence to thwart European inroads into its strategic eastern trading cities of Baghdad and Basra, in today’s Iraq.

The British were the strongest external power in the Persian Gulf for 350 years. They arrived tentatively in the early 1600s, rose to dominance during the height of the British Raj in India in the late 1800s, and finally sailed away amid the crumbling of the imperium in 1971. They were interested in Arabia for its strategic location on trade routes between Europe and India. The British imposed their dominance around a series of truces, starting in 1835, which granted protection and political backing for ruling sheikhs who relinquished control over foreign affairs and trade. The last of these was signed with Qatar in 1916.3

While the Ottomans and British were rival intruders, they presided over a crucial change in the system of tribal rule on the peninsula. Before their arrival, communities in Arabia were not organized under the current system of hereditary sheikhly rule. Instead, a more ad hoc system prevailed, where the head of a respected family agreed to mediate disputes and manage relations with neighbors and distant powers.4

British and Ottoman treaty relations amended the old system. The British had a particular problem with ill-defined tribal rule and nebulous concepts of territorial control. They wanted to deal with identifiable rulers who controlled sovereign territory with clear boundaries.5 Since these institutions did not exist, the British created them. British authorities gave political and financial backing to sheikhs who followed the terms of the queen’s treaties. Once imperial powers recognized a local sheikh, ...