Gulf Politics And Economics In A Changing World

Michael Hudson, Mimi Kirk

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9789814566216
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The wave of uprisings that has engulfed the Arab world since 2011 has impacted the Gulf significantly, however much the region appears to have remained unscathed. In Bahrain, the regime cracked down on protestors with the help of Saudi forces, and increasing Gulf tensions with Iran, political chaos in Yemen, and rumblings among unemployed youth throughout the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states all complicate the facade of Gulf stability. In addition, ties with the United States appear to be weakening; regional politics are varied and changing, particularly with the rise of India and China; Gulf governance is often oppressive; and GCC economies are even more tied to rentier practices of distribution to keep populations satisfied and in check.

Gulf Politics and Economics in a Changing World addresses these aspects of political and economic life in the GCC, Iran, and Iraq in order to assess the present situation. It also offers analysis and predictions as to what the future of this important area of the greater Middle East may hold. The volume, which features contributions from some of the best scholars in the field of Gulf studies in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, provides an in-depth and critical look at the region.

Contents:

• Introduction: The Gulf Enigma (Michael C Hudson)
• The Gulf States and the Economy:
  • The Development Trajectory of the GCC States: An Analysis of Aims and Visions in Current Development Plans (Martin Hvidt)
  • Redesigning the Distributional Bargain in the GCC (Steffen Hertog)
  • State-Business Relations in the Gulf: The Role of Business Actors in the Decision-Making Process of Reform in Bahrain and Oman (Marc Valeri)
• Gulf Governance:
  • The Rule of Law and Political Liberalization in the Arab Gulf (David M Mednicoff and Joanne E Springer)
  • The Dynamics of Distribution in the Gulf: Selective Allocations, Agency, and Bureaucratic Accessibility in Kuwait (James C A Redman)
• The Gulf and Beyond: Relations and Tensions:
  • Rethinking Regional Organization in the Gulf and the Greater Middle East (Malik R Dahlan)
  • Sources of Continuity in Iran's Foreign Policy (Mahmood Sariolghalam)
• The United States and the Gulf:
  • American Policy in the Persian Gulf: From Balance of Power to Failed Hegemony (F Gregory Gause, III)
  • Neither East Nor West? The Gulf in a Post-American World (Alain Gresh)
  • US Military Bases in the Gulf and the Dynamics of Redeployment (Degang Sun)

Readership: Undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers who are interested in social, economic and political affairs of the Persian Gulf.

Gulf Governance

Chapter 4

The Rule of Law and Political Liberalization in the Arab Gulf

David M. Mednicoff and Joanna E. Springer

For centuries, until the commercial exploitation of its massive oil and natural gas reserves, Doha, Qatar was a backwater trading city. Many people would still be hard-pressed to find it on a map. Yet, in May 2009 Doha played host to perhaps the most illustrious array of global legal luminaries in modern history. Hundreds of high court judges, respected lawyers, and high-powered legal academics from nearly 60 countries and six continents convened at the first Qatar Law Forum for three days to discuss varied issues underscoring their shared commitment to the rule of law.

One of the United Kingdom’s preeminent jurists, former Chief Justice of England and Wales Lord Woolf, helped run the meeting in his capacity as the president of a new tribunal established by Qatar’s government to resolve disputes related to the country’s widespread financial and construction projects. Professors and administrators from Harvard Law School and several other important American legal academies were among the forum’s organizers.

The Qatar Law Forum illustrated an important broader trend. In the past few decades, Arab states generally, and Gulf states especially, have made, or felt pressured to make, the rule of law a central piece of their national politics. This connects to internal citizen demands, as has been shown dramatically since 2011, with calls for the rule of law serving as a major frame for the popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt.

This focus on the rule of law also links to a Western foreign policy objective, with the United States at the center, which aims to enhance the rule of law in non-Western countries.¹ This recent vintage of legalist wine fits partly in the old bottles of “law and development” practitioners of the 1960s and 1970s.² At the same time, contemporary U.S. rule-of-law reform efforts take place in a setting of globalized inter-connectedness,³ where international law and the legal norms of one society are easily accessible and often salient elsewhere,⁴ and where non-Western domestic and regional legal initiatives are significant, as the Qatar Law Forum exemplified. Thus, multiple and contending discourses and practices around the rule of law suggest a complex political picture.

In fact, such work is complicated further because both internal and external impulses for legalist reform stem from two broad aims. First is an economic stake in facilitating stable market and property transactions for transnational capital. Second is a political concern for improving individual rights and opening up the participatory process.

These two goals may not be mutually reinforcing, and the second can take a back seat to the first. Indeed, efforts to enhance the rule of law to improve the predictability of market transactions and the reliability of contracts can accompany, and possibly enhance, non-democratic regime stability.

Added to this picture is the complex general relationship of the West to the Arab world. At least until 2011, Arab countries were a particularly potent nexus for Western ambivalence about whether to push greater political accountability or maintain support for repressive regimes that accept U.S. security goals, such as the war on terror or the alliance with Israel.

Given the prevalence of non-democratic governments in the Middle East, alongside the significance of political frames around the rule of law for more recent political mobilization, the political and policy sides of the rule of law are worth study. The broad question motivating this work is how the rule of law and its reform can help make Arab political systems more accountable to their citizens. A secondary question is if foreign efforts to amplify the rule of law can be of any use.⁵ In this paper, the first of these questions will be addressed with specific regard to the Arab Gulf societies of Qatar and the UAE.

Broad questions about the rule of law share intellectual and practical importance. Theoretically, the imprecise and contested nature of legalist ideals and their confusing relationship with religious norms muddy the waters of how to understand the rule of law in the Arab Islamic world. In practice, despite the influence of courts and lawyers in the West, social scientists and policy practitioners have few clear answers about how promotion of the rule of law can help political liberalization in non-democratic settings.

Yet the monarchical societies ofQatar and the UAE illustrate one possible pathway through which legal growth may connect to political opening. The rapid hyperglobalization that these countries are experiencing has brought to bear pressures to bolster the rule of law both in terms of economic transactions and political rights. If legal reform geared toward improving transnational economic relations need not also advance political rights, the dual factors of hyperglobalization and little indigenous legal infrastructure to administer this hyperglobalization have created environments in increasingly prominent Gulf cities that may suggest linkages between the rule of law and political opening.

The remainder of this Chapter fleshes out this argument and reveals some differences as well as broad similarities with respect to the rule of law and political change in Qatar and the UAE. The contention is that the combination of particular developmental choices and federalism in the UAE have made legal growth, marked though it may be, somewhat less conducive to political change than in Qatar. At the same time, in both cases, hyperglobalization has transformed the legal context of both societies so that a connection to global norms around the rule of law and international rights is highly significant.

Before developing the above argument, it is worth exploring some of the general challenges around the rule of law, as well as in the particular context of the contemporary Arab world.

The Rule of Law: Strong Ideals and Unclear Politics, Particularly in the Arab World

It may be that the rule of law “stands in the peculiar state of being the preeminent legitimizing ideal in the world today.”⁶ Yet the diverse ways in which the term is deployed also has led theorists to dismiss the significance of this “bit of ruling class chatter.”⁷

The concept generally refers to two broad political categories. On the one hand, it stands for a single norm or cluster of norms that subordinate aspects of personal political authority to legal equality, fair laws, or perhaps the protection of individual rights.⁸ This is at the heart of the pithy if ambiguous formula of a government of laws, not men. On the other hand, the rule of law can describe a particular institution or constellation of functioning legal institutions, certainly including courts but often embracing legislatures and civil society organizations.

When used in the first sense of an ideal, the term “rule of law” is deployed in diverse and imprecise ways.⁹ Nevertheless, there is typically an assumption of a separation between a society’s politics and law.¹⁰ Specifically, the rule of law is meant to protect people from political anarchy and arbitrariness. It suggests a promise that legal supremacy, stability, and accountability will prevail over the caprice of leaders.¹¹ Possibly, but not necessarily, related is an emphasis on citizen equality before the law.

It is easy to see the rule of law as a set of measures and institutions united in their tendency to guarantee basic fairness to all people, even vis-à-vis the politically powerful. Yet nothing guarantees that the normative pieces of this puzzle fit together. Thus, however it is conceived, the ideal of the rule of law is likely to embed broad goals that potentially cut against each other. Rachel Kleinfeld suggests that the importance of specifying the diverse meanings of the rule of law lies precisely in the near certainty that, in this field, not all good things come together.¹²

A particularly obvious and critical tension is that of the law’s importance in providing order and its promise to guarantee the rights of citizens, justice, and equality. Despite the ideal that laws will stand above the self-interested actions of people, the reality is that the drafters, executors, or interpreters of law can flout this ideal unless meaningful accountability, popular awareness, and transparency exist. In other words, the rule of law can bolster democracy or it can slide into rule by law and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: The Gulf Enigma
• The Gulf States and the Economy
• Gulf Governance
• The Gulf and Beyond: Relations and Tensions
• The United States and the Gulf
• Index