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| Volume VII, February 2000, Number 2 |
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| Book Review |
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For a printable version of this book review, click here.
The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, by Rosemarie Said Zahlan. Reading, England: Ithaca Press 1998. 200 pages: foreword by Roger Owen, introduction, maps, and index. £12.95, paperback.
Brooks Wrampelmeier
Former U.S. diplomat (ret.) in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE
This is the revised and updated version of a book originally published in 1989. Additional material has been added to cover the events of the past ten years, most notably the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the ensuing Gulf War, and domestic political developments in the several Gulf states, with emphasis on Kuwait and Bahrain. Some earlier material, such as an index with lists of Gulf state Councils of Ministers and some other dated material has been dropped and some errors corrected. In general, however, Dr. Zahlan has not significantly altered her brief but lucid account of the way in which these five Gulf Arab states assumed their present geopolitical structure and the role played, first by Great Britain and more recently by the United States, in first establishing and then maintaining that structure against threats or pressures from other regional and extra-regional powers.
In the first two chapters, Dr. Zahlan sketches the historical background of the Gulf's Arabian littoral to show how these five states came to acquire their present territorial and political status. She explains that the British trucial system inaugurated in 1820 and the advent of oil concessions beginning in the 1930s were major factors in confirming the political pre-eminence of local tribal shaykhs or city-state rulers and their families. British protection and oil revenues enabled the rulers effectively to insulate themselves from popular pressures for political evolution and to make them financially independent of their people. The creation of modern bureaucracies to oversee development projects and to distribute oil wealth generously to their people further reinforced the rulers' authority but at the same time reduced their accessibility and the sense of interdependence between ruler and subject.
In the next three chapters, the author describes the efforts in Kuwait and Bahrain to re-establish popular participation in decision making. While the institutions of representative government in Kuwait are still evolving, in Bahrain the ruler's unwillingness to revive the National Assembly he dissolved in 1975, together with serious economic and social problems, has led to continuing dissidence and even violence. Although not dictators, the central authority of the rulers in all the Gulf states has survived even the events of the 1990s virtually intact -- in part, the author believes, because those who would reform these political systems have often confused the two objectives of "participation" in the political process and "development" or administration of the welfare state (pp. 92-93). "Until the disruption of the pre-oil relationship between the ruler and his people [has been] fully redressed ... external events will continue to pose a challenge to the well-being of the Gulf states" (p. 93).
After several chapters relating the histories of the ruling families of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the seven member shaykhdoms of the UAE, Dr. Zahlan examines the influence exerted by Saudi Arabia at various stages during the last 75 years. Despite periods of conflict and tension over territorial and other issues, the size, wealth and conservative outlook of Saudi Arabia has "inextricably linked" the kingdom with its smaller eastern Arabian neighbors. This linkage has only been reinforced by the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the perceived threats from the other major regional players, Iraq and Iran. As the most important Gulf oil producer, Saudi Arabia has also set the parameters for the oil policies of the other GCC states. Their future, she concludes, has become intertwined with that of Saudi Arabia.
In her final chapter, Dr. Zahlan discusses the Gulf states in their regional context -- the formation in 1981 of the GCC, Saudi Arabia's efforts to resolve the Bahrain-Qatar dispute over off-shore islands, and Gulf-state responses to the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-89 and the Gulf War of 1990-91. She argues that the most important objective of the Gulf states throughout the Iran-Iraq War was to maintain internal stability and external security. But the events of the past two decades showed that the smaller Gulf states could not rely on Saudi Arabia alone for their defense against hostile regional neighbors. By the end of the century, the United States had replaced Britain as the maintainer of the status quo, guarding the freedom of maritime shipping in the Gulf and restoring the basic geopolitical characteristics of the region following the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. At the same time, their bilateral defense agreements with the United States have enabled Gulf rulers, especially the Al Khalifah of Bahrain, to continue to suppress or ignore popular demands for political reform. In a brief but somewhat muddled conclusion, Dr. Zahlan suggests that the nature of U.S. interests, and therefore policy, will likely cause it to become much more involved in Gulf-state affairs on a wide variety of levels than Britain ever was.
There are a few concerns about this book that must be noted. As mentioned above, Dr. Zahlan's treatment of the U.S. role in the Gulf is sketchy. She appears uneasy about the enhanced U.S. involvement there since Desert Storm, but she offers no clear prescriptions for either U.S. or Gulf-state decision makers on how their new and evolving relationship should be handled. Dr. Zahlan relied heavily on British and U.S. archival material in her research, as well as on secondary sources. Her footnotes, especially for the updated material, are sparse, and there are sometimes references to "other reports" for certain pieces of information that are undocumented. There is no indication that she has done recent field work in the region, and some of her remarks suggest a tendency to accept too readily the face value of certain public pronouncements. An example of this is her rather rosy description of the achievements in economic integration among the GCC member countries (p. 161). Despite some progress toward developing a common market by eliminating internal tariffs and trade barriers, disagreement between Saudi Arabia and the UAE over the level of the tariff to be established on exports from outside the GCC has been an obstacle to establishment of an effective customs union. In addition, this reviewer found puzzling her statement (p. 138) that "Qatar, Oman, and most of the Trucial States had common borders with Saudi Arabia" when in fact only Abu Dhabi of the seven UAE member shaikhdoms has had a common land frontier with the Kingdom. In the same paragraph, she refers to the Wahhabis controlling the tribes by "the enforcement of subsidies." This use of "subsidies" is somewhat misleading; the Saudi practice was to collect from the tribes the zakat, or obligatory contribution enjoined by Islamic law, as formal evidence of their acceptance of Saudi overlordship.
Dr. Zahlan, who has also written separate histories of the UAE and Qatar, has nevertheless done an excellent job in compressing and describing the political history of these five small Gulf countries. For this reason, her book is a good one for students new to the area or for general readers who seek a quick and highly readable introduction to the area. As Professor Roger Owen of Harvard states in his brief foreword to the new edition: "There is, quite simply, no other short book which combines the same wealth of history, detail and insight." More advanced scholars of Gulf affairs, however, will wish to turn to other works, such as those of Jill Crystal and F. Gregory Gause III, for deeper and more analytical studies of the socio-political evolution and economic development of these Gulf states.
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