Qatar: Small State, Big Politics Read Free Page B

been aided by the persistently tumultuous politics of the Middle East, ranging from the near-chronic instability of Lebanese politics to the reverberations of the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Levant, thus presenting Qatar with repeated windows of opportunity to interject itself into the regional political scene.
    Fourth, Qatar’s very experimental nature as a country offers us insights into processes of state- and nation-building. Through the deployment of vast oil and gas revenues, the Qatari state is engaged in a frantic effort to construct an entirely new society. Although the emir’s National Vision 2030 promises to navigate social and economic change while ensuring continued anchor in tradition, the pace of change is breakneck and its nature awe-inspiring. Can material culture change so rapidly and fundamentally while political values remain static and traditional? Can the state continue to delay political development while fostering profound social change? Given the small population base, and the nationals’ ever-increasing dependence on rent income despite state efforts to usher in a knowledge-based economy, is this model of development sustainable? How long can the Qatari varieties of high modernism and political antiquity coexist side-by-side?
    In exploring these questions, I have adopted an integrated approach to the study of Qatar’s domestic and international politics, taking into account the importance of leadership and choices, the role of institutions, and the importance of context. As the arguments throughout this book make clear, agency and structure are both important. Neither institutions nor individuals alone have been responsible for making Qatar what it is today. Agency, contingency, and institutions have all gone hand-in-hand in the making of contemporary Qatar into a force to be reckoned with.
    The Book’s Plan
    I make three main, interrelated arguments in this book. First, I argue, there has been a steady shift in the regional balance of power in the Middle East away from the region’s traditional heavyweights and in the direction of the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Not that long ago, the political, military, and diplomatic centers of gravity in the Middle East rested in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. In their own ways, Algiers and Tripoli also sought to overcome their geographical remoteness from the region’s heartland and tried to shape the Middle East’s, or at least the Arab world’s, destiny as much as possible. Each might had its moment in history, but that moment is now over, at least for the time being, eclipsed by the combined effects of crumbling domestic infrastructures, mounting economic difficulties, and, perhaps most detrimentally, stale and increasingly reactive leaderships.
    Not all states of the GCC have been immune to the maladies plaguing the larger Middle East, and, as the events of the Arab Spring have shown, the less wealthy states of the Persian Gulf—namely Bahrain, Oman, and even Saudi Arabia—have largely staved off its repercussions. Overall, it is the GCC states that are exhibiting a new economic dynamism and a new vibrancy that is turning them into the Middle East’s new center of gravity. Within the GCC, a series of comparative advantages have given Qatar a significant edge over the other states, not the least of which is the country’s huge hydrocarbon resources and its wealth in relation to its population, its comparative social cohesion and lack of sectarian and other political tensions, and, perhaps most important, its visionary and determined leadership. Agency is as important as the institutional constraints and opportunities within which states find themselves.
    Mention must be made here of Iran and its position within the Persian Gulf region and in the larger Middle East. In recent years Iran may have achieved a number of successes insofar as its relations with the Lebanese Hezbollah and with Hamas, or its ties with certain