Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (18 page)

What upsets the emir and the PM is the QIA’s underperformance. What pleases them is more money, more visibility, and more influence. In that, it has succeeded. And there is little reason to believe this success will not continue into the future. In the process, the monarch is likely to collect his share of criticisms and unsolicited advice. “Qatar’s strutting on the world stage,” wrote one particularly cranky commentator, “would seem more savvy if the QIA was half as transparent about its strategy for managing its existing wealth as it is for domestic development.”
¹⁶¹
But, Byzantine opacity aside, the QIA has done what it was meant to do—to make Qatar, a small, young state in a rough neighborhood a key and highly consequential player in the world of global finance and diplomacy.

Finally, mention must be made of Qatar’s agricultural land purchases abroad, about which even less is known as compared to the workings of the QIA. In 2008 the QIA established a company for the specific purpose of purchasing lands and investing in food production companies around the world. With an initial capitalization of $1 billion, by 2012 Hassad Food was reported to have invested more than $2 billion in the agricultural sector worldwide.
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Preliminary research indicates that, along with the rest of the GCC states, Qatar is a major investor in and purchaser of agricultural lands aboard, especially in many parts of Africa, most notably in Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, and Mozambique, and also in a few countries in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Cambodia.
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Hassad has also purchased sizeable plots of land in New Zealand and Australia—in the latter just under 250,000 hectares by 2012
¹⁶⁴
—as well as in Argentina, India, Pakistan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Uruguay.
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The company is also reportedly a major stakeholder in agricultural corporations in Kenya, Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey, among others. The primary purpose of these purchases and investments is to guarantee the country’s food security through ensuring supplies and access to agricultural resources.
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One of their major consequences is to enhance Qatar’s global financial status and, especially insofar as other developing counties are concerned, their dependence on continued investments and revenue flows from the small Sheikhdom.

Conclusion

Since 1995 Qatar has steadily emerged as one of the major players in Persian Gulf and Middle Eastern politics as well as in global finance. Under the energetic leadership of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his trusted lieutenants, Qatar has successfully employed a combination of diplomatic hyperactivism and hedging, the American security umbrella, economic prowess, and branding to position itself as an influential actor in the region and beyond. By turning hedging into a science, it has set itself apart from the rest of the region by pursuing a foreign policy that at first glance seems maverick but is actually well thought out. In the process not only has it broken out of the mold in which small states are generally cast but it has indeed thrown into question existing assumptions about the types of power and influence that may be generated in international politics.

Despite the pervasive influence of Al Jazeera on Arab public opinion across the globe, Qatar may not really be said to have soft power; Al Jazeera may have brought Qatar worldwide acclaim and admiration among Arabs and many others, but it has not, at least for now, led to the widespread salience and appeal of Qatari values and a sense of Qatariness. Al Jazeera is primarily a mechanism for branding the country; the residual admiration that it generates for Qatar is at best marginal. More than anything else, as yet another element in the country’s branding arsenal, Al Jazeera has helped Qatar, as one observer has somewhat cynically noted, create “an extremely digestible narrative.”
¹⁶⁷

Neither does the country have hard or smart powers. Yet its negotiating skills are sought after by those disputants eager to exit their conflicts in face-saving ways.
¹⁶⁸
Its diplomatic self-confidence in dealing with the Americans, the Iranians, the Israelis, Hamas, the Sudanese and the Yemenis, and with everyone else, has been extremely high, betraying a sense of can-do optimism that is indeed rarely found anywhere else in the today’s Persian Gulf and the larger Middle East. What Qatar has is a subtle form of power—a quiet, steadily accumulating type of power that has resulted from a combination of financial affluence, diplomatic activism, self-confident and cohesive leadership, effective self-advertizing, and a sense of indispensability to peace and stability when others busy themselves with conflicts. What Qatar has done is to generate and to benefit from what is by all indications
subtle power
.

A
Times
journalist captures the essence of Qatari foreign policy perfectly:

Since the invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani decided that anonymity is no form of defense. With energetic diplomacy he has established an unrivalled contacts book straddling regional tensions and has alliances with the United States, and Israel, Hamas, and Iran.

Underpinning all this is money…The attraction of Western economies struggling out of recession is obvious.

This financial clout keeps countries coming back. And the emirate has grown more daring, mediating in Lebanon, Darfur, Yemen and Eritrea.

In Washington, the Obama Administration has recognised the value in Qatar’s relationship with rogue states and terrorist groups.

As the US tries to ensure regional stability while extricating itself from two foreign wars, Doha’s willingness to engage America’s enemies on its behalf in invaluable.
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Is this increasing power of Qatar sustainable in the long term? The question of what the rise of Qatar’s power and influence means for the long-term geopolitical alignments of the Persian Gulf in general and Qatar in particular is difficult to answer. In sultanistic regimes such as Qatar, one heart attack can change everything. Especially in Qatar where there is no parliament, no meaningful armed forces to speak of, no institutional bastions of the state, only an army of imported functionaries who implement the decisions made by a few Qataris. In Qatar individuals have not just replaced institutions. They have become institutions. If Louis XIV were alive today, he would have felt at home in Qatari politics. And, just as the forced transition of power in 1995 radically changed the direction and tenor of Qatar’s domestic and international politics, it is conceivable that the next power transition would also usher significant shifts in Qatar’s perceptions of itself and the global position it is seeking to carve out for itself.

Although conceivable, several indicators point to the unlikelihood of dramatic alterations in Qatar’s ambitious diplomatic pursuits and its far-reaching programs of domestic social change. Even if the country’s next emir wishes to pursue fundamentally different domestic and international priorities, by now path dependency makes such possible developments as retrenchment from the global economy, moving away from the US security umbrella, or abandoning hedging extremely difficult and at best highly incremental. At any rate, for a future emir to steer the country too far from what has become the norm in each of these areas would require substantial political capital, which neither the current heir apparent, nor anyone else within the royal household possesses. Qatar is likely to pursue its current domestic and geopolitical trajectories for generations to come.

4

T
HE
S
TABILITY OF
R
OYAL
A
UTOCRACY

Qatar can capitalize on its resources and its strategic location only if it has its domestic house in order. While larger structural developments in the Persian Gulf region and in the larger Middle East may have played important roles in creating leadership opportunities for Qatar, the deliberate policies and priorities of the Qatari leadership have been instrumental in capitalizing on those opportunities and in maneuvering developing circumstances to their advantage. Qatar’s current regional and international ascent cannot last without a visionary and determined leadership that feels secure in its domestic position.

More than forty years after the country’s official independence, and more than two hundred years after its birth as a country, Qatar is still undergoing a process of state formation. Successive rulers have proliferated state institutions as a means of expanding their patronage resources and thus ensuring their own tenure in office, and Sheikh Hamad, perhaps the country’s most energetic and transformative leader, has been no exception. He has staffed existing and new institutions of the state with younger cohorts sharing his vision of the country’s future, dismantled some institutional bastions of conservatism, and, when necessary, created parallel institutions meant to compete with and eventually eclipse older ones.
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In the process, he has streamlined and brought under control internal family politics, has effectively monopolized the political process under his consolidated rule, and has ensured that succession remains within his own branch of the family.

Al Thani rule per se was never threatened, as from the earliest days of its move into the city the family was able to establish its dominance in Doha and to marginalize potential competitor families. While the family’s monopoly on political rule was secure, the personal position of the emir was not, thus compelling each successive emir to grant more concessions and patronage rewards to family members to ensure their acquiescence to his rule. This chapter examines the twin processes of state formation and political consolidation in Qatar, analyzing the means and methods through which power has been contested, captured, and secured by one ruling sheikh after another. Qatar’s political history has been anything but peaceful, featuring repeated contested successions. But today the sources of that drama appear to have subsided, and there are multiple reasons to believe that the next succession will be a comparatively smooth one. This, I argue, is the product of a system that has finally reached a comfortable degree of political consolidation.

I begin with a brief political history of Qatar, chronicling the steady consolidation of Al Thani rule throughout the country and, commensurately, the ruling family’s increasing and overwhelming domination of emerging and proliferating state institutions. Creating and then staffing new institutions of the state has been one of the most favored means of ensuring political consolidation, with the inadvertent result of simultaneously fostering state formation. From humble beginnings as late as the 1960s and 1970s, the Qatari state’s explosive growth continues to this day, as much in order to accommodate new and emerging social classes into its employ as to direct the phenomenal development of the country’s economy and infrastructure.

All states rely on a combination of means and methods to maintain themselves in power. I conclude this discussion with an examination of the central pillars on which the Qatari state relies for ensuring its political longevity, focusing specifically on expansive patronage networks, the emir’s successful balancing of multiple, countervailing trends and influences within Qatari society, and instruments of coercion. These, of course, are in addition to the ruling family’s monopoly over the institutions of the state, which give them unsurpassed organizational, political, and economic superiority over the rest of society. The outcome has been a consolidated and comparatively powerful state, enjoying a remarkable level of elite cohesion, power, and, with the emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani as its head, palpable popularity. Qatar’s political system may be autocratic, but it is stable and popular as well.

A Political History

Qatar’s political history features two prominent characteristics: by comparative standards, it is brief; and it is also marked by a fair degree of instability and turmoil. Qatar did not have the tradition of centralized authority and strong leadership that was the case in Kuwait and Bahrain. It is not surprising that the alliances and settlements found throughout the country were highly fluid.
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In fact, the country acquired permanent settlements only in the late nineteenth century. Although technically under Ottoman suzerainty until 1914, Qatar was often Ottoman only in name and remained a restless territory during much of the period of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans, in fact, could hardly afford to bring it under their full control. According to Frederick Anscombe, “throughout the last period of Istanbul’s sovereignty over Qatar, the Ottoman position in this dangling
kaza
[administrative district] varied from poor to woeful.”
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Requiring large, permanent civil and military posts, beginning in the 1880s the maintenance of Qatar became a costly drain on the Ottomans.
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Besides Kuwait, which they viewed as strategically especially important, the Ottomans in fact paid little sustained attention to their Persian Gulf territories.
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The Al Thani were able to employ this hands-off policy to their advantage by accepting Ottoman suzerainty, thus protecting themselves from the possible wrath of Istanbul and other nearby tribal adversaries, while at the same time building up their own powerbase and patronage network.
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The Al Thanis were somewhat latecomers to the Qatari political scene. Throughout the 1700s they played no major role in the events that shaped Qatar’s history, such as the conquest of Bahrain, in which other notable families such as the Al Sulaithis, the Jalahima, al-Bu Kwara, al-Musallam, and the Al Khalifa were involved, the latter eventually establishing their rule over the island.
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It was not until the 1820s that power, whatever of it there was, shifted from the western city of Zubara to Doha in the east.
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The Al Thanis moved to the city in the 1850s and, under the leadership of Sheikh Muhammed bin Thani, steadily emerged as one of its dominant and influential clans. The Al Thanis viewed the acceptance of Ottoman suzerainty as strengthening them against rivals in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Najd.
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Al Thani rule in Qatar received the all-important British recognition in November 1868, when Sheikh Mohammad bin Thani was acknowledged by the British Resident in the Persian Gulf as the “principal Chief of Katar.”
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Signed onboard HMS
Vigilant
on 11 September 1868, the treaty took the form of a pledge by Sheikh Mohammed to the British Resident not to “put to sea with hostile intensions,” to refer any possible disputes with others, especially the al Khalifa of Bahrain to the British Resident. In return, two days later the British Resident issued a note to the other leading clans of the city informing them that Sheikh Mohammed “has bound himself to live peaceably there and not to molest any of his neighbouring tribes. It is therefore expected that all the Sheikhs and tribes of Gutter should not molest him or his tribesmen.”
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Despite British assurances, by the beginning of the twentieth century, both the coastal and interior parts of Qatar were still riven with conflict, most of which was due to pearl fishing disputes. Compounding the country’s difficulties were depressed economic circumstances throughout the early 1900s because of poor pearl fishing and financial mismanagement. Al Thani rule remained on tenuous ground, and Qatar sought the same kind of treaty relationship with Britain that the Trucial States had had since 1892. British protection gave emerging ruling elites significant power. According to Nazih Ayubi, “the state was separated from its socio-economic base and given a specifically political/strategic underpinning within newly defined, ‘rigid’ and often artificial borders.”
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Qatar was, in fact, the last of the Arabian Peninsula states to enter into a treaty relationship with Britain, which it did in 1916, whereby Qatar was given protections similar to those granted earlier to the Trucial States in return for placing the country “firmly within the British orbit.”
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Abdullah Al Thani (r. 1913–1949) was promised protection from sea and land attacks in return for privileged diplomatic and trade relationships, and abstention from piracy, arms trafficking, and slavery. By giving international recognition and military support by the superpower of the day to a ruling sheikh and his clan, the treaty greatly strengthened processes of political consolidation and, eventually, state building.

The early decades of the twentieth century brought little change to Qatar, and it was only with the arrival of the oil era that the country began to witness rapid and profound transformation of its social and economic landscapes. Besides Britain, which essentially played the role of a quasi-colonial power in Qatar, the ruling family was the only other agent of change in the country, and its default position was conserving the status quo and preventing change. The Great Depression and the collapse of the pearling industry in the early 1930s had decimated Qatar’s already sclerotic merchant classes, leaving only two families, the Al-Darwish and Al-Mani, with any meaningful wealth derived from commerce before the oil era.
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Social change remained conspicuously absent from Qatar.

According to one contemporary observer, “even by the late 1950s, most ordinary modern amenities had not yet arrived. Water was brought in by tanker…. There was no drainage of any kind…. The weekly plane which brought the mail often did not bother to land; it would circle around two or three times and then drop its load by parachute. In the harbor there were only two small jetties. One belonged to the ruler.”
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Social services were not widespread. Thanks to Ottoman efforts to modernize the country toward the end of the nineteenth century, in 1891 Qatar was estimated to have a population of 20,000, fifteen schools, and thirty-four mosques.
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By the mid-1950s, the number of literate Qataris was estimated at only about 630. There were an estimated 3,000 slaves in Qatar in 1951.
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Even more resistant to change was the political system, which remained highly personalist and was essentially summed up in the person of the emir and, at times, the heir apparent. Beginning in the 1950s, Britain introduced the establishment of fiscal and coercive state institutions. Throughout the decade, while factionalism within the ruling family increased in scope and intensity, so did British influence within the internal affairs of Qatar, especially as far as the ruling family and the court were concerned. By the end of the 1950s, “a security apparatus of sorts” was in place but most other state institutions had yet to emerge. Nevertheless, there were some state services, especially the provision of health care, education, and drinking water that were established in the 1950, with the number of state employees increasing from six in 1949 to forty-two in 1954.
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By the late 1950s and 1960s, Qatar had experienced little in the way of political development. Throughout, the emir sought to redress his own fragile power base by buying the support of the sheikhs with allowances, land grants, and state jobs, policies that inadvertently helped create a large and bureaucratic state. Oil had the paradoxical effect of increasing tensions among the Al Thanis while at the same time making them the undisputed rulers of the realm. In fact, claims for sheikhly allowance by another prominent family, the Al Attiyah, were denied, leaving the Al Thani as the only sheikhs throughout the country.
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At the same time, however, with the stakes exponentially higher, bitter rivalries within the ruling family continued and in fact intensified. Sheikh Ali, who ruled from 1949 to 1960, developed policies for allowances derived from oil revenues for members of the ruling family. These allowances varied based on the recipients’ proximity to the person of the ruler. But these and other similar efforts brought the emir little respite from family tensions, and as he kept giving more and more privileges to members of the ruling family, few were placated and wanted more, in turn raising the resentment of the population.

The arrival of oil hastened the transformation of the Qatari state from a quasi-tribal institution to a comparatively more bureaucratic one. Prior to oil wealth, one of the primary means of securing patronage had been through land distributions—a practice that continues to this day—resulting in the emergence of the Al Thanis as large landowners as early as the 1950s. Oil added proliferating state offices into the patronage mix, enabling the Al Thanis and their loyal allies to monopolize new and expanding levers of power. In the process, tribal identities were increasingly subsumed under state-sponsored ones, but they were hardly replaced altogether. Unwritten tribal rules and customs, commonly referred to as
urf
, still dominate the societies of the Arabian Peninsula, including Qatar.
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Although designations such as “tribe” or “tribal” are largely problematic, tribes, according to Allen Fromherz, remain “the major self-identified groupings of Qatar’s society, imagined or not.” “One’s
qabila
, one’s extended ‘tribe’ or family” remains the fundamental determinant of an individual Qatari’s social position and future. This remains true even if that ancestry is in some ways imagined, created, or politically repositioned.
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