Coalitions in Oil Monarchies: Kuwait and Qatar

In recent decades Kuwait and Qatar have experienced a radical but apparently smooth transition from pearls to petroleum, poverty to prosperity. Oil revenues have fueled the development of economic infrastructures, new welfare systems, and radically different and at least materially better lives for their inhabitants. Yet these rapid changes have been accompanied by remarkable political continuity at the apex of the systems: these two countries continue to be ruled by centuries old tribal elites. Despite the many coups and populist uprisings throughout the Third World and despite the obituaries regularly written for these regimes, their rulers have survived the arrival and departure of Britain, the trials of independence, and now the new demands of oil wealth. This continuity is the result of oil and on closer examination hides more fundamental change. Continuity at the very top of the political system, while real, has been accompanied, since the development of oil in the 1940s, by the withdrawal from formal political life of the merchants, the group which historically pressed its claims most effectively on the state. Merchant claims have not been put forward because of a tacit deal between the rulers and the trading families, a trade of wealth for formal power. In effect, the merchants renounced their historical claim to participate in decision making. In exchange, the amirs guaranteed them a large share of the oil revenues. Where economic elites once entered politics to protect their economic interests, after oil merchants left the realm of formal politics to preserve those interests. The merchants' withdrawal has also been accompanied by the development of new ties between the amir and the ruling family, whose political role has expanded, and between the amir and the national population, through social services and transfers. Oil revenues preserved continuity at the apex of the political system by forcing the breakdown of the old ruling coalition and catalyzing the formation of a new pattern of political control. Oil in fact introduced important changes in the ruling coalition even as it preserved continuity at the very top of the political system. The political changes that occurred-the breakdown in the old ruling coalition binding the trading families and the amir and its replacement by a new set of elite arrangements--were not the result of idiosyncratic local factors, but a patterned response to oil that occurs repeatedly. The same broad transformations that occurred in Kuwait were repeated in Qatar. Variations on the basic pattern appear in all the oil dependent states: in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, the rulers have gradually weakened their old economic allies, replacing their economic and political dependence on domestic allies with a new dependence on foreign allies. The new arrangements, however, are only transitional adaptations, for they carry within them the seeds of future change. Distributive policies designed to ensure domestic peace have inadvertently created relatively large and complex state administrations, distributive states, unusual in that they emerged from the imperative to