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Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait
Mary Ann Tétreault
2000
Chapter 1: Introduction
For more than two decades I have been deeply fascinated by the politics and society of Kuwait. This interest began with my dissertation, which included an examination of Kuwait’s role as a major oil-exporting country and a founding member of OPEC and OAPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, respectively). It grew as I learned more about Kuwait’s exemplary foreign aid program, its eccentric brand of nonalignment during the Cold War, and the development of KPC, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, its pathbreaking national oil company. As I explored these issues, I became curious about what sort of people and what kind of political system could devise and support so many “major power” policies on such a tiny base.
In the spring of 1990 I spent five months in Kuwait on a Fulbright fellowship to begin fieldwork for a book-length study of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. This was my second visit to Kuwait; it took place at an interesting time. Kuwait’s pro-democracy movement was at the peak of its activities when I arrived in January, and clearly had been outmaneuvered by Kuwait’s amir, Jabir al-Ahmad, by the time I left at the end of May. Ten days later, Kuwaitis elected members to an extra-constitutional consultative body, the Majlis al-Watani. This election marked a significant backward step away from the real, though limited, popular representation provided for in Kuwait’s constitution (which had been suspended in July 1986), and in the lively parliament (also suspended that troubling summer) which was its hallmark. Less than two months after the June 1990 election, however, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the political kaleidoscope shifted once again.
The political opportunities presented by Saddam’s invasion arose as much from the skill of Kuwaiti citizens at exploiting the situation as from the deus ex machina himself. Kuwait’s oil and its oil production policies were the ostensible causes of Saddam’s invasion. However, as historians of the region know well, the causes of the “crisis in the Gulf” were far more complex. They involved Iran even more than Kuwait, and especially Iran’s engagement with Iraq in competing versions of what Ghassan Salamé has described as the politics of “historic missions.” This messianic style of politics has had devastating effects on the development of virtually every large state in the Middle East. 1
Elsewhere I have called Kuwait’s role in this recurrent clash a “sideshow,” 2 an assessment made from the perspective of the larger powers involved. For the Kuwaiti nation, it was the first (1980&-;1988) and second (1990–91) Gulf wars that were sideshows. Kuwait’s “main event” throughout the twentieth century has been the repeated clashes between would-be citizens demanding civil and political rights and what has become over the period a deeply entrenched albeit variably autocratic “traditional” regime. 3 When a grant from the United States Institute of Peace enabled me to return to Kuwait in the fall of 1992 to witness the first parliamentary elections held there since 1985, it was to observe a political process that had been restored rather than derailed by invasion and occupation.
The shift in perspective that can move a single event of the magnitude of the second Gulf War from a central defining moment to a sideshow also characterizes much of my understanding of Kuwait’s domestic politics. For example, by the end of the six years I spent studying and writing about KPC, 4 I had come to believe that the company should operate more openly and that Kuwaitis should take a more active interest in it and in its policies. Over the same period, and much to my surprise, I also came to believe that KPC should continue to pursue its generally successful strategy of multinational vertical integration as the best means to preserve Kuwaiti sovereignty and national autonomy. However, the implications of these two recommendations are not necessarily compatible. Few Kuwaitis approve of KPC’s corporate strategy. Indeed, Kuwaiti preferences on economic issues are very similar to those of people living in the United States: they tend to be based on a poor understanding of the processes and consequences of globalization; 5 usually they are the product of private desires for personal gain rather than a strategic foreign policy vision or some definition of the public good. From this it might seem that greater transparency and popular involvement in oil company policies would be bound to undermine a corporate strategy heavily tilted toward furthering Kuwait’s strategic interests. Looking at the problem a little differently, however, one also could envision transparency as the impetus for Kuwaitis to view KPC as a public asset underpinning their long-term security rather than as a wasting asset each had better grab a share of before someone else gets it first.
This question of perspective and its impact on evaluation becomes even more complicated when the topic is democratization rather than corporate strategy. In the Middle East, “democracy” is disparaged as a “Western” concept by those who benefit from the status quo and, as a result, both are problematic terms. Those of us who teach about the “Middle East” are fond of exploring the meaning of this label with our classes—middle of what? east of what? But we could as easily ask what or where is “the West”? Patricia Springborg finds the origin of our conception of the West as the positive pole representing civilized life in the city-states of ancient Greece, alongside the beginnings of what Edward Said calls “orientalism,” the negative pole representing either primitivism or decadence, depending on the intention of the user. 6 Ironically, modern Greece, along with the Balkans which lie north and west of it on geographic maps, are well off the mental maps cherished by most of those who today think of themselves as Westerners. 7 In popular cultural representations such as the British play and later film Shirley Valentine (1989), Greece is an exotic locale where one finds authentic emotions among simple people living far from the demands of modern civilization. As the icon signifying the center of the rational world—if not of the entire universe—“the West” has moved far from its geographic origin at the time when Greeks invented it to describe themselves. Even so, its exact location on any kind of map can best be thought of as debatable.
Democracy is another concept that “moves” depending on one’s assumptions. Like “the rational West,” the concept of democracy developed from Greek roots. However, the tree that those roots nourish in the twentieth century is likely to shade parliaments of elected representatives in capital cities and vast, far-flung executive establishments—an imperial domain from the perspective of the citizens of ancient city-states. Democratic practices with which they were familiar relied on citizen assemblies and a face-to-face politics that is fundamentally local. In most of today’s mass societies, such an intimate public sphere is difficult to realize except among elites or in subnational units such as towns and provinces, where the range of issues to be decided is relatively narrow.
Yet among the most notable aspects of Kuwaiti politics during the tense spring of 1990 was its close resemblance to the politics depicted in stories about classical Athens. During my long stay in Kuwait, I read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition for the first time, and discussed with Kuwaiti philosopher Ahmad al-Rub`i parallels between the images of classical Athens that Arendt paints and the Kuwait we were observing in the present. Ahmad agreed that a surprising number of similarities between the two could be identified. Ghassan Salamé also finds parallels between classical Athens and modern Kuwait, and exploring these parallels is part of the task I set myself here. 8
The limits and the contradictions of that ancient democratic ideal also were evident in 1990 Kuwait. Modern classicists remind us that Athenian democracy was, despite Aristotle’s prescriptions to the contrary, far from self-sufficient economically and also was enjoyed by very few persons—that is, absolutely, as a proportion of the city’s inhabitants, and in terms of group representation. Classical Athens depended heavily on external financing and the domestic exploitation of slaves, noncitizen foreigners, and women called citizens who were, in reality, the subjects of their fathers and husbands. 9 To most Westerners, these aspects of the reality subsumed by the symbol “classical Athens” are suppressed or denied through “(re)traditionalization,” the reinvention of the past to suit the needs of the present. 10 For me, however, the negative and the positive similarities linking 1990 Kuwait to many different representations of the ancient world encouraged me to examine Kuwaiti politics in a framework that incorporates references to its identity as a city-state.
Furthermore, I write from the perspective of one who believes that modernity is a global project. However much a nation is shaped by its history, it is equally and contingently shaped by myriad and various reactions by its people and their leaders to social forces, many disembedded from particular locations in time and space. Anthony Giddens calls this process of continuous interdependent adjustment “modern reflexivity.” 11 Throughout, you will find explicit comparisons between “Kuwait” and various components of “the West” conceived as sharing a common functional experience of moving from “traditional” to “modern” status, albeit along very different historical trajectories. As I read and talked and thought about the history of my own “democratic” country as compared to Kuwait, it seemed that Kuwait encapsulates more of the classical understanding of day-to-day democratic practice than I or my own society do. But contradictions continued to present themselves because I also saw myself and my peers as enjoying freedoms and rights that all Kuwaiti citizens, especially women, could only dream about. Consequently, my conceptions of democracy and citizenship have changed to include aspects of an iconic past along with what I understand to be the practices of a number of contemporary polities. This process is reflected in the theoretical frameworks developed in the following two chapters.
Chapter 2 considers formal models of citizen-state relations and what is meant by public versus private life. As I argue, these meanings are shaped by history, culture, and the degree of penetration of society by the processes of modernization. These strong social forces produce patterns of interaction, some mediated by formal rules and institutions, that limit interplay between the political and social repertoires of key actors. The interpenetration of political, social, and economic structures and practices limits the rate and degree of change. At the same time, the rewiring of human social organization that we call “modernity” enlarges the repertoires of individual social and political actors along with their opportunities to shape their own lives. In chapter 3, I deal with these processes in the Kuwaiti context as sets of contending myths—about Kuwait and its history, its citizens, and its rulers. The interplay of these various stories defines the place of Kuwait and Kuwaitis in their country, their region, and the world.
The remainder of the volume focuses on the politics of democratization in Kuwait. In chapter 4, I trace the development of Kuwaiti notions of democracy from 1921, when Kuwaiti elites first tried to institutionalize formal curbs on the ruler, to the Iraqi invasion of 1990. Chapter 5 looks at how the invasion and occupation were assimilated to preinvasion ideas and practices and also were used as platforms by Kuwaiti democrats to push their political liberalization project forward. Chapter 6 concentrates on the election of 1992. This was not only the first postliberation election but, even more importantly, the first election held after the ruler had suspended for a second time the provisions of Kuwait’s constitution that protect public political life. Its unfolding illustrates not only the political manipulation of structures and rules but also the spontaneous fragmentation characteristic of modern societies and the difficulties that stand in the way of managing reflexivity (see chapter 2), whether the manager is a democrat or an autocrat. Chapter 7 shows how even such a cataclysmic event as external invasion is limited in its capacity to effect lasting political change. It also looks at the common practices of normal political life and their role in producing or retarding political change and development. Chapter 8 looks at Kuwaiti domestic politics in the context of new social movements and the growing “internationalization” of citizen activism. In the final chapter, I draw some conclusions about Kuwait’s democratic prospects and the forces I see shaping the country’s political future.
The overall framework employed here for examining Kuwaiti political life is the concept of political space and how it conditions state-society relations. Democracy as an existential reality is centered on the experience of the individual as an autonomous public actor, but at the same time that totalitarian regimes were collapsing across Eastern Europe, Kuwaitis were chafing under a newly imposed return to autocratic rule. Encouraged by the spectacle of citizen activism as an agent driving the collapse of communism, the people of Kuwait flocked to their own pro-democracy movement. 12 Citizens from every social group petitioned their ruler, the amir Jabir al-Ahmad, asking him to restore their civil liberties and authorize new elections for the National Assembly. The pro-democracy campaign intensified in the winter of 1989–90, when a series of meetings at which prominent citizens challenged the legitimacy of the amir’s actions were met with increasing levels of state repression. During the summer of 1990, the amir’s extra-constitutional resolution of the immediate crisis was swept away by Iraq’s invading army just a few weeks after it went into effect.
The invasion, occupation, and liberation of Kuwait were regarded by some analysts as having improved prospects for democratization, in Kuwait and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East. 13 But others were less sanguine. Doubters cited reasons ranging from culture to world-system pressures for concluding that the countries of the Middle East are unlikely to participate in an otherwise global convergence toward more open domestic political systems. 14 Some argued that Islam as a belief system and tribalism as a cultural pattern present formidable obstacles to democratization in the Middle East. 15 Others, dismissing arguments based on Islam and tribalism as little more than orientalism in modern dress, based their skepticism on structural conditions they see as impeding democratization in the Middle East and in other places where these same conditions hold true. 16
Counterarguments based on religion and local culture challenge the first set of doubters. Islam, like Christianity, includes egalitarian ideals as well as traditions of debate and plural interpretations of doctrine. 17 This heritage is as available as the legacy of repression to serve as a basis for redefining tradition. Too, the local cultures of Arabs, Turks, and the Maghreb peoples, who are thought to be so resistant to democracy today, are the offspring of the same “Mediterranean” culture presumed to have invented democracy in the first place. 18 To attribute the origin of democratic practice to the urban civilizations of the Mediterranean encourages a reexamination of how democracy operates and a broader view of the conditions under which it can be realized. By looking at democratization as a complex process, we may be able to understand and devise multiple ways to check the power of elites, protect human rights, and expand individual freedom. As a result, “democracy” becomes not an end in itself, but rather a means for realizing what citizens together define as a good society.
Before the modern period, the Western political order was heteronomous and interpenetrated, with political units that were relatively undeveloped as compared, for example, to China, with its highly organized and closely controlled bureaucracy and judicial system. 19 Individual freedom in the West—what philosopher Isaiah Berlin calls “negative liberty”—was virtually nonexistent, limited by powerful religious, social, and economic institutions that sometimes supported and other times competed with political institutions for the labor and loyalty of populations. In the modern period, a combination of ideology, technology, and mass mobilization has created enormously powerful and destructive states all over the world. 20 At the same time, individual liberty and human rights are endangered by nonstate actors and institutions and by political entrepreneurs acting alone, in groups, and in formal as well as informal organizations, a phenomenon visible in developed democracies as well as in developing areas. 21 States, regimes, and governments themselves are vulnerable to predators and, as a result, may look to their populations to protect them in exchange for an expansion of citizens’ rights. 22 Consequently, we should view the state not merely as a set of potentially repressive institutions but also as a potential supporter of liberty and human rights.
In this conception, the state is autonomous rather than a control apparatus run by dominant social, religious, or economic interests. This does not mean that state interests are independent of the interests of other holders of power. However, it does mean that state interests coincide only partially with those of other institutions or groups. It is the divergence of these various sets of interests that creates “political space,” geographic and metaphoric locations within which it is possible for people to invent new identities, relationships, and institutions, including those that expand human freedom and the political capacity of citizens. 23 I have chosen to analyze the contemporary politics of Kuwait in terms of political space in order to emphasize the agency of individuals in the process of political change.
Political space as a concept owes much to Hannah Arendt’s description of the “space of appearance,” and her conviction that “the political realm rises directly out of acting together.”
Action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. 24
Spaces of appearance are defined by four characteristics. The first is plurality, the fact that every individual is different from every other individual. Second is agency, the capacity of human beings to act, to speak, convince, and mobilize one another to do something together. Third is natality, the creation of something new—a new idea, a new way of looking at things one has seen before, actions whose conclusions cannot be foreseen or foreordained. Fourth is the existence of a place or places where individuals can show themselves—can appear—to others through their actions and words. A space of appearance also has strategic qualities: like the concept of energy in physics—the capacity to do work, possible only where there are differences in the energy levels of various components of a system—political power is the result of human beings of differing capacities operating in the same political space. It is realized when this plurality of individuals acts—moves—in concert.
Arendt contrasts power with strength. “Strength is the natural [material] quality of an individual seen in isolation, [but] power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.” However, superior strength is not sufficient to guarantee that an actor will prevail. Arendt uses the concept of passive resistance to illustrate this point.
Popular revolt against materially strong rulers . . . may engender an almost irresistible power even if it foregoes the use of violence in the face of materially vastly superior forces. To call this “passive resistance” is certainly an ironic idea; it is one of the most active and efficient ways of action ever devised, because it cannot be countered by fighting, where there may be defeat or victory, but only by mass slaughter in which even the victor is defeated, cheated of his prize, since nobody can rule over dead men. 25
Plurality and agency are characteristics of human beings. Natality is an outcome of these qualities. Spaces of appearance as geographic and metaphoric sites also are outgrowths of human characteristics but as these spaces are expressed structurally rather than psychologically. Because I am interested in democratic politics, the spaces of appearance I concentrate on here are public spaces, that is, spaces to which any member of a community can claim access, although an individual’s capacity for action in any particular public space may be constrained or enhanced by her or his status and/or resources. Spaces of appearance can be actual in the sense of assemblies of persons occupying a particular physical space at the same time. They also can be virtual, mediated by communication networks such as a free press where effective simultaneity is approximated by readers being more or less in the same place at more or less the same time, although cognitively rather than physically. 26 Spaces of appearance, therefore, depend on the existence of actual or virtual public arenas where individuals can listen and speak to one another, all of them spaces that are vulnerable to closure. Forbidding public gatherings such as parliaments, law courts, and club meetings, and censorship of books, films, and news media are examples of how despotic rulers erase political space. The continuation of politics under tyranny requires the existence of protected spaces to which access by repressive institutions can be limited effectively.
In the context of Kuwaiti politics, I have written about two protected spaces, the home and the mosque. 27 Both are protected from state encroachment by a culture whose social norms are strong enough to mobilize popular and elite resistance to the same effect as the passive resistance described above by Arendt. However, neither the home nor the mosque is a satisfactory democratic alternative to political space, public space to which every citizen has ready access for the purpose of political action. The home is private, and access is limited to idiosyncratically selected members of the community. It is too small physically and too limited socially to allow the full range of citizens’ viewpoints on issues to emerge. The mosque, though it is public and offers a large physical space where people can gather, imposes religious controls on expression and action that deprive particular groups, such as women and non-Muslims, or particular points of view, such as secularism, from access to the forum it provides. Despite their limitations, however, both of these protected spaces support the partial mobilization of political resources and have proven themselves capable of maintaining the capacity of some Kuwaiti citizens to act in the name of the community even during periods of severe political repression.
Action also is limited by contingent factors—the particularities of one’s situation. These include the finite nature of personal and group resources, the outcomes of previous actions, and the inability to control events even though one might have some power to influence them. Thus, action is limited by what can be brought to bear on a situation whose parameters have been shaped by history and whose outcome will be influenced by factors beyond the understanding and control of those initiating it. The power of the past to cast its shadow on the future is profound even when the action taken is directed explicitly at smashing its physical, social, and ideological authority. 28 Yet, although one may be tempted to be fatalistic in the face of contingency, such a position denies plurality, agency, and natality. If individuals do indeed differ from one another, and if each has some capacity to act, then the creation of new ideas, new forms, new relationships, and new institutions is a constant possibility. If it were not so, the variety we see in human society would not exist and political change would be impossible.
Action also is limited by basic human needs—“necessity.” Necessity is an equalizer: everyone must eat, drink, find shelter, and protect the integrity of the social unit that maintains the physical survival of the individual and the group. With respect to political life, necessity involves more than physical sustenance. It includes as well emotional security and personal autonomy. 29 Plurality can be realized only after the demands of necessity are satisfied. Thus politics in the sense of free choice and action is impossible where basic human needs, physical and emotional, remain unmet. 30 Any institution that controls the means of satisfaction of basic human needs can eliminate freedom and thereby eliminate politics. This point is made frequently as an argument against state control of the economy, a primary source of the means to satisfy basic needs. 31 Institutions and actors other than the state also have the potential to deny freedom by depriving persons of life or the means of subsistence. Indeed, it is the fact of deprivation rather than the identity of its agent that must be the focal point of assessments of freedom and human rights in any society.
Any discussion of Kuwait’s internal potential for democratization also must consider its external environment and the supports for and constraints on liberty that come from this source. Kuwaiti historian Hasan `Ali al-Ebraheem is fond of saying that Kuwait is a small state living in a bad neighborhood, an observation that contains a great deal of truth. Kuwait was deeply affected by the Iraqi invasion and occupation. Even so, liberation did not reveal a “new Kuwait.” The preinvasion struggle between Kuwaitis and their government over whether, how much, and in what direction to revise the social contract governing state-society relations simply resumed, but with an additional vocabulary and a new set of contending myths for each side to bring to bear on the other. Thus, despite the power of the external environment to alter conditions inside Kuwait and possibly to eliminate Kuwait entirely, it is the internal environment composed of Kuwaitis positioning themselves in the various spaces within which they define one another and act in concert that determines the parameters of Kuwaiti politics.
In some ways, Kuwait was more democratic under Iraqi occupation than it was before or has been since. Part of the reason is because the internal boundaries dividing Kuwaitis into groups were erased by the common experience of occupation. “When Saddam Hussein came, he treated us equally. He did not kill Sunna or Shi`a: he killed Kuwaitis.” 32 Family, sect, and class lines faded into insignificance; Kuwaitis under occupation saw themselves as a unified national community, one very like what they imagined Kuwait had been in a past none of them had experienced directly. 33 The political meaning of this odd and unexpected experience of democratic life has not been lost in postliberation Kuwait. It enlarged the repertoire of strategies that democrats and antidemocrats have adapted and used throughout this century in the Gramscian war of position that characterizes modern Kuwaiti politics.
What I hope is reflected throughout this volume is a strong sense of the unique quality of life in Kuwait—what it might be like to be a Kuwaiti and what that identity means politically. I would like to think that the Kuwaitis depicted here are representative and therefore that the impressions of Kuwait they convey also are representative, but this is only partly true. In spite of the remarkable accessibility of Kuwaitis to foreigners, my direct knowledge of the Kuwaiti people remains limited. Most of the people I have interviewed formally are well-educated and hold responsible positions. Even so, I’ve met many others in less formal settings: in markets, at meetings and public gatherings, in households and businesses that I visited, or as friends and acquaintances of persons I already knew. Through queries, direct observation, and shameless eavesdropping at every opportunity, I continue to construct a collage of not entirely compatible images that signify “Kuwait” in my mind. In this volume I have tried to convey some of the diversity and complexity of my imperfect knowledge and understanding of “Kuwait.” I have taken pains to do this using the words of Kuwaitis and other observers along with my own so that readers can understand how I came to see Kuwait as I do and yet be able to disagree with my interpretations and conclusions.
Another goal of this work is to present a textured view of Kuwaiti politics as it is experienced and conducted by various individuals in their personal and public lives. My training as a political economist predisposes me to look for structural explanations for social phenomena, and some of that predisposition is reflected here. However, I have concentrated in this work on writing about personal experiences in actual situations and how participants recall and understand them. I hope this will allow the reader to see the agency of individuals as well as to understand the structural constraints that limit their choices and shape the outcomes of those choices. One purpose of this approach is to show how different people have seen their opportunities and their obligations and have chosen how to act on them. Another is to show what happened to them as a result and, as well as I can, to explain why.
Given this practical goal, it may seem odd that I cast many of the stories I recount here as myths. The word myth is popularly understood as a fairy tale or fable, a story that isn’t “really” true. But I mean something quite different by this word. Here, a myth is a paradigmatic story, one intended to convey concern for “issues transcending immediate data,” such as stories of communal origin and depictions of individual and cultural values. 34 In this sense, a myth is more than true; it is “super true.” The myths about Kuwait that I recount in chapter 3 are intended by their various tellers to delineate some essential aspect of “Kuwait” in much the same spirit as the Homeric tales convey essential aspects of what it means to be Greek and Old Testament stories essential aspects of what it means to be Jewish. Similarly, the models of democracy and citizenship I present in the next chapter are stories of origins and values through which “the West” imagines and understands itself and projects this identity to others. In this sense, all the stories and models recounted here are idealizations of a representative self and the group to which that self belongs.
As I make clear in chapter 3, myths are not monolithic and often develop as clusters of contending images. In the first three chapters of Genesis, for example, there are two myths of creation. The first is a story of women and men created as equals in the image of God. The second tells of woman as “Adam’s rib,” a story of divinely ordained female subordination and inferiority to men. Harold Bloom argues that the misogyny reflected in the second Genesis creation myth is due as much to inadvertent traditionalization through the choice of idioms by translators as to intentional interference by redactors—that is, that at least some normative aspects of myths are unintentionally created in the process of transmission. 35 However, Elaine Pagels insists that it is the instrumental goals of those who create and re-create myths that shape the choice of words, emphases, and understandings. 36 The Pagels perspective comes closer to what I see in the creation and transmission of political myths. From my position as an outsider, it appears to me that the founding myths of Kuwaiti nationhood and the stories Kuwaitis tell about the Iraqi occupation reflect not only the memories of experiences but also the feelings and the contending values, interests, and goals of those who recount them.
Making and interpreting myths is a basic task of political leadership. 37 Defining the content of myths is an objective in itself as well as a means to create instruments for achieving other objectives. Connections between myths and politics also are explored in this book. The thesis guiding this exploration is that the inability to harmonize or suppress contending mythic interpretations of national life mirrors a fundamental disagreement over the nature of power and its appropriate distribution and management by a people and its government. In contrast, “normal politics” marks a successful synthesis of contradictory theses or, perhaps even more, such a politics, when successful, keeps a regime and a society within the bounds of an Aristotelian mean, a broad middle path between contending sides whose full simultaneous expression would produce civil war rather than civil society. This point may be clarified by considering what Jean Leca has identified as the two basic ingredients of democracy in the context of modern Arab politics: populism, that is, the access of the masses to politics; and constitutionalism, the rule of law that protects specific spheres of life against arbitrary power. 38 The potential for conflict between these two ideals is well known when they are formulated as the opposition between majority rule and minority rights. Any Aristotelian mean between them is the product of a “political pact” or agreement establishing limits to the expression of each and rules for managing the conflicts that arise when these limits are exceeded.
The idea that there is such a thing as a social contract is another myth, one that justifies the establishment of a political regime; the story that describes any particular social contract rationalizes the unique distribution of power in that system. In Kuwait, the social contract has been a subject of open dispute since the time of Mubarak (r. 1896–1915). This dispute is conducted in forums ranging from diwaniyyas to marketplaces to legislative assemblies, and it fuels the struggle to control interpretations of other myths describing Kuwaiti history. It is complicated by a parallel struggle to dominate myths about democracy, many of which include various reasons why democracy is or is not suitable for Kuwait and Kuwaitis. In effect, pro-democracy forces tell stories integrating Kuwait and Kuwaitis into a larger world defined by universal values; antidemocrats speak of a world where Kuwaiti (or Muslim or Arab) society occupies a niche carved out by particularistic qualities like tradition, religion, and culture. The world defined by universal values is pluralistic—one world composed of many different parts that are morally equal in terms of responsibility for ideas and actions; the world defined by particularistic values is monadic, defined by a single hegemonic vision. This dispute is articulated most clearly in clashes between secularists and Islamists, but it also shapes other conflicts over the “true” nature of Kuwait and Kuwaitis. 39
My story about Kuwait also is a myth. Like other stories that concentrate on individuals and actions, mine is intended not only to recount events but also to tell a story about democratization, to imagine what it is, whether it is possible, and whether it is worth the struggle to achieve it. I see conflicts among Kuwaitis over who is a citizen and whether to democratize or to suppress democracy as part and product of a frightening and often repressive process of global restructuring whose effects have evoked myriad countervailing social movements worldwide. Myths about Kuwait should be viewed in the context of this global process and the contest to control these myths and their meanings as part of the larger reconsideration of democratic values occurring worldwide, including in societies conventionally viewed as having achieved democracy once and for all.
Even from this point of view, of course, a story about Kuwaiti politics is a story about Kuwaiti politics. However, it also is a story about how we understand social contracts in political systems from North America to Southeast Asia. This story about Kuwait is itself a collection of myths: about Kuwait, about political change in the Arab or Muslim world, and about citizenship and democracy anywhere and at any time.
Endnotes
Note 1: Ghassan Salamé, “Small Is Pluralistic: Democracy as an Instrument of Civil Peace,” in Salamé, ed., Democracy Without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World, 87. Back.
Note 2: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Kuwait: The Morning After,” Current History 91 (January 1992): 9. Back.
Note 3: Throughout this volume, I use “citizen” to describe a legal status based on nationality. Haya al-Mughni and I discuss the ambiguity of this term generally and in the Kuwaiti context in “Gender, Citizenship, and Nationalism in Kuwait,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1995): 64–80. One ambiguity of relevance here is the overlap between “citizen” and “subject,” discussed at greater length in chapters 2 and 3. In this context, citizenship in Kuwait has been achieved only partially. The impact of Kuwait’s large population of foreign workers on citizenship is not dealt with explicitly in this volume. Interested readers should consult Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait. Back.
Note 4: Mary Ann Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the New World Order. Back.
Note 5: The distinction I wish to emphasize here is that, unlike an “international” economy, a “global” economy is not mediated significantly by state institutions, thus exposing the domestic economy directly to uncontrolled market forces. The disintegration of national economies that is the natural consequence of globalization was analyzed by Jane Jacobs in Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, and Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), although each saw the mechanics of the process somewhat differently, Jacobs emphasizing trade relations and Strange the uncontrolled operation of international finance. Kuwaitis hold their government responsible for bad outcomes such as erratic national income levels and capital losses, both heavily influenced by global market forces. Back.
Note 6: Patricia Springborg, Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince; Edward Said, Orientalism. For a perfect illustration of polarity reversal in Western conceptions of the East, see Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte. Back.
Note 7: The place of the Balkans on the mental maps of Westerners is particularly illustrative of the fluidity of identity boundaries and some of the factors that influence their construction. An independent Bosnia and its cosmopolitan capital, Sarajevo, were off the map for European and American policymakers in the early 1990s. By the end of the decade, inspired in part by guilt for having abandoned Bosnia to territorial dismemberment and its population to genocide, an obscure province of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, was deemed to be part of “Europe.” Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) declared Kosovars to be entitled to NATO military protection against their own state government and its army. Back.
Note 8: Salamé, “Small Is Pluralistic,” 100. Back.
Note 9: I have written about this in “Formal Politics, Meta-Space, and the Construction of Civil Life,” in Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, eds., Philosophy and Geography 2:81–97. Back.
Note 10: For examples of how and why this is done, see the essays in George C. Bond and Angela Gilliam, eds., Social Construction of the Past: Representation as Power. Back.
Note 11: Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. Back.
Note 12: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Kuwait’s Democratic Reform Movement,” Middle East Executive Reports (October 1990). Back.
Note 13: See, for example, Michael Hudson, “After the Gulf War: Prospects for Democratization in the Arab World,” Middle East Journal 45 (1991): 407–26; Paul Aarts, “Democracy, Oil, and the Gulf War,” Third World Quarterly 13 (1992): 525–38; Tétreault, “Kuwait: The Morning After.” Back.
Note 14: Examples include Bernard Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly 271 (February 1993): 89–94; and Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993). Back.
Note 15: See, for example, Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society. Sharabi points to culture as the cause of Arab authoritarianism. Others offer more structural analyses. One of the best comes from Kuwait University sociologist Khaldoun Hasan Al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective. He argues that imperialism and then, for some Arab states, oil money, transferred resources to the state that enabled it to quash indigenous checks on its power and to create a new state class that, in return for its livelihood, supports the state against its democratic critics. Sharabi also nominates this new class as an element in neopatriarchy, but his argument is essentially cultural rather than structural. Lewis and Huntington come to the same conclusion based on different mixes of cultural and structural arguments. See Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” and Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Back.
Note 16: See Simon Bromley, Rethinking Middle East Politics; or Aziz al-Azmeh, “Populism Contra Democracy: Recent Democratist Discourse in the Arab World,” in Salamé, ed., Democracy Without Democrats?, 112–29. Back.
Note 17: Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World. See also Charles Lindholm, “Quandaries of Command in Egalitarian Societies: Examples from Swat and Morocco,” and Ellis Goldberg, “Smashing Idols and the State: The Protestant Ethic and Egyptian Sunni Radicalism,” both in Juan R. I. Cole, ed., Comparing Muslim Societies: Knowledge and the State in a World Civilization; and Mary Ann Tétreault, “Individualism, Secularism, and Fundamentalism,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Birmingham, UK, July 1998. That multiple interpretations of Islam are characteristic rather than exceptional is well illustrated in Jonathan E. Brockopp, “Early Islamic Jurisprudence in Egypt: Two Scholars and Their Mukhtasars,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30: 167–82. Back.
Note 18: Patricia Springborg, “Politics, Primordialism, and Orientalism: Marx, Aristotle, and the Myth of the Gemeinschaft,” American Political Science Review 80 (March 1986): 185–211; Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society; Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “Reform of Personal Status Laws in North Africa: A Problem of Islamic or Mediterranean Laws?” Middle East Journal 49 (Summer 1995): 432–46. Back.
Note 19: Charles Tilly explores some of the connections between the strength of the state and its institutions vis-à-vis society and its institutions in “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skoçpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In, 168–91. Back.
Note 20: Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 6. Back.
Note 21: Both Hobbes and Locke were concerned more with the potentially devastating actions of individuals and disadvantaged groups than they were with overreaching by the state: see C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. The power of “society” rather than “the state” is the focal point of John Stuart Mill’s critique in On Liberty, first published in 1859. Today many fear the activities of militias, death squads, youth gangs, and other terrorist groups more than the states where these groups operate with such apparent freedom, and “mafias,” international banks, and multinational corporations that evade state regulation as they exploit the vulnerable. Back.
Note 22: The notion that governments negotiate with populations in such circumstances is reflected in Tilly’s discussions of state-building in Europe, for example, in “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” This point is made throughout Salamé, ed., Democracy Without Democrats?, particularly in the case studies. I have examined this phenomenon in the context of social movements in “Spheres of Liberty, Conflict, and Power: The Public Lives of Private Persons,” Citizenship Studies 2 (July 1998): 273–89. Back.
Note 23: The argument that such differences create possibilities, even imperatives, for change is made by Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 387–90. Back.
Note 24: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, 177. Back.
Note 25: Arendt, The Human Condition, 179. Back.
Note 26: Virtual space is necessarily truncated by the limitations of various media, and never reproduces the full scope of even the individually limited experience of a single person. It also is distorted by the particular qualities of each medium of transmission. For example, television enhances the power of visual images over other kinds of information even when the other information explicitly contradicts the message of the picture. Back.
Note 27: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Civil Society in Kuwait: Protected Spaces and Women’s Rights,” Middle East Journal 47 (Spring 1993): 275–91. Back.
Note 28: The continuities between old regimes and postrevolutionary regimes often are cited in support of this point. See, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, or Theda Skoçpol, States and Social Revolutions. Back.
Note 29: Tétreault, “Spheres of Liberty.” Back.
Note 30: Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy; see also Carol C. Gould, Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy, and Society. Back.
Note 31: See, for example, Bromley, Rethinking Middle East Politics. Back.
Note 32: Attorney Saleh al-Hashem, in an interview with the author, September 29, 1992, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 33: For the importance of imagination of this kind as a matrix for nationalist identity and emotions, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Back.
Note 34: Lawrence J. Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths, 29. Back.
Note 35: Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, The Book of J, 178–80. Back.
Note 36: Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. Back.
Note 37: See Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. Back.
Note 38: Jean Leca, “Democratization in the Arab World: Uncertainty, Vulnerability, and Legitimacy. A Tentative Conceptualization and Some Hypotheses,” in Salamé, ed., Democracy Without Democrats?, 56–57. Back.
Note 39: An example of this perspective that asserts a global reach can be found in Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Back.
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