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Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait
Mary Ann Tétreault
2000
Chapter 3: Stories of State and Society
Clashes among contending myths of citizenship and the state have characterized Kuwaiti domestic politics for nearly a hundred years. Although Kuwaiti status has come to be associated with material privilege, Kuwaiti national identity has a strong cultural foundation in stories, practices, and artifacts that predate the oil era. The passion with which Kuwaitis today argue over who is a real Kuwaiti and what is the real Kuwait is intensified by internal and external pressures to resolve the status of noncitizen populations and, among Kuwaiti citizens, adult women. Despite theoretical and practical shortcomings, Kuwait and “Kuwaitiness” are real concepts, and Kuwaitis of all kinds continue to be absorbed in the struggle to control their meanings.
Founding Myths
The dynamics of state-society relations in Kuwait are reflected in stories describing the community’s social and political origins. One example comes from economist Robert Mabro. 1 As he tells it, in the early eighteenth century, three important families headed a group of nomads forced from the Arabian interior by a prolonged drought. Finding water at an oasis near the shores of the Gulf, they decided to settle there permanently. Then they were faced with a second decision: who would rule their group—who would be responsible for keeping the peace, settling disputes, dealing with foreigners, and doing the other jobs necessary if the rest were to live and work in comfort and security. The tribal elders met to talk about this. The head of the most important family was the first one asked to take the job, but he declined because running the government would interfere with his business. The head of the second-ranking family declined for the same reason. The Sabah were the poorest of the important families. When they were asked to provide a ruler for the city they agreed, both for the honor of it and because the opportunity costs for them were very low.
The rhythms of this story are familiar. They remind us of fairy tales in which the youngest sibling, despite the inequities of primogeniture, rises on merit to triumph in the end. A similar transformation has been worked on the Sabah. Although their precise position in the economic and social hierarchy of pre-oil Kuwait is a matter of some dispute, their present dominance over the economy and the state is not. This transformation has accompanied, indeed, been part of, a general shift in the old social order, unmoored by the flood of oil wealth that has altered the balance of power inside and outside Kuwait over the past fifty years. During the unsettled period immediately prior to the Iraqi invasion, the identity of Kuwait and hopes for its future were mirrored in the conflicting stories citizens and observers told about its political origins.
In their stories, Kuwaiti historians tend to emphasize the participatory nature of the politics surrounding the founding of the city and the choice of its ruler. For example, Hasan `Ali al-Ebraheem says that the selection of the first amir, Sabah I, was made by his peers, that is, through consensus reached by an oligarchy. 2 This assessment is echoed in contemporary reports written by European travelers until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. For example, a French observer, E. Reclus, writing in 1884, remarked that “the people of this republic (Kuwait) is one of the freest peoples in the world.” 3 Perhaps the most tenacious contemporary historian of Kuwait’s ruling family is British author Alan Rush. His writings on the ruling family reflect the fragmentary nature of what we know, indicating merely that “[the Sabah] are said to have acquired the right to rule through a voluntary division of responsibilities between themselves and the other leaders of the community.” 4
Other outsiders tell stories built around images of domination by a leadership with an unassailable right to rule absolutely. Robert Stevens says that the Sabah founded a “dynasty [which] has continued to this day,” a royalist perspective echoed by some other British writers. 5 A story H. R. P. Dickson reports as having been told by the amir `Abdullah al-Salim (r. 1950&-;1965) has the tribal council selecting Sabah as their emissary to the Turks shortly after the migrating families had settled in Kuwait. They did this to avoid an attack from Constantinople in retaliation for appearing to be infringing on the imperial rights of the Porte. 6 But Dickson also tells another story, one he seems to like better. In this one, the Sabah establish their status as tribal leaders through fealty sworn by their retainers prior to a battle to defend the honor of the family from an importunate outsider wanting to marry the shaikh’s daughter Mariam. 7
The origin of the name “Kuwait” also is differently accounted for. Most agree that it comes from the Arabic word kut or “fort.” Peter Mansfield says that such a fort on the site of modern Kuwait had been used by the then-dominant Bani Khaled tribe before the ancestors of the Kuwaitis arrived. 8 Dickson says that the word refers to the “stronghold” constructed in the center of their tent city by the settlers themselves. 9 Ahmad Mustafa Abu-Hakima says that the name Kuwait and the old name of the city, Grane, are both diminutives, one meaning a small fort and the other a small hill; both signify that the place was unimportant. 10 Hasan al-Ebraheem agrees, saying that Kuwait is the word for a little mud house, indicating the “insignificant origin of the town which later became the capital of the present state of Kuwait.” 11 Local versions of the naming myth often project this defensive insignificance. The founding myth told by Kuwaiti merchant `Abd al-`Aziz al-Saqr takes this self-deprecation even further. Some cowardly bedouins were chased out of their territory. They roamed for years and years through the desert until they came to Kuwait. It was very hot. It was dusty. There was no fresh water. “Let’s stay,” they said. “No one will bother us here.”
Myths of Money and Power
Another history of Kuwait is told from the perspective of its wealth and who controlled it. These stories are not only about money but also about power, both political and social: who had it, what they did with it, and to whom. Particularly in a patriarchal society, this kind of myth is a “family romance,” a story in which relationships among individuals in various familial roles echo the shape of the struggle for power in society as a whole. 12 In many of these myths, Kuwait’s rulers are pictured as protectors of the common people against a rapacious oligarchy, while the merchants are portrayed as exploiters who put their private—their selfish—interests above those of the community as a whole.
Stories about Kuwaiti wealth vary, not only with respect to heroes and villains but also according to the period of time that the teller has in mind. Nearly everyone agrees that Kuwait became poor in the first half of the twentieth century. 13 Pearling, the main industry, declined throughout the region following the introduction of Japanese cultured pearls in the 1920s. Jacqueline Ismael blames Kuwait’s poverty on a turn-of-the-century alliance between the British and merchants from some of Kuwait’s founding families that led to Britain taking over Kuwait’s local dominance of long-distance shipping. Ismael argues that the basis of this unholy alliance was the merchants’ desire to freeze Ottoman competition out of Kuwait, and the British desire to freeze all their competitors out of long-distance trade. 14 However, in the Ottoman archives, Frederick Anscombe finds evidence that Kuwaiti merchants and the Ottomans were similarly injured by rising taxes on trade imposed by the Kuwaiti amir Mubarak (r. 1896–1915). Anscombe’s research indicates that it was Mubarak’s secret alliance with the British that hastened the substitution of British for Ottoman influence. 15
Kuwait’s entrepôt economy was further weakened by the disruption of local trade that occurred because of World War I. Afterward, it was ravaged by bedouin raiding, masterminded by a former Kuwaiti dependent, `Abd al-`Aziz Ibn Sa`ud. Then it was hit by the Great Depression. The population of Kuwait grew during the Depression because of immigration from areas that were even worse off, 16 but the resulting surplus of labor further depressed per capita income, already devastated by declines in pearling and trade. World War II imposed additional hardships in the form of new disruptions in normal trade patterns and also reduced food supplies, especially the imported rice that is a staple of the Kuwaiti diet.
This dismal picture changes when the nineteenth century is the focus of consideration. The extent and diversity of Kuwait’s trade then made it very lucrative, especially during the second half of the nineteenth century, although the prosperity was confined to a small elite. 17 Sailors and pearlers worked under a system of debt peonage. They borrowed money, often from their ship’s owner or its captain, worked for an entire season—about ten months—to pay their debts and, if they were lucky, earned enough to have some left over. Few were so lucky. The average sailor earned fifty dollars per season. 18 Smuggling was the main source of income for sailor and ship’s captain alike, and gold smuggling was one of the primary avenues for capital accumulation by Kuwaiti merchants. 19 W. G. Palgrave, a British observer, was impressed by Kuwait’s mid-nineteenth-century prosperity. He attributed it to the high quality of its mariners, its low tariffs, and the “good administration and prudent policy” of the ruling family. 20 Palgrave does not mention inequalities in income distribution or any conflict between the ruler and the merchant elite over control of the surplus produced by the local economy.
The chief source of the surplus in the nineteenth century was the merchants’ profits from long-distance trade. 21 As in Europe, merchants in Kuwait relied on the state for policing, 22 that is, for the provision of administrative infrastructure to support the community and its way of life—including enforcement of the labor contracts that allowed the merchants to accumulate significant wealth. This wealth also gave them economic leverage to use on the rulers, but its accumulation depended on the rulers keeping the system together. When the rulers’ requirements for financing from the merchants disappeared, this unequal but still effective interdependence also vanished, giving the rulers the upper hand.
Jabir I (r. 1812–1859) and Sabah II (r. 1859–1866) acquired the date gardens in Iraq that formed the basis of the family’s independent wealth. 23 However, neither altered the relative superiority of the merchants in the domestic balance of power. Jabir I was preoccupied with foreign policy, and whatever attention he had left for domestic concerns was centered on the poor. He spent his disposable income to maintain “a sort of public table (of food) of a plentiful but coarse description to which every one appears to be welcome.” 24 Sabah II did challenge the merchants, instituting customs taxes on imports during a period of booming trade. But when he tried to impose export taxes, the merchants “insisted that if he needed money he could ask for it but not receive it routinely as a right.” 25 They also threatened to leave Kuwait if the amir’s tax collector were not removed from office. Sabah II yielded on both points. He, like his father, is remembered for having used his money and prestige to help the poor of Kuwait, many of whom were exploited by the same merchants who opposed extending the ruler’s authority.
Power Myths: Dragons and Dragon-Slayers
Stories about the development of autocratic state power in Kuwait are told in whispers—literally—by Kuwaitis. Not only students but their parents and teachers as well discuss the accession of the amir Mubarak (r. 1896–1915) in lowered voices. 26 Some Kuwaitis say that the ruling family tries to suppress any mention in textbooks of the manner of Mubarak’s takeover to avoid being tainted by his actions. The family is assisted in its desire to legitimize the position of the present rulers by histories that put Mubarak’s 1896 coup in a favorable light. These stories are centered on external threats from the Ottomans and the complicity of Kuwaiti merchants opposed to Turkish interests in the coup that established the current method of selecting Kuwaiti rulers. Frederick Anscombe’s The Ottoman Gulf, which draws on extensive research in Ottoman archives, challenges many of these stories, painting Mubarak as a skillful political opportunist motivated primarily by greed. When Mubarak’s strategy for adding to his wealth and political autonomy proved to be successful, Anscombe shows how it was emulated by other Arabian Peninsula princes who, like Mubarak, also aspired to be state-builders. This state-building activity contributed to the erosion of Ottoman power and prestige in the region prior to World War I. 27
The older stories depict the successor of Sabah II, `Abdullah II (r. 1866–1892), as forced by circumstances to align himself with the Ottomans. Prior to `Abdullah’s reign, Kuwait was said to have paid only “nominal recognition to Ottoman authority . . . [while] it pursued an independent policy” that included a refusal to deny asylum to political refugees from Ottoman Baghdad. 28 A dynastic struggle in neighboring Najd is said to have forced `Abdullah into an alliance with the Ottomans in a war on the Arabian Peninsula, an involvement Anscombe reports as having been undertaken in self-defense. 29 Afterward, `Abdullah accepted the Ottoman title of Quaimmaqam (subgovernor), which signified that Kuwait was a qaza or dependency of the wilayet (province) of Basra. 30
Anscombe’s account of this period is part of the story of Midhat Pasha, the visionary Ottoman governor of Basra, who “revived, altered, and pushed vigorously the idea of establishing Kuwait as Ottoman territory.” 31 As part of Midhat’s strategy to counteract growing British influence in the Gulf, he cut off the revenues from the Sabah date gardens, forcing the family to acquiesce in the extension of Ottoman suzerainty over Kuwait. Constantinople regarded this as resurrecting an old relationship rather than forging a new one, but still agreed to Midhat’s accommodation of Kuwaiti requests that no revenues be collected from Kuwait and no Ottoman officials be stationed there. 32 There were occasional impulses to go back on these promises, but the Porte decided in 1893 to reinforce Kuwaiti loyalty with a carrot rather than a stick, giving `Abdullah’s brother and successor, Mohammad (r. 1892–1896), a generous annual stipend.
Some accounts depict Mohammad, who ruled almost in partnership with another brother, Jarrah, as orienting himself and his policies so closely toward Ottoman interests that Kuwaiti merchants became fearful of the potential “Iraqization” of Kuwait. 33 The merchants are said to have looked for an ally in a fourth brother, Mubarak, to assist them in their struggles, but that Mubarak exceeded their expectations when he and his sons assassinated Mohammad and Jarrah, after which Mubarak declared himself ruler of Kuwait. In contrast to this almost collegial depiction of Mubarak’s coup, Jill Crystal tells the assassination story as Mubarak’s response to his effective exile from the city, sent by his brothers on military campaigns to Hasa and among the tribes in Kuwait’s hinterland, but with no funds. 34 Anscombe also recounts mixed motives, but concludes that “money more than politics caused the quarrel that resulted in the murder of Muhammad and Jarrah.” 35
Whatever the role of the merchants in encouraging Mubarak, the new ruler dissociated his interests from theirs and devoted considerable effort to curbing their power. The merchants—Kuwait’s incipient bourgeoisie—were not without resources in their various struggles against Mubarak. Despite income from his date gardens and the payments Mubarak received from Constantinople and London, 36 the merchants remained the primary source of state revenues until the 1930s, and the country’s chief employers until the 1950s. 37 Merchant power was social as well as economic: employers in a status-based society exacted “a loyalty that was almost absolute” from their employees. 38 As in the past, the merchants’ greatest weapon against the government was to threaten to leave, and this remained their strategy in the face of Mubarak’s incessant fiscal demands. The British political agent at the time observed that Mubarak liked to live well and that he was an expansionist who warred with local tribes to enlarge the scope of his control in the hinterland. But when he proceeded to raise taxes, camels, and conscripts for another desert campaign in 1910, some of the pearl merchants packed up and moved to Bahrain in protest. Mubarak was forced to send a delegation to woo them back and, in the end, nearly all of them did return. However, neither the merchants nor most other Kuwaitis ever liked Mubarak, who surrounded himself with armed guards for protection from “his own subjects, more and more of whom condemned his luxurious way of life.” 39
British protection enlarged Mubarak’s powers tremendously, though British records and histories, along with Kuwaiti memories, tend to understate Britain’s role in Mubarak’s reign. The British gave Mubarak substantial political and economic independence from the Ottoman Empire, to which Kuwait remained nominally attached until World War I, as the result of a series of mostly secret agreements beginning in 1899. 40 Mubarak received large sums of money under the table every time he signed a new treaty ceding another portion of Kuwait’s foreign policy autonomy to Britain. 41 Gradually, British authority spread over Kuwait’s port, some of its commerce, and its as-yet-undiscovered oil and gas deposits. In return, Britain contributed to Mubarak’s financial independence from his Kuwaiti constituents. British officials also guaranteed that, after he died, his sons rather than his remaining brothers or any of his nephews would succeed him. 42
Mubarak’s direct descendants aspired to rule as he did, but Kuwaiti merchants were unwilling to concede so much power to the ruler without a fight. Following the short reigns of Mubarak’s two sons, Jabir (r. 1915–1917) and Salim (r. 1917–1921), they demanded that a system of consultation be established between the ruler and Kuwait’s leading citizens. The merchants’ first attempt at institutionalizing such a check on the ruler’s power was to propose a consultative body that seems to have been a cross between a legislature and a cabinet. The merchants insisted that they would only accept as ruler someone who would assent to such a council, which was established under the leadership of Hamad ibn `Abdullah al-Saqr, a member of an important merchant family. Of the three “candidates” for the job, the one who is said to have agreed to the council was Ahmad al-Jabir, who was duly appointed by his family and then approved by the British. But as Dickson says, the council met infrequently and, in any event, was ignored by the ruler, who preferred the older system. 43 Even so, the council represented the first formal “attempt at democratic rule in Kuwait and, for that matter, in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.” 44 The precedent it set allowed subsequent attempts to establish representative government in Kuwait to be construed as reform rather than revolution, 45 and may explain some of the reason why, even though violence has been a part of this process, it has played a relatively minor role.
Myths of Representative Government
Parliamentary bodies periodically were formed and dissolved in Kuwait following the institution of that first council. This pattern held both before and after a Kuwaiti national constitution was adopted in 1962. The evolution of representative government in Kuwait also was conditioned by oil revenues, which tilted the social balance of power in two ways. First, oil revenues allow the ruler to be fiscally independent of the population, including the merchants who formerly were the primary financiers of the state and thus the primary checks on ruler autocracy. Any merchants who move to Bahrain today cannot hope to influence the government by reducing its disposable income—even if they were paying taxes at the old rates, these payments would be minuscule in comparison to oil revenues.
At the same time, the magnitude of Kuwait’s oil revenues allowed the ruler to create and maintain a welfare state, shifting the allegiance of the population from the merchants to the regime. Kuwaiti social rights can be seen as manifestations of a complex system of Marshallian “class-abatement.” Among them is the right to state employment. The importance of the merchant elite as employers of Kuwaiti workers has declined dramatically since pre-oil days. Social rights, in the form of extensive economic benefits dispensed by the government, thus both reduced the social status of the merchants and undermined their control over Kuwaiti society.
Following the decline and fall of oil prices in the mid-1980s, merchants and their allies engaged in persistent public complaints about the bloated public sector of Kuwait’s economy, something they had been complaining about privately for some time. 46 The state pays the salaries of “about half of all working citizens in Kuwait,” 47 and provides a high level of social benefits such as free health care and child allowances (which go only to male state employees and those few female state employees whose husbands work in the private sector). Government salary and benefit scales constitute a “minimum wage” floor for Kuwaitis, and their magnitude and downward rigidity have long encouraged Kuwaiti merchants to staff their enterprises with lower-wage foreigners. (Also see chapter 7.)
Oil revenues are mediated by markets which are indifferent both to the principles and to much of the behavior of owners of profitable investments. As a result, the replacement of British support by oil revenues also removed the important, if intermittent, external check on the regime’s growing autocracy that Britain previously had exercised. British political agents had oscillated between supporting the ruler and pressing him to allow greater citizen participation in domestic politics. 48 However, as Kuwaiti rulers became less dependent on British economic and strategic resources, they also became less responsive to British political advice.
Ever since the initiation of Kuwait’s oil industry, revenues have been appropriated directly by Kuwaiti rulers, who regard them as part of the autocratic domain that their state became thanks to the internal independence from checks on their power that their relationship with Britain had fostered. 49 After Kuwait’s first democratic government was installed following elections in January 1963, the disposition of oil revenues was undertaken with the advice of cabinet officers, some of whom came from families other than the ruler’s. 50 Even so, virtually all cabinet members are considered to be “yes-men” whose positions depend on their willingness to agree to whatever the ruler wants. 51 Few have the power to act effectively as checks on the ruler, especially those who also are elected members of the Kuwaiti parliament (see chapter 7). Within the cabinet and outside of it, those with the greatest power to check the ruler’s behavior come from within the ruling family itself, which is one reason why I sometimes refer to the leaders of Kuwait’s regime as “rulers” rather than “the ruler.” The plurality of the rulers is itself a check on extreme behavior, a product of the family’s collective interest in preserving the regime that gives them so much power.
The most important institutional check on the ruling family today is the elected National Assembly (Majlis al-`Umma) provided for in the 1962 constitution. In spite of its many institutional shortcomings and constant efforts by the regime and its allies to place it in an unfavorable light, the National Assembly is viewed by Kuwaitis from every social class as a check on executive power, though some contend that interference in elections produces a less-than-representative result. 52 What is so curious about the Kuwaiti parliament is that its authority persisted during the two extended periods when the amir dismissed it and suspended the constitution. During those times, the parliament’s power was exercised through nonviolent resistance movements which successfully undermined the legitimacy of the regime in spite of its having halted the parliament’s formal role as a legislative body. 53 Both times, when the parliament was restored it was in conjunction with other changes intended to check its power. 54
Clearly, contests for political power and authority in Kuwait have broadened far beyond the conflicts between merchants and rulers which defined the faultlines in Kuwaiti politics through most of the nation’s history. 55 New groups, many from the “middle class” created and supported by oil-financed education and employment, demand greater participation in state and society. The resulting shifts in Kuwait’s political universe both embrace a greater diversity of persons and generate conditions for the appearance of mass publics. Government payments fuel a politics of private desires that appeals to Kuwaitis of all income levels. The working masses of Kuwaiti citizens, that is, citizens who live on their wages—a group that is not a working class in the Marxian sense according to most observers 56 —have reoriented their allegiances as a result of how the state’s oil income is translated into wages and social benefits. Before the development of mass-level civil or political rights, social and economic benefits such as jobs, education, housing, health care, and free utilities constituted the most valuable citizenship rights of Kuwaitis. The regime’s mediation of the transfer of oil wealth in such highly visible ways bolstered popular support for the ruling family and allowed it to shift the status loyalty of the masses from the merchant elite to itself. These benefits also create an acute economic dependency between large numbers of citizens who otherwise are incapable of supporting themselves in today’s Kuwait and a state that gives them jobs and services for very little effort. 57
Elites also are seduced by gifts of private wealth. Crystal identifies a number of ways that Kuwaiti rulers use oil money to buy off traditional challengers to their authority. 58 One of the first programs to distribute Kuwait’s oil wealth directly to elites was begun in 1946 and involved government purchases of land at highly inflated prices. 59 The Land Acquisition Policy has been criticized by Kuwaitis and foreigners for handing far more money to the already-rich, including many members of the ruling family, than to the working and badu “masses.” 60 Between 1946 and 1971, about a quarter of Kuwait’s total revenues from oil were distributed directly to individuals through this program, a sum that exceeded investments in foreign assets and almost equaled the total spent on economic development. 61
Both old merchants and the new rich benefit from laws requiring every business to be majority-owned by Kuwaitis and every foreign worker to have a local sponsor. 62 These laws produced a growing group of “agents” and “sponsors” who take a substantial cut of the profits and wages earned by foreigners. 63 Local monopolies are another example of the myriad gentlemen’s agreements marking little pacts between the ruler and one or another of the influential merchant families, each of which is something of an interest group all by itself.
Citizenship Myths
During the second Gulf War, it became a commonplace to hear that there is no such thing as “Kuwait,” that what we call Kuwait is an artificial construct with a very short history, 64 an “accidental state” consisting of little more than a rich family sitting on top of a large oil well. 65 This commonplace arises from envy as well as from ignorance—Saddam Hussein is an enthusiastic retailer of such anti-Kuwait myths. Kuwaiti nationalism is, in fact, far more fully formed and realized than Iraqi nationalism. 66 It is shaped by the city-state experience and, like other nationalisms worldwide, it was fired in the crucible of external attacks. Two twentieth-century invasions threatened Kuwait’s independent existence. The more recent is Iraq’s 1990–91 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. The other, an invasion by the Saudi-allied Wahhabi Ikhwan, was equally defining in terms of its impact on Kuwaiti nationalism and political culture.
The cultural legacy of the war with the Ikhwan rests on two collective experiences. Both occurred in 1920: the construction of the wall around Kuwait town and the battle of Jahra.’ Like the Iraqi occupation, the building of the wall and the battle of Jahra’ simultaneously united and divided the Kuwaiti people. The events themselves solidified perceptions by Kuwait’s urban residents of their engagement in a common political enterprise, but they also initiated a system of differential status and rights that continues to work against the social cohesion of the Kuwaiti population as a whole.
Anthropologist Anh Nga Longva believes that notions such as nationality and citizenship are relatively new to the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula. 67 Formally launched as nation-states only in the twentieth century, these communities continue to reflect earlier conceptions of group identity that are primarily tribal, based on the principle of jus sanguinis, or entitlement to membership of a community by virtue of “the right of blood.” In 1948 two decrees on citizenship were promulgated that added the principle of jus soli, entitlement to membership of a community by virtue of residence, to the rules establishing who could be a Kuwaiti citizen. These decrees defined persons as “originally Kuwaiti [asil]” who were “members of the ruling family, those permanently residing in Kuwait since 1899, children of Kuwaiti men and children of Arab or Muslim fathers also born in Kuwait.” 68 The decrees also outlined procedures for naturalization.
Kuwait’s 1959 nationality law, since amended but still the basis for determining citizenship today, reversed the 1948 inclusion as Kuwaitis of those entitled by jus soli. It made naturalization more difficult and exceedingly rare—limited to fifty persons per year—and also changed the interpretation of the jus sanguinis principle as it applies in Kuwait. Thus, the citizenship category “children of Arab or Muslim fathers also born in Kuwait” was dropped, while the citizenship category “originally Kuwaiti” was enlarged to include the descendants of those who had resided in Kuwait in 1920.
Until independence in 1961, the term “Kuwaitis” was used to refer exclusively to the inhabitants of the town of Kuwait. Beyond it, the bedouin nomads were known by the names of their tribes and their sub-divisions. . . . Kuwaiti society, [like] most societies in the Arabian peninsula, consisted of two sharply contrasted communities, the sedentary town-dwellers (hadhar) and the nomads (badu). 69
The hadhar, merchants, sailors, and others lived in the town and earned their living, directly or indirectly, from the sea. The badu were herders of sheep and camels who saw the town primarily as a market where they could exchange meat, milk, and wool for salt and manufactured items like knives and guns. 70 The badu could break camp and scatter if they were under attack, but the hadhar, as a community with a fixed abode, had to depend on mutual aid to defend themselves and their homes.
The year chosen as the demarcation was not arbitrary. The antagonism that had simmered for some years between Ibn Sa`ud and the amir of Kuwait, Salim al-Mubarak, came to a boil in 1920. 71 A small force of Kuwaitis sent by Salim to camp at Manifa Mountain near Kuwait’s southern border was almost entirely massacred by invading Wahhabi Ikhwan forces in April. The massacre indicated to Salim that Ibn Sa`ud would not honor the boundaries of Kuwait set under the unratified Anglo-Ottoman treaty of 1913, but the British resisted the idea that Ibn Sa`ud was behind the Wahhabi attack. This, along with the harrowing tales told by the few survivors, convinced Salim that he would have to defend Kuwait on his own. 72
Salim mobilized Kuwait town to construct defenses. For four months the entire male population worked day and night to build a wall around the town. 73 After the wall was built, Salim learned that the Ikhwan, led by Faisal al-Duwaish, were on the verge of reaching the oasis of Subahiyya on their way to Jahra’, an agricultural community west of Kuwait town. Salim took a force of armed men from the town to Jahra’,
a village of Arab cultivators, tending date-groves and carefully irrigated gardens of lucerne [alfalfa]. They were settled inhabitants who shared neither the worldly sharpness of the Kuwait businessman, nor the maritime interests of the Kuwait sailor. . . . Most of them had come from Najd, and had made of this village a scene more typical of the oases of central Arabia than of the coastal settlements. 74
Ideally, Salim would be able not only to prevent Faisal from taking Jahra’, which occupied a strategic location on the road between Kuwait town and Basra, but also to inflict enough of a defeat on the Ikhwan to forestall an attack on the town altogether. 75
Abu-Hakima calls the battle of Jahra’ “one of . . . the most important events in the modern history of the shaikhdom of Kuwait.” 76 The Kuwaiti forces, augmented by badu clients of the amir Salim, met a well-planned attack launched by Ikhwan fighters on the morning of October 10. The Kuwaitis were “considerably outnumbered.” 77 After some three hours of fighting, they lost control of the village and had to withdraw to the Red Fort, located on the outskirts of the palm groves. That afternoon, a messenger from Faisal al-Duwaish offered safe conduct to the Kuwaitis to leave Jahra.’ However, retreat would not have removed the Wahhabi threat to the town. Salim refused Faisal’s terms and continued to fight, repulsing three assaults against the fort and inflicting heavy casualties on the Ikhwan forces. Meanwhile, Salim’s nephew, Ahmad al-Jabir, who had been left in charge of the town’s defense, heard the gunfire from Jahra’ and mobilized a relief expedition which left the following morning. When these reinforcements arrived in Jahra’, they found eight hundred dead among the Ikhwan and about a quarter of that number among Salim’s forces. Faisal already had retreated back toward Subahiyya with his surviving fighters, taking along the camels and other goods they had looted from the people of Jahra.’ 78 However, the backbone of the Ikhwan as a military threat to Kuwait had been broken.
The town wall, a symbol of the collective effort that had gone to build it, was transformed into “the symbol of Kuwaiti unity against external threats.” 79 Longva says that “the battle of Jahra’ . . . created a special bond between the town-dwellers who had taken part in the events and their descendants. These [persons] qualify today as full-fledged `first category’ Kuwaitis whose loyalty to Kuwait has never been questioned.” 80 Yet the town-dwellers were not the only residents of Kuwait who had fought with Salim against the Ikhwan. “Badu” are recorded as having been part of Salim’s forces, a designation that lumps together not only nomadic tribesmen but also settled Jahra’ villagers. Zahra Freeth recounts a story about the aftermath of the battle that she heard as a young woman from “badu” witnesses. The fighting had taken place in mid-autumn, a time of year when the weather in Kuwait is still very hot. The number of casualties, small by the standards of European wars, was huge in comparison to the size of the Jahra’ settlement. Faisal had abandoned so many dead and wounded Ikhwan that it took days for the Kuwaitis to sort them out, and the fingernails fell off some of the corpses before they could be buried. “For a period after the battle whenever the wind rose human fingernails were blown like husks around Jahra’, eddying and drifting among houses and tents, creating a weird rattling sound which was vividly described by those who had heard it.” 81
To the town-dwellers, mercifully far from the eerie noises made by these macabre relics of slain Ikhwan, the construction of the town wall (which was never assailed) and the battle at the Red Fort, which they had experienced as the sound of far-off gunfire, were remembered and recounted as singularly hadhari accomplishments. Today, Kuwaiti hadhar speak with pride about the defense of Kuwait town by their ancestors but are unashamed to say that they’ve never been to Jahra’, a large urban area less than twenty miles from Kuwait City. Meanwhile, as carefully selected cohorts of badu were awarded full Kuwaiti citizenship, with its plenitude of social rights, to boost support for the regime, 82 indiscriminate prejudice against tribal Kuwaitis by hadhar Kuwaitis intensified. Tribal Kuwaitis whose ancestors had been settled inhabitants of Jahra’ since before the Ikhwan wars are especially resentful at the inclusion of recently settled badu among first-category citizens when so many of their own number have been denied that status. The Iraqi invasion brought some of these antagonisms to the surface in charges by hadhar that “the badu” had fled before the Iraqis rather than standing to defend Kuwait.
Legal and cultural understandings of citizenship continue to divide the Kuwaiti people. The institutional translation of Kuwaiti identity into legal citizenship required heads of families to register with the government during limited open enrollment periods designated by nationality laws and their amendments. This process introduced discrimination against some groups among the settled residents of Jahra’ and the nomadic population. Whether because of ignorance of the requirements or suspicion of the procedure, many family heads among the tribes failed to record themselves or their sons as Kuwaitis, either at the most advantageous of these designated times or ever. Those registering late received “second-category” citizenship, analogous to the status of naturalized persons. Second-category Kuwaiti men are deprived of political rights even though they are entitled to the same social and civil rights as first-category Kuwaitis. Nonregistrants are among the bidun, short for bidun jinsiyya or persons “without [documented proof of] nationality.” The status of all Kuwaiti bidun was tainted by the incursion of large numbers of refugees during the Iran-Iraq war. Even those bidun who have worked their entire adult lives as soldiers or policemen in Kuwait continue to exist in a stateless limbo. 83
Longva offers an interesting cultural hypothesis about citizenship to explain the depth and persistence of the division between town and tribe. The English word citizen is derived from a Latin root, civis, “city,” coming through the French citoyen, the egalitarian term of address used among “fraternal” French revolutionaries. This linguistic legacy reflects the history of citizenship as a concept embedded in the experiences of urban life. In the Kuwaiti urban experience as well, national identity is bound up with the connection between the citizen and the town. As a result, despite a very different linguistic tradition, urban Kuwaitis share a cultural understanding of citizenship very similar to that of Europeans.
Urban Kuwaitis . . . understand citizenship as jinsiyya, from the root verb jns, to make alike, to assimilate, to naturalise. . . . There is here an idea of similarity and horizontal solidarity. . . . Jinsiyya . . . does not posit a priori an idea of hierarchy or supreme authority. In this sense, it is . . . [close] to the Western concept of citizenship. Although jinsiyya [carries] no connotation . . . [of] the city, the urban Kuwaitis relate this notion with a territorialised community . . . previously the town, today the nation-state, rather than with a particular leadership. . . .
[In contrast,] the tribes in Kuwait understand nationality and citizenship in the sense of tabi`iyya, which can be translated as “following” or “allegiance” to a leader, in this case Kuwait’s ruling family. The root verb of tabi`iyya means, among other things, to walk behind someone, to be subordinate to, to be under someone’s command. The concept is clearly built on an idea of hierarchy and vertical allegiance. 84
While Kuwaiti hadhar experience citizenship in the context of modernity with its emphasis on equality and autonomy, significant numbers of tribally oriented Kuwaitis remain part of the old imagining. They are subjects of a ruler, personally tied to him by two-way vertical bonds of status and obligation.
The badu tradition, with its absence of attachment to a particular territory, is based on such leader-follower bonds, free of competition from crosscutting loyalties rooted in geography. Even among the badu, however, the leader-follower bond cannot be taken for granted. It also proceeds from a social contract, one that requires a leader not merely to reward his followers materially but also to reaffirm his competence and worthiness to retain their allegiance. 85 Salamé argues that a contemporary state organized along these lines follows a recipe first set down by Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun.
Leadership (ri’asa) exists only through superiority (ghulb) and superiority only through group feeling (`asibiyya). Leadership over people, therefore, must, of necessity, derive from a group feeling that is superior to each individual group feeling. . . . [The] two ingredients of the state’s strength . . . are, on the one hand, the actual capabilities of the state and, on the other, the recognition by others of these capabilities. Their recognition of this strength will make them accept it, obey it and shift their political loyalty to its possessors. The central concept of iltiham [the coalescence of subordinates around a superior leader] . . . . is then the ultimate form of hegemony in its insistence on social integration by and around the ideology professed by the ruling `asibiyya. 86
The tabi`iyya conception of citizenship, with its focus on actual or fictive blood relationships arranged in a hierarchy topped by a “superior leader,” is the basis of the citizenship myth favored by Kuwaiti rulers. It is precisely this cultural manifestation of citizen-as-subject that Hisham Sharabi calls “neopatriarchy,” a complex of nested hierarchical institutions modeled on the patriarchal family. 87 Habermas’s concept of representation in premodern political formations as a process that “pretended to make something invisible visible through the public presence of the lord,” 88 is mirrored in the official myth of the Kuwaiti nation, which portrays the amir as the father of his people and citizenship as a family romance.
This version of Kuwaiti national identity is based on the concept of al-`usra al-waheda, the “one” or united family. In an effort to promote national cohesion, a campaign to associate this slogan with communal solidarity was undertaken by the government in the early 1970s. Al-`usra al-waheda resonates with individual family histories as well as with idealized images of the old-style tribal families of the Arabian Peninsula, idylls of a bygone age when everyone lived securely under the protective wing of the family patriarch. 89 This Kuwaiti national myth incorporates nomadic tribal values such as the subordination of women and young men, and emphasizes those such as that one’s primary loyalty is to the `asibiyya and its leader. 90 Consequently, the national myth clashes with the entrepreneurial values of the town, not only because of the relatively more horizontal orientation of hadhar values but even more because of the town’s connection to a particular place. 91 This divergence is bridged structurally by the legitimation of a pyramid of quasi-amirs, “princes” whose castle domains are the households and clans in which they claim entitlement to the absolute loyalty and obedience of their dependents. Consequently, the Kuwaiti national myth is heavily dependent on the acceptance of (neo)patriarchy as the paradigm of social organization and therefore on the continued subjection of women 92 and the acquiescence of young men in their own subordination to family heads. To support their positions, Kuwaiti rulers have given tacit and sometimes open support to those whom they hope are “safe” Islamists, neofundamentalists whose advocacy of this vision of “family values” adds religious legitimacy to the al-`usra al-waheda story. 93
The cultural constraints that produce compliant women and obedient sons are beginning to dissolve as modernity reorganizes Kuwaiti family life. Modernity provides both alternative models for reflexive adjustment and structural support for personal autonomy. 94 Over fewer than fifty years, public education, including female education, has transformed a mostly illiterate population into one where large majorities of female and male adults can read. Increasing numbers of Kuwaiti women work outside the home 95 and marry later than their mothers and grandmothers; some do not marry at all. These changes already have begun to reflect different sets of family values from the ones Islamists promote, and even Islamist values regarding women are far from uniform. In fact, Islamist views of women “as people, and no longer as mere instruments of pleasure or reproduction,” are among the strongest indicators of the modernity of Islamist political movements. 96 Modern Kuwait is the home of mixed-gender social organizations such as the Kuwait Graduates Society and the Kuwait Human Rights Organization, while gender itself has become an analytical category that activists use to sharpen arguments for a broadening of civil and human rights in other areas—for example, with regard to the rights of bidun. 97 Although citizenship rights for Kuwaiti women remain at this writing inferior to men’s rights in every one of Marshall’s canonical categories, 98 reflexivity mediates both the development of gender-equal models of citizenship and political mobilization to promote their wider acceptance and implementation.
At the same time that modernity is eroding traditional conceptions of citizen-as-subject among Kuwaitis themselves, the dependence of the country on immigrant labor embeds a huge population of subjects in the daily lives and consciousnesses of the Kuwaiti people. Longva’s study of labor migration and its impact on Kuwaiti society in the 1980s demonstrates the confusion in identity that results from the overlay of large numbers of persons from different—and hierarchically ordered—national groups. One example of this confusion is how the concept of “masculinity” is experienced as a quality of persons. Longva argues that gender roles in Kuwait are unstable except for two groups, Kuwaiti men and Asian women. Kuwaiti men always behave as the masculine (i.e., dominant) partners in relations with members of all other groups: Kuwaiti women, Arab men, Arab women, Asian men, and Asian women; just as Asian women are always the feminine partners, that is, subordinate, without power, in their relations with members of every other group. 99 Consequently, Kuwaiti women have “masculine” roles in some situations and “feminine” roles in others, contributing to the fluidity of their identities as they are experienced by themselves and perceived and reacted to by others. The dependence of Kuwaitis on a migrant population that outnumbers them by about three-to-one also tends to promote “traditional” values—examples include the contribution to high Kuwaiti birthrates from conscious and unconscious pressures arising from the minority status of Kuwaiti citizens, and the tendency to place responsibility for the size of the immigrant population on “lazy” Kuwaiti women. These multiple roles and identities add to psychological fragmentation and weaken the hegemonic authority of neopatriarchy.
Myths of the Rentier State
Shortly after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries took control of member oil production and pricing away from the international oil companies, articles and books began to appear in the West comparing OPEC nations to sixteenth-century Spain. Awash in bullion from the New World, the Spanish government was said to have been too primitive and incompetent to deploy these vast financial resources in the long-run interests of the state. Some said that Spain’s loss was Holland’s and England’s gain, and that the loot from America financed the capital accumulation that set the stage for Europe’s industrial revolution. 100 After 1973 the Spanish theme was exchanged for a contemporary focus, first on the “problem” of petrodollar recycling and then on a formal theory of the rentier state.
A rentier is . . . more of a social function than an economic category. . . . The distinguishing feature of the rentier . . . resides in the lack or absence of a productive outlook in his behavior. [With respect to the rentier state,] there is no such thing as a pure rentier economy. . . . Second . . . a rentier economy is an economy which relies on substantial external rent. . . . Third, in a rentier state—as a special case of a rentier economy—only a few are engaged in the generation of this rent (wealth), the majority being only involved in the distribution or utilisation of it. . . . Fourth, a corollary of the role of the few, in a rentier state the government is the principal recipient of the external rent. 101
Early versions of the rentier state myth warn about the impact on the world economy of flawed economic and financial policies pursued by rentier states; later ones, many told by Arab nationalists and other advocates of regional redistribution of oil revenues, emphasize the moral shortcomings of rentier status. 102 Both offer structural explanations describing how rentier status disconnects the state apparatus from domestic checks on autocratic behavior. Some contrast oil rentiers with the former British colonies that became the United States. The American Revolution was fought on the principle that there should be no taxation without representation; in wealthy oil-exporting countries, these stories say, there is no representation because there is no taxation. 103 Most of these accounts are consistent with Charles Tilly’s description of the evolution of the nation-state in modern Europe. 104
Another way to look at the myths of the rentier state is to see them as parables contesting different patterns of differential accumulation. A concept developed by economist Jonathan Nitzan, differential accumulation reflects an understanding of capital as a crystallization of power, and its accumulation as the outcome of a struggle for dominance among competitors.
Accumulation is usually associated with rapid mechanization and productivity gains, but these are technological processes; as such, they are not unique to capitalism and therefore cannot be equated with accumulation. . . . The value of capital represents discounted future earnings. Some of these earnings could be associated with the productivity (or exploitation) of the owned industrial apparatus, but this is only part of the story. As capitalism grows in complexity, the earnings of any given business concern come to depend less on its own industrial undertakings and more on the community’s overall productivity. In this sense, the value of capital represents a distributional claim. This claim is manifested partly through ownership, but more broadly through the whole spectrum of social power. Moreover, power is not only a means of accumulation, but also its most fundamental end. . . . The ultimate goal of business is not hedonic pleasure, but differential gain. 105
Nitzan’s reintegration of capital with other manifestations of power explains the ferocity of the competition to acquire not simply “enough” for oneself but more than anyone else. By “beating the average,” the successful competitor bests his rivals and also impairs their capacity to challenge his dominance. This reintegration explains some of the moral opprobrium heaped on the rentier state, whose military inferiority is seen as disqualifying it from the traditional source of entitlement to dominate other states. A comparison to the Soviet Union is instructive here. The Soviet Union enjoyed substantial rentier income from the oil, gas, and gold sales which produced the lion’s share of its foreign exchange earnings. However, its dominance in the markets for these commodities—including its capacity to disrupt them—was not analyzed as an example of rentier state behavior, even though the connection between strategic economic power and strategic military power frequently was made in analyses of Soviet state behavior. 106 That the Soviet Union conformed structurally and politically to conventional conceptions of what it means to be a powerful state may explain some of this disparity.
In the context of differential accumulation, we can see myths of the rentier state as romances revolving around three stock characters: the undeserving rentier, the rent-seeking client, and the poor-but-worthy victim. The rentier state achieves its dominance by cashing in on unearned advantages, in this case, large deposits of natural resources. It is portrayed as the recipient of income to whose generation it contributes nothing because it lacks a “productive outlook.” Income originates “outside” the state, a fiction it is possible to maintain if one forgets that the resources originate “inside.” 107 Only a small segment of the domestic workforce is devoted to producing rentier income, which accrues to the government by virtue of its control of the state apparatus. As a result, the rentier state goes unchallenged domestically or internationally; it fritters its income away on hedonic consumption and rent-seeking clients who offer political support in exchange for differential access to a protected share of rentier spoils. Everyone else is a victim: those who do not share directly in the spoils and those from whom the spoils are wrested and accumulated.
The myth of the rentier state is the subtext of Saddam Hussein’s criticisms of and justifications for invading Kuwait. 108 More broadly, it is the subtext of a whole set of criticisms of OPEC members and other developing-country mineral exporters who, during the 1970s, claimed authority over the production and pricing of their natural resources and used their positions as sellers in tight markets to demand a New International Economic Order. 109 Syrian diplomat and scholar George Tomeh points out how critics from developed countries used the concept of “interdependence” to challenge this authority, though they never cited interdependence as a reason why they themselves should exercise restraint with respect to the economies of developing nations. 110 It seems clear that the issue is less that some countries have the power to drain and/or destabilize the economies of others, but that the wrong countries have this power.
Rentier state mythology also underlies criticism by Kuwaitis of how the state allocates oil wealth internally. In this context, these myths are part of the competition among rent-seekers, those who want to be the most-favored recipients of whatever trickles down from the rulers’ coffers. Rentier state mythology is the subtext of stories about “service candidates,” payoffs, and gentlemen’s agreements that are the subjects of one of the main genres of the rich oral literature of rumor and gossip that make up the Kuwaiti equivalent of urban legends. 111 Payoff legends explain how the deserving are cheated and the unworthy favored by an overly powerful yet seriously flawed state. Sometimes the state’s flaws are moral: payoffs are quids pro quo for sycophancy and political support. Here the recipient is morally defective too. He sells his integrity for status when he agrees to become a candidate for an office he knows he cannot win; he sells his citizenship when he trades a vote for the money to buy a satellite dish or a fancier car; he sells his principles when he abandons the interests of his constituents to hold onto a plum job.
Other stories show the state to be “mentally” defective—it pays off the wrong people. The lazy and shiftless get government jobs and the economy staggers under their dead weight. Wealthy merchants get monopolies and dealerships, and in return they send their profits out of the country. Badu who neither care nor work for the community get citizenship and its many welfare benefits at the expense of “real” Kuwaitis. Islamists waiting for an opportunity to turn Kuwait into “another Egypt”—or worse, “another Algeria”—get payoffs of all kinds, despite the fact that they turn on the government if it makes even a small attempt to control them. In these myths, the “welfare recipients” are cleverer than the state because they succeed in maneuvering it into giving them something for which they have no intention of returning anything of equivalent value. These domestic urban legends resemble the foreign-generated rentier state myths. Both sets of stories are fables about injustice with moral points to make, 112 and both omit details and perspectives that might show the actions they criticize in a more favorable light.
Rentier state myths usually are recounted in a spirit of envy. It is not that the teller wishes for a more egalitarian state or a more even-handed system of distribution. Rather, he is arguing that someone else (perhaps himself?) would be a worthier recipient of the state’s largesse or a more responsible holder of the ticket to rentiership than the subject of the story. The same perspective is evident in assessments by external critics from Saddam on down who see Kuwaitis in general as less worthy of Kuwait’s oil wealth than they themselves would be. Analyzing myths of the rentier state as weapons in the war for differential accumulation encourages scrutiny of the position and likely agenda of the teller as well as a more comprehensive consideration of the position of the object of such stories.
Myths of Diplomatic Prowess
Kuwait is a very small country that is highly vulnerable to external threats. As in the past, the internal security of modern Kuwait depends on the ability of the state to keep foreign demands at an acceptable minimum. Even before the Iraqi invasion, doubts about the regime’s ability to fulfill this obligation contributed to social unrest and widespread calls for domestic political change. At that time, Kuwait’s political independence as a regional and global actor was frequently interpreted by Kuwaitis as the outcome of intentional and highly successful manipulations by Kuwaiti rulers of power balances among larger states and empires. 113
In its various dealings with the international system, Kuwait has had two high cards to play: its strategic location and, for more than fifty years, its oil. Both also attract the envy of other states. Kuwait’s small population and tiny territory make an independent military defense strategy against most external threats impossible. 114 Its existence as a more or less independent entity requires not just good luck but also diplomatic skill and the intelligence to play its cards so as to achieve consistently a “least unattractive” outcome. Since the Iraqi invasion, Kuwaitis’ faith that the rulers can manage this on their own has declined dramatically.
In the late nineteenth century, Kuwait was the first choice to become the terminus of the controversial Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. This enterprise had grown out of a commercial alliance between the Ottoman Empire and Germany, whose leaders wanted to open a land route of access into regions where raw materials and markets were monopolized by maritime powers, chiefly Britain. The railroad also promised new economic opportunities for a state like Kuwait, whose wealth was almost entirely dependent on long-distance trade. However, it also threatened to insinuate Ottoman political control over and perhaps clear the way for Ottoman economic penetration of Kuwait, prospects far less attractive to Kuwaitis and their ruler. The railway also challenged British interests in the Gulf, India, and in Europe. It seemed potentially able to enhance the power and economic reach of Germany and to constitute an overland route culminating in a platform for the penetration of a “British sea” by other European powers, chiefly Russia. An understanding with Kuwait’s rulers thus seemed desirable from the British point of view. 115
The Kuwaiti-British arrangement is conventionally seen as one of several examples of Kuwait’s standard strategy of embracing the least unattractive choice, but it also reflects the personal qualities of Mubarak as rent-seeker and political entrepreneur. The January 1899 bond with Britain imposed significant constraints on Kuwait’s autonomy. Mubarak agreed for himself and his successors
not to receive the Agent or Representative of any Power or Government at Koweit . . . without the previous sanction of the British Government . . . and to bind himself not to cede, sell, lease, mortgage, or give for occupation or for any other purpose any portion of his territory to the Government or Subjects of any other Power without the previous consent of Her Majesty’s Government. 116
These provisions mandate a relinquishment of initiative in foreign investment and foreign policy, requirements that both Mubarak and his successors were able not merely to maneuver around but to flout. Their application to the development of Kuwait’s oil was explicitly confirmed in a separate agreement signed in 1913. After a geological survey indicated a strong likelihood of finding oil in Kuwait, Mubarak exchanged letters with the British political representative, Percy Cox, promising that Kuwait would not grant an oil concession “to anyone except a person appointed from the British Government.” 117 However, Kuwaiti rulers found themselves able to exercise significant autonomy in spite of the formal constraints imposed by their treaty obligations.
As I noted earlier, a key feature of the agreements between Kuwait and Britain is that they were secret. 118 The British insisted on secrecy because they did not want to provoke any Ottoman challenge to their relationship with Kuwait’s rulers that might require them to devote serious resources to their Kuwait policy. The secrecy also protected Mubarak. It enabled him to continue to profess his allegiance to the Ottomans, and thus to collect honors and subventions from them, and also to keep both Constantinople and London off-balance by telling each what it wanted to hear while, as much as he could, doing whatever he liked. 119 Mubarak’s status at home depended in part on his reputation as an astute diplomat, a reputation he might lose if it were known that he was a British dependent. Also, the secrecy hid the payments Mubarak received from Britain in return for his various concessions of sovereignty. The British political agent in Kuwait, Maj. Stuart George Knox, worried about how “Mubarak’s subjects” would view the British role if they were to learn about it: “It will be an unpleasant moment for us when they arrive at a juster view of the situation and realize that it is our support chiefly that has enabled and will enable Shaikh Mubarak’s despotism to flourish.” 120
Mubarak’s deals with the British enhanced his power and that of his family, but they protected Kuwait as well. Abu-Hakima reports that Mubarak refused to sign the first agreement without written assurances that Britain would intervene in the event that Kuwait was attacked by a foreign power, a guarantee that Britain had not given to those Arab states with which it had regular protection treaties. 121 One could argue also that the Kuwaiti-British relationship kept Kuwait on the winning side in the conflicts that resulted in the defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and guaranteed its survival through the postwar period of mostly British-mediated state-creation in the region. Yet the British were willing to use Kuwait as a pawn when it suited them, such as in the Anglo-Turkish agreement of 1913 which named Kuwait an Ottoman province and acknowledged Ottoman authority over it, a status that no Kuwaiti ruler ever had conceded. 122 Despite the fact that the treaty was not ratified, it was used by Saddam to justify Iraq’s 1990 invasion and annexation of Kuwait as well as earlier assertions by Iraqi rulers of their sovereignty over Kuwait’s territory. 123
This arrangement also elicited British support for an independent Kuwait during the postwar exercises in boundary construction which David Fromkin notes that, even by contemporaries, was seen as a “peace to end all peace.” 124 Yet another apparent exception was the 1922 agreement establishing the boundaries separating Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. Despite the infatuation of Sir Percy Cox, then British High Commissioner for Iraq, for Ibn Sa`ud, Kuwait’s long relationship with Britain limited the scope of “adjustments” to Kuwait’s borders to benefit Saudi Arabia that Cox reasonably could justify. 125 David Finnie argues convincingly that the British protected Kuwait from territorial encroachments by Iraq for more than thirty years, 126 though it is possible that British failure to attend to the demarcation of the boundary between Kuwait and Iraq was a cause of the recurring border conflicts between the two countries in the first place. Finally, as I noted with respect to the exploitation of Kuwait’s oil, the relationship between Kuwait and Britain did not foreclose maneuvering by a Kuwaiti ruler that resulted in a partnership between a British and an American company to exploit Kuwait’s oil reserves, actions that attenuated the cliency relationship that Mubarak had initiated. 127 On balance, therefore, even though the arrangement had serious flaws it was not without its political benefits to Kuwaitis and their rulers.
British military protection was another benefit for Kuwait even after Mubarak’s demise. Despite having had to defend themselves without British assistance from the Ikhwan invasion of 1920, Kuwaitis were protected by British forces on other occasions during the tribal warfare of the 1920s and 1930s. 128 After independence in 1961, Kuwait’s first foreign policy crisis was precipitated by Iraq’s threats to take it over, eliciting immediate direct military assistance from the British and only afterward from members of the Arab League. 129 Twenty years later, the Iran-Iraq war created a whole new set of threats to Kuwait. The government’s ingenious defense against Iranian shelling of Kuwaiti oil tankers was a proposition to operate some of its ships under the flags of other countries, and it persuaded the United States and other major powers, including the Soviet Union and Britain, to intervene to protect its fleet. 130 Resolution was sought not in direct confrontation but in diplomatic efforts to convince powerful states that Kuwait’s strategic interests coincided with their own. 131 The apotheosis of this strategy was achieved during the Iraqi occupation, when the Kuwaiti government orchestrated a campaign in coalition countries to persuade their leaders to mount a military offensive to retake Kuwait. 132
Diplomatic skills achieved Kuwait’s ends indirectly, often through the initiation of cliency relationships with extra-regional powers designed to defend the country against local threats to its survival. Oil money allowed the government to pursue state interests directly and to build constituencies out of nations on whose political resources Kuwait could draw. Such a strategy enlarged the range of foreign policy options available to Kuwaiti rulers. Two important components of Kuwait’s oil diplomacy are its oil-financed portfolio holdings and direct foreign investment in developed and developing countries, and an aggressive preinvasion foreign aid program that targeted potential allies and neighbors, particularly those that threatened Kuwait. 133 The Iraqi invasion and occupation demonstrated shortcomings in Kuwait’s foreign aid policy as a guarantee of its external security. However, Kuwait’s direct foreign investment, especially in Europe, created strong mutual interests between the Kuwaiti government and the governments and societies of countries in the UN coalition supporting Kuwait’s restoration as an independent state. 134
Mythology and Politics
The prevalence of contending myths in Kuwaiti political discourse has many causes, among them a continuing disagreement among Kuwaitis about various provisions of their social contract, and a lack of adequate mechanisms for resolving domestic disputes in a way that can be seen as fair by concurrent majorities of multiple social groups. Kuwaitis are split politically across many dimensions. Some divisions draw class, sectarian, and gender lines; others draw cultural lines such as those dividing citizens from subjects, hadhar from badu, and secularists from religionists. Like citizens everywhere, Kuwaitis also are divided along myriad lines that separate reasonable people who disagree on various issues of policy. As elsewhere, these divisions frequently are crosscutting, limiting conflict by allowing people to find themselves on the same side on one issue when they are on opposite sides on another. In consequence of this reflexive experience, many Kuwaitis have come to see conflict as a function of external circumstances subject to change rather than as the result of a fundamental difference between the essential natures of a set of opponents.
Domestic divisions in Kuwait are greatly aggravated by political manipulation, not only by rulers who pit groups against one another to discourage the formation or persistence of an effective opposition, but also by political entrepreneurs with their own policy and interest agendas. In the next chapter, I trace the development of some of the domestic political patterns of conflict and reconciliation that have characterized Kuwaiti politics throughout this century. Political life in Kuwait oscillates between traditional monarchy and oligarchic democracy. Each political cycle constitutes a set of reflexive processes; as such, it is shaped by contingently altered grounds which, in turn, shape the next ensemble of institutions, expectations, and practices that compose the contemporary political universe. The repeated recurrence of broadly similar situations and strategies indicates the inability of Kuwaiti rulers to “go back” to a stable autocracy just as it reveals the inability of pro-democracy forces to “move forward” to a stable rule of law. How to get off the horns of this dilemma is the fundamental issue to be resolved in Kuwaiti politics today.
Endnotes
Note 1: In a talk at Rice University in March 1975. Back.
Note 2: Hasan `Ali al-Ebraheem, Kuwait: A Political Study, 25. Back.
Note 3: B. J. Slot, The Origins of Kuwait, 185n99. This volume compares contemporary writings with Kuwaiti legends about the founding of Kuwait. It also reproduces contemporary maps of Kuwait and the Gulf region. Back.
Note 4: Alan Rush, Al-Sabah: History and Genealogy of Kuwait’s Ruling Family, 1752–1987, 2. Back.
Note 5: Robert Stephens, The Arabs’ New Frontier, 30. Back.
Note 6: H. R. P. Dickson, Kuwait and Her Neighbours, 27. Back.
Note 8: Peter Mansfield, Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf, 5–6. Back.
Note 9: Dickson, Kuwait and Her Neighbours, 32. Back.
Note 10: Ahmad Mustafa Abu-Hakima, The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965, 1. Back.
Note 11: Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait, 26. Back.
Note 12: Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Hunt takes Freud’s conception of the family romance as a fable of an individual’s desired place in the social order to mean the “political—that is, the collective—unconscious” made up of “images of the familial order that underlie revolutionary politics” (xiii). I believe that Kuwaiti political myths serve a similar function and thus also are family romances, arising from a collective unconscious structured by myths and experiences of family life. Back.
Note 13: A fascinating description of living conditions for average citizens in Kuwait town in the 1930s and after can be found in Mary Bruins Allison, M.D., Doctor Mary in Arabia. Back.
Note 14: Jacqueline S. Ismael, Kuwait: Social Change in Historical Perspective, 46, 56–57. Back.
Note 15: Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, 114, 155, 224n. Back.
Note 16: Ismael, Kuwait, 60. Back.
Note 17: Abu-Hakima, Modern History of Kuwait, 92–106. Back.
Note 18: Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait, 101; also Ismael, Kuwait, 61–64. The sailors’ debts were not canceled by their deaths. Captains could claim the services of the relatives of sailors who had died owing them money. Similarly, the ship captains, nakhodas, were tied to the merchants who financed them. If a ship was lost at sea, the nakhoda lost his investment and also was required to repay cargo losses. “The ships belonged to the nakhodas and the debts to the merchants” (Alan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad, quote from 377). Back.
Note 19: Villiers, Sons of Sinbad; see also M. W. Khouja and P. G. Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait: Development and Role in International Finance (London: Macmillan, 1979), 16. Back.
Note 20: Quoted in Stephens, The Arabs’ New Frontier, 30. Back.
Note 21: Khouja and Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait, 12–16. Back.
Note 22: Interviews with Kuwait University political scientist Saif `Abbas `Abdulla, spring 1990. Back.
Note 23: Rush, Al-Sabah, 3, 175. The story of the date gardens and how they complicated Kuwaiti-British relations is told very well in David H. Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand: Kuwait’s Elusive Frontier with Iraq. Back.
Note 24: From a secret report written by S. Hennel for the Court of Directors of the East India Company, quoted in Rush, Al-Sabah, 174. Back.
Note 25: Rush, Al-Sabah, 154. Back.
Note 26: Interviews in Kuwait, spring 1990. Back.
Note 27: Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf. Back.
Note 28: Ismael, Kuwait, 42. Back.
Note 29: Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf, 93. Back.
Note 30: Rush, Al-Sabah, 140. Rush notes that this new relationship between the Kuwaiti ruler and the Ottomans strengthened the family’s title to its date gardens in Iraq, and allowed `Abdullah significant policy independence from the merchants. `Abdullah was said to have used much of his income to entertain lavishly, not to suit his personal tastes but, in Rush’s words, “to enhance his prestige and the strength of his position when negotiating with tribal leaders and foreign governments” (139). Back.
Note 31: Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf, 21. Back.
Note 33: Rush, Al-Sabah, 120. Back.
Note 34: Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar, 23. Back.
Note 35: Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf, 94. Back.
Note 36: Mubarak received income from the Ottomans as a dependent of the Porte, and from the British in return for a series of secret agreements giving Britain special privileges in Kuwait. See ibid., 114, 116. Back.
Note 37: Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait, 122. Back.
Note 38: Khouja and Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait, 14. Back.
Note 39: Rush, Al-Sabah, 103. Back.
Note 40: Finnie notes that, technically, the British-Kuwaiti relationship was not a protectorate. Still, throughout his book he makes it very clear that Britain dominated the relationship and frequently supported the Kuwaiti ruler against internal and external threats. (See Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand.) Anscombe agrees, reporting analyses from contemporary British officials making the same point. He notes that the primary difference between a protectorate and a “bond,” the term used to describe the British-Kuwaiti relationship, lies in the secrecy of the latter, an important qualification both for London and for Kuwait. (See Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf, 111.) Back.
Note 41: These agreements are reproduced in appendix 4 of Abu-Hakima’s Modern History of Kuwait. Back.
Note 42: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Autonomy, Necessity, and the Small State: Ruling Kuwait in the Twentieth Century.” International Organization 45 (Autumn 1991): 572–74. Back.
Note 43: Dickson, Kuwait and Her Neighbours, 258. Back.
Note 44: Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait, 133. Back.
Note 45: Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 58. Crystal is referring to the parliaments of the 1930s, but these parliaments themselves were seen by contemporaries as direct descendants of the council. Back.
Note 46: Interviews with Ghanim Hamad al-Najjar and others, spring 1990, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 47: Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), “Kuwait: Country Profile, 1990–91” (London: Business International, 1990), 10. Back.
Note 48: Tétreault, “Autonomy, Necessity, and the Small State,” 576–77. Back.
Note 49: Frank Stoakes, “Social and Political Change in the Third World: Some Peculiarities of Oil-Producing Principalities of the Persian Gulf,” in Derek Hopwood, ed., The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics, 196. Back.
Note 50: Abdul-Reda al-Assiri and Kamal al-Monoufi, “Kuwait’s Political Elite: The Cabinet,” Middle East Journal 42 (1988): 48–58. Back.
Note 51: This opinion was widespread among businessmen and members of the political opposition whom I interviewed in the spring of 1990 and in September and October 1992 in Kuwait. Back.
Note 52: This conclusion is based on many interviews of Kuwaitis conducted over more than fifteen years in and outside of Kuwait. Back.
Note 53: Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait, 133–41. Back.
Note 54: For example, see Nicolas Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy: The Anatomy of Parliamentary Elections in Kuwait,” in Linda L. Layne, ed., Elections in the Middle East: Implications of Recent Trends, 165; and Kamal Osman Salih, “Kuwait’s Parliamentary Elections: 1963–1985,” unpublished paper. See also chapters 6 and 7, this volume. Back.
Note 55: Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf. Back.
Note 56: See Ralph H. Magnus, “Societies and Social Change in the Persian Gulf,” in Alvin J. Cottrell, ed., The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey, 399–402; also several 1990 interviews with Saif `Abbas `Abdulla. Nazih Ayubi argues that oil income has retarded modern class-formation throughout the gulf region, including in Kuwait (see Over-stating the Arab State, 225–30). Ayubi calls groups occupied by Kuwaiti government workers “intermediate classes,” created by capitalist modernity but not yet either classes in themselves or classes for themselves. I discuss Kuwait’s middle class further in subsequent chapters. Back.
Note 57: Khaldoun Hasan al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula, 129. This is not to say that all Kuwaiti state employees are indifferent workers, but dedicated workers are exceptions and even persons in elite positions such as university professors have told me that they work much less than they would if they were not state employees. Back.
Note 58: Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 75–78. Back.
Note 59: Ibid., 76–77; Michael E. Bonine, “The Urbanization of the Persian Gulf Nations,” in Cottrell, ed., The Persian Gulf States, 250; Ghanim Hamad al-Najjar, “Decision-Making Process in Kuwait: The Land Acquisition Policy as a Case Study,” Ph.D. diss., University of Exeter, 1984. Back.
Note 60: Al-Najjar, “Decision-Making Process in Kuwait”; Khouja and Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait, 45; interviews with `Abdullah Nibari, spring 1990. Back.
Note 61: Khouja and Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait, 44–45. Back.
Note 62: Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 76. Back.
Note 63: Interviews in Kuwait (spring 1990, September-October 1992, September-October 1996). For an excellent treatment of agency relationships and the role of migrant workers in the creation of Kuwaiti citizenship, see Longva, Walls Built on Sand. Back.
Note 64: See, for example, Timothy W. Luke, “The Discipline of Security Studies and the Codes of Containment: Learning from Kuwait,” Alternatives 16 (1991): 315–44. Back.
Note 65: See, for example, Theodore Draper, “The True History of the Gulf War,” New York Review of Books (January 30, 1992): 38–45 (quote on 44). Back.
Note 66: According to Phebe Marr, writing in the mid-1980s, “It is not yet possible to speak of an Iraqi nation.” See Marr, The Modern History of Iraq, 5. Back.
Note 67: Anh Nga Longva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States: Conceptualisation and Practice,” paper presented at the Conference on Citizenship and the State in the Middle East, University of Oslo, November 22–24, 1996. Back.
Note 68: Quoted in Longva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States.” Back.
Note 70: Zahra Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait, 141. Back.
Note 71: In December 1915, Salim had allowed members of the `Ajman tribe, then at war with Ibn Sa`ud, to take refuge in Kuwait. “This enraged `Abd al-`Aziz [Ibn Sa`ud] . . . [and] marked the beginning of the enmity between the two men, an enmity which led later to the siege of al-Jahra town by the forces of the fanatic Wahhabi Ikhwan (brothers) under the command of Faisal al-Duwaish in 1920.” Abu-Hakima, Modern History of Kuwait, 132. Back.
Note 72: Ibid., 133; H. V. F. Winstone and Zahra Freeth, Kuwait: Prospect and Reality, 83–84. Back.
Note 73: Jill Crystal, Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil State, 15. Back.
Note 74: Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait, 139. The old hadhar families also originated in Najd. Back.
Note 75: Winstone and Freeth, Kuwait, 84. Back.
Note 76: Abu-Hakima, Modern History of Kuwait, 132. Back.
Note 77: Winstone and Freeth, Kuwait, 84. Back.
Note 79: Longva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States.” Back.
Note 81: Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait, 140–41. Back.
Note 82: Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 88–89; and chapter 6, this volume. Among the results of this policy is what Shafeeq Ghabra refers to as the “desertization” of Kuwaiti political life. See Ghabra, “Kuwait and the Dynamics of Socio-economic Change,” Middle East Journal 51 (Summer 1997): 358–72; and chapter 6, this volume. Back.
Note 83: The status of the bidun is of staggering importance to Kuwait today, not only because of internal and external pressures to resolve the issue but because of the myriad effects of that resolution on the state—who will be the policemen and soldiers when bidun become full citizens, for example; and on the economy—how will the incorporation of what is estimated to be more than 125,000 Kuwaiti bidun affect the provision and distribution of social rights, including housing, services, and jobs? Back.
Note 84: Longva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States.” Back.
Note 85: Lindholm, “Quandaries of Command in Egalitarian Societies,” 63–94. Back.
Note 86: Ghassan Salamé, “ `Strong’ and `Weak’ States: A Qualified Return to the Muqaddimah,” in Giacomo Luciani, ed., The Arab State, 32. Back.
Note 87: Sharabi, Neopatriarchy. Back.
Note 88: Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 7. Back.
Note 89: Mary Ann Tétreault and Haya al-Mughni, “Modernization and Its Discontents: State and Gender in Kuwait,” Middle East Journal 49: 407. Back.
Note 90: Gavrielides, “Tribal Democracy,” 158–63. Back.
Note 91: Lonva, “Citizenship in the Gulf States.” Back.
Note 92: Tétreault and al-Mughni, “Gender, Citizenship, and Nationalism in Kuwait,” 75–77. Back.
Note 93: Ibid., 71–72. I discuss Islamism in Kuwait further in subsequent chapters. Back.
Note 94: Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Benedict Anderson envisions the spread of alternative life models as an outcome of print capitalism and the widespread distribution of newspapers and novels (which today would be augmented by television and films)—see Imagined Communities. Back.
Note 95: Eqbal al-Rahmani, “The Impact of Traditional Domestic Sexual Division of Labor on Women’s Status: The Case of Kuwait,” Research in Human Capital and Development 9 (1996): 79–101. Back.
Note 96: Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, 58–59. See also Tétreault, “Individualism, Secularism, and Fundamentalism”; and Haya al-Mughni, “Women’s Movements and the Autonomy of Civil Society in Kuwait,” in Robin L. Teske and Mary Ann Tétreault, eds., Feminist Approaches to Social Movements, Community, and Power, vol. 1, Conscious Acts and the Politics of Social Change. Back.
Note 97: Tétreault and al-Mughni, “Gender, Citizenship, and Nationalism in Kuwait,” 69, 74. Back.
Note 98: On May 16, 1999, the amir issued a decree granting full political rights to female citizens. These included both voting rights and the right to run for parliament. Under the decree, women could not vote in the July 1999 election, in part because there would not have been time to get them registered properly but, more importantly, because amiri decrees promulgated during parliamentary recesses must be approved by the new parliament when it reconvenes. As I describe in chapter 9, this decree was rejected in November 1999. Back.
Note 99: Longva, Walls Built on Sand, 131. Back.
Note 100: One example can be found in Charles F. Doran, Myth, Oil, and Politics: Introduction to the Political Economy of Petroleum, 161–62. Back.
Note 101: Hazem Beblawi, “The Rentier State in the Arab World,” in Luciani, ed., The Arab State, 86–88 (emphasis in the original). Back.
Note 102: Beblawi points out that the implicit normative judgment carried by the imputation of “rentier” to anyone has generally been negative ever since the concept was first developed by the classical economists (ibid., 86). Back.
Note 103: See, for example, Paul Aarts, “Democracy, Oil, and the Gulf War,” 525–38. Two morally divergent examples of earlier versions of this myth, extended to the region as a whole, can be found in Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World, and al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula. A differently focused and highly sophisticated analysis of rentier status and political development can be found in Kirin Aziz Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East. Back.
Note 104: Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Back.
Note 105: Jonathan Nitzan, “Differential Accumulation: Toward A New Political Economy of Capital,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Toronto, March 1997, emphasis in the original. Another version of this paper can be found in the Review of International Political Economy 5 (Summer 1998): 169–216. See also Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, “Bringing Capital Accumulation Back In: The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition—Military Contractors, Oil Companies and Middle-East `Energy Conflicts,’ ” Review of International Political Economy 2 (Summer 1995): 446–515. Back.
Note 106: See, for example, Bruce W. Jentleson, “Kruschev’s Oil and Brezhnev’s Natural Gas Pipelines,” in Robert J. Lieber, ed., Will Europe Fight for Oil?, 33–69. An example of Soviet disruption of oil markets can be found in Mary Ann Tétreault, Revolution in the World Petroleum Market, 80–81. Back.
Note 107: Those who admit the existence of domestic resources in the generation of rentier wealth discount their importance by assuming that the opportunity cost of these resources approaches zero. For an example of this kind of reasoning, see Paul Hallwood and Stuart Sinclair, Oil, Debt, and Development: OPEC in the Third World. Back.
Note 108: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Independence, Sovereignty, and Vested Glory: Oil and Politics in the Second Gulf War,” Orient 34 (March 1993): 96–98. Back.
Note 109: Doran, Myth, Oil, and Politics. See also Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism. Back.
Note 110: George Tomeh, “Interdependence: A View from the Third World,” in Peter Dorner and Mahmoud A. El-Shafie, eds., Resources and Development: Natural Resource Policies and Economic Development in an Interdependent World, 359–84. Back.
Note 111: For two interesting discussions of urban legends, see Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture, and Roger Angell, “True Tales—Well, Maybe,” The New Yorker, January 22, 1996, 37–43. Back.
Note 112: In her book Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum looks at injustice as a function of the denial of intersubjectivity and the imputation of malevolence to the unknown. Patricia Turner sees it more as the reflection of the fears that members of one group have about members of another (see I Heard It Through the Grapevine). Back.
Note 113: For examples see al-Ebraheem, Kuwait; Khouja and Sadler, The Economy of Kuwait; and Abdul-Reda al-Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy: City-State in World Politics. Back.
Note 114: Tétreault, “Autonomy, Necessity, and the Small State.” Back.
Note 115: Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait, 46–50; Edith Penrose and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development, 16–17; Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf, 116–17. Back.
Note 116: Quoted in Abu-Hakima, Modern History of Kuwait, appendix 4, 185. Back.
Note 118: Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand, 17. Back.
Note 119: Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf, 132–42. Back.
Note 120: Quoted in Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand, 32. Back.
Note 121: Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand, 118. Back.
Note 122: Ibid., 35. The issue was described by British contemporaries as the difference between “sovereign” and “suzerain,” with the presumption that the Ottomans might have been suzerains over Kuwait but never sovereigns. Back.
Note 123: Extract from the “Report on the Negotiations with Hakki Pasha on the Baghdad Railway and the Persian Gulf, 3 May 1913,” reprinted in E. Lauterpacht, C. J. Greenwood, Marc Weller, and Daniel Bethlehem, eds., The Kuwait Crisis: Basic Documents (Cambridge: Grotius, 1991), 32; “Press Release by the Press Office of the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq, London, 12 September 1990,” in ibid., 75. Finnie also points to the Anglo-Ottoman Convention as the basis for Saddam’s claims to Kuwait (Shifting Lines in the Sand, 37) and its role in the very first such claim proposed in 1938 by Iraq’s foreign affairs minister, Taufiq Suwaidi (Finnie, ibid., 99ff.). Back.
Note 124: David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Back.
Note 125: The story of the boundary talks is told in Dickson, Kuwait and Her Neighbours, 270–80. Finnie does not share Dickson’s perspective that Kuwait was entitled to the territory transferred to Saudi Arabia. Most of it fell between the so-called red and green lines in the Anglo-Ottoman Convention and thus had been recognized as early as 1913 as tribal lands rather than areas clearly under the control of the Kuwaiti ruler. Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand, 61. Back.
Note 126: Finnie, Shifting Lines in the Sand, 99–125. Back.
Note 127: Archibald H. T. Chisholm, The First Kuwait Oil Concession Agreement: A Record of the Negotiations, 1911–1934. For a discussion of the Kuwaiti-British relationship as an example of international cliency, see Tétreault, “Autonomy, Necessity, and the Small State.” Back.
Note 128: Stephens, The Arabs’ New Frontier, 31; Dickson, Kuwait and Her Neighbours, 281ff. Back.
Note 129: Tétreault, “Autonomy, Necessity, and the Small State,” 582. Back.
Note 130: Al-Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy, 100–10. Back.
Note 131: Theodore Draper, “American Hubris: From Truman to the Persian Gulf,” New York Review of Books, July 16, 1987, 40–48. Back.
Note 132: This is covered in some detail in Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, 130–38. Back.
Note 133: Al-Assiri, Kuwait’s Foreign Policy, 32–48. Back.
Note 134: Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. Back.
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