The Gulf is a reminder of Europe’s past – and its future

 Why are many Europeans fascinated with the Gulf? For me one reason for fascination is that the Gulf mini-states like Qatar and Dubai are a real-life reminder of Europe’s early modernity, a reenactment of life in Europe 300-400 years ago. These are essentially “enlightened” autocracies where less than 10% of the residents have any form of political rights. Indeed, this tiny minority constitutes these states’ “political nation” the same way that similar groups were the enfranchised groups of their societies centuries ago – and often on the basis of same criteria (a combination of ethnic belonging and property ownership). If we take into account also the fact that in the Gulf political rights are obviously retained only for men, the analogy becomes more complete. Qatar and UAE are not functionally all that different from the liberal-elitist regimes of early modern Europe and North America, indeed shortly before its independence the United States had very few things to differentiate it from today’s Gulf states: it was also a monarchy run by a closed oligarchy of male property owners, united to a very large extent by close kinship, surrounded by a mass of disenfranchised women and lower ethnic classes, some of them slaves.

As revivals of early modern Europe’s liberal-autocratic systems, the Gulf states today exhibit a similar commitment to progress and modernization while maintaining stringent traditionalist power structures and judiciously policing and restraining effective political citizenship. Here as well property is bestowed on normal people by the grace of the monarch, who retains the right to withdraw it at any moment. The political nation forms essentially an extended aristocracy, broader than the narrow circle of palace courtiers but much narrower than the society at large surrounding it, and it is linked to the monarch through relations of extended kinship and personal favours. Because of mass immigration to the Gulf countries in recent decades, this extended ruling class is surrounded by a sea of disenfranchised labourers and professionals, the analogous “peasants” and “artisans” of early modern Europe, tolerated for their economic inputs but completely shut out from any form of political power. The analogy with early modern Europe is further compounded by the explicitly racialized immigration system used by the Gulf countries, which ranks immigrant groups on the basis of race (from white to yellow, brown and black), thus reminding of the post-medieval compounded use of religion, ethnicity or proto-nationality as criteria to confine people to specific occupational groups and classes. The analogy is rounded up by the use of religion as the legitimation of these absolute monarchies, whereby the king presents himself as the guarantor of confessional orthodoxy in exchange for approval by the religious establishment to dispose of his political authority as he wishes.

If you are European this setup appears indeed fascinating, although in the way that a long-buried family secret that you don’t hear about anymore or a very dark urge you try to suppress are fascinating. Life in the Gulf monarchies is for most European visitors tacky, barren, expedient, cynical and unexciting. And yet here is the real-life temptation of tasting life in a political system that combines a free and open economy, relatively concealed authoritarianism, relatively effective bureaucracy, strong nationalism, institutionalized inequality along compounded class and ethnic lines, and political elitism. What would it be like to be transported back to the days when only a select group got to make decisions and enjoy the fruits of the labour of disenfranchised others? Educated middle class Europeans are allowed to think this naughty thought because today almost all of us would fulfil the criteria set by the bourgeois-autocratic regimes to belong to their political nation: property and education. Of course, we know that the broad sharing of these privileges in European societies today is the result precisely of agonizing and often violent struggles of democratization of these regimes. But in a world of middle-class ennui, if not anxiety about downward mobility, the Gulf states allow us all to fantasize about life as part of the select few, without any of the moral scruples that similar admiration for the liberal-aristocratic regimes of pre-mid-20th century Latin America, Americo-Liberia or apartheid South Africa would create. The Gulf monarchies are after all held to very different standards of morality, weaponizing as they do Western post-colonial guilt as well as economic interests.

But the main reason that the Gulf monarchies create fascination among Europeans is not some deep knowledge or memory of early modern European history (although I maintain that this always lurks in the background subconsciously). The main condition that the Gulf fascinates us today is due to the new structural condition of European life created by immigration and multiculturalism. In this sense, the Gulf experience emerges as a mirror to European life that both scares and excites us. On the one hand, societies with up to 90% of inhabitants being disenfranchised immigrants sound like a living nightmare for Europeans concerned with theories of ethnic replacement, cultural dilution and genetic mixing. The Gulf monarchies in this sense are a cautionary tale of the dehumanization of societies if they allow to be swamped by immigrants to the degree that natives become minority in their own country. If this happens, formerly liberal democratic regimes must make some very nasty choices indeed, like restricting political rights to the natives or resorting to large-scale brutalization of the army of newcomers, of the kind European audiences became adept at moralistically denouncing every time news came out about labourer deaths in the buildup to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

But on the other hand, don’t the Gulf states show us that, after all is said and done, we can have our cake and eat it if we only decided we wanted to? As European societies need to import an ever-larger number of labourers, builders, servers and carers, is the logical solution not to agonize about incorporating these groups into our mass-democratic systems as equal citizens, but rather to reinstate the institutionalized class and ethnic divisions of our bourgeois-autocratic past, creating ethnic hierarchies among immigrants, jealously guarding our exclusive political rights, and strictly policing the activities of the newcomers in segregated communities? The Gulf experience shows that, surely, it is not immigration per se that is the problem, but rather a too kind a heart in managing it. As long as immigrants and ethnic others are put at their right place, their colour confining them to a specific socioeconomic status and occupational category (yellow for carer, brown for low-end service worker, black for labourer), then perhaps immigration can be “managed” after all.

This underlying thought, harking back to the dark original days of liberalism as an ideology of exclusive for the anointed few, is not some kind of perversion of a few fantasists. It is expressed out in the open and in the mainstream by many Europeans who make a career and life in the Gulf states, fawning about the low taxation, the orderly family-friendly life, the iron discipline of the state and (implicitly) the ease of being constantly surrounded by servants. Hearing these people speak about the wonders of Qatar and Dubai makes you think how different they sound from bourgeois tracts exalting Glorious Revolution England and post-independence United States on precisely the same terms. Of course, these people are not part of the political nation of the Gulf monarchies, which creates a small degree of resentment and jealousy to be sure. But as whites they are in any case sheltered from the worst experiences of segmented and casualized life in the Gulf of Asian and African immigrants. And in reality, their love for the Gulf is not about the Gulf itself. It is rather about an indirect projection of life in the Gulf back home in Europe.

It is indeed bizarre that white Europeans who complain about the chaos of multicultural Europe would enjoy life in Dubai and Doha so much. Shouldn’t they feel appalled living in societies where 80% of inhabitants are non-white immigrants? The fact they are not shows that perhaps it is not the practice of immigration as such that concerns them back home, but rather the terms under which this takes place, with newcomers progressively (albeit very slowly) absorbed into the body politic as equal citizens. One gets the sense that for many Europeans the Gulf experience appeals precisely because of the high rate of immigration that however is regulated in a very different way. Put differently, if you enjoy life in Dubai, it means you also would not really have an issue with a Britain or France where 80% of inhabitants (perhaps even more) are non-European immigrants, as long as they are treated and subjugated in precisely the same way and terms as they are in the Gulf. In a perverse way wouldn’t this be a way to reenact the elitist lifestyle of the political nation of the early bourgeois era, living off the surplus produced by disenfranchised peasants while cultivating education, civic virtues and a safe family life?

All of this of course is a pipe-dream to the eyes of the vast majority of everyday Europeans, who have anyway very few opportunities to experience the Gulf in these privileged terms (NB: there are after all thousands of white Europeans in very non-glamorous jobs there as well) and are much more interested in leveraging their numerical majority through the established processes of mass electoral democracies to safeguard their rights and privileges (especially to welfare) against newcomers. Today’s European popular classes, perilously on the verge of the coveted middle-class lifestyle, are after all a living reminder that the bourgeois-autocratic ideal of early-liberal enlightened monarchies is bound to be short-lived. Inevitably and inexorably, the weight of the masses proves unstoppable and this has been proven true in 19th century Europe as it has in early and mid-19th century US, mid and late-20th century Latin America, Nasserite Egypt, post-1980 Liberia and post-apartheid South Africa. Eventually, the cost of repression and, most importantly, the internal erosion of any ethical consistency leads such regimes to their collapse, ruined by their lived hypocrisy of propagating a certain set of values and ideals for the select few but denying them to the many. European fawning over the Gulf is ultimately an exercise in subconscious nostalgia about liberalism’s oligarchic past, as much as an expression of fear about the future of a Europe irremediably transformed by immigration. The Gulf is to the European mind indeed a utopia and a dystopia all at the same time.

Where does this analysis leave the Gulf monarchies themselves? Can their current political-economic model of institutionalized semi-slavery remain intact? I would very much like to think that at some point in the future a disgruntled Pakistani labourer or a courageous Philippino nurse will kickstart a civil rights movement or a revolution that will shake these unjust and obscene regimes to their core. Can we imagine a complete overthrow of the Arab monarchies in the Gulf the same way the Americo elite was overthrown and dispersed in Liberia in 1980? Could we imagine the creation of Indo-Pakistani ‘Haitis’ in the Gulf, staving off invasions by Saudi Arabia and other regional powers to reestablish order? Would these be populist regimes distributing oil wealth to the newly elevated class of the old servants and develop into more-or-less harmonious multiethnic settler societies like Mauritis, or would they degenerate into inter-ethnic clashes between the liberated groups fighting for the oil revenue? Of course, the most probably scenario is the perpetuation of the current scenario, bolstered by a rare combination of immense wealth the elites enjoy, diplomatic coverage by the West and their unending cruelty in maintaining their privileges. As such, the Gulf countries will continue to fascinate Europeans, presenting them with a disturbing as well as alluring image of their past and future.