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The myth of the reforming monarch: Orientalism, racial capitalism, and UK support for the Arab Gulf monarchies
David Wearing
First Published September 2, 2021 Research Article
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211041547
Abstract
The narrative of ‘reform’ in Saudi Arabia, recently recurring in British political discourse around the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, is situated within wider Orientalist themes, wherein a progressive and modern West is juxtaposed with an Arabian peninsula mired in backwardness. In this context, the purported Arab ‘reformer’ is presented as the ideal ally of the West, attempting to haul his society up to the West’s supposed standards, for example on women’s rights. This racialising narrative serves to legitimise British support for authoritarian Gulf regimes, thus helping to sustain the political economy of this set of international relations at the political level. It does this by obscuring the important role the United Kingdom plays in sustaining authoritarianism in the Arabian peninsula by externalising the explanatory focus onto the terrain of cultural difference. This article contributes to the literature on UK relations with the Arab Gulf monarchies by critically analysing the ways in which racialising discourses dovetail with material interests to reinforce and sustain these ties. In doing so, it also contributes to the emerging literatures on ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘race’ in international relations, through its exploration of the role of Orientalist discourse in this significant empirical case study.Keywords
British foreign relations, orientalism, political economy of the Middle East, race in international relations, racial capitalism
Introduction
The narrative of ‘reform’ in Saudi Arabia, promoted by the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and taken up by governments and media commentators in the United States and the United Kingdom, was undermined by the October 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, an exiled Saudi journalist critical of the Crown Prince’s rule. The Crown Prince himself likely ordered the assassination (Barnes and Sanger, 2021). The dissonance between the projected image of benign liberalisation and the silencing of Khashoggi poses questions about the nature and role of the narrative of Saudi ‘reform’ within Western public discourse, which this article will attempt to shed light on.The narrative of the ‘reforming’ monarch is not new, and is consistent with the juxtaposed, binary caricatures of Orientalist discourse, wherein the West is cast as axiomatically progressive and modern, in contradistinction with an East mired in a backwardness determined by its culture and traditions. In this context, the purported Arab ‘reformer’ is presented as the ideal ally of the progressive West, attempting to drag his society up towards what are taken to be our own higher standards.
As such, the ‘reform’ narrative serves two important discursive functions. First, it legitimises Western support for authoritarian rule with the implied but false promise that the regime in question is working to achieve some form of meaningful and transformative change. Second, by moving the explanatory focus for the persistence of authoritarianism away from the historic collusion of governing elites in both the East and West, and firmly onto the terrain of cultural difference, it serves to reinforce the West’s self-image as liberal and democratic, despite its sustained support for authoritarian rule. In fact, Western support for Gulf monarchs, once the latter are cast as ‘reforming’, becomes proof, rather than disproof, of the liberal nature of Western power. Authoritarianism is thus externalised as an Arab trait, or problem, and a sense of Western innocence is preserved.
Crucially, by legitimating Western support for these monarchies, this racialising discourse serves to facilitate the ongoing incorporation of the Gulf region into global capitalism on terms favourable to the interests of the Atlantic powers. That is to say, the process of racialising the Gulf is a constitutive element of the capitalist relations between the region and the West. To this extent, we are dealing here with an instance of ‘racial capitalism’.
This article will critically analyse the ‘reform’ narrative in the case of UK relations with Saudi Arabia primarily, but also with reference to Bahrain. These illustrative cases will be set within the structural context of UK relations with the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (‘GCC’, comprising Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman). Notwithstanding the heterogeneity across these six states, they constitute a coherent geopolitical bloc from the point of view of UK foreign relations. Maintaining support for monarchical rule in the GCC has long been a policy of high strategic value to the British state and British capitalism.
The article begins by outlining the role that Britain has played in sustaining authoritarian rule in the region. Noting the contradiction between these practices and the political philosophy of democratic liberalism in which the British political class is steeped, it contends that, beyond the material self-interest of the British state and British capitalism, we must look to the role of ideology and discourse to gain a more complete understanding of how these relationships are justified and thus rendered sustainable politically.
The article then draws on the concept of ‘racial capitalism’, noting how certain peoples have been racialised within western discourse so as to justify integrating them into the global capitalist system in a subordinate position. It utilises the concept of ‘Orientalism’, to examine the specific processes of racialisation to which this article pertains. The narrative of the ‘reforming monarch’ emerges from Orientalist discourse, and the article discusses the nature and lineage of that narrative, and the ways it has been employed in the UK-Gulf context. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and the utility of the ‘reform’ narrative as a defence of continued British support for the Saudi kingdom. Here, the treatment of women’s rights within the discourse provides an especially telling illustration of the dynamics in play.
The article concludes that racialising discourse is an important component of the political economy of UK-GCC relations, shoring up and even sharpening Britain’s self-image as a liberal presence on the world stage, obscuring its sustained commitment to authoritarian rule and thereby facilitating the maintenance and renewal of the ties between British and Gulf capitalism.
These conclusions are reached through analysis of contemporary texts which convey the British government’s narrative on UK-GCC relations. This analysis situates that narrative within long-established discourses around relations between the West and the Middle East, identifying familiar or adapted tropes and evaluating the work they are doing at key moments. The analysed texts include transcripts of parliamentary debates and select committee hearings, as well as official statements by ministers. Particular attention is paid to moments of scandal, crisis, or change, where the discourse has been mobilised to justify UK support for monarchical rule. These moments include the 2011 uprising in Bahrain, the mass execution carried out in Saudi Arabia in January 2016, and the 2018 visit to the United Kingdom of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
The article makes two distinct contributions. First, it adds to a somewhat sparse literature on current UK relations with the Arab Gulf monarchies. This mostly comprises a handful of articles and book chapters, concentrating on distinct issue areas within those relationships (notably, Hollis, 2010: 158–178; Kelly and Stansfield, 2013; Leech and Gaskarth, 2015; Roberts, 2014; Stansfield and Kelly, 2013; Stavrianakis, 2017, 2018).
In AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters To Britain (Wearing, 2018), I work towards a more comprehensive theorisation and empirical account, in the only book-length survey of the modern political economy of UK-Gulf relations. This covers the commercial and geopolitical significance of hydrocarbons; the importance of Gulf petrodollars to British capitalism; and the various forms of arms exports and military cooperation provided by the United Kingdom to the Gulf regimes in order to maintain these relations. However, this monograph only engages intermittently with the ways in which British support for authoritarian rule is legitimated and sustained within British elite discourse. This article sheds more substantive light on this important dimension. It complements and expands on my previous work by showing how racialising Orientalist discourse legitimates support for the authoritarian regimes that sit at the heart of this set of capitalist relations. Between the discourse analysis in this article and the political-economic analysis in my earlier monograph, a picture of ‘racial capitalism’ emerges.
Second, the article contributes to recent literature on ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘race’ in international relations, through exploration of an important contemporary case study. It analyses the political-economic utility of racialising narratives that posit a culturally liberal West and a culturally authoritarian Middle East, showing how, within that Orientalist juxtaposition, the story of a ‘reforming monarch’ helps legitimise British support for authoritarianism in the Gulf region. Here, ‘race’ and racialisation are playing significant roles in sustaining a key subset of capitalist relations and hierarchies within the international system.
The political economy of UK-Gulf relations
For Hanieh, the GCC together represents an emerging economy of comparable significance to the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa; Hanieh, 2018: 51). This due both to their enormous reserves of oil and gas, and to the ‘petrodollar’ wealth generated by the sale of these hydrocarbons. The GCC is a lucrative import market, Gulf investment is a shaping factor in Middle Eastern capitalism, and above all, GCC petrodollars have played an increasingly significant role in global finance, especially since the turn of the millennium (Hanieh, 2018). In addition, the GCC has emerged as a major shipping hub, central to global trade, and military logistics (Khalili, 2020; Ziadah, 2018).Against this background, I have argued that UK relations with the Gulf Arab monarchies constitute Britain’s most important set of strategic ties in the Global South. By absorbing British exports and through capital inflows to the City of London, Gulf petrodollars play a key role in addressing the major balance of payments challenges resulting from Britain’s shift from manufacturing exports towards financial services under neoliberalism (Wearing, 2018: 110–153). In addition, GCC petrodollars are recycled into the British military industry through major arms export contracts, which are vital to sustaining the United Kingdom’s industrial capacity to remain a global military presence capable of projecting power internationally (including into the Gulf, protecting the local regimes; Wearing, 2018: 154–186). It is in these various ways that British and Gulf capitalism are bound together. And to the extent that the racialising discourse analysed in this article helps to legitimise the specific terms upon which this integration occurs, with the Gulf monarchies in a central role, UK-GCC relations can be understood in part as an instance of ‘racial capitalism’.
In constructing these strategic ties, British imperial power was an active presence through the entire process of state formation in the Gulf throughout the 20th century and up to the present day. Yom and Gause (2012: 78) note that:
the near-absolute power wielded by Arab royals originates not from some ancient cultural essence but from modern colonialism . . . [T]he Gulf region’s royal families . . . could not impose their will on rival tribes and clans until Britain formalized their respective claims to rule through defense treaties in the late nineteenth century, and later helped to put down internal resistance.
Bsheer (2018: 242) points out that in the inter-war years:
the new [Saudi] state was opposed by a majority of its inhabitants. It was one among multiple possible political formations that British imperial orchestration had blocked . . . The experience of the British colonialists with counter-insurgency and mass repression . . . were central to maintaining Al Saud in power.
From then on, ‘reliance on imperial support, first British and then American, to fight subsequent internal threats became a hallmark of Saudi rule’ (Bsheer, 2018: 244). As Hanieh (2013: 24, 27) notes, the kingdom ‘faced the rise of revolutionary and nationalist movements during the 1950s and 1960s, which were severely repressed with the open support of US and British advisors’, an episode Bsheer (2018) documents in some detail.
As we will see, British officials today often attribute the persistence of monarchical rule in the Gulf to the region’s ‘culture’ and ‘values’. Bellin (2004), like Yom and Gause, dismisses the cultural argument. Rather, she concludes that:
the solution to the puzzle of Middle Eastern and North African exceptionalism lies less in absent prerequisites of democratization [such as the right ‘culture’] and more in present conditions that foster robust authoritarianism, specifically a robust coercive apparatus in these states. The will and capacity of the state’s coercive apparatus to suppress democratic initiative have extinguished the possibility of transition. (Bellin, 2004: 143)
This coercive apparatus is considerable, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) coming second and fifth respectively in the league table for world leading arms importers over the past 10 years (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2019). These arms have been supplied almost exclusively by liberal democracies, specifically the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, who between them provided 85% of the GCC’s major arms imports since the end of the Cold War (Wearing, 2018: 159–163). British arms sales and military cooperation continued almost completely undisturbed through the Arab uprisings of 2011, even as the Gulf regimes colluded in the violent suppression of an overwhelmingly peaceful pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, a subject to which we will return.
Resolving the tension between discourse and practice
It is clear that a simple dividing line cannot be drawn between an authoritarian Arabian peninsula and a liberal West. Authoritarianism cannot be externalised from the West and onto the Gulf as a cultural characteristic. Rather, the persistence of monarchical rule in the Gulf is in no small part the product of an extended period of deeply structured collusion between local elites and Anglo-American power. This directly contradicts the self-image of Anglo-American power as fundamentally shaped and guided by the values of liberal democracy.This contradiction suggests a tension that must somehow be resolved. The dominant political discourse in, and self-image of, the United Kingdom are framed by the values of liberal democracy. How then has it been politically, morally, or intellectually sustainable within the British polity for the United Kingdom to provide vital sustenance to the Saudi regime and its counterparts for over a century?
Economic and strategic advantages evidently account for a large part of the motivation for UK support for these regimes, but they cannot provide the sole explanation for the solidity of that support, unless we are to dismiss the dominant discourse and set of values in British politics as irrelevant, even a cover story, deployed with conscious cynicism to mask the true impulses of British power. A more plausible interpretation is that the dominant discourse reflects a set of values and beliefs that are sincerely held by the British political class, and that support for highly repressive authoritarian regimes such as the Saudi kingdom must therefore be explained and justified, within that discourse, in such a way as to plausibly reconcile the policy with the predominant values and with the British polity’s collective sense of itself. Squaring the contradiction between the claimed liberal democratic values of the British elite, on one hand, and the British state’s commitment to authoritarian rule in the Arabian peninsula, on the other hand, is plainly no small task. Discourse, therefore, is not epiphenomenal or a side issue. It plays an important constitutive role and as such merits close analysis.
This article contends that the key conceptual ingredient in squaring purported British values with concrete British policy, in this case, is racism. By framing the peoples and cultures of the Arabian peninsula in an essentially racist way, the British political class is able to justify – not only to others, but to itself – its continued support for authoritarian rule in the region. The role of racialised discourse in legitimating these material realities has a long history in the political economy of capitalism and Western imperialism. The ‘reform’ narrative is a distinct and notable manifestation of that phenomenon.
