Common use of Country Study Clause in Contracts

Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1993. Andrew Rathmell and Kirsten Schultze, ‘Political Reform in the Gulf: The Case of Qatar’, Middle Eastern Studies, p. 57. which was finally settled out of court. Qatar’s neighbours, in particular Saudi Arabia, had supported Sheik Khalifa bin Hamad bin Abdullah bin Jassim bin Muhammed Al Thani’s rise to power by deploying National Guard units near the Qatar-UAE border. 200 Now, two decades later Saudi Arabia, along with Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, backed Sheik deposed Emir and provided either moral or material support for the attempt to dislodge his son. Their decision to do so profoundly influenced Qatar’s emerging approach to external engagement in international affairs. As this thesis will show, this in turn would have significant implications for Qatar’s future bilateral and multilateral relations with its Gulf neighbours inside the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and well as its regional engagement more generally. In a move that went a long way to clear up the succession question, and thus eliminate a major cause of domestic political tension, the new Emir issued an Emiri decree changing the line of succession from within the Al-Thani family to male descendants of Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani He also quickly appointed an heir, his third son, Jasim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. In 2000, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani established the Ruling Family Council, a body appointed by him and under his chairmanship, tasked with deciding on the vacancy for the post of Emir. The new Emir also placed his allies in positions of power and populated the cabinet with highest number of ruling family members of any GCC state.201 Once succession was settled and potential familial threats were neutralized the Emir faced few other credible challengers to his rule. The Al-Thani family had 200 ‘Briefing Memorandum from the Assistant Security of State for Near Eastern and Asian Affairs (Sisco) to Secretary of State Rogers, 18 May 1972, No. 158, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969-1976, Vol. XXIV, p. 506. 201Mehran Kamrava, ‘Royal Factionalism and Political Liberalization in Qatar’, Middle East Journal, p.414. dominated Qatar since the nineteenth century to the extent that the history of the ruling family and the country were almost inseparable. As western official documents on the region from the time of independence in 1971 highlight, there was agreement among US and UK officials at the time that ‘it is difficult to see how any subversive group could get a footing there in view of the tight control by a large and tough ruling family’. 202 As Mehran Kamrava has pointed out, unlike the situation in other GCC states, most notably Saudi Arabia, the religious establishment of Qatar did not traditionally pose any real threat to the ruling family because there was no indigenous local clerical powerbase in Qatar.203 Nor was there any tradition in Qatar of Islamists challenging the established order by acting outside the law. Indeed, the October 1996 attempt to set off a bomb near a government building in Doha by a group calling itself Al- Munazzamat Awdat al-Sharia, the Organisation for the Return of Islamic Law, was a one-off action that had no broader implications for the country’s vulnerability to radical Islamists. A national market did not emerge in Qatar until the twentieth century and the prolonged weakness of the trade sector meant that the merchant community, especially in comparison to their counterparts in Kuwait or Dubai, had never been able to transform its economic power into a claim for political leadership. The new Emir benefited from this to the extent that he inherited a country that was not home to a cohesive and organised merchant class capable of challenging the ruling family for political power.204 Moreover, even factoring in the tribalism, local territorial disputes and internal 202 ‘US-British Memorandum of Conversation on the Persian Gulf’, 13 January 1971, No.93, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969-1976, Vol. XXIV, p. 293. 203 Mehran Kamrava, ‘Royal Factionalism and Political Liberalization in Qatar’, Middle East Journal, p.409. 204 Jill Crystal, ‘Coalitions in Oil Monarchies: Kuwait and Qatar’, Comparative Politics, p.430. power struggles that resulted in the involuntary transfer of power in 1949, 1960, 1972 and 1995, Qatar had been remarkably stable under the paternal and personal political leadership of the Al-Thanis.205 This ensured that the ruling family’s position as the most important player in the formation, integration and modernization of the Qatari state went unchallenged. As such, Qatar was free to exhibit two characteristics common in small states, both of which would have significant implications in the period under examination in this thesis. The first was a highly personalised form of government. Between 1995 and 2010, Qatar’s foreign relations were dominated by what commentators have called ‘the two Hamads’ –the Emir and the Prime Minister.206 The second was the fact that Qatar’s regime has always enjoyed both exceptional autonomy in foreign policymaking and, as noted above, has faced very few domestic political constraints. One should never understate the significance of the personalized nature of Qatari political life in the decade and a half covered by this thesis. As Hassan Ali Al- Ebraheem has noted in relation to Kuwait, this allows for important policy decisions to emerge out of the personal aspirations and preferences of the leader rather than through a cold, and impersonal political system.207 The flip side of this is always the possibility of unchecked actions based on instinct but the upside is a decisiveness lacking in larger political nations.208 This, in turn, allowed the Emir to focus his efforts on bringing his vision for 205 Ali Mohammed Khalifa, The United Arab Emirates: Unity in Fragmentation, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979. 206 Lina Khatib, ‘As Son Takes Over in Qatar, Little Chance of New Policies’, IPI Global Observatory, 2 July 2013. 207 See Hassan Ali Al-Ebraheem, Kuwait and the Gulf: Small States in the International System, p.49; W.S. Jung, ‘Financial Sector Development and Economic Growth: International Evidence’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol.34, No. 2 (January 1989), pp.333-346. 208 Simon Henderson, ‘Knee-deep in Syria's civil war and surrounded by family quarrels, Qatar’s emir is looking to hand over the country to his 33 year-old son’, Foreign Policy Magazine, 14 June, 2013; Jane Kinnimont, ‘What next for the Gulf's rulers- for-life?’, The Guardian, 22 June 2013; Shibley Telhami, ‘Behind the abdication of Qatar’s emir’, Reuters, 26 June 2013. twenty-first century Qatar to fruition. As Rosemarie Said Zahlan noted in her path breaking 1979 book, The Creation of Qatar, the fundamental challenge that faced the country in the wake of independence in September 1971, was how to provide an effective and realistic forum for political participation that would complement the tribal and Islamic make up of society.209 Until Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani acceded to power, Qatar was widely viewed as the ‘quintessence of the Gulf’ in terms of the make up, constraints and opportunities of a small state in the region.210 In part, this was due to the fact that Qatar had not yet faced up to the challenges that produce resistance. Its leaders had not had to neutralise any opposition elites. Nor were they forced into coalitions that restricted their power, forced them to dilute their rule or agree to wider political participation. As noted above, there had not even been any substantive pressure to deal with societal partners with an independent stake in the regime’s viability.211 This gradually changed in the early 1990s on the eve of the royal succession. In mid-1992, to take one notable case, apart from petitioning on the issue of education, a group of 54 prominent Qatari citizens called on Sheik Khalifa bin Hamad bin Abdullah bin Jassim bin Muhammed Al Thani to bring about free parliamentary elections, a written constitution and broader personal and political freedoms.212 On taking power, the new Emir looked to address the rumblings of discontent that the above petition symbolised by embarking upon a ‘limited course of political liberalization’213 in order to find a balance between what Zahlan correctly termed in her work as a process of ‘change and continuity’. As Rathmell and Schulze have 209 Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Creation of Qatar, p.12. 210 Liesl Graz, The Turbulent Gulf, London, I.B. Tauris, 1990, p. 175. 211 Jill Crystal, ‘Coalitions in Oil Monarchies: Kuwait and Qatar’, Comparative Politics, p.441. 212 Youseef M. Ibrahim, ’54 Qatar citizens petition Emir for free elections’, The New York Times, 13 May 1992. 213 Christopher M. Blanchard, Qatar: Background and U.S. Relations, Washington D.C, Congressional Research Service, Updated January 24, 2008. noted, this took the form of a highly publicized programme of political reform involving liberalization and steps towards democratization’ 214 From the time of independence in 1971 the machinery of the Qatari state had centred on the Emir, the Council of Ministers (most of whom hailed from ruling family) and the Advisory Council (majlis al-Shura), appointed by the Emir. On taking power in 1995 Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani appointed a new government and successfully separated the powers of the royal family from those of cabinet and prime minister, although the new prime minister remained a member of the royal family. The prime minister was then able to choose his own cabinet, which nevertheless owed its ultimate loyalty to the head of state, the Emir.215 Peter J. Katzenstein has argued that for small states ‘periods of great crisis can profoundly affect the way domestic politics is organized; periods of relative normality can…reinforce that pattern of organization’.216 This is undoubtedly true in most cases. However, what is immediately noticeable and impressive in the context of Qatar from 1995 onwards is that from the beginning of his reign Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani broke with this norm. Instead, in what was both a highly innovative and potentially extremely risky move, he looked to capitalise on the country’s stability in order to ensure elite support for his vision of re-organising the political (and socio- economic) basis of the Qatari state. This meant, as Rathmell and Schulze have argued, that economic necessity was not the only driver of political reform under the new Emir in the first five years of his rule. Rather, they argued, it was ‘consciously chosen for reasons of foreign policy 214 Andrew Rathmell and Kirsten Schulze, ‘Political Reform in the Gulf: The Case of Qatar’, Middle Eastern Studies, pp.47, 53. 215 On the history of legislative authority in Qatar, its Constitution and governing structures see W. M. Ballantyne, ‘The Constitutions of the Gulf States: A Comparative Study’, Arab Law Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Feb 1986), pp. 158-176.