A general view show in a military parade during the Gulf emirate's National Day celebrations in Doha on December 18, 2012. (KARIM JAAFAR/AFP/Getty Images)[/caption]Something interesting is happening in the social politics of the Gulf: in the last few months, both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have passed legislation that will require male citizens (18 to 35 years old in Qatar and 18 to 30 in the UAE) to undertake national service in their nations’ armed forces. Kuwait has also recently been mulling over a similar proposal for its young men.
Although demographically smaller than the Islamic Republic of Iran and located in a region which is resource rich and strategically insecure, security guarantees afforded the Gulf states by outside powers mean that conscription into the armed forces is not a vital strategic requirement. Additionally, offering basic training to a few thousand young men will hardly increase the resilience of either nation to a massed attack by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or prevent missiles from raining down on areas home to critical national infrastructure. So what is going on?
The answer is more social than strategic, and is based in visions of long-term domestic stability that involve redefining the relationship between citizen and state. The clue is in the name, “national service,” a demand by the state of its citizenry to contribute time and energy to work in the name of the state. Its aim, in part, is to inspire loyalty as well as inculcate young men with the values of work and discipline.
It is interesting that in both countries the idea of national service has generally been received positively. Those pursuing tertiary education in particular have questioned how they are to manage their military service with academic work (asking, for example, whether a sabbatical will be needed), and some grumbling about lost earnings has arisen, but there is little in the way of outright hostility to the program in either country.
Importantly, national service gives young local men something to do. Unemployment figures in Gulf nations are extremely low, but this does not tell the full story. Ask any economist in Qatar and the UAE and they will tell you that unemployment figures for young male locals are far higher than is officially admitted. Estimates vary greatly, and there is no way to ever know the exact percentage, but optimists place it around 10 percent, pessimists as high as 30 percent.
In short, there is a need to address this problem, and military service requires little of these men other than a bit of physical exertion. Those with poor school grades struggling to find work may well find the military a more positive use of their time. In Qatar, to use one example, those who simply do not have the motivation to find work will find the 50,000 Qatari riyal (approx. 14,000 dollar) fine and one-month jail term for non-attendance a suitable incentive to enroll.
National service is strategically a much smarter decision than imposing taxes, which is often viewed as a direct financial penalty on the citizen. Listening to morning radio programs like Sabah Al-Khair Watani Al-Habib (“Good Morning, My Beloved Country”) already shows that the average resident of Qatar has a lot to complain about. Adding tax to the equation would begin a process of turning grumbling gratitude for public services into expectation and a demand of value for money. It is a gestalt switch that is best avoided for the time being, especially given that government departments across the Gulf are not exactly known as bastions of timeliness and financial efficiency.
So national service it is. Whether the program in either country will have the desired affects is not a given, and it would certainly be unrealistic to expect Emirati and Qatari men to become patriotic Rambo clones in just a few months. But if some gentle tweaks of the current civic order are achieved, whereby it becomes understood that citizenship requires more than words of loyalty to the sheikh, this will be a positive step forward for the Gulf. Some expenditure on behalf of the citizen to justify the generous benefits bestowed by the state apparatus may ultimately be the beginnings of a reformulation of the rentier state.
Rentier state theory has come under fire from some quarters recently as being an anachronistic model to explain how the Gulf states function. To some extent this is true: the Gulf states are trying in their various ways to encourage citizens to be entrepreneurial, and political problems in Bahrain and Kuwait have meant some citizens have disengaged from wanting state handouts altogether. But those who say rentierism is finished are either overly optimistic or not looking at the reality as it stands.
The problem is that the current economic models in place in all the Gulf states do not allow for a reduction in subsidies and economic handouts to citizens. Reducing the level of state handouts would, like the introduction of taxes, produce a backlash that would be difficult to assuage. The most sensible answer therefore is not to give Gulf citizens less than what they had before, but to ask them contribute more back to the state for the money they already receive.
National service is not intended to be a panacea for the structural economic and productivity issues in the member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. But if viewed as a first step in institutionalizing a citizen–state relationship that is more reciprocal in nature, it might lay the foundations of longer term economic and social stability and greater civic participation in decades to come.
Blog Disclaimer: All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
