Answer: It’s Not That Different

The extent to which the Gulf States really are aristocracies, and whether and how they’ve co-opted the rest of the citizens. All is silent except in Bahrain. So why is Bahrain different?

You know a revolution if over when News Hour’s Margaret Warner interviews a country’s foreign minister about it, and he makes it a virtue that the revolutionists will, in the main, suffer only relatively modest, but still criminal penalties. I wasn’t paying terribly close attention, but it didn’t seem to me that Margaret asked, and certainly she didn’t force, the question about what the Bahraini regime intended to do about the revolutionary values that up to then had been at stake. At any rate, the answer, had it been honestly given, would have been “Nothing,” and that is how matters stand.

I looked very briefly into the demographics, and even more briefly into the dynastic history, of Bahrain, and found little enough to show that the revolution might have been successful, or have become strong enough to compel the regime to listen to its demands. The law against forming political parties belies the official claim that the form of government is constitutional monarchy. If it really were constitutional monarchy, a revolution would not be required to change political, social, and economic conditions, nor would the government be compelled to treat demonstrations as if they represented a revolution. The regime is really an oligarchy in which all the ministers (the ones I know of) have the same last name, but that just might happen to be, or at any rate pretend to be, on the way to constitutional monarchy.

For one thing, the proportion between foreign-born to native-born populations is roughly equivalent to that between the industrial and service economies in Bahrain: 40/60%. This indicates the proletarians there as elsewhere in the Arab world are not citizens, and thus they have no standing to revolt, nor would they be likely to gain adherents from the other (citizen) classes if they tried. It’s the functional equivalent of slave revolt, which historically has never been, and probably in principle can never be, directed toward the overthrow and reformation of the state.

As for the middle classes, it’s clear that, to run the Bahraini service economy, the skills of many professionals, including financial professionals, are required. The export agricultural economy has actually shrunk since they found oil, so there can be no petit bourgeois peasantry. Yet on the whole, the weight of numbers favors bourgeois revolution there.

So why did it fail? Or, it might be more pertinent to ask, how did it get a start, however feeble, in Bahrain, when nothing at all happened in any of the other, similarly situated, Gulf States?

I don’t have a principled answer.

Then last month, with the revolution well over, and King Khalifa having decided there was no more emergency, the people, permission restored, rallied again, proving there still is revolutionary, or at least democratic, energy in Bahrain.

And, by all applicable principles, there should be. It’s just that in a country that geographically small, these energies are easier to contain and control than to extinguish. Saudi troops and the Fifth Fleet, the one by their presence and the other by their absence, had something to do with the result so far. If the opposition who still want to rally can hold strictly to non-violent tactics, better to say, if the people who want to rally could form covert parties and formulate specific programs of demands, more can be looked for in Bahrain…

…and if in Bahrain, why not in the other Gulf States? They also must have numerous, if not politically self-aware, middle classes. Yet despotism, whether lodged in a monarch, in a family, or in a close oligarchy, is easier to maintain if it has a lot of money. As Baron de Montesquieu observed, the tendency of despotism, because it governs through fear, is to make the people poorer. Fear or not, that does not apply in the Gulf States now, nor will it in the foreseeable future.

It probably safe to say: the more oil, the less revolution, in states, particularly geographically small ones, where the oil economy pays the salaries of the middle classes. But seemingly Bahrain has the least oil of all.