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Dubai in the 1960s.
Over at Steve Clemons’s The Washington Note, guest poster Jim Krane whipped up a storm last week by claiming that Dubai offers up an ideal model, one that other countries in the region should emulate. Call it the “Arabs need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” theory. I’m actually having a really difficult time trying to summarize the post, which is just all over the place, but I’ll give it a shot anyway:
- The U.S. is prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and otherwise bringing destruction to the region.
- The U.S. can’t fix the Middle East. The U.S. didn’t help Dubai. Arab countries need to serve their own interests.
- How? Follow Dubai’s business-before-politics model. Don’t bother trying to help the Palestinians or complaining about Israel.
Then, watch how Krane parries the straw-man counterargument!
But wait, Dubai is in financial trouble. How could it be a role model?
Dubai’s downturn is temporary. Being one of the world’s most globalized cities, it couldn’t help but be infected by a global recession. The contagion kneecapped each one of its economic pillars: Shipping, logistics, tourism, and its binging real estate sector. Most of these pillars remain sound.
I guess he meant to say temporarily kneecapped? Bit of a strong word for something that remains “sound.”
The whirlwind, logic-free tour continues, with a reminder of the controversy from 2006 when a Dubai-based firm bought the operations of some U.S. ports.
Then we arrive at my favorite part of his incoherent evangelism:
The Dubai model is a mixture of social freedom, unbridled immigration, and raw capitalism. It is overseen by a government that is one of the world’s least democratic. This is no accident. Dubai avoids both elections and the Arab obsession with politics, especially the syndrome of feeling slighted by the West.
The writing is, if you haven’t been able to tell already, a train-wreck. “Unbridled immigration”? I suppose by unbridled he means to say unregulated and prone to coercive practices. Near the end, he concedes that the labor market is “abusive,” the dependence on the real estate market is crippling, and “raw capitalism” and its attendant consumerism also mean unbridled pollution and general deterioration of the environment.
But let’s ignore all that, and focus on the best part of Dubai: it is undemocratic, so it doesn’t have to deal with pesky elections or ideas of citizenship that demand engagement and involvement from the people of the country. Instead, citizenship in Dubai is predicated purely on transfers of wealth and privilege from the government to its citizens.
If Dubai wasn’t autocratic, think of how terrible it would be! Guest workers would (hopefully? eventually?) have a voice, or at least the ability to advocate for themselves without being subject to arrest.
Putting aside arguments about the inherent strengths and weaknesses of democracy, it’s absolutely daft to call Dubai a model that could be replicated elsewhere in the Arab world. I’m sure that if the Palestinians had a booming real estate market and large petroleum/natural gas reserves, the Emirati self-help model would serve them well. But as it stands, I don’t think the Gazans can count on tourism to fix their problems.