Over the last few weeks, Qatar has been the subject of unprecedented global scrutiny. The media, especially in the West, have cast a blazing spotlight on a litany of abuses perpetrated by the Qatari government. The three major cross-marks over Qatar’s suitability as a World Cup host included the criminalisation of the LGBTQ community, widespread suppression of political and civil freedoms, and the appalling treatment meted out to migrant workers.
When non-democratic nationstates hold a global sporting event, the media narrative invariably falls back on the familiar trope of ‘sports-washing’, or the laundering of human rights abuses. Such a reductive approach tends to overlook the complex ways in which sports is interwoven in the political strategy of Qatar, or even the wider Gulf region, anchoring the transition from an unsustainable past towards a higher-equilibrium future.
A well-designed pressure campaign can certainly be employed as an effective tool to hold autocracies like Qatar to account. However, it might be useful to distinguish between an ‘instrumental’, soft-boycott platform aimed at garnering significant concessions from the regime and an ‘absolutist’, hard-boycott platform geared towards undermining the regime’s legitimacy. The latter approach makes no bones about its determination to ensure that the Qatar World Cup gets marked down in history as an embarrassing failure. Such an outcome might tweak the strategic calculations of Gulf regimes beyond Qatar, goading the monarchies back into more familiar, conservative pathways.
The hard-boycott approach misunderstands the drivers of cultural and political change in the Gulf region. Qatar is not hosting the World Cup to whitewash its human-rights record. As a small, carbon-trading outpost without any significant military power, Qatar has the reputation for exquisitely deploying all facets of ‘soft power’ to emerge as an important regional player. It is hard to imagine that the media-sophisticated Qatari emirate would not have anticipated a human-rights backlash over its World Cup bid. Yet, it took that risk of heightened global scrutiny precisely because of the centrality it attaches to sporting events and the infrastructure and innovation needed to support them.
The Qataris view the ongoing World Cup as a high-grade fuel meant to provide an unstoppable ‘escape velocity’ to its transition from an energy-based, rental economy to a modern, knowledge-based economy. Unlike fascist Italy in 1934, or neo-imperialist Russia in 2018, Qatar showcases its World Cup not as a triumphant finale of a political vision but as the crossing of a critical qualifying stage.
Qatar is not the only Gulf country to pour massive oil revenues into the global football economy as a soft-power lubricant of a smoother process of modernisation. Saudi Arabia has mirrored the tactics of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in establishing a presence in the interstices of State capitalism and commercial sports, buying up Newcastle United to rival the neighbouring ruling families’ acquisitions of Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, while bankrolling crucial ties with foreign leagues and global sporting authorities. Saudi Arabia now holds several marquee sporting events — the Supercoppa Italiana, a Formula One racing grand prix, and high-profile boxing contests. The largest Gulf monarchy, whose investments in domestic football infrastructure were repaid handsomely by a memorable slaying of Argentina, is now gearing up for the 2030 World Cup bid. The desire for installing a World Cup in Saudi Arabia as the crowning jewel of ‘Vision 2030’, the flagship project of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, can be gauged by the lucrative sums paid to recruit Lionel Messi as Saudi Arabia’s brand ambassador.
A major axis of competition among Gulf monarchies now seems to revolve around making the fastest and most efficient transition to the rapidly approaching post-oil future. Renewable energy is making rapid strides and the hopes of a long-term recovery in oil prices appear grim. High levels of public debt, fuelled by unsustainable welfare hand-outs, co-exist in the Gulf states with a persistent failure to create employment opportunities for its young population. This was the economic tinderbox that lit up North African rentier states such as Egypt, Libya and Tunisia during the Arab Spring.
The narrow window for making a successful transition towards modern service sectors (such as finance, health, education, recreation and tourism) on the back of large-scale public investments might shut down soon. When constructing the oilbased rentier State, the hard part for the sheikhs was not the accumulation of industrial capital (rented out from the West) or the development of labour resources (rented out from South Asia), but a framework of legitimacy that ensures regime stability. The ruling Gulf families face a similar challenge now, and it seems that global sports (especially football) are making significant inroads into the space previously occupied by religion as a totemic resource, ironing out the rougher edges of a new political order. This symbolic capital of sports, like religion, is desired by regimes both as a source of soft power in international engagements as well as a source for bolstering domestic legitimacy.
As Gulf monarchies rebalance their political economies from an oilbased, rentier paradigm to a diversified, State capitalist paradigm, they might encounter both challenges and opportunities. Let’s take the case of Saudi Arabia, which is perhaps a decade or two behind Qatar and the UAE along the economic modernisation curve. The first threat comes from the religious establishment, which might turn against the liberal social codes demanded by industries, such as entertainment, sports and tourism. The Saudis under MBS seek to follow the Qatari model of a cautious, tightly-controlled Wahhabism rather than the more expansively tolerant framework of the richer emirates of the UAE. This model entails the curbing of the religious clergy and religious police, without necessarily involving liberalising reforms of the legal code.
The second threat comes from the middle rungs of the political establishment — the powerful families and clan networks that will lose out in the transition away from oil rents. The two most powerful Gulf rulers — Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Zayed of the UAE — have staked their political capital primarily on building a streamlined capitalist economy on the ruins of the rentier State. MBS and MBZ, as they are known, have replaced the ‘the old sheikhly consensus systems’ of their predecessors into a personalistic autocracy. As the scholar, Christopher Davidson, has argued, MBS has followed in the footsteps of his more senior mentor, MBZ, by concentrating power in a centralised State through the steady marginalisation of the power networks of clanbased oligarchs.
In the heyday of the oil boom, chronic dependence on the military protection of the US skewed Gulf regimes towards seeking authority in religious terms rather than nationalistic terms, as the political scientist, Timothy Mitchell, stated in Carbon Democracy. As the US withdraws from the Middle East, erstwhile Western protectorates now have the leeway to pursue a more independent foreign policy and build their legitimacy around nationalist objectives.
The hard-military projection of the Saudis and the UAE in Yemen, as well as the blockade of Qatar, certainly points to conscious efforts at forging a distinct national identity. After all, “war-making is state-making”, argued the sociologist, Charles Tilly. But the constraints placed by the peculiar Gulf demographics (usually a thin crust of citizens supported by a bulky population of migrant workers) does not lend itself to an Egypt or Iran-style coherent nationalism. Moreover, since the powerful ruling families of the Gulf superseded the British as the new rentier overlords rather than emerge out of a national struggle for independence, Gulf states also lack unifying national myths.
This is where the power of sports comes into the fore. It is nobody’s case that the Middle-East power struggles would be resolved through late-night skirmishes between Manchester City and Newcastle United. But sports can have the unique power not just to aid nation-building by fomenting and sustaining shared myths (the two proudest events in Qatari national history might well be the lifting of the Asia Cup in 2019 and the hosting of the World Cup in 2022), but also providing a translational source of relatively low-cost soft power.
The inconceivably bloody aftermath of the Arab Spring might have given pause to certain Gulf regimes on the usefulness of reflexively backing various non-State, Islamic actors against each other. While Islam would probably continue to be manipulated in regional power struggles, sports as a trans-national source of soft power also has considerable potential in wielding diplomatic influence and regulating conflicts. MBS sporting a Qatari scarf during the opening match and the ruling Emir of Qatar waving the Saudi flag after its historic win over Argentina provided some preliminary evidence from the world’s first global sporting event held in a Muslim country. To misquote Churchill, ball-ball is always better than war-war.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
