STIRRINGS IN SAUDI ARABIA. At first blush, an article on democracy in Saudi Arabia a state often. Democratization in the Arab World?

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1 Democratization in the Arab World? STIRRINGS IN SAUDI ARABIA Jean-François Seznec Jean-François Seznec, adjunct professor at Columbia University s Middle East Institute and Georgetown University s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, is the author of The Financial Markets of the Persian Gulf (1987) and a founding member and managing partner of the Lafayette Group LLC, an investment company in Annapolis, Maryland. At first blush, an article on democracy in Saudi Arabia a state often described as an absolute monarchy could be very short indeed. The secret services are strong and imposing. Most nongovernmental organizations and associations are forbidden. The press is entirely controlled, and the largest press groups are actually owned by members of the royal family. Elections, local or national, have never been held, and King Fahd has said that there is no place for them. There are no political parties. Arrests are arbitrary. The judicial establishment is politically dependent. And, while the political clout of radical Islamists is greatly overplayed in the Western media, the regime actively sponsors a conservative form of Islam that is highly repressive, particularly regarding the freedom and equality of women. Given this litany of nondemocratic features, Saudi Arabia would seem to be a perfect example of an authoritarian state. On the ground, however, Saudi Arabia s authoritarian character is not so obvious. One can even detect protodemocratic stirrings. Granted, if we were to plot the country on Robert Dahl s famous chart ranging regimes between closed hegemonies and polyarchies, we would find it very near the former end of the spectrum. 1 But its political trajectory today is discernibly toward the latter. Since 1992, Saudi Arabia s rulers have allowed for more consultation with those whom they rule, more inclusiveness in institutions, a limited liberalization of the press, and less repression of the Shi ite Muslims who make up an estimated 3 to 5 percent of the kingdom s total population of approximately 22 million. Journal of Democracy Volume 13, Number 4 October 2002

2 34 Journal of Democracy It has been a custom of the king and the major princes to open their doors to petitioners once a week in well-publicized and now televised meetings called majlis (the word refers to the salon or reception room where these meetings take place). While today the king s poor health precludes his own involvement, one can see a senior prince receiving thousands of petitioners at each majlis. The petitioners will kiss him deferentially and usually hand him a piece of paper bearing a request, perhaps for a land grant or a small sum of money. This paper is passed on to the prince s staff, which will then provide a response. It is a system in which the princes dole out largesse in order to display and reaffirm their eminence. The royal family, and the king in particular, traditionally wield enormous power, but it is power that traces its roots to a Bedouin society which was itself quite egalitarian. Tribal leaders were normally chosen for their valor and wisdom, not their birth. Today, the king is named according to a procedure defined in the Basic Law of 1992, but that law only codifies a Bedouin tradition long followed by the House of Saud: A king-to-be is not born heir apparent. He must be approved by the rest of the family, even if also ultimately endorsed by the existing king. One of the consequences of this arrangement is that a potential king must show his ability to negotiate, to maneuver, and to manage his family and some affairs of state before being chosen and enthroned. De facto, then, the king is elected by his family members. And since the family is very large there may be as many as 15,000 royal princes the competition for power is keen. It can be argued that while the Saudi state is authoritarian, the ruling class governs itself internally in ways that at least approximate democratic procedures. 2 This tradition of choosing the princely candidate who seems most able to win acceptance and cooperation from his relatives has been the key to the kingdom s political stability. In one form or another, aside from two hiatuses totaling 35 years, the Al Saud family has been in power in central Arabia since Unlike other ruling Bedouin families in the region, they have tended to transfer power to one another peacefully, which has limited vengeful transitions and helped to keep the family unified. The royal family is also bound to other families in the kingdom. Since 1744, the Al Saud have allied themselves (often through marriage) with the Al Sheikh, the descendants of Abdel Wahab ( ), the famous radical religious reformer whose name is now attached to Wahabism, the most influential form of conservative Sunni Islam in the region. The Al Sheikh, who hail from the same west-central Arabian province of Najd as the Al Saud, have traditionally handled the religious establishment while the Al Saud have provided the sword and the purse. A certain degree of political competition within the closed circle of the family and its allies does not, of course, translate into democracy for the rest of the population. The latter has customarily been patronized

3 Jean-François Seznec 35 and helped, but only to the extent that it has remained in basic harmony with its rulers. Yet with the discovery of oil and subsequent improvements in health and education, the country has seen huge and politically consequential demographic changes. The population, thought to be about 4.5 million in 1970, is probably almost five times that number now, although that figure includes roughly six million foreign workers who will not stay in the country and have no claims to any of the benefits of being Saudi. But the rest of the population over half of which is younger than 16 is Saudi and views itself as a citizenry with rights, not as a class of servants indentured to the Al Saud. Accordingly, the leaders of that family, including King Fahd, have come to act as if they must coopt a large number of commoners (that is, those outside the royal family) to stay in power. Since 1975, economic change and more widespread education have nurtured a population that is more sophisticated and outspoken than ever. The king could have chosen to open up the political system so as to include and consult with the increasingly diverse elements that have gained significant social and economic clout, but this would have meant risking the royal family s grip on power. Instead, he chose to continue a policy, dating from the mid-1960s, of sharing a substantial part of the regime s oil benefits with commoners in return for their tacit agreement not to challenge the royal family s ultimate prerogatives. By 1998, when King Fahd s health began to fail, the entire economy had by royal design gradually become binary : Any activity that has to do with oil, finance, industry, and, to a large extent, commerce is handled by commoners, while anything having to do with the military, the interior, and agriculture remains within the purview of the royal family. 3 Each half of this binary system receives about 50 percent of the oil income, distributed through state contracts and industrial investments to the commoners and through military contracts to the royal family. 4 From 1970 to about 1998, the interaction between commoners and royals was minimal, but this implicit social contract kept peace in the valley. Had the arrangement been different, with princes in command of the oil ministry or the ministry of finance, so much of the oil wealth would have flowed directly to the royal family that the commoners would have felt dangerously disenfranchised. By spending $432 billion on the military between 1984 and 2001, 5 the king was able as well to satisfy his family, which profited directly. By limiting the family s involvement in the rest of the economy, he was able to keep the commoners happy. Pressures for Change This arrangement has kept Saudi Arabia stable for more than 30 years, and until now it has staved off pressure for mass participation in public

4 36 Journal of Democracy life. In short, by fostering a commoner-controlled civil service and economy, King Fahd has limited the influence of his family for the sake of its own long-term preservation absorbing protodemocratic social pressures and containing them through politically institutionalized economic incentives. Nevertheless, the pressures for change are intensifying. The greatest challenge to the system is the country s demographic explosion. With population growth averaging about 3.5 percent annually, the country must create between 260,000 and 500,000 new jobs every year. 6 Theoretically, the new generation of young Saudi graduates and job seekers could replace the six million foreign workers, and to a certain extent this is happening in some service industries such as banking and the hotel trade. But on the whole, the number of foreign workers has actually increased, and with it the unemployment rate among locals. Part of the problem is the Saudi social contract itself: The government does not want to push the merchants too hard to hire Saudis for fear of losing the merchants support. The merchants and industrialists, for their part, want to be competitive in world markets and so need to keep labor costs down. It is easier to hire well-educated Indians or Pakistanis, who cost a fraction of what Saudi workers do and are totally at the mercy of their employers in a way that Saudi workers are not. Massive government and private investments in industry and related services could lead to further employment, but the state s ability to invest more in petrochemicals and related industries has limits. Income from petroleum is about US$50 billion per year when oil is at $24 a barrel, as was the case from 1999 through Since 1980, however, deficits have been the rule. In 1998, oil income was $37 billion, leaving a budget deficit of $13 billion. To invest more in industry, the state and parastatal agencies would have to rely on further borrowing on local and international financial markets. Major new debts would hurt Saudi Arabia s blue-chip image and subject it to vastly increased international pressure. An obvious alternative to borrowing would be for the state to divert its large military expenditures into industrialization, but this would weaken the royal family s position in the social contract. Only the private sector, which keeps $200 to $500 billion overseas (the figure is debated), could make the necessary investments. In spite of the demand for capital, very little private investment has occurred. The bureaucracy has made the establishment of large new private industries so difficult that few ever get off the ground. This is unlikely to change unless financial and commercial regulations become independent of civil-service control. 7 But the civil service knows very well that true economic liberalization, especially in the financial and energy sectors, would expose these sectors to purchase by the major princes. Commoners would be crowded out, and tensions between the royal family and the rest of Saudi society would mount. Thus it seems

5 Jean-François Seznec 37 that the civil service tacitly supporting the strategy of King Fahd strives to limit the power of the royal family in order ultimately to protect the binary economic system, and with it the entire Saudi social bargain. Since King Fahd became infirm in 1998, there have been a few alterations in this arrangement. Princes have become more involved in the previously protected sectors of finance and oil. Saudi American Bank, for example, one of the largest banks in the kingdom, is now controlled by al-walid bin Talal bin Abdel Aziz a well-known, if not politically powerful prince. The energy sector is now managed by a committee of technocrats and princes under the leadership of Prince Saud al-faisal bin Abdel Aziz and Crown Prince Abdullah, not solely by the minister of oil and the king as in the past. But the economic system is still tightly controlled; the stock markets remain small; and the ability to create companies that float capital is very limited, even though all indications are that the markets would boom if liberalized. The elements in Saudi society most destabilizing to its social contract and so, to its incipient process of liberalization tend to come from the ranks of Wahabi Islamic reformists. As part of the deal between the Al Saud and the Al Sheikh, the Wahabi religious establishment has long been pampered and indulged with access to state funding and the state-controlled media. But while religion is central to the everyday life of Saudis, there is between the Al Saud and the religious establishment a marked distance that has kept the Wahabis from assuming a major role in the political evolution now taking place. Moreover, the Wahabis themselves are very much divided: There are the traditionalist proponents of a purer Islam who support the regime, advocate reform by peaceful means, and are seen mainly on Saudi television mostly as boring old men best ignored. Then there are the jihadis, who are generally younger, advocate change through violence they include the followers of Osama bin Laden and are widely disparaged as unstable hotheads. 8 Their ideas frighten most Saudis, particularly the middle class. Despite Western impressions that a broad and deep stream of radical, antidemocratic Islamism runs just beneath the surface of Saudi society, the jihadis support is slim. And so, ironically, Wahabi jihadism is more apt to abet liberalization indirectly by maintaining some anxiety among the royal family and the commoners about what might be waiting for Saudi society should their social contract fail than it is to threaten the regime directly. Petitions, Portents and Proto-Parliaments? In 1991 and 1992, King Fahd himself had a taste of the pressures that have been building in Saudi society over the past few decades when he received two particularly significant petitions, one from a liberal group and a second from a conservative one. After avowing their support for

6 38 Journal of Democracy the monarchy, both sets of petitioners asked that there be increased consultation with the people generally; both complained about bureaucratic delays and corruption, and both warned that judges were not acting independently and were failing to render justice according to Islamic law (shari a). 9 The very fact that petitions such as these, mild though they may have appeared on the surface, were even offered was a sign of serious tension. The king not only heard the petitions but acted on them by royal decree, laying down the Basic Law of 1992, which created a 60-member appointed body called the Shura Council. 10 The Shura is only a consultative body it has no power to pass laws and can offer advice only when the government asks. Yet in the course of the decade the Shura has become more and more active. In 2001, it doubled in size. The new members are mostly technocrats, businessmen, and academics (no royals belong), and their ranks include remarkably two Shi ites. The significance of this inclusion in Wahabi Saudi Arabia is hard to overstress. Since the kingdom s earliest days, Shi ites have been subject to severe repression by the Wahabis, who regard Shi ism as heresy. Only very recently has the state made efforts to stop anti-shi ite discrimination and assaults, to provide Shi ites with more funds for their schools, and to include them in the kingdom s economic development. The significance of the Shura itself is likewise hard to overstress. Its meetings are widely reported in the local press and on television. They take place regularly each year for a number of weeks in a very large and luxurious custom-built hall in the palace district of Riyadh. The annual opening of the Shura s session looks almost like that of the British Parliament: The king and the major princes come and proclaim the Council open, and state-run television shows selected excerpts from the deliberations. The Shura is now a major institution in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps even more surprising to frequent visitors to the kingdom is the amount of private and semiprivate discussion one hears regarding national affairs. There are no public opinion polls, so reports on the views of the people can only be anecdotal. It seems, however, that everyone with whom a visitor speaks will complain about corruption, especially corruption in the royal family. People complain about the dearth of jobs for Saudis as well, and they often question the right of the Wahabi establishment and its religious police to control everyday life. But no one challenges the legitimacy of the king or the royal family. It is also striking to the visitor that over the years the same people, however closely or distantly related to the state they might happen to be, have become more and more vocal about their disagreements with the current state of affairs. Semi-public meetings (likewise called majlis) are often held during early-evening hours in private homes, where male Saudis will gather to talk politics.

7 Jean-François Seznec 39 This new political ferment is striking and vigorous, and one sees it taking place at all social levels, even that of the royal family. Though Saudi Arabia is still in the lower left-hand corner of Dahl s chart that is, in the closed hegemony segment it is at present slowly but discernibly moving upward and to the right, toward more liberalization and inclusiveness. Democratization from the Top Down If further evolution in this direction is to take place, however, it can only be with the encouragement, or at least approval, of the king. A current rumor in the kingdom is that Crown Prince Abdullah wishes to allow municipal elections. It is of course unlikely that King Fahd would agree to such a move, so the question depends very much on whether and when Abdullah officially becomes king. All indications are that most of the Saudi people and the main social groups including even some circles within the royal family would like more liberalization and participation. But no actual decisions can take place on this front until the issue of succession is resolved. It is highly likely that extensive negotiations are now taking place among various clans of the royal family over who will hold the leadership in the future. These negotiations will be decisive, because only skillful and courageous leaders will be able to channel and accelerate the protodemocratic trends currently at play in Saudi Arabia. There are those in the royal family who are capable of making the necessary policy choices, and the process of selecting a new leadership does allow for the most able to be promoted. But the kingdom is under tremendous social pressure to change rapidly, and it is not clear that a transition on the political level will happen soon enough to cope with the needs of the entire population, as opposed to those of a few senior princes. Despite appearances, then, there is some hope for democratization in Saudi Arabia: It has a preexisting culture of consultation and discussion inherited from the Bedouin and Arab traditions of majlis. It has a leadership that is used to negotiation on most issues within its own group (and to a certain extent with other groups). It has relatively low levels of tension among social groups, due in great part to the share the wealth policies of King Fahd. And the royal family has begun to include more ethnic and religious (though solely male and Muslim) groups in the discussion of public affairs. Yet elements remain in place that can only raise doubts for democrats: The Saudi state, in order to maintain the country s relatively low levels of social tension, has become heavily bureaucratic, and there are no elected officials to control it. The civil service will not relax its grip until the bureaucrats feel sure that the royal family will not muscle its way into ownership of the main industries, crowding out the private sector and

8 40 Journal of Democracy creating tensions. Finally, the lack of an independent judiciary means that the royal family stays above the law. Until this changes, and the Al Saud is placed strictly on the same legal footing as commoners, the state will remain imperious. And this will not happen through any pressure from below: Equality under the law can be imposed on the family and the judiciary only by a strong and well-respected king. Paradoxically, an authoritarian ruler of stature will be needed to establish the institutional structures that can push Saudi Arabia further away from closed hegemony. Until the question of succession is definitively settled, then, the country s protodemocratic reforms will necessarily remain stalled. NOTES 1. Robert A Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), Jean-François Seznec, The Politics of the Financial Markets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, unpubl. diss., Yale University, 1994, Jean-François Seznec, WTO and the Perils of Privatization: A Case Analysis of Saudi Arabia, in Kartik Roy and Joern Sideras, eds., Institutions, Globalization and Empowerment (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002). 4. Military expenses have hovered around $10 to $15 billion per year, and spending on other security agencies such as the Ministry of Interior may be about $5 billion. Oil income has been in the range of $15 billion to $50 billion since 1980, for a total of about $1.2 trillion between 1974 and 2000 (figures extrapolated from the Middle East Economic Survey). 5. Totaled from Anthony Cordesman, The Conventional Military Balance in the Gulf in 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2000), 12 14, and Saudi Military Forces Enter the 21 st Century (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2002), Youssef Courbage, L Arabie Saoudite: Une démographie en changement, in Monde Arabe Maghreb-Machrek (Paris), October December 2001, A new institution called Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) has been established to help foreign investors establish firms in the kingdom. SAGIA lobbies to simplify the laws and regulations, and pushes the potential investors files in the various ministries. This new organization has had some success in the past year, but it is too early yet to see whether it can truly break down bureaucracy. 8. Quintan Wiktorowicz, The New Global Threat: Transnational Salafis and Jihad, Middle East Policy 8 (December 2001): See F. Gregory Gause III, Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1994), ch The Basic Law established the first informal constitution of the kingdom. Among the most important provisions were the formalizing of the rules of succession, a regulation governing state contracting and spending, and the setting forth of the principle that the resources of the country belong to the state rather than the royal family.