4. The Wider Regional Impact
Even if the Arab Quartet’s boycott of Qatar is resolved, it is likely that deep divisions and mistrust among the GCC countries will remain an enduring feature of wider regional politics. This adds further complexity to a region that is already beset with civil wars and insurgencies, as well as witnessing mounting tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Rather than regarding the GCC as their primary regional alliance, its members are now pursuing new alignments. The current crisis has catalysed and strengthened two bilateral alliances between small states and larger powers: between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, formalized in their 2017 strategic partnership; and between Qatar and Turkey, underscored by Turkey sending a small contingent of troops to Qatar when the blockade was announced. (Turkey and Qatar had already agreed in 2014 that Turkey would establish a military base in Qatar, as part of a bilateral defence agreement that they signed that year; and some Turkish troops were deployed there in 2016. This was one of the issues that the Arab Quartet raised in their dispute with Qatar: their 13 demands included that Qatar close the base. It is Turkey’s first modern base in the Gulf, although in the late 19th century Qatar came under the Ottoman Empire.)
For the most part, however, the new regional alignments will be shifting, issue-based coalitions rather than hard alliances: different groups of countries will work together on different issues. For instance, Qatar has aligned itself with Turkey and Iran for pragmatic reasons, to protect itself against the embargo imposed by the Quartet of UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt. At the same time, Qatar and Turkey have sided with Sunni Islamist factions in Iraq that are opposed to Iran’s closest allies there. On Syria, Qatar is on the opposite side to Iran, while Egypt has little interest in regime change. Egypt has also in effect counselled caution to Saudi Arabia over Lebanon, in the interests of avoiding further escalation in the region; and it is far more concerned with Sunni Islamist opposition than with Iran. On the issue of Jerusalem, moreover, Kuwait and Jordan –normally closely aligned with Saudi Arabia and the UAE on regional politics – have been closer to the Turkish and Qatari position.65
These shifting allegiances also reflect an increasingly multipolar global context. Each of the GCC countries wants to hedge its bets diplomatically, and also wants to do business with a widening range of partners. Thus, for example, even the most pro-US powers in the region are also working closely with Russia.
Most Arab countries have stayed neutral
Few other Arab countries have either joined or denounced the embargo. There are three reasons for this.
First, for the various Middle Eastern countries that are themselves caught up in conflict the main fault lines are not over political Islam and secularism, the issues that primarily divide the GCC. To most of them, the Saudi–Iranian ‘cold war’ is far more important than are the intra-GCC rivalries (the exception is Libya, where Qatar and UAE have strongly backed different sides). In Lebanon, one of the most politically divided countries in the region, Prime Minister Saad Hariri responded to the Gulf crisis by emphasizing the country’s long-standing policy of ‘positive neutrality’ towards other Arab countries.66 With regard to Yemen, Syria and Iraq, the GCC states have more in common than they do dividing them. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been willing to work with various groups of Sunni Islamists in all three countries. In Yemen, Qatar was part of the Saudi-led coalition until the start of the GCC crisis, when Saudi Arabia expelled it. Since then, Qatari officials have criticized the war, and Al Jazeera has focused on the humanitarian impact of the conflict. But Doha’s new-found opposition to the war has been an opportunistic response to the crisis, and an indication of how the Gulf states are reframing their interests in zero-sum terms.
Libya is the main instance in which the UAE and Qatar find themselves on different sides of a ‘hot’ conflict, respectively backing General Khalifa Haftar and more Islamist forces. The Islamist–secularist line is also critical in the Palestinian context, but the dispute within the GCC has had a more limited impact on the already polarized relations between Fatah and Hamas. This may reflect cynicism about the degree to which any of the GCC countries actively pursue Palestinian interests.67
Second, for most Arab countries, economic interests imply working with both sides in the GCC crisis. Investment, tourism, aid and remittances from the GCC states play a major role across the Arab economies. Egypt, as a members of the Quartet, has cut diplomatic relations and ended visa-free travel for Qataris, but notably has not turned against Qatari investments, nor has it recalled its estimated 300,000 citizens who work in Doha. In June 2017 Egypt’s investment minister was reported as saying that Qatari investments were protected by law.68 As the Qatar dispute (and the more recent Saudi–Canadian spat) have demonstrated, economic ties with the GCC states can be vulnerable to sudden political changes. This is another reason why other Arab states tend to hedge their bets by seeking support from a broad range of Gulf states.69 For instance, Jordan, which has sided with Saudi Arabia against Iran, welcomed aid from Qatar, as well as from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait in response to anti-austerity protests in 2018.
Third, while the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt now take a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to political Islam, many other Arab countries do not view the issue in such binary terms. Whereas all three have banned the Muslim Brotherhood, and Qatar’s Brotherhood movement dissolved itself some years ago, other Arab governments typically find some way to give nonviolent Islamists limited political space.70 They try to manage them by offering a measure of tolerance combined with a dose of repression, rather than banning them.71 In Tunisia, moreover, En-Nahda – which was traditionally associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and whose spiritual leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has been one of the movement’s most influential thinkers – was elected to power after the Arab uprisings and subsequently peacefully voted out.72 In Morocco, the Justice and Development Party is the largest party in parliament. In Jordan, the Islamic Action Front won 12 per cent of seats in parliament after several years of restrictions and boycotts began to ease in 2016, and Islamist parliamentarians have encouraged the government to maintain good relations with Qatar. In Algeria, Islamist parties have never recovered from the civil war that broke out after an elected Islamist government was prevented from taking office by the military in 1991, but the Brotherhood-aligned Movement for a Society of Peace is permitted to operate – albeit with little electoral success. These examples are included to indicate that several Arab governments are trying to accommodate Islamists while also controlling and constraining them; policies are less clear-cut than the ‘with us or against us’ rhetoric of the Arab Quartet implies.
Beyond the GCC, many Arab governments are frustrated with Qatar. Its foreign policy and support for Sunni Islamist groups has been widely criticized, even if the groups it was closest to are now mostly out of power. Moreover, Al Jazeera has angered virtually every Arab government at one time or another. But, not least because they are preoccupied with with their internal political and economic issues, they have developed pragmatic coping mechanisms to balance the geopolitical demands of larger regional and international powers, and to hedge their bets rather than fully taking sides in other people’s disputes. They have thus been relatively resistant to being drawn into the conflict between the Arab Quartet and Qatar.
Beyond the GCC, many Arab governments are frustrated with Qatar. Its foreign policy and support for Sunni Islamist groups has been widely criticized.Moreover, Al Jazeera has angered virtually every Arab government at one time or another.
Qatar has hitherto sought to counter the influence of the Quartet internationally mainly through its soft power – chiefly by means of its media and lobbying, and its ability to dispense foreign aid and sovereign investment. It has few, if any, hard power options. By contrast, the UAE has a larger economy and a far more professionalized military, and it is building up hard power in Libya, Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
The intensive competition for influence has had particularly polarizing effects in the Horn of Africa. This is especially evident in the case of Somalia’s fragile political transition and state-building processes, as the UAE, out of favour with the central government in Mogadishu, has made agreements to establish a military base and port contract directly with the secessionist state of Somaliland, while Qatar has encouraged the central government to break ties with UAE. The GCC countries can play a positive role in developing the Horn of Africa region economically, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia were key brokers of the 2018 peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea, helping to end a conflict long seen as intractable. However, the position and reputation of the Gulf countries in the Horn of Africa has been undermined by the opposing sides’ desire to score points against each other, and by the perception that chequebook diplomacy by the GCC states reinforces problems of patronage in countries that critically need transparency and institution-building.73 In Sudan, where long-time president Omar al-Bashir was overthrown by the military in April 2019 in response to popular protests and a deep economic crisis, diplomats are concerned that the GCC tensions will play out in the country to the detriment of Sudan’s national interests.
65 Kuwait and Jordan sent their heads of state to the extraordinary summit of Muslim countries convened in Turkey to discuss Jerusalem in May 2018, in response to the US’s decision to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv.
66 Asharq Al-Awsat (2017), ‘Hariri: Economy, Electricity Are Government’s Priorities’, 8 June 2017, https://eng-archive.aawsat.com/theaawsat/news-middle-east/hariri-economy-electricity-governments-priorities (accessed 5 Mar. 2019).
67 At a 2017 Chatham House roundtable, a former Palestinian politician said the Palestinians did not want to take sides in the Gulf crisis, adding ‘we love all of them’ in a manner that indicated the opposite.
68 Reuters (2017), ‘Egypt says Qatari investments in Cairo protected by law’, 7 June 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gulf-qatar-egypt-investments-idUSKBN18Y0VL?mod=related&channelName=worldNews (accessed 5 Mar. 2019).
69 This is not entirely new; GCC countries have long used their aid or government contracts to wield power, and at times they have used expatriate workers (and the loss of their remittances) as instruments of foreign policy.
70 In many countries, Muslim Brotherhood movements are estimated to enjoy the support of some 20–30 per cent of the population.
71 Lust-Okar, E. (2004), ‘Divided They Rule: The Management and Manipulation of Political Opposition’, Comparative Politics, 35(2), explores the record of Jordan and Morocco in effectively managing and dividing political opposition movements into ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ factions, thereby fragmenting them over tactics.
72 In 2016 En-Nahda announced it was separating politics from preaching and that its political leaders could no longer speak in mosques.
73 Author conversations with international organizations and diplomats in Kenya, September 2018.