Contexts

Social scientific research is uniquely poised to document the patterned and probabilistic evidence helpful in achieving legal accountability for mass atrocities—and offers a voice to those who would not otherwise be heard.

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During eight years of a U.S.-led occupation, Iraqi attitudes have shifted away from sectarianism and toward a national identity. Coupled with increased support for the separation of politics and religion, this shift may pave the road for a functioning national government.

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An imbalanced sex ratio in the 1970s and 1980s has led South Korean men to seek wives abroad. Though a solution to one problem, this spike in interracial marriage has posed new social conundrums for the formerly homogenous society.

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In her time as a researcher in Abdijan, Jordanna Matlon explored the African city’s peripheral economies and the men who make their livings and identities in these spaces.

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The United States, we are told ever more frequently and emphatically, is heading toward fiscal disaster, unable to simultaneously pay for its extensive military involvements around the world, its current commitments to social programs, and the investments in education, infrastructure, and research needed to compete with China and other rivals.

If current trends continue, American economic and military dominance will be lost, the era of American empire over. Whether the U.S. will be succeeded by a new hegemon or the world will enter an era of multiple power centers is as yet uncertain.

What is the cause of the fiscal crisis at the root of American decline and how can it be solved?

The dominant view, shared by almost all those on the right and many “centrists,” is that fiscal crisis is due to rising spending on social programs. (An alternative version of this theory points to increases in military spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.) From this perspective, excessive spending produces fiscal crisis which, in turn, causes decline. The solution, then, is to cut back social benefits (or military commitments) in order to head off a run on the U.S. dollar and drastic increases in interest rates that would fatally weaken the U.S. economy.

This approach doesn’t square with basic facts about American state spending. The federal budget in the U.S. has held steady as a share of GDP since 1968 (see below). That lack of growth is possible in part because social benefits in the U.S. are among the skimpiest of any industrialized country, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of the thirty-three richest countries. The OECD also reports that poverty rates are higher in the U.S. than most other rich countries. The last expansion of Federal social programs occurred with the Great Society of the 1960s. And military spending, again as a percentage of GDP, has actually declined drastically since the Cold War (see below).

If neither military nor overall spending are increasing burdens on the U.S. economy, then they cannot account for U.S. decline. Instead, I hope to show that the real problem is the misallocation of government revenue and expenditure, resulting in resources being diverted from the tasks vital to maintain economic or geo-political dominance.

To understand American economic and geopolitical decline we must identify the elites who determine much of the federal spending and then explain how the transformation of U.S. politics in recent decades has allowed those elites to exert control over governmental resources and agencies. Sociologists, beginning with C. Wright Mills, have found that elites—the heads of large corporate and governmental organizations—exercise disproportionate power in the United States. I have found that conflicts among elites and with non-elites shaped the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe and, as we will see in the next section, the decline of dominant powers in that era.

Our understanding can be clarified if we compare U.S. dominance and decline with the histories of two previous great powers.

Great Powers, War, and Decline

Just as social spending is incorrectly blamed for the U.S.’s current budgetary woes, military expenses are viewed as the cause of past great powers’ fiscal crises and decline. In his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, British historian Paul Kennedy argued that for the most powerful nations, whose interests span the globe, the costs of their military commitments outweigh the benefits of empire. Eventually, “imperial overstretch” saps economic growth as resources are diverted to the costs of empire, and the dominant power’s economy declines until it’s no longer able to afford the military needed to sustain its position. That, in Kennedy’s view, was the cause of each previous great power’s decline—and, he predicted, so it would be for the United States.

In fact, as I’ve previously found, the temporal sequence was the opposite of what Kennedy describes: military defeats and the loss of colonies preceded each hegemon’s fiscal crisis. The Netherlands won its independence and took colonies from Spain when its budget was a fifth of its former ruler’s. The Dutch, in turn lost most of their colonies to Britain while their budget was three times greater. The problem wasn’t the availability of resources: colonies yielded enough revenues to pay for the general costs of fighting wars against other European nations and controlling empires. Rather, European powers lost wars and colonies because they were unable to gain central control over the troops and weapons their budgets bought, or to ensure that colonial profits and domestic taxes actually arrived in the central treasury.

The Netherlands was a coalition of provinces, cities, and chartered companies that defeated Spain when they fought together. The Dutch grabbed colonies on three continents, because Amsterdam and the companies were able to send their own ships and men around the world without getting approval or resources from the provinces that did not share their interests or daring. In so doing, the Dutch became the dominant economic and naval power of the seventeenth century.

However, when the Netherlands needed to mobilize greater resources against the rising British, their fragmentation ensured defeat. Even though the Dutch were richer than the British and had more ships, they were divided into separate navies (seven of them!) that did not fight in unison because they didn’t share the same commercial or geo-strategic interests. Proposals to centralize governmental authority or create a unified military command were blocked by provincial interests, and colonial companies were able to withhold revenues from the national government. While these problems were apparent to Dutch state officials and to outside commentators who formulated reform proposals, their proposals were blocked by provincial elites who retained the capacity to protect their particular interests even at the expense of their nation’s geopolitical and economic dominance.

Britain was alone among the European great powers in creating a government able to prevent particular families or elites from appropriating tax revenues or claiming hereditary rights to offices and military commands. The national parliamentary system forged in the Civil War and institutionalized after the Glorious Revolution allowed the gentry and big London merchants to block each other’s unilateral grabs for office and resources, and it forced those elites to build party coalitions spanning counties and interests. Unable to exit those coalitions by appropriating private privileges, British elites forged agreements that controlled policy and operated the state’s fiscal levers in their collective self-interest. While nobles and gentry dominated the highest ranks in the navy and army, there was promotion from below and incompetent highborn officers were not entrusted with key commands. Britain’s military was reformed in time for the decisive showdown with Napoleon.

The corrupt East India Company and its army had been nationalized in the eighteenth century when self-dealing by corrupt company officials threatened Britain’s economic and military hegemony in Asia. The nineteenth century reform of the civil service maintained Britain’s advantage in state capacity, guaranteeing the nation’s continued fiscal and military dominance over its European rivals. Britain was able to finance its imperial and military costs out of the profits of empire until World War I.

The Military Now

The contemporary American military faces the same problem of divided commands and misallocation of resources that plagued the seventeenth century Dutch (and all the other European powers except Britain). Even as U.S. military spending has fallen as a share of GDP, its advantage over other powers has increased. In 2009, according to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. accounted for 43 percent of total world military spending—more than the next fifteen biggest spenders combined. This margin is far greater than that enjoyed by any of the dominant powers in the past 500 years, and probably ever in world history. At present, though fighting just two wars that by historical standards are small (as seen in the chart on p. 47, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined peaked in 2009 at 190,000, far less than the maximums of 550,000 in Vietnam and 480,000 in Korea) and not particularly bloody (U.S. deaths in the two current wars totaled 5,316 at the end of 2009, less than a tenth of the Vietnam fatalities and a seventh of Korea’s), the American military describes itself as “overextended” and its forces as “tapped out.” How can that be?

Much of America’s military budget is still spent on weapons systems designed to counter the Soviet Union but now worthless for fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any other area the country might plausibly become involved in. Despite having twice run on a platform of military restructuring (to fight precisely the sorts of wars he initiated), President George W. Bush succeeded in only canceling the Army’s Crusader Artillery system. President Obama cancelled the F-22 fighter jet in his first year. If he attempts to further reorient military spending, the President will meet resistance from all who benefit from current priorities.

The misallocation of American military budgets is not mainly caused by the self-dealing of oligarchs who control military spending, as was the case in early modern Europe, although the recent privatization of some military functions is diverting an increasing fraction of the military budget. Rather, I have found that consolidation of the defense industry has allowed interlocking elites (defense contractors, military service heads, and bankers) who have financed industry consolidation to resist the reallocation of spending away from highly profitable though strategically worthless weapons systems. New weapons systems and types of forces proposed by military reformers as appropriate for the actual wars fought by the U.S. today aren’t expensive enough to generate sufficient profits to justify the capital invested in the merged defense firms.

Such institutional interests are embodied in and reinforced by the structure of careers within the U.S. military. Officers are assigned to units that man and deploy specific weapons systems. A naval officer, for example, commands submarines designed to fire nuclear missiles or aircraft carriers built to allow fighter planes to shoot down enemy air forces. A decision to invest in mine sweepers to counter the sort of low-cost and low-tech challenge most likely to be posed by today’s actual enemies would stymie the careers of officers attempting to rise in the resultantly stagnant submarine or carrier corps. And since officers almost never receive further promotions and often have to leave the military if they transfer from one weapons system to another, they’re naturally reluctant to take command of forces devoted to counterinsurgency, civilian administration, or low-tech weapons designed for actual combat.

budget priorities

These days, competition among putative hegemons is mainly economic rather than military—a marked change from at least the past 500 years. Investment in infrastructure, scientific research, and education are paramount, and this is the realm in which China has focused almost all its efforts. In fact, Johns Hopkins sociologist Giovanni Arrighi has argued that China hasn’t even attempted to compete with the U.S. militarily. Unlike previous challenges to dominant powers (like those mounted by Germany and Japan to Britain and the U.S. in the first half of the twentieth century), the Chinese threat comes from economic growth, not military might.

America’s economic and military competitiveness have been hobbled as elites have gained greater control over civilian spending and taxes to the detriment of the kinds of investment fundamental to long-term economic growth. Federal outlays for “general science, space, and technology” are by far the largest source of the basic scientific research that is essential to compete with rival economic powers, but they fell from 4 percent of the budget and 0.786 percent of GDP in 1967 to 0.93 percent of the budget and 0.21 percent of GDP in 2009. Spending on infrastructure has stagnated as bridges collapse, air and road traffic snarl, and a shrinking network of passenger trains struggle to reach early twentieth-century speeds. From arrival at the airport to the high-speed train or subway trip into town, a visit to most countries in Europe and East Asia can seem to an American like a journey to Tomorrowland, never to be realized in the U.S. outside of Disney World.

Instead of addressing these needs, our budget is languishing in terms of GDP, and, as documented by non-partisan organizations like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, increasing portions are spent on unproductive subsidies to well-connected firms and elites. Current examples include: subsidies, water rights, and access to federal lands for the overproduction of certain agricultural commodities; a commitment to a Medicare drug plan that pays prices significantly higher than anywhere else in the world for drugs developed mainly in federal or university labs (or for copycat drugs designed to extend patents with no medical advantage over older generic drugs); free access to federal lands for mining, ranching, and logging with no obligation to pay for environmental effects which are then borne by public funds and health; and federal tax benefits and direct subsidies for the export of technology and capital to foreign subsidiaries and customers.

The 40-year stability of the federal budget masks a dramatic reallocation of the taxes that support it (see below). Corporate, inheritance, and gift taxes have declined as a share of revenue (from 25 percent in 1967 to 13 percent in 2008). That decline has been made up entirely by increases in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. The top income tax rate, which was 75 percent in 1968, is now 35 percent, and President Obama has faced resistance to his modest proposal to return it to the 39.6 percent level of the Clinton years. The top estate tax rate dropped from 77 percent in the 1960s to 45 percent by 2008, and (at least temporarily) to 0 percent in 2010 (and every twenty-first century Republican presidential candidate and virtually every GOP member of Congress has pledged to permanently abolish that tax, which falls only on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and mainly on the richest 0.1 percent.

In this context, it is not surprising that many taxpayers resist further increases to make up for tax cuts for those at the top and instead support politicians who advocate tax cuts for all. Nor is it surprising that the wealthiest seek to maintain the political structures and politicians who have delivered tax cuts and subsidies to them that dwarf those in every other developed nation. What needs explanation is the absence of any significant effort by the state to force elites to coordinate spending in a way that would provide the infrastructure, research, and trained workers needed to compete internationally.

Political Sources of Decline

The shift in spending from programs that further national productivity and competitiveness toward ones that don’t is a consequence of the restructuring of elite relations in the U.S. over the past four decades, This process has been traced most clearly by sociologist Mark Mizruchi, who writes that the U.S. was characterized, until the 1980s, by a dual elite structure. Like the similar structure in imperial Britain, this set up ensured that local and national elites could limit each other’s attempts to appropriate state powers and offices. That, in turn, gave federal officials a high degree of autonomy to appropriate revenues and to implement policies that furthered national military and economic dominance, even at the expense of individual elites.

National banks, linked together by directors who serve on multiple corporate boards coexisted with regional and local banks and firms that were shielded from competition with bigger rivals thanks to federal and state regulations. Local elites had the political muscle to sustain these through influence on their Congressional delegations and in their state governments. Both national and local firms in most industries, then, had enough political power to prevent each other from fully capturing state agencies and from monopolizing markets or governmental resources.

But this structure of elite relations has been transformed in recent decades by waves of mergers in sectors such as banking, telecommunications, media, utilities, retail sales, and agriculture and by the declining capacity of national banks to control firms. Once-dominant banks face competition from new regional behemoths created by the merger of smaller competitors and from non-bank firms freed by federal deregulation to issue their own financial instruments. Competition and the relaxation of federal regulations have led national banks to focus their resources on more lucrative investment banking, further removing them from active involvement in the management of industrial firms.

Mergers have also reduced intra-industry differences over government policy, creating unified voices push legislative changes to enactment. The banking and telecommunications “reform” acts of the 1990s failed to pass Congress in earlier decades due to counter-lobbying by (mainly regional) sectors of those industries with opposed interests. But mergers resolved those disagreements as secondary sectors were brought into larger firms (or merged themselves to form new large firms) and so came to share the most general interest of their industries. Deregulation opened the way to further waves of mergers and acquisitions, intensifying elite consolidation within major industries.

Consolidation within sectors facilitates the capture of government agencies and their powers and budgets by firms: the bigger the firms, and especially the less competition they face within their sectors, the greater the slice of the federal budget they control. The drastic fall in the share of workers in unions and the decline of national membership organizations have weakened the main sources of popular challenges to elite control over government resources and policies.

Future Prospects

As previous great powers faced decline, there were voices in each polity that correctly diagnosed the problem and proposed solutions, which, in retrospect, would have made significant differences. Each had schemes to eliminate tax privileges, end elite control over offices and governmental powers, and reform the military. Voices called for measures to invest in infrastructure and to hold or attract skilled craftsmen and businessmen and their enterprises from foreign competitors. Almost all of those reforms were stillborn. Only in Britain, where single elites or families were limited in their ability to seize and hold pieces of the state, were significant reforms enacted, and that’s why British dominance lasted so much longer than previous hegemons or, it now appears, the United States.

All of President Obama’s proposed (and enacted) reforms—in health care, energy, research funding, infrastructure investment, and financial regulation—are premised on winning support by accommodating elites and firms through continued subsidies and privileges. But such offers have the double effect of deepening the federal government’s fiscal crisis and fostering popular cynicism about the possibilities of genuine reform within the American political system.

Scenarios for significant change are based on hopes that the financial or other crises will foster a sprit of sacrifice among the public at large. However, decline and fiscal crisis are reversed only when elites are forced to surrender privileges. Ralph Nader’s most recent book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (2009), a utopian novel that imagines billionaires undermining corporate power and revitalizing citizen action, shows how much current progressive plans are based on hopes for elite generosity rather than realistic efforts at political mobilization. It is especially revealing, and depressing, that this book is the latest word from the American who has been the most successful at building citizen organizations over the past forty years. Claims that the Internet might foster effective political movements that can replace defunct or shrunken unions and mass organizations have yet to be realized.

Good ideas and high hopes did not save previous imperiums. There is no historical or social scientific basis for expecting they will do so for the United States—unfortunately, if we examine the contemporary U.S. as cold-eyed sociologists, rather than as hopeful citizens, our elites seem to match the capacities of their Dutch (and Habsburg Spanish, czarist Russian, and imperial Roman) predecessors to block reforms and withhold resources, thus remaining first class passengers on a sinking ship.

Recommended Readings

Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2007). Identifies the bases for China’s rapid rise and considers its future.

Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Random House, 1987). The classic argument that global military dominance leads to economic decline.

Richard Lachmann. “Greed and Contingency: State Fiscal Crises and Imperial Failure in Early Modern Europe,” American Journal of Sociology (2009), 115:39-73. Explains how elite self-dealing weakened European great powers and blocked reform except in Britain.

Mark S. Mizruchi. “Berle and Means Revisited: The Governance and Power of Large U.S. Corporations,” Theory and Society (2004), 33:579-617. Traces the decentralization and growing autonomy of U.S. elites.

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The remaking of the Old Fort in Johannesburg, South Africa illustrates how heritage sites create a collective sense of history and how developing these sites is about more than just memory. Politics, economics, and the need for national healing all converge when it comes to preserving the past.

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For More Information

• Official website for Constitution Hill
• The Constitution of South Africa
• City of Johannesburg (including maps of the city)
• History of South Africa (government website)

Parents in the United States and the Netherlands take very different approaches to adolescent sexuality. While religion and economics play a role, a closer look at the two countries reveals different cultures of independence and control that shape attitudes toward teen sex. Implications are also discussed.

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More From Amy Schalet

Read more by Amy Schalet in The Washington Post, Mother Talkers, and on ACT for Youth (PDF).

Also check out Amy Schalet's "Must We Fear Adolescent Sexuality" (PDF), named Medscape General Medicine's best article on Women's Health in 2004.

I left the facility with a strong desire to wash my hands, perhaps to shed any trace of horror in my body. Yet as an Argentine, how could I not be implicated in the history of state violence that still haunts the nation?

More than two decades after the last military dictatorship in Argentina ended (1976-1983), its legacy of terror is still an open wound. In the name of national security and of defending Western Civilization from the threat of leftist “subversion,” the military regime tortured and “disappeared” tens of thousands of people. One emblematic site of such practices is the E.S.M.A. (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, School of Naval Mechanics), a facility I gained access to in 2007 as part of a guided visit. The E.S.M.A. was among around 500 facilities turned into clandestine detention centers during Argentina’s dictatorship. It operated as a concentration camp, torture center, and platform from which detainees were taken on “death flights” to be thrown into the ocean or river to drown.

Now open to the public and managed by human rights groups, the E.S.M.A. has been transformed into a “Space of Memory and for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.” As I left the E.S.M.A., the cold, humid quality of the buildings seemed to have penetrated my bones. The screams of the people subjected to torment remained in the silent walls. Reverberating in my head were the words capucha (hood) and capuchita (little hood) (rooms where detainees were kept shackled with eyes covered), “avenue of happiness” (corridor in a torture area), and “the Sardá” (a small room—named after the Maternity Sardá—where pregnant detainees gave birth, only to have their babies taken away). The military regime’s penchant for twisting the meanings of words mirrored its systematic distortion of other aspects of reality. After all, what is the meaning of security when a government brutally turns against its own population?

The experience of state terrorism in Argentina embodies social suffering which anthropologists Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock say stems from “what political, economic, and institutional power does to people, and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.” How do people collectively struggle with trauma related to state-sponsored atrocities? How do movements seek to redress such events? The following pictures feature various strategies of memorialization linked with the goal of bringing about truth and justice. The photo essay focuses on four sites in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the Park of Memory and the Human Rights Walk (places of remembrance and tribute to the victims of state terrorism) and the E.S.M.A. and “Olimpo” (former clandestine detention centers, now refashioned by human rights organizations). The pictures illustrate the diverse methods human rights advocates use to raise awareness, construct memory, and garner political support: testimony, displays, public art, and cultural events that build cross-movement solidarity. Above all, these images capture the critical roles that the reclamation and resignification of formerly terrifying physical spaces play in grappling with social suffering and human rights.

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Further Reading

Books by Barbara Sutton

Sutton, Barbara, Sandra Morgen, and Julie Novkov, eds. 2008. Security
Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Sutton, Barbara. 2010. Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.

Organizations

• Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora
• Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo
• Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo
• Asociación de Ex-Detenidos Desaparecidos
• H.I.J.O.S. ( Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio)
• CELS (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales)
• Secretaría de Derechos Humanos de la Nación
• Instituto Espacio para la Memoria
• Memoria Abierta

I was standing on the helipad of a new, swanky highrise apartment building in the Dubai Marina with my friend Vishul in the summer of 2006.

We took in the panoramic, nighttime view of skyscrapers in the making, each capped with cranes lit red and white like so many giant Transformer action figures. Vishul, who’d grown up in Dubai, turned three hundred and sixty degrees and jokingly exclaimed, “This is the future!” And, until the global economic meltdown hit in late 2008, it probably was. Listen to Syed Ali on the Contexts Podcast

Dubai has been lauded by Western statesmen and the media as a model for the rest of the Muslim world to follow—a capitalist, consumerist paradise tolerant of alternative (read: Western) lifestyles and undisturbed by terrorism. This city of the future is ruled over by a benign autocrat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and is populated mainly by foreigners.

These expatriates, who comprise over ninety percent of the population, account for ninety-nine percent of the private sector workforce and ninety percent of the public sector workforce in jobs ranging from construction workers and maids to engineers, architects, and bankers. Because Dubai has been a migrant-receiving city since the early 1900s, its massive foreign population is nothing new. In fact, even before the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is a semi-autonomous member) received independence in 1971, Dubai’s migrant population exceeded its native citizen population.

What’s astounding, though, is that all expatriates are in Dubai on short-term visas. Unlike immigrant-receiving countries such as the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany, Dubai has no form of permanent immigrant incorporation. Even in countries as strict as Switzerland, migrants, including lower-skilled “guest workers,” can find roads to permanent settlement and family reunification. So while guest workers and their children throughout Europe may find it varyingly difficult to acquire citizenship, they often have the legal right to stay permanently.

In Dubai, expatriates willingly give up political rights such as free speech and due process, and they live precariously on short-term visas that can be revoked at any time for any reason. In exchange, they earn tax-free wages as “economic mercenaries,” fully aware that they are there solely to work. For lower-level workers from developing countries, the trade-off includes the unstated promise that they will live and toil in harsh conditions in Dubai so they can send remittances and make a better life for themselves back home. The middle class, mainly South Asians and Arabs from outside the Arabian Gulf who fill the bulk of lower and middle white-collar positions, find better occupational possibilities, better schools, more comfortable family living, and a largely crime-free environment enticing. And for upper-class professionals (Westerners, but also South Asians, Arabs, and others) there is the lure of the “good life”—comprised of cheap household help (maids alone form ten percent of the population), luxury accommodations, spas, clubs, bars, restaurants, outdoor sports, and prostitution—that has made Dubai so famous in the West.

On its surface, the case of Dubai and its permanently impermanent workforce seems singular. But, as many Western countries implement restrictive guest worker programs that limit immigrants’ ability to stay and circumscribe many of their rights, the case of Dubai’s expatriates may actually be a harbinger of the future of global migration.

A Mercenary Life

All expatriates in Dubai, even those born in Dubai, are on short-term, renewable visas, regulated through the kafala, or sponsorship, system. Expatriates’ residence visas are, as in the rest of the Arabian Gulf countries, tied to their sponsors, usually their employers. Changing jobs is virtually out of the question, and any expatriates who quit or are fired, with some exceptions for professionals, have to leave the country for a six-month period before they can return to take another job. So long as expatriates in Dubai hold on to their jobs and don’t bring negative attention to themselves, though, they can stay until the retirement age of 60, at which point, unless they own a business or receive permission on a case-by-case basis, they must leave.

Not unexpectedly, laborers, the middle class, and professionals experience their temporariness differently. Laborers including construction workers, maids, cab drivers, and lower-level service workers (who generally earn slightly better than third-world level wages) constitute the vast majority of Dubai’s population and are highly regulated in their working and social lives. Their passports are confiscated upon arrival (an illegal practice that even government ministries engage in), their wages are often withheld for months at a time to prevent them from quitting (a practice the government tolerates), and unions and strikes are illegal. Workers who have participated in strikes or protests have been immediately deported without a trial or due process of any kind. Many men (especially construction workers) are housed in remote, overcrowded, filthy labor camps, and most of the rest of the working class shares rooms in overcrowded, filthy, and dilapidated villas or apartment buildings. Socially, they fare no better: construction workers, for example, are often denied entry to the shopping malls they build.

Where laborers’ lives are largely regulated by this series of “sticks,” the middle class and professionals’ lives are regulated mostly with “carrots” like high salaries, fast professional advancement, and luxury living. The government doesn’t need to enforce discipline, as these expatriates essentially live in a “gilded cage,” willingly trading political rights for economic possibilities. And the government is more than happy to allow these expatriates wide latitude in their social behaviors (they’re free to worship as they like, drink, and openly visit prostitutes, for instance) so long as none of those behaviors looks remotely political.

While professionals, and to a lesser extent the middle class, find a great degree of social freedom, in the end they too, like laborers, are simply factors of production, there to create wealth for the ruler, the government, and the national citizen population. The kafala system essentially defines the bulk of the population as disposable and temporary. It is not incidental that the government insists expatriates are “guest workers.”

The transience of expatriates is underscored by the fact that citizenship is basically unattainable and there is no such category as permanent residence. The most commonly stated reasons given by government officials for denying citizenship or permanent residence are the threats of cultural extinction and demographic imbalance posed by the possibility of absorbing so many expatriates into the pool of citizens. These twin arguments are repeated time and time again. However, there are two critical but unstated factors that are central to the management of expatriates in Dubai and the government’s stance on naturalization. First, the government’s legitimacy depends to a great degree on its ability to guarantee a high standard of living to national citizens. Allowing expatriates to naturalize might lead to the state having to spread its welfare largesse among a much larger pool of recipients. Second, the kafala system provides a simple and effective mechanism of social control. As expatriates are in Dubai primarily to work, the mere possibility of deportation is enough to stifle any kind of threat they may pose to the political-economic order.

Many scholars argue that formal, legal citizenship is becoming less important in an increasingly globalized world. As money, goods, ideas, and people move further and faster than ever before, legal and social barriers to movement have weakened. The idea of dual citizenship is more widely accepted than it ever has been, further eroding the historical notion that citizens should have loyalty to only one place. Even illegal migrants can often become legal by proving that they have conducted themselves like “good citizens” in their new land.

The literature on citizenship has expanded the concept to take into consideration how the boundaries of the nation-state have become, literally and figuratively, more permeable and, in some ways, less relevant over time. International treaties and institutions (especially those making human rights universal) and the free movement of people and capital greatly affect the sovereignty of states and how they relate to both citizens and noncitizens living within their borders. In the past 20 years, terms such as “flexible citizenship,” “post-national citizenship” and “denationalized citizenship” have gained currency. And while there are major differences between these influential concepts and other ideas that expand upon the notion of what is and who is a citizen, taken together they announce that “citizen” is more than simply a legal category and that people can claim to “belong” to a place without legally belonging to that place.

But legal citizenship and the realistic possibility of obtaining it remains important—you simply cannot legally and securely live somewhere without a proper visa or citizenship. The non-legal dimensions of citizenship, including the cultural, economic, consumer, and psychological angles, are largely meaningless without formal legal standing. Consider one of the most basic factors of citizenship: generally, you cannot be deported—and if you are deported, the other forms of citizenship become moot. For noncitizens, these other forms of citizenship can only be meaningful if the threat of deportation is minimal.

These are things that expatriates in Dubai, most of whom are from the developing world, understand all too well. While there are no publicly available data on the numbers of deportations, they occur frequently enough that stories of deportees serve as widely-known cautionary tales that help keep laborers, the middle class, and professional expatriates in line. These nonnatives are careful to stay out of trouble with the police, they make certain not to engage in behavior that might look political, and they avoid criticizing the ruling family or national citizens in general. At any point and for practically any reason, the government or an employer may arbitrarily cancel a worker’s visa and trigger immediate deportation.

The threat of deportation and the lack of any legal recourse is one reason why so many expatriates would welcome the possibility of naturalization or, at least, permanent residence. Without these possibilities, expatriates understand that their stay in Dubai, no matter how long-term, is by definition temporary. They plan accordingly: Westerners know they will return to the West. Laborers know they will also go back home. South Asian and Arab middle class and professional expatriates must either go home (an undesirable outcome for many) or attempt to go to the West seeking new professional opportunities for themselves or education for their children.

Expatriates born in Dubai also understand that they are temporary residents. Of the forty-five South Asian and Arab second-generation expatriates I interviewed, more than half had acquired permanent residence or citizenship in Western countries, and most of the rest were trying to do the same. Hardly anyone I interviewed intended to return to their legal home in their parents’ third-world country of origin, but few had any illusions of calling Dubai home. I was stunned to hear one young, Indian corporate headhunter say bluntly, “Dubai is a pitstop, a place where you come, make a good amount of money and you get out.” Why was this so shocking? The young man in question had been born and raised in this “pitstop.” Until just before we met, he’d never even been outside the U.A.E.

In response to recent international pressure and spiraling unemployment among national citizens, some Arabian Gulf states have begun to rethink the kafala system. Bahrain was the first to initiate radical change, discarding the sponsorship system altogether in August 2009. Its expatriates will now be “sponsored” directly by the government, and their visas will no longer be tied to a particular job. Following Bahrain, Kuwait took a first step toward abolishing the kafala system when it announced that its expatriates would be able to change jobs after three years without sponsor approval or after one year if the sponsor doesn’t object. Using language that Human Rights Watch would approve of, a Kuwaiti minister lauded the change and called the kafala system “modern-day slavery.”

The abolition of the kafala system could lead to higher wages, especially at the middle and lower ends of the job market, where most workers are from the developing world and paid accordingly. Bahrain and Kuwait also hope that the current high unemployment rates among national citizens will be reduced, as the financial costs of hiring and training nationals become more attractive to private-sector firms. Conspicuously though, officials in Dubai have remained mum on any similar changes. Their silence is deafening—and unsurprising, given that Dubai’s government-owned companies in construction, hospitality, and other sectors employ tens of thousands of workers at all levels, and government coffers are enriched through those depressed wages.

These policy changes represent a monumental shift for the region. The basic premise of my research has been that the kafala system colors every aspect of life in Dubai. If similar, radical changes were undertaken in Dubai, the way of life for expatriates and national citizens alike would be drastically altered. Expatriates would have freedom of mobility in the labor market and would no longer have to fear deportation should they lose or quit their jobs. This is a particularly important issue today, as Dubai is in the middle of a recession, with megaprojects at a standstill and many completed highrises standing empty. Workers are being laid off in such large numbers that some estimate Dubai’s population may have shrunk by an incredible seventeen percent in 2009.

The “Dubai Effect”

The story of Dubai’s expatriate population feels, at first, like an outlier. But it may end up being replicated beyond Dubai and the Arabian Gulf countries. While Bahrain and Kuwait are in the process of abandoning the kafala system, Western countries are increasingly adopting labor policies similar to those of Dubai and the other Gulf countries. These policies mainly concern working-class laborers, but as in the Gulf, professionals may find themselves living under similar visa regimes. For example, more than half of skilled workers from non-European Union countries arrive in the U.K. on “intra-company” transfers. As of a 2008 overhaul, the U.K.’s visa system is largely grounded through employers. While Tier 1 visas, issued for highly skilled professional migrants, do not require a sponsor, Tier 2 employees applying for permanent status must be sponsored or they’ll be forced to leave. Further, in 2009, the government was considering banning transferred, “intra-company” workers from citizenship altogether, a move that could conceivably turn them into Dubai-like expatriates: legal, but impermanent.

Similarly, the U.S. has programs limiting the ability of professionals from overseas to stay, most notably the H1B visa ­program. The H-1B program is mostly for IT professionals, whose visas are tied to their employers. They can stay up to six years, so long as they are employed, and they are allowed to apply for permanent residency. There is, however, no guarantee that it will be granted; my friend Vishul tried, but failed, to adjust his own H-1B status and had to leave the country. At its peak, the H-1B program covered roughly 200,000 people a year, but the number of these visas being issued yearly has since dropped to its original 1999 level of 65,000.

The U.S. has also toyed with the idea of a wide-ranging guest worker program for lower-skilled workers. This would echo the Bracero Program, which brought temporary Mexican agricultural laborers to the U.S. from 1942-1964, but ended in part because of widespread abuse of workers. In 2006, Congress proposed a plan to create a permanent guest worker program that would admit 400,000 more workers a year. While it was not enacted, many in Congress made it clear that when immigration reform is eventually addressed it must include some kind of temporary guest worker program.

Recognizing aspects of the kafala system creeping into national policy debates, the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman mused on what he called “the Dubai Effect” in The New York Times. Writing in 2006, Krugman said that a guest worker program could amount to a dangerous betrayal of the United States’ democratic ideals. It would, he wrote, basically form an entrenched caste system of temporary workers whose interests would largely be ignored and whose rights would be circumscribed. Further, their wages would undoubtedly be less than those of people with greater labor market mobility, though the ripple effects of a glut of guest workers would be expected to lower wages for all workers in sectors where guest workers are “bonded” to their employers, Dubai-style.

Following Krugman, I wonder if Western states increasingly adopt policies like those in the Arabian Gulf countries, they will see situations of non-assimilation similar to those played out among expatriates in Dubai. Of course, unlike in Dubai, any children born in the U.S. acquire citizenship by birth, but there would still be a sizeable community of adults who were essentially in the country, but not of it. If that’s the case, Dubai and its permanently impermanent population would look less like a unique example and more like a prescient harbinger of the future experience of incorporation—or lack thereof.

Recommended Resources

Human Rights Watch. Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates (November, 2006). Examines government collusion in employers’ exploitation of workers in the UAE.

Andrzej Kapiszewski. Nationals and Expatriates: Population and Labour Dilemmas of the Gulf Cooperation Council States (Ithaca Press, 2001). Explores how Arabian Gulf countries controlled their expatriate labor force and kept their citizens happy before the latest economic boom.

Aihwa Ong. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, 1999). Details how globalization and transnational behavior have changed the meaning of citizenship.

Yasemin Soysal. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shows how formal citizenship declines as states, influenced by the global discourse of human rights, increasingly grant rights and benefits to noncitizens.

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More from Syed Ali

• A hard edge to Dubai's glittering allure, The Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2010
• In Dubai, the party's far from over, The Guardian, March 20, 2010
• 'You must come with us', The Guardian, November 12, 2007
• Dubai: Gilded Cage, Yale University Press.