To understand the current political scenario and explore opportunities for development in GCC-Iraq relations, it is important that we start with the history of the GCC. Although undeclared, the formation of the GCC was primarily based on a shared political narrative that constructs a common enemy.
When we speak of narrative, we are broadly speaking of a “story.”6 Generally, narrative is a story that can be told by an individual or by a collective and which promotes a particular perspective or a viewpoint. Narrative is commonly associated with fiction and so it is understood as more related to Arts and literary studies.
However, lately the study of narrative has gained popularity in social and political sciences.7 The acknowledgment of narrative as being relevant to social and political disciplines stems from the understanding that narrative is never neutral,
6. Molly Patterson and Renwick K. Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 1, no. 1 (1998): 315 available at: doi: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.315 (accessed on March 20, 2013).
7. Shaul R. Shenhav, “Political Narratives and Political Reality,” International Political Science Review 27, no. 3 (2006): 245 available at: doi: 10.1177/0192512106064474 (accessed March 9, 2013); this argument can also be found in Patterson and Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science,” 315.
it is always embedded in particular ideologies, perspectives, and world views.8 This understanding indicates that narrative is representative of unbalanced power relations and therefore it is highly relevant to politics. However, it also indicates that narrative is contested in meaning because its relation to power makes it open to different definitions regulated by different disciplinary ideologies.
In this sense, coinciding “politics” with “narrative” makes the term even more contested especially because there is no one definition of politics. However, the term “political narrative” in this chapter refers to the political construction and legitimization of certain realities that serve particular political interests in society.
Dennis Mumby defines political narrative as “an ideological force that articulates a system of meaning which privileges certain interests over others.”9 In this sense, political narrative is an important topic of enquiry given its capacity to facilitate social change within any given society due to its ability to provide “a shared language that becomes the basis of mobilization around particular issues.”10 Also, another important aspect of political narrative is its capacity to construct a shared political identity that promotes the interests of the dominant group as collective.11 Therefore, political narrative becomes a “means of constituting and diffusing collective identities in particular societies.”12
Shaul Shenhav emphasizes that political narrative can be located within both formal and informal frameworks.13 By formal framework, Shenhav means a narrative produced within formal institutions by politicians and formal political figures.
Informal framework, on the other hand, is representative of a fairly broad definition that could include any issues or themes that are “normally considered political, such as power relations, collective decisions and social conflicts.”14 This chapter discusses political dialogue in both forms, formal and informal. The following section provides an example of how a particular political narrative encouraged the development of a
8. Shenhav, “Political Narratives,” 248.
9. Dennis K. Mumby, “The Political Function of Narrative in Organizations,” Communications Monographs 54, no. 2 (1987): 114, available at: doi: 10.1080/03637758709390221 (accessed February 1, 2013).
10. Janet Hart, “Cracking the Code: Narrative and Political Mobilization in the Greek Resistance,” Social Science History 16, no. 4 (1992): 633.
11. Patterson and Monroe, “Narrative in Political Science,” 322.
12. Hart, “Cracking the Code,” 633–34.
13. Shenhav, “Political Narratives,” 247.
14. Shenhav R. Shaul, “Thin and Thick Narrative Analysis: On the Question of Defining and Analyzing Political Narratives,” Narrative Inquiry 15, no. 1 (2005): 77, available at: doi:
http://10.1075/ni.15.1.05she (accessed March 8, 2013).
special alliance within the Gulf region. Subsequently, the implications of this same political narrative in dividing today’s Arab region are discussed.
GCC: Six States and One Narrative
An important element of political narrative is its capacity to construct a shared political identity. The GCC was established on the basis of a shared political narrative that is especially concerned with security measures. The organization was established in 1981, a critical time of insecurity, just after the Iranian revolution.
Its establishment did not come as a surprise; the six Gulf States had a tradition of social and economic collaboration.15 Also, and more importantly, in 1976 Saudi Arabia initiated an informal cooperation among the six states on issues concerning cross-border security.16 This was largely motivated by the British withdrawal from the region that made it more vulnerable to external threats. Although the United States was constructing a more structured relationship with the Gulf region at the time, there was no concrete relationship that the Gulf region could rely on, and therefore, a unified body based on political collaboration had the potential to generate a sense of security within the region.
However, subsequent political developments in the region, shaped by the growth of the Iranian Islamic revolution, introduced a threat to Gulf monarchies.
As Ramazani emphasizes, the Gulf States feared the exportation of the Islamic revolution, especially Saudi Arabia that was facing a rebel movement by some of its radical Sunni fundamentalist groups at the time.17 There was also fear that the Shia minority (and a majority in Bahrain) could be encouraged to rebel by the success of the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the first-ever Islamic Shia state. As a matter of fact, the Shia in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain rebelled in 1979 and 1980, but their rebellion was controlled by the monarchies. The fear of the Iranian revolution was not limited to Saudi Arabia or Bahrain; it was also shared by other monarchies in the region. It is important to mention that the Iranian revolution was the second in the region where the monarchy was replaced with a republican system. It seemed that monarchy-based governments were becoming more and more vulnerable to transformational revolutions. Also, the time of the revolution
15. Rouhollah K. Ramazani and Joseph A. Kechichian, The Gulf Cooperation Council: Record and Analysis (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 7.
16. Neil Patrick, “The GCC: Gulf State Integration or Leadership Cooperation?” (research paper, Kuwait Programme on Development, Governance and Globalisation in the Gulf States, November 2011), 4.
17. Ramazani and Kechichian, The Gulf Cooperation Council, 7.
coincided with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan which made the Gulf region even more vulnerable to political instability.
However, Neil Patrick emphasizes that the Iranian revolution was different and more threatening in the sense that it had the potential to “weaken Saudi Arabia and a number of other Gulf states from within.”18 It is important to emphasize that this argument not only refers to the development of a powerful Shia state that can politically mobilize Shia minorities (and the majority in Bahrain) within Gulf States, but it is also referring to the potential for small Gulf States finding refuge in Iran’s growing power.19 A Saudi government advisor stressed that after the British departure from the region, the development of GCC was necessary
“to avoid the situation of those states lacking protection looking elsewhere.”20 As Walt argues using power theory, “[w]hen confronted by an external threat, states may either balance or bandwagon.”21 With a lack of protection, small Gulf States were prone to form an alliance (bandwagon) with either Iraq or Iran. Such a reality threatens Saudi Arabia’s interest in being a powerful regional player and would make it vulnerable to Iran’s or Iraq’s domination.
Therefore, and despite the fact that there were other secondary motivations including common culture, religion and economic resources, the political narrative that sees the Gulf region as politically vulnerable to security threats particularly from Iran was the main aspect of unification. Economic and socio-cultural aspects were secondary because firstly, these aspects are not confined to the participant states; there are other regional states who share the same economic and geo-cultural framework including Iraq. Secondly, commonality has always existed between these states and there were certainly better times for unity to develop on the basis of economic and socio-cultural expansion than in 1981. However, the timing of the establishment of the GCC indicates that there was an urgent concern that motivated the formation of an alliance among the six Gulf States.
Going back to the power theory, most often alliances develop as a response to threat; power theory confirms that to prevent strong powers from domination it is essentially important that power balance is developed and maintained.22 Creating a power balance often involves weaker or insecure states forming alliances to counter a hegemonic power. In this sense, revolutionary Iran and a powerful and resourceful
18. Patrick, “The GCC,” 5.
19. Patrick, “The GCC,” 6.
20. Patrick, “The GCC,” 6.
21. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 17.
22. Walt, The Origins of Alliances, 18.
Baathist Iraq placed the Gulf region under a security threat consequent upon which an important decision had to be made of either balancing power through the formation of an alliance or bandwagoning with the threatening power. While some smaller states in the region were compelled to bandwagon with Iran or Iraq, Saudi Arabia had to act urgently to establish a formal cooperation council which is, in reality, a defense cooperation initiative based upon a security-based political narrative shared by the six GCC states.