Abu Dhabi does not belong in the list with the other ones. It has been extremely well run since Zayed bin Sultan and will probably transition quite well to a post oil future.
> Abu Dhabi does not belong in the list with the other ones. It has been extremely well run since Zayed bin Sultan
It's also governed differently from the others in being an oligarchy. That requirement for consensus-building and internal variation creates robustness; it gave Dubai the room to experiment, for example, with religious moderation.
It's not a view I hold too seriously. But I remember visiting the Emirates and Saudi Arabia--shortly after the Phillipines and India--and thinking to myself that the British were, in their time, far better at nation building than we've (EDIT: America) been in the post-War era.
If you read historical political discourses in France regarding the colonies, it's easy to see why the British were far better than the French. There was a lot of talk about bringing the light of civilizations to those poor colonies so, in general, they pretty much tore down the existing administrations and instead recreated their own administration from the top up.
The British strategy was far more pragmatic, they kept the local powers in place and played each of them against each other to maintain control over the colonies.
Of course, I'm generalizing but there's a clear difference of ideology that I do think explain the differences between the French and British when it came to managing their colonial empire.
I don't know if oligarchy is the correct word, its more like a union of 7 mini-monarchies.
UAE is doing so well for (mainly) 2 reasons:
1) The Shakhbut coup in Abu Dhabi
2) Abu Dhabi and Dubai buried the hatchet to form UAE(there was a lot of bad blood between the 2 states, but because Rashid bin Saeed and Zayed bin Sultan were way above average as far as authoritarians go they managed to avoid stupid conflicts and focused on cashing in on the oil).
> I don't know if oligarchy is the correct word, its more like a union of 7 mini-monarchies
Fair enough. And as you describe, it's more a diarchy of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Nevertheless, structurally different from the absolute monarchies around them.
It's basically just Abu Dhabi now, because they bailed out Dubai's housing sector on multiple occasion - in 2009 [0], 2019 [1], 2020 [2], and (down the grapevine) I've heard they might be providing an additional bailout to Dubai soon.
Furthermore, Saudi has started requiring companies that are operating in Saudi to operate a Saudi office, and won't give tenders to those who are managing the relationship remotely from Dubai now, so companies have started moving staff to Riyadh.
> Nevertheless, structurally different from the absolute monarchies around them
MbS is trying to remake KSA into an Abu Dhabi 2.0, as MbZ was his mentor
