The Persian Gulf at the Millenium: Essays in Politics, Economy, Security, and Religion.

• Author: Bahgat, Gawdat

Reviewed by Gawdat Bahgat

This book is an important contribution to a growing body of literature on the future of the Gulf region. The contributors are from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. In their twelve chapters, the authors cover a variety of topics such as border disputes, oil, privatization, political reform, and Islamic revival. Throughout the book, there is an attempt to focus less on individual states and to concentrate more on a broad approach to the region as one unit. No one formula was followed by all contributors in dealing with these significant issues. Rather, each one of them tackled his or her topic from a different perspective. Thus, there is no consensus among the contributors on either the diagnosis or the cure for the current situation in the region. Throughout the twelve essays, the fundamental agreement is that the current patterns of economic and political development, and the low level of regional cooperation, might lead to a bleak future if not treated properly.

Since the war to liberate Kuwait in 1991, Western powers (particularly the United States) have taken the responsibility of defending the Gulf states from any intra-region military conflict. This relative security from external aggression highlights the threats posed by the internal socio-economic and sectarian cleavages within each Gulf society. Accordingly, with the exception of Anthony Cordesman's essay on Iranian military capabilities, most of the other chapters deal with domestic challenges, particularly the distortions in the economic structures.

The reasons for this imbalance in the Gulf regimes can be identified as follows: 1) budgetary uncertainties due to a heavy dependence on oil as the main, and almost sole, source of national revenues; 2) dominance of the public sector and lack of genuine efforts to introduce and implement economic reform; 3) distortion of the labor force with heavy reliance on expatriates, accompanied by high rate of unemployment among the indigenous labor force; and 4) absence of popular participation as demonstrated by the absence of autonomous civil society. These themes have been examined in specific case studies such as Iran (Gary Sick, pp. 22-24), Saudi Arabia (Karim Pakravan, pp. 119-126), and Bahrain (Munira Fakhro, pp. 168-188).

In addition to examining the internal structural imbalances in different settings, some regional issues and their implications have been thoroughly analyzed. Paul Steven's essay...