Saudi Arabia has significantly reduced the powers of its absolute monarchy by quietly removing the king’s authority to choose his own successor.
This landmark constitutional reform, enacted by royal order last October but only disclosed this week, fundamentally changes the way the desert kingdom – which controls 25 per cent of the world’s oil – is governed.
Until now, the king alone has selected his successor, known as the crown prince, from among the sons and grandsons of King Abdul-Aziz, the founding leader of Saudi Arabia, better known as Ibn Saud.
In future, a committee consisting of senior members of the royal family, called the Bay’ah Council, will vote for the crown prince from three candidates named by the king.
The council is empowered to reject the king’s choice and can even impose a crown prince against the monarch’s will. It can also declare the king or crown prince incapable of ruling.
The nitty gritty of the changes can be found here and an explanation by Prince Turki al-Faisal was delivered at St. Antony’s College last week.
What’s interesting about this is that there now seems a clear succession mechanism — one of course that is still extremely restricted and undemocratic, but that has the advantage of being clear. Contrast that with the utter confusion over Egypt’s own succession system — the refusal of President Mubarak to appoint a vice-president in 25 years and the uncertainty about whether Gamal Mubarak, Omar Suleiman, or someone else altogether will succeed Mubarak.
I usually hate to praise the Saudis, but here as in so many other respects, they’re doing things a lot more professionally than the Egyptians. Just consider how Saudi Arabia has completely eclipsed Egypt as a regional mediator, and how it actually seems to have a foreign policy of its own. There’s been much grumbling about this in the Egyptian press lately. Salama Ahmed Salama, one of the most respected establishment columnists, recently noted in a column on Iran that:
During the Cold War, the Arabs were not the sheep blindly following US policy that they have become. They developed independent foreign policies that were based on Arab interests. Today, the Arabs’ problems are growing and reveal an total inability to manage their internal problems. The Arabs are in such an impasse that they are accusing Iran of having expansionist ambitions.
. . .
Arab policies, notably the foreign policy of Egypt, seems to be magnetically attracted to the US. This is evident from the confusion of Egyptian diplomacy. [Egypt] accused Iran of being behind the murder of its ambassador, Ehab al-Sherif, in Baghdad. Then, it denied that it had made these accusations only to later withdraw that denial — even though it is obvious that it was Sunni followers of al-Zarqawi who were behind the assassination.
The rest of the column (from about a week ago) went on to suggest that closer Arab relations with Iran would be positive, if only to shake off the “vicious circle of American hegemony over the region.” But even if there were criticism of Arab states, it was really aimed at Egypt. One only needs to take at the recent Saudi initiatives to deal directly with the Iranians to see that Saudi policy is a lot more independent. The conclusion: Saudi may be a pretty twisted country, but its regime has its act together. You can’t really say that about Egypt.
I was talking about this phenomenon with an Egyptian friend a couple of nights ago and he despaired: before the 1952 Free Officers’ coup, he said, Egypt was a country with money and clout. By 1969 Nasser had spent it all. We’ve been beggars ever since.
I didn’t think any of this was particularly new. Simon Henderson wrote on this in October:
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2526
Also, I am not sure how true what Salama Ahmed Salama wrote really is. If you replace, “Arab” with “Egyptian” and “Arabs” with “Egyptians,” okay, *then* it might be true.
Andrew, you’re right this dates from last October but was only formally unveiled last week. And I do believe that Salama means Egypt especially, although he might include Jordan too.
Your friend not a big fan of Nasser, huh? I would debate how much clout Egypt had in, say, 1948 on the regional stage. Puppet of the Americans in may be now, but it wasn’t exactly all that independent from its British sponsors then. No American tanks dictated government formation these days, as the British tanks did in the 1940s. In fact when it comes to regional prestige and clout, my failing memory seems to suggest that came exactly during Nasser’s era.
As far as I’ve heard, this initiative is just a formalisation of selection procedures that had developed informally over time. Of course, it’s nice that step-brothers no longer have to kill each other off for the throne. It says something about that rotten monarchy when a formal succession procedure is seen as great progress. They’ve been chipping away at the consultative council that was formed in 1992 (the formalisation of succession was also supposed to be part of those reforms – ha) and arresting dissident sheikhs quietly in recent months too, so Prince Turki’s PR is less than convincing.
SP, the only praise I give the al-Sauds is that they have a system in place that allows for forecasting. In Egypt it’s a mystery who might be president in 5-10 years.
Paul, he’s definitely no Nasser fan. I think he’s right about the money, though — Egypt after WW2 had a GDP comparable to Italy’s, I remember hearing. Nasser’s foreign policy was pretty ridiculous though objectively, all that money spent on agit-prop but a disastrous military record (because of mistakes as much as lack of military balance) and bizarre adventurism in Yemen, by the end of his reign he was begging at the Saudis like everyone else is now. Plus he is largely responsible for the personality cult / totalitarian strand in modern Egyptian political culture, a good deal of the security infrastructure, etc.
I would have thought that if the monarchy had survived the troubles of the early 1950s it would have had a good chance of becoming quite an influential regional player.
Yeah, but, post-war, pre-industrial Italy, how much of a comparison is that? Your point is taken of course, and it was a wasteful foreign policy, but the point was it was a foreign policy and Egypt had a great deal of regional and global clout, vis-a-vis the nonaligned movement and all that.
But as far as Nasser laying the groundwork for Egypt’s current disgraceful situation, yes, of course. Under him Egypt lost its “foreign” communities that had lived there a least a century if not longer, and many fine old institutions were dismantled to be replaced by the banal mediocrity of Sadat’s new middle class… and of course the whole security/cult of personality thing.
I’m not sure, however, Farouk’s Egypt would have ever amounted to much. Perhaps. Certainly would have kept downtown alive a bit longer and they had a better architectural aesthetic.
Farouk was a mediocrity. But what about a political scene that pit, say, the Wafd’s Fouad Pasha Serageldin against the MB’s Hassan al-Banna and the Egyptian socialists and communists of the 1950s? It would have been an interesting scenario – and generated some interesting compromises, or a rather chaotic and fragile system.
Well, no doubt Nasser comitted huge mistakes, mainly due to lack of experience. Non the less, he was just the right man for the Arab world at that era. He reasserted,if not, rediscovered, the Arab identity of the region. He charged at the core problems of Arabs- which is lack of confidence after being the losers for centuries, poverty and the abscense of a middle class. 1967(his fault) had a dramatic impact on the modernisation of the entire Arab world, not only Egypt. The outcome of his rule and 1967 has been what we are experiencing at the present- a medicoral middle class, disillusioned structurally corrupt elites and disfunctioning institutions. Still, had he lived longer we would have been better off, yet way off his moons. The pre 1952 era was unhealthy, and no way it could have lead to a radical change in Egypt’s miserable destiny.
dude!
Don’t let the change in succession laws fool you! People complain about nepotism, oppression, and the lack of democracy in Egypt? In Saudi Arabia it’s like the royals own the country… wait…they do own the country…