INAUGURAL WORKING PAPER SERIES

A TALE OF TWO (ASIAN) CITIES: Dubai and Singapore Before and After the Crisis*

AHMED KANNA (TRINITY COLLEGE)

VOL. I., NO. 3 SPRING 2009

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A TALE OF TWO (ASIAN) CITIES: Dubai and Singapore Before and After the Crisis*

Ahmed Kanna 2008-09 Raether Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Urban and Global Studies

at Trinity College 2008-09

Ahmed.Kanna@trincoll.edu

PLEASE NOTE: This paper is based on conversations with various members of the Trinity College community following, and a paper delivered at, the Center for Urban Studies’ November 2008 “Rethinking Cities and Communities” conference. The original conference paper was more limited in scope and addressed the meanings of the rise of neoliberalism as an ideology and cultural dominant in contemporary Dubai. In the meantime, spurred by the aforementioned conversations, it occurred to me that few scholarly works have comparatively treated Dubai and Singapore, in spite of the similarities between the two, and indeed, their occasionally symbiotic relationship in the sphere of strategic models and cultural policies. I have been studying Dubai now for over six years. To Singapore, I am wholly new. I claim no authority on the latter, and offer this paper as a jumping-off point for future conversations, ideas, and, hopefully, scholarly projects. *Paper Number 3 in the Inaugural Working Paper Series sponsored and published by the Center for Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College in May 2009. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Conference on “Rethinking Cities and Communities: Urban Transition Before and During the Era of Globalization,” sponsored by The Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, November 14-15, 2008. We would like to thank Jason C. Percy, Managing Editor, for his skilled work on this version. Please contact the author for permission to quote or cite material from this paper.

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Introduction

In spite of their shared colonial history, centrality in Asian—Indian Ocean trade and

commercial economies, and other similarities, such as the collapse of the cities’ respective real

estate markets during the current economic crisis (Marchal 2005:97, Wright 2009), there has

been little if any work comparing Dubai and Singapore. Such a comparison offers a fruitful

avenue for research on city-state scale economies, casting new light on the strategies and

limitations of urban globalization in late capitalism. Specifically, the ways in which Dubai and

Singapore have dealt with the economic crisis of 2008—2009 reveal the influence, respectively,

of institutional, territorial, and ideological—symbolic factors in shaping the constraints with

which cities have to contend when attempting to deal with rapid economic changes. The last

factor, the ideological—symbolic, is especially germane for understanding urban adaptations to

global economic shifts. This area has been paid relatively little attention in the literature on

global cities.1

“Piracy” and the Port City as “Imperial Screen”: New Constructions of Indian Ocean Sovereignty

It is no coincidence that among the rationales for early nineteenth-century British

intervention in the Malay Straits and soon thereafter in the Arab Gulf, ending “piracy” was

central. As Sugata Bose has put it, the early nineteenth century witnessed a new construction of

Indian Ocean maritime trade: Western imperial states now saw themselves as beset by “pirates”

(Bose 2006:45). This gave an otherwise patently imperial project the patina of self-sacrifice and

duty. As Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, asserted in a 1903 address to the assembled sheikhs

of the so-called Trucial Oman emirates (as the United Arab Emirates were known prior

independence in 1971):

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We found strife and we have created order … The great Empire of India, which it is our duty to defend, lies almost at your gates … We are not now going to throw away this century of costly and triumphant enterprise; we shall not wipe out the most unselfish page in history. The peace of these waters must still be maintained; your independence will continue to be upheld; the influence of the British government must remain supreme. [Bose 2006:37].

Until around 1820, when the British entered the region, the southern Arab Gulf was

controlled by the Qawasim (sing. Qasimi), a maritime people from the emirate of Sharjah,

located directly east of Dubai. To the British, the tolls charged by the Qawasim interfered with

access to India, and they sent a “devastating naval expedition” against what was called, in

colonial parlance, the “Pirate Coast” (Onley 2005:30). They imposed the General Treaty of 1820,

subjecting the rulers of the Coast of Oman (which then encompassed today’s UAE) to British

India. These were followed by the Maritime Truces (1835—1853), which incorporated Abu

Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, the Qasimi state (today’s Sharjah), and Umm al-Qawain – all states of the

contemporary UAE – into the Empire as the “Trucial States” (Onley 2005:31). At this time, the

purpose of the treaties was to ban maritime warfare during the pearling season. The Exclusive

Agreements (1880—1916) followed, granting Britain exclusive political relations with, and

control of the foreign affairs of, the Trucial States, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar (Onley 2005:32).

Along with securing access to India, these treaties created a buffer between the British zone and

those of other Great Powers, such as France, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, which,

respectively, made inroads into Egypt and Iran (1798—1809), Central Asia and Iran (1868—

1885), and the eastern Arabian peninsula (1871—1872). By persuading Gulf potentates to sign

exclusive treaties with them, the British created “a screen” of principalities along the northwest

boundary between India and the Middle Eastern—European region (Onley 2005:42).

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Although a less urgent concern for the British in Southeast Asia, “piracy” became more

than a minor annoyance by the 1830s. Until the mid-1830s, the Illanun and Balanini expeditions

from Mindanao and the Sulu Sea, respectively, would disrupt trading activities in the Malay

Straits. “Pirates” of the Riau-Lingga archipelago were also involved: “So intense was their

rivalry that they often neglected their prey in order to fight with one another” (Ken 1991b:48). In

1836, the Indian government initiated a plan for suppressing Malay piracy, making gunboats and

money available for counter-piracy measures. By the 1850s, the British had succeeded in

undermining “piracy” in the Malay Straits (Ken 1991b:48).

This helped free Britain to consolidate the role of Singapore as an imperial node of the

then new free trade ideology and, like the small principalities of the Gulf, as a shield against

competing imperial claims on a shared sphere of interest (the Malay economy), in this case,

those of the Dutch and the French:

The role of Singapore as an entrepot, a strategic centre for the British Empire, and as the base of operations for the British expansion into the Malay States and elsewhere made it a significant colony in South-East Asia. From Singapore, the British expanded into the Malay States, deriving considerable economic and political benefits. The British were able to consolidate their influence in the Malay Peninsula and deter other colonial powers, especially the Dutch and the French, from expanding into the Malay States and Thailand. [Soon 1991:371].

The 1819 Anglo-Malay Treaty formalized relations between Britain and the Malay

authorities. It is interesting to note the echoes of the exclusive treaties imposed on the Gulf

during in the late nineteenth century (indeed, the Malay treaties seem to have been a model for

the versions imposed on the Gulf). In return for British “ protection” against external enemies,

the British were permitted to establish a “factory,” a European trading post (Chew 1991:36). This

was, moreover, to be an exclusive treaty, forbidding the Malay authorities to make deals with

other foreign states. The Temenggong, the local chieftain of Singapore, was to receive half of all

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levies on from native vessels (Chew 1991:37). In 1823, the British extended control over the

entire island, with the Temenggong and the Malay Sultan agreeing to receive allowances for life

in exchange for renouncing rights to port duties (Chew 1991:39).

If there is a parallel between the exclusive treaties between the British and the Malay

authorities and the Gulf sheikhs, respectively, that is largely where the similarity ends (at least

for the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth). As Christopher Davidson has

shown, the British treaty system isolated the Gulf and made it a desperately impoverished region

until the successive oil booms between the 1930s and the 1970s (Davidson 2008). Emirates such

as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Qatar were among the poorest, least developed parts of the Middle

East until the 1970s. In the nineteenth century, Singapore became one of the premiere entrepots

in the world, a bastion, and exemplar of the free trade ideology (Ken 1991). Singapore’s

innovation was that it was a free port, something that Dubai would in fact emulate in the future.

Indeed, as we will see below, among the strategies of the rulers of Dubai were their attempts to

poach Gulf trade from rivals by adopting free port policies throughout the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, it should be added that, while imperial functionaries such as Curzon saw in

the Qasimi and Sulu sultanates “the quintessence of an Islamic world whose activities centered

about piracy and slavery” (Bose 2006:45), another and less self-serving view of “piracy” is as the

resistance of local peoples to monopolistic European trading practices in the imperial era (Bose

2006:45). The British “solution” to piracy – the creation of pliable, centralized, autocratic states

deploying a unitary, European-style sovereignty – would have a momentous impact on the Indian

Ocean states (Bose 2006:25).

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The Emergence of Nationalism and its Fate

This impact is perhaps best seen in the intersection of nationalism and the post-

independence trajectories of Dubai and Singapore. In the era of Indian Ocean Empire, the British

sought to put in place pliable local rulers and to envelope them in the trappings of “tradition” and

legitimacy. With respect to the Gulf emirates and the Straits Settlement, the British chose two

variants of a policy embedded in the same ideology and vision of sovereignty: unitary,

indivisible, “a major break from ideas of good governance and legitimacy that had been

widespread in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal domains and their regional successor states”

(Bose 2006:25). Moreover, and especially with respect to India after the Great Revolt of 1857,

and later the Bay of Bengal and the Arab Gulf emirates, the British “juxtaposed with their own

monolithic sovereignty a particularly fake version of sovereignty invested in reinvented

‘traditional’ rulers” (Bose 2006:25).

While India and the Gulf states were administered by Calcutta, in 1867 the administration

of the Straits Settlements was transferred directly to London in a bid to expand British capitalist

claims on the emerging Malay tin mining trade (Bose 2006:50). Again, British intervention was

justified in the name of stopping (Chinese and Malay) piracy. In 1874, the government of the

Straits Settlements imposed a British resident on the sultan of Perak, the so-called Pangkor

Engagement, whereby the sultan was bound to accept British advice “on all matters except those

concerning Malay religion and customs” (Bose 2006:51). The Pangkor agreement was soon

extended to Selangor and Sungei Ujong, and, by the late 1880s, to Pahang and Negri Sembilan –

in other words, to most of the states incorporated into the British-invented Malay Federation.

“If India and the western Indian Ocean experienced a transition to two versions of sovereignty – the unitary kind in provinces directly ruled by a British-dominated center and the personalized sort vested in subservient, yet autocratic, princes and

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chiefs – colonial Malaya presented the unique spectacle of a fusion of centralization and indirect rule within the same territories.” [Bose 2006:51—52].

Predictably, British domination benefited local elites in both the Gulf and the Southeast

Asian contexts, in particular, Dubai’s (and Abu Dhabi’s, although not Sharjah’s) invented

dynasts, on the one side of the Indian Ocean, and Singapore’s British-connected capitalist elite,

on the other. However, while the independence and post-independence periods witnessed broad

continuity in Dubai, they saw a break in Singapore. This was primarily the result of the ways in

which the two cities experienced the transition from colonial domination to independence in the

period of the emergence of nationalism.

In the Trucial Emirates (the present-day UAE), according to Christopher Davidson,

Britain’s successful attempt to create a system of “robust, British-dependent dynasties” resulted

in the arrest of the “centuries-old ebb and flow of tribal power” (Davidson 2008:18). I would go

even further to maintain that British intervention arrested the very possibility of substantive

politics in the UAE. During the 1950s, a nationalist movement inspired by Nasser emerged in the

Trucial Emirates, with Dubai as its focal point. Known as the Dubai National Front (DNF), it

began mobilizing in the early 1950s as a simple ethnic-nationalist project - attacking the Dubai

ruler for his close allegiance with Persian and Indian merchants. However, by the mid-to late-

1950s, the DNF began to broaden its platform, adopting a more ethnically pluralistic, anti-

colonial, and social-reformist agenda (Davidson 2008:39—54). British imperial archives from

the 1950s evince the distaste if not paranoia on the part of the British Resident and Political

Agent vis-à-vis the “Nasserite threat.” The new dynasts, such as Abu Dhabi’s Zayed bin Sultan

Al Nahyan and Dubai’s Rashid bin Said Al Maktoum, shared this distaste. For example, Rashid

routinely executed British desiderata, such as the deportation or arrest of nationalists and

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reformers. Both Zayed and Rashid, moreover, offered to personally pay for a continued British

presence in their domains after London’s decision to dismantle the empire east of Suez in 1968

(Davidson 2008:63).

At independence in 1971, the UAE state (and those of its two most significant constituent

emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai) took the form Britain had intended: dynastic and autocratic

rather than republican or constitutional (let alone nominally socialist or anti-colonial). Davidson,

in his useful new study of Dubai, puts it well: “the Political Resident was well aware that the

Trucial states (along with Qatar) were relatively ‘primitive and needed to be kept under a more

colonial character,’ and therefore recommended a much looser system that still retained

monarchical sheikhdom-level powers and respected local institutions” (Davidson 2008:59,

emphasis added). The term “local institutions” is to be understood here more specifically as

referring to political institutions of a hierarchical, unitary, and “tribal” nature, conflating “tribal

consultation” with what is sometimes called the Gulf’s “Arabian” version of democracy.

From a reformist republican perspective, the timing of UAE independence was

unfortunate. The British role in ensuring that the southern Gulf states took a conservative cast

should be contextualized in the post-1947 collapse of the British Indian and Near Eastern

empires, evidenced by Indian independence, the rise of Nasser, and the Suez debacle, of course,

but also by less celebrated events such as the decolonization of Zanzibar and the overthrow of its

invented dynast in 1963—1964 and British withdrawal from and the inroads of Arab nationalism

into Yemen in the mid- to late-1960s (Davidson 2008:59).

The path that the Singapore state took, by contrast, was the result of the coincidence of

timing and war. If Britain had a relatively free hand in shaping the outcome of independence in

the Arab Gulf, it had no such luxury in Southeast Asia. The Syonan, or Japanese occupation,

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years (1942—1945) were a (bloody) interregnum between a British-dominated prewar order and

a relatively robust, independent republican postwar order in Singapore. An important part of the

legacy of the Japanese occupation, according to Eunice Thio, was its puncturing of the image of

an invincible British empire. Lee Kuan Yew and his colleagues belonged to the generation that

went through the occupation. Thus, it is interesting to compare, on the one side, the conclusion

that Lee drew from the collapse of British and Japanese occupation, with, on the other side, the

Emirati dynasts’ desire for continued British protection. Lee: “There was never a chance of the

old type of British colonial system ever being repeated” (Thio 1991:110). According to Thio, this

assertion symbolizes Singapore’s independent and self-sufficient postwar streak (Thio

1991:111). This is in striking contrast to the tendency among Arab Gulf states to adjust oil

production rates to suit American consumer market demands, engage in desperate scrambles to

attract British and American military protection, and peg their currencies to the US dollar.

While the British, via their protégés, the Al Maktoum and dynasts, succeeded in

destroying the reformist tendencies, through either expulsion or co-optation of the most

troublesome nationalist elements, reformist tendencies in Singapore, triggered by struggle

against British and Japanese occupation, were incorporated into the state as it came increasingly

under the control of Lee’s Peoples Action Party (PAP). Like their counterparts in the Gulf, these

tendencies tended to be secular and progressive; but unlike in the Gulf, they also significantly

expanded the space for republican and reformist policies - and would become a force with which

the PAP had to reckon. Part of this can be explained by the fact that the PAP shared certain

reformist commitments, such as socialism and distributive developmentalism, if in a politically

defanged version enabling eventual one-party rule. Nevertheless, the Communists, feminists (e.g.

the Malay Women’s Welfare Association), and trade unions that were in the vanguard of

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Singapore reformism (Thio 1991:110—111) were largely absent in the British-invented “tribal,

monarchical, and primitive” UAE.

Post-Independence Dubai and Singapore: The Relative Roles of “Formal” and “Informal” Economies

The distribution of power and forms which popular participation (or lack thereof) took in

Dubai and Singapore, respectively, were thus results of each city’s specific path to independence.

While the main theme of post-independence in both cities is the increasing centralization and

authoritarianism of the state, there were also significant differences in the respective paths taken.

While the PAP sought to break with the colonial past by applying a statist and developmentalist

toolkit, in Dubai, the role of private-sector merchant houses was more significant. In the case of

the latter, this was much more in keeping with pre-independence traditions, where merchants and

rulers had tended to collude in, for example, protection-for-subsidy pacts, and the drafting

commercial laws (Field 1985:8—9, Herb 1999:54).

Of all the Gulf States, the boundary between ruler and merchant was most permeable in

Dubai. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the state began to commission private companies to

provide public services such as utilities. The boards of these “public” institutions consisted of the

ruler and notable merchants (Heard-Bey 1982:260). Another example of the continuity between

pre-independence and post-independence is protection, which is in turn connected to capital

flight. Hawala (non-traceable cash-transfer trade) and, I would suggest, the real estate sector

(often a reservoir for money laundering), would be current examples. The market-protection

aspect of these sectors was anticipated by the favorable land and tax-free deals between the

Dubai rulers and Persian merchants in the early twentieth century. A third example is smuggling,

where a continuity exists between the trade in gold and contraband in the middle period of the

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twentieth century and the current trade, going through Dubai and its neighbor Sharjah, in illegal

minerals, endangered species, arms, and stolen cars (Bowcott 2002, Brown 2002, Burke et al.

2000, Campbell, et al. 2001, O’Brien 2003, Field 1985, Traynor, Bowcott, and Aglionby 2004).

Thus, there is something of an understatement when Michael Field writes that Dubai is “not so

much a state as a diversified industrial, banking and trading enterprise, headed by (the ruler) as

chairman of the holding company” (Field 1985:60).

Smuggling should not be extracted from its global contexts in the shipping industry and

the real (as opposed to the “formal”) economy. Both Singapore and Dubai are among the world’s

top ten shipping hubs (Deutsche Bank Research 2006:8). In 2004 Singapore accounted for 21.3

million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU), while Dubai ports accounted for 6.4 million TEU

(Deutsche Bank Research 2006:13). Indeed, in 2005 Asian shipping accounted for the majority

of the world’s activity, nearly double that of Europe and North America combined (Deutsche

Bank 2006:1). As Carolyn Nordstrom has put it:

A shipping container can “contain” arms, cigarettes, and the latest pirated DVDs, along with a host of other commodities ranging from the seriously illegal to the merely mundane … such transits work more smoothly than they would if all routes were separate: arms buyers find an easy market for cigarettes, videos, and information technology (or Mach 3 razors, 4 X 4 all-terrain vehicles, or pornography). [Nordstrom 2007:8]

She adds, “more than 90 percent of world trade is conducted by the international shipping

industry. Around 50,000 ships registered in 150 countries are manned by more than a million

sailors from virtually every country in the world” (Nordstrom 2007:115). Moreover, “the most

sophisticated ports in the world can inspect a maximum of only 5 percent of the cargo passing

through customs” (Nordstrom 2007:118). Thus, it is safe to deduce that “smuggling” and

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“informal” trade account for a significant amount of trade through both Singapore and Dubai, a

significant symbol of continuity from both cities’ early entrepot periods.

Although entrepot traffic continues to play a significant role in Singapore’s economy, its

relative significance has declined in the post-independence period, with first commerce and, by

the 1970s, manufacturing taking more central roles (Hwa 1991:197). Indeed, while much of

Dubai’s economic approach – such as state intervention in the economy, the centrality of free

ports and FDI, and even annual shopping festivals and shopping tourism – is modeled on that of

Singapore, Singapore’s industrial and banking sectors are far more advanced than Dubai’s

(Marchal 2005:97).

In Singapore, the state has been much less laissez-faire, directly participating in any

sector of the economy considered vital, such as shipbuilding, the national airline, and the

national petroleum company (Hwa 1991:213—214). This might seem similar to the case of

Dubai. The difference, however, is that in Singapore, these state enterprises would be seen

(ideally, if not in fact) as the national patrimony, with an obligation to some notion of the

national welfare. In Dubai, enterprises such as the various real estate ventures owned by the ruler

and the national airline, Emirates, tend to be seen as private, landlord ventures. Hence the

prevalence of seemingly redundant real estate projects and multiple airline companies in each of

the UAE emirates. One of the reasons that Singapore was relatively less impacted than its

neighbors by the Asian economic crisis of 1997—1998, and why it may weather the current

world crisis better than Dubai, is its efficient, centralized infrastructure, which has tended to

enable the state to take swift action in periods of rapid change (Ho 2009:83).

By contrast, the two city-states are similar in their centralization and authoritarianism. As

Roland Marchal has suggested, Dubai may in fact be borrowing from the toolkit that Singapore

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had established with such striking results after independence (Marchal 2005). But whereas in

Singapore, state power was deployed through actual institutions of the state, in Dubai, the ruler

established private sector institutions, in competition with if not more powerful than the state, to

deploy its expanding claims on territory and segments of the economy. The closest parallel to

Singapore’s state-run Economic Development Board (EDB), for example, would be Dubai’s

Executive Council. Both Singapore’s EDB (and its spinoffs, the Jurong Town Corporation and

the Development Bank of Singapore), and Dubai’s Executive Council, are charged with

economic planning, investment policy, and land management. However, while the first acts

within the confines of the state, the latter is meant to circumvent it. Singapore is often analogized

as a corporation and so indeed is Dubai. But Dubai’s demography (at least 80 percent of the

population is non-national) combined with its access to Abu Dhabi’s petrodollars mean that it is

an even more dramatic case of “city as corporation” than is its Southeast Asian counterpart. The

lack of accountability of the ruler and the sixteen-member Executive Council “is a testament to

Dubai’s particularly strong version of (Gulf states’ common policy of popular cooptation) and its

more business-focused national population that to some extent views the government as a board

of directors rather than as a forum for political participation” (Davidson 2008:159).

Both the Maktoum and PAP regimes thus avail themselves of intensely authoritarian

state or quasi-state apparatuses where political participation is closely regulated and dissent is

inconceivable. Among the corollaries of this is the centralization of the state or quasi-state. One

indicator of this phenomenon is land tenure in Dubai. Waleed Hazbun argues that land tenure, in

which the state (i.e., the Dubai royal family) claimed all territory not claimed by other Dubai

nationals at the time the current land regime was established around 1960, has resulted in the

Dubai state’s “total territorial control” (Hazbun 2008:216—217). Moreover, “even those with

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property rights have only limited autonomy over the range of uses they may make of (property).

In this form of capitalism, the private sector is given rights to ownership of capital and to profits,

but the state retains the prerogative over the disposition of territory” (Hazbun 2008:217).2

However, it is important to remember that while urban development is the sphere of the private

or quasi-private sector (in the form of the ruler’s Executive Council shadow state), urban

planning is the sphere of the public sector. When tensions between the two emerge, the latter

tends to win out. This has resulted in a type of economic and urban practice which privileges

competition among landlords over coordination and centralization, fueling the recent speculative

bubble (Davis 2006:59).

Dubai: Entrepot on the Neoliberal Frontier

Although any economy where transnational shipping plays a major role will inevitably

rely on the “informal” sector (Nordstrom 2007), informality has had an arguably much larger

proportionate role in Dubai than in Singapore. Geographically and economically, Dubai may be

regarded as an entrepot astride one of the more volatile boundaries of the post-1970s global

economy.

The independence of the UAE (1971) and the establishment of Dubai’s first free-trade

zone at Jebel Ali (1979—1980) bookend a number of events of regional and global significance

– and as a result, a premium was placed on the stable, small-scale port economy and banking—

protection platform that characterized developments in Dubai. Oil was discovered in Abu Dhabi

in 1958 and in Dubai in 1969. Soon after independence, the national oil industry was

reconstituted, with Abu Dhabi acquiring a 60 percent stake in the country’s largest oil company.

This was followed by the 1973 OPEC embargo and economic booms in the Gulf, Iran, and Iraq.

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Between 1968 and 1973 Dubai’s economy expanded sevenfold (Zahlan 1978:185). Meanwhile,

wars and coups convulsed the region. Lebanon was destroyed in a protracted civil war and by

foreign invasions, the effects of which still afflict the country (enabling Dubai to take over

Beirut’s functions as a banking, finance, and tourism capital of the Arab world). Radical Islam

filled vacuum left by Arabism, nearly toppling the Al Saud and doing so to the Shah in 1979.

The USSR fumbled into Afghanistan, also in 1979.3

Dubai’s significance to the region – not only the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, but

also a transcontinental arena connecting Africa, East Asia, and Russia – began to increase at this

moment. It became a central node in a rapidly reconfiguring geography of various kinds of

mobility. By the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and neoliberal restructuring in India

reinforced connections with these regions. During the 1990s, for example, a large number of

chelnoki, Russian itinerant traders, arrived in Dubai. Tourists and real estate investors soon

followed. In a recent estimate, there were about ten thousand Russian citizens living permanently

in Dubai (Starostin 2007). India, for its part, has supplied not only working class migrants but

also middle class professionals, making Dubai home to one of the most prosperous Indian

communities in the world (Economist 2002) and also a platform for South Asian money

laundering, with both Dubai and Singapore, as well as Hong Kong, operating as off-shore

linkages in the hawala network (Janardhan 2007).

Iraq and Iran are also central to Dubai’s modern evolution. Large human and capital flight

to Dubai from Iraq began after the Gulf War of 1991. These movements continue today, for

obvious reasons, but for less obvious ones, re-export from Asia, especially of Japanese stolen

cars, goes through Dubai to Iraq (Bowcott 2002, Parker and Moore 2007).4 In fact, re-exports

from Dubai to Iraq increased to $550 million in 2002, from $176 million in 2000 (Marchal

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2005:96—99). Dubai is also considered the “economic capital of Iran” (Marchal 2005:96, see

also Adelkhah 2001). In 2004—2005, 50 percent of re-exports out of Dubai were going to Iran.

Meanwhile, about 70 thousand Imarati nationals are of Iranian origin, and they along with the

approximately one hundred thousand Iranian migrants in the UAE, facilitate the operations of the

three thousand Iranian companies in the country (half of which are based in Dubai). Since the

Revolution, the United States and Iran officially broke off relations, but continued to trade with

each other by way of Dubai (Marchal 2005:99). Other examples since the 1990s include

Chechnya and Afghanistan. In the case of the latter, the Taliban was recognized by only a

handful of states, the UAE among them. In 2000, Afghanistan was the tenth largest market for

Dubai re-exports (Marchal 2005:99).

Although connections between Africa and Dubai go back to the period of the British

Empire, the current reconstitution of Dubai as a central node along African networks is more

recent, dating to the end of the Cold War (see Fenelon 1976 and Marchal 2005 for two different

perspectives).5 Restructuring in various parts of Africa, often as a direct result of the USSR’s

collapse, guided the capital “freed” from these countries, increasingly, to Dubai. In the aftermath

of September 11, 2001, Nigeria’s elites, for example, shifted laundering activities from Europe

and the United States to the Middle East by establishing front companies in Dubai (International

Oil Daily 2007). In the 1980s, formal economies in many African countries collapsed or

weakened significantly. “Second” or informal economies filled the gap. This resulted in the

eclipse of the “socially thick” welfare state by the “socially thin” neoliberal extraction state

(Ferguson 2006:197—198, see also Ferguson 2005 and Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Structural

readjustments imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s exacerbated, if not

caused, this trend. This process led to the emergence of new entrepreneurs who could not operate

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within the formal banking system and who looked for products cheaper than those in traditional

European markets, products that are in plentiful supply in the duty-free malls of Dubai (Marchal

2005:104—106). With the end of Cold War, aid to African countries shriveled. By 1980s and

1990s, the development differential between Asia and Africa, which was about equal in the

1950s, greatly favored Asia. All of this coincided with the expansion of Dubai, the celebrated

boom of the Gulf studies literature, as the city became the interface between the two continents.6

In this context of political collapse and economic restructuring in the region surrounding

Dubai, it is unlikely that the rise of the duty-free and free-trade zones, transshipment, and

irrational-seeming consumption patterns are coincidental. The local institutional structure is

intentionally organized to capitalize on such events. The lifestyle that the municipality advertises

is tax-free, the corporate regulations of the state enable total profit repatriation, and workers’

rights and environmental protections are non-existent. In other words, a great deal of cash and

humanity is unmooring itself, or has become unmoored, from continent and empire-sized regions

and is heading to nodes of stability in the post-1970s world economy. Dubai has largely

succeeded in capitalizing on such volatility.

Neoliberal Singapore, Neoliberal Dubai: “Baroque Ecology” and “The City—Corporation”

Since the 1990s, both Singapore and Dubai have adapted a set of strategies that can

loosely be termed “neoliberal.” Here there are remarkable similarities. The neoliberal turn is also

a good study, both in the role of ideology and symbolic values in shaping the policies and

strategies of global cities, and in the ways in which such strategies, in turn, reshape local values.

The 1997—1998 Asian economic crisis is a watershed in Singapore’s specific neoliberal

turn, pushing the city-state to try to reposition itself as a hub for the global knowledge-driven

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economy (Ong 2007:178). The government’s agenda for the early twenty-first century was to

diversify Singapore’s strategy to complement manufacturing, especially in currently leading

areas such as electronics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals (Ho 2009:79), with informational and

technological production appealing to an increasingly interconnected global economy inflected

by new alignments of localism and regionalism. This strategy envisions Singapore as an

incubator for re-territorializing Asian business and a testing site for drugs and treatments targeted

at Asian patients (Ong 2007:182—183).

This has entailed two kinds of re-conceptualization, pertaining, respectively, to the spatial

imaginary of the state and to the ethical and symbolic dimensions of Singaporean identity, in

other words, what it means to be culturally Singaporean. With regard to the first, the city-state

framing of the state’s sovereignty has been reformulated along the lines of what Aihwa Ong calls

“Baroque ecology.” “Baroque or complex ecology,” she writes, suggests,

The spatial formation that repositions the city-state as a hub in an ecosystem created from the mobilization of diverse global elements – knowledge, practices, and actors – interacting at a high level of performance … The Singaporean ecosystem puts into play multiple domains, technologies, and actors so that their futures become intertwined in a network of sustainability. [Ong 2007:180].

At a basic level, this is perhaps best exemplified by the concept of the growth triangle

(GT), in effect a regionalization strategy meant to enhance regional advantage in the global

economy (Ong 2007:88). In Singapore’s case, the GT strategy is pursued through the so-called

Sijori, or Singapore—Johore—Riau GT, which connects the city-state to both Malaysia and

Indonesia in an attempt to align each state’s labor and technical resources in complimentary

ways (Ong 2007:89). From Singapore’s perspective, the advantage of the GT is that it allows the

city-state “to retain command/control functions at home while moving ‘low-end’ jobs offshore. It

20

takes advantage of cheap Indonesian labor, and it also ameliorates tensions over the presence of

too many guest workers within the city-state” (Ong 2007:89).

Baroque ecology, however, also has symbolic—cultural ramifications. This is the second

arena in which the claims of the Singaporean state over territory and citizens are being subtly

reformulated. The management and efficiency of the emergent ecology, according to Ong,

require “a complex reorganization of ethical norms” (Ong 2007:180). In other words, “the

knowledge ecology that has been forged is meant to shake Singaporeans out of their

conventional ambition of working for multinational corporations and instead become

knowledgeable, risk-taking entrepreneurs who help attract investments from global firms” (Ong

2007:183).

“A kind of biosociality” has emerged in which Singaporeans often have to question

deeply held beliefs to fully participate in the new neoliberal order (Ong 2007:184). Examples

include pharmaceutical-industry provocations of Malays to overcome reservations about surgery

and organ transplants, and the problematization of Chinese values of guanxi, kin- and

community-based definitions of economic competition. Thus, according to Ong, the ethical and

symbolic implications of being Singaporean are being reshaped by environments dominated by

global pharmaceutical firms and other multinational corporations in which the figure of the

Western entrepreneur takes precedence over that of the “traditional” Chinese merchant (Ong

2007:185—189).

In the case of Dubai, the neoliberal turn has, similarly, initiated a process of dialectical

adaptation of values – the neoliberalization of selected local ideas about capitalism and

entrepreneurialism, but also the Arabization of neoliberal values – as part of a larger strategy,

similar to that of Singapore’s, to make the Emirati city-state a knowledge economy hub (Kanna

21

forthcoming). Perhaps even more explicitly than is the case with Singapore, the ruler and the

Executive Council (as already mentioned) analogize the city as a corporation. The ruler calls

himself the “CEO of Dubai, Inc.” and recent attempts have been made to supply this ideology

with academic cachet. An influential Emirati academic, for example, has deployed the terms al-

madina al-marka (the city as brand), al-madina al-qudwa (the Dubai model), and, crucially, al-

madina al-sharika (the city—corporation) to capture what is seen by Dubai elites as the essential

identity of the city (Abdullah 2006). Drawing on local discourses and narratives about Dubai’s

free-market history, neoliberal reformulations of Dubai’s Arab version of neoliberalism become

ideological instruments for legitimizing total control by the Executive Council. Thus:

Non-interference by the state in the economy is the law for all aspects of life in the city—corporation … a city which offers a pool of skilled, cheap labor, 100 percent profit repatriation, non-interference in any way by the UAE state in the operations of the free zones, especially when it comes to labor laws, as well as lack of taxes and speed and ease of communications with other cities and capitals of trade and finance. [Abdullah 2006:15].

Moreover, as in Singapore, the neoliberalization of Dubai has entailed a certain targeting

of Dubai citizens in the realms of their bodily being and subjectivity, a kind of “biopolitics”

carrying a set of “technologies of the self” aimed at reshaping this subjectivity.7 An example of

this can be seen in the governmentality (Foucault 1991) of the knowledge economy enclaves of

Dubai (Kanna forthcoming). These are free zones such as the Knowledge Village, Dubai Media

City, and Dubai Internet City – known collectively as the Technology and Media Free Zone

(Tecom) – where the state provides the infrastructure and exceptional governance regime to

attract multinationals to Dubai. To manage Tecom, the state puts in place a member of the

Executive Council at the head of the organization (during the time of my fieldwork, this was

Ahmad bin Bayyat) and recruits young, English-speaking, often Western-educated Emiratis to

22

positions of managerial influence. As I show in a recent essay (Kanna forthcoming), these

Tecom employees regard both the organization and themselves as exceptional, well-educated,

and uniquely prepared – in terms of social background and temperament – to embody and

articulate what they call the “vision” of the ruler and the Executive Council. This vision,

predictably, is expressed well by such figures as Thomas Friedman: a Dubai that has supposedly

disengaged itself from what is stereotyped as an Arab world of tyranny, state socialism, and anti-

Western attitudes, and which has “properly” adapted the lessons of a West valorized as

entrepreneurial, progressive, and selfless in its dealings with the non-Western world (Kanna

2007, Kanna forthcoming).

In other words, like their Singaporean counterparts, an individual from among the elite

class in the Dubai population is selected by the neoliberal state and provided with an exceptional

regime of rights and obligations. In turn, by internalizing and embodying this regime, these

subjects indicate their capacity to take up the vocation of being a “worthy citizen,” as Ong has

put it in the context of Singapore. By doing so, these subjects enter into a “moral calculus” which

requires them “both to excel at self-management and to be globally competitive and politically

compliant” (Ong 2007:194).

It is also important to note some differences in Singapore’s and Dubai’s respective

strategies. This is evident from the way in which each city-state has approached the issue of

expanding its global links. Put simply, Singapore’s approach, via the EDB, has been to establish

offices in foreign locations staffed by its own representatives as a way of creating a global

network for economic intelligence-gathering and channeling investment to Singapore (Ho

2009:76). Initiated with the Frankfurt office in 1966, this network has expanded throughout

Europe, as well as to the United States and Asia. It is a means for keeping track of the shifts in

23

the global economy and a way of connecting Singapore to emerging sectors within this economy.

Thus, by the early twenty-first century, the EDB shut down the Hong Kong office and opened

branches in Shanghai, Beijing, Bombay, and Guangzhou (Ho 2009:77).

As Ong has put it, “first, a site like Singapore redefines itself not within an established

urban system but in relation to an emerging network of symbiotic flows. Second, by pulling

together elements from disparate sites, the hub intertwines its future with that of global

organizations” (Ong 2007:179). The same, largely, can be said of Dubai. But while the EDB’s

efforts have been guided by investment, Dubai’s globalization approach applies the toolkit of

franchising. Founded between 1999 and 2004, Al Maktoum spin-off companies such as EMAAR

and Nakheel and parastatals such as Dubai Ports Authority (DP) and Dubai Holding (DH) have

become an integral part of Dubai’s active interconnections with other cities and regions in Asia,

Africa, and Europe. The Rice University architecture scholar Neyran Turan has coined the term

“the Dubai Effect” to describe this phenomenon: “Dubai development and investment projects

are packaged first as a brand within their own locality and then exported and franchised

adaptively as templates of compact urban organization to various spots in the world” (Turan

2008). Turan describes how EMAAR, Nakheel, and DH projects have now spread to places such

as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Syria, and other Arab countries, as well as to Germany, Britain,

the Czech Republic, Turkey, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States.

She points to four aspects of this expansion: real estate developments, free-trade zones, iconic

high-rise developments, and leisure/themed developments. An example of the first, according to

Turan, is DH’s Smart City, a joint venture with the Maltese government drawing on the expertise

of DH subsidiaries in the information technology and communications industries (specifically,

the Internet and Media Cities and the Knowledge Village of Dubai). The Maltese look at this,

24

ironically, as part of the island’s economic dynamism and, thus, its European identity. The free-

trade zone of Dakar, Senegal is modeled on Dubai’s Jebel Ali free-trade zone (headed, like DH,

by Executive Council member Muhammad Al Gergawi) and is an example of the second type of

development, according to Turan. With the real estate developer Sama Dubai, a subsidiary of

DH, Turkey and Morocco are developing the third type, iconic “brand” projects named,

respectively, “Dubai Towers-Istanbul” and “Dubai Towers-Casablanca.” Finally, Croatia,

Greece, Mauritius, Montenegro, the Seychelles, and South Africa are each tapping Dubai’s

Istithmar Properties (a Dubai government firm run by the Executive Council’s Ahmad bin

Sulaym) in a joint effort to develop golf-based leisure projects. Turan also describes diverse joint

ventures between Dubai and Djibouti (ports) and Saudi Arabia (free-trade enclaves).

Conclusion: After the Crisis

With 20 percent of its exports going to the American market, Singapore’s problems

during the current crisis have much to do with the collapse of the commercial trading sector

(Wijaya 2008). Ironically, however, a large part of the reason that the city-state finds itself in a

sticky situation is that it has been adapting Dubai-like real estate practices.8 In this, the historical

pattern – in which Dubai followed Singapore’s example in the investment, tourism, and free port

arenas – was reversed. Starting around 2004—2005, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment

Authority, the city-state’s land-use planning body, “drew up blueprints for world-class casinos,

theaters and residential areas” (Wright 2009). The projected Sentosa Cove project, a gated

community of multi-million dollar mansions, was modeled on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, the

Nakheel (i.e., Maktoum) land reclamation project in the shape of a palm-tree jutting off Dubai’s

coast. Sentosa Cove was part of a larger attempt to make Singapore, like Dubai, a luxury

25

expatriate and resort-tourism destination, an enterprise undertaken during times of strong growth.

Between 2004 and 2007, the Singapore economy grew by more than six percent annually,

growth based on the city-state’s electronics exports and shipping. During roughly the same time

period, around half a million expatriates made Singapore “the densest concentration of

millionaires in the world” (Wright 2009). Real estate seemed like a logical growth area. Dubai-

like financing policies were approved: investors were permitted to make down payments of only

20 percent. The market soared, speculation ran amok, and by 2007 the market began overheating.

Today, prices have cratered. Small, private developers have gone bankrupt and are unable to

secure bank loans. Foreign investors have been spooked, no longer regarding Singapore as a safe

reservoir for FDI.

Dubai’s real estate policies, and therefore the gravity of its current problems, have been

even more extreme. An architect friend recently sent me a list of over 50 projects that have either

been cancelled or put on hold. The values of these projects are not insignificant, ranging from

between $70 million and $38 billion, and the clients include some of Dubai’s major firms, such

as Nakheel, Tatweer, and Istithmar. Like in Singapore, easy credit seems to have been the main

culprit. As Mike Davis observes, a majority of Dubai properties were acquired for speculative

purposes in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York, when Middle Eastern

investment shifted from the United States and Europe to Dubai. Combined with spikes in oil

prices during 2004—2005, the region became awash in money, which was in turn ploughed into

real estate. Investors began flipping these properties “in the contemporary Miami manner”

(Davis 2006:59). Davis’s skepticism has therefore proven to be well-placed: “Will Dubai

someday fall from the sky when this real-estate balloon bursts, or will peak oil keep this desert

Laputa floating above the contradictions of the world economy?” (Davis 2006:59). It seems that,

26

for the moment, the former scenario is transpiring, with Abu Dhabi uncharacteristically and

perhaps for federal—political reasons withholding a petrodollar-fueled bailout (Worth 2009).

What lessons do the crisis and its effects on Singapore and Dubai hold? First, the recent

shift to a neoliberal-style governmentality, noticed by Ong in the case of Singapore and by

myself in the case of Dubai, may yet lead in unexpected directions. Dubai, for example, is

already showing signs of a return to the dreaded distributive-welfare state style that people such

as Bin Bayyat and other neoliberals had decried as retrograde during the boom years. For

example, new laws make it illegal for private sector firms to fire Emirati employees and

“damaging the country’s reputation” is now punishable by a fine of over $270,0000 (Issa 2009,

Worth 2009). What Ong called “baroque ecology,” complex and confounding of state-territorial

boundaries, may be rethought as the Singapore and Dubai—UAE states reassert a more

monolithic version of state control over crucial sectors of the economy. The fundaments of the

free port, city-state approach may be reconceived.

Second, and more generally, the experiences of Dubai and Singapore will hopefully

inspire some fresh thinking about the role of spectacular and privatized landscapes in the urbanist

strategies of global cities. For the past three decades, it was a truism of urban development that

what Sharon Zukin has called “the artistic mode of production” is a sane and rational way to

develop cities. As cities started to compete for image recognition to attract tourism and

investment in an increasingly image-mediated and interconnected global economy, real estate

development, especially of brash, expensive, privatized landscapes, took on reckless proportions.

A best-case scenario would be a new debate about the value of urban development which takes

seriously community, local, and social justice – in other words, “public” – values. Crises are

27

natural terrains for breeding cynicism, but they also contain a latent potential for progress. One

should not be unhopeful.

28

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Notes

I am indebted to Xiangming Chen, Vijay Prashad, Waleed Hazbun, Arang Keshavarzian, and Farha Ghannam for valuable feedback.

1 As someone who is much more familiar with Dubai than Singapore, my observations will naturally tend to focus more closely on the former. This paper is part of a projected larger project on the two cities – hence the sections on Singapore are meant to be tentative and exploratory rather than authoritative – and is meant to initiate a discussion about two cities that have received far less comparative attention than I think they should. 2 In general, I agree with this, especially as it applies to Hazbun’s object of analysis, tourist-oriented real estate. However, the territories to which large non-royal merchant families have claims, and therefore the types of development non-royal corporations undertake, are considerable (if not as large as the territory controlled by the Al Maktoum). Examples would be the Futtaim, Ghurair, and Zarooni families, each of whom operates massive shopping and tourist/resort properties. This “fragmentation” of tenure applies especially to the retail sector. Hence the numerous large, functionally and urbanistically redundant shopping malls all over Dubai. 3 And, one could argue, so too did the United States, which is still reaping the blowback from this and other examples of so-called containment. See Johnson 2000. 4 Christopher Parker and Pete Moore write about “southern (Iraqi) cities overrun with goods coming over the border from Iran and re-exported from Gulf ports, primarily Dubai” (Parker and Moore 2007:13). 5 Fenelon, for example, tells us that the carrying trade was a central Dubai economic activity in throughout the nineteenth century. Between December and March, sailing vessels made use the northeast monsoon to take them to Mombasa, Zanzibar and Dar Es-Salaam, while between April and September, they returned with the southwest monsoon (Fenelon 1976:64). 6 All figures in this paragraph, unless otherwise noted, are taken from Marchal 2005:103—104. 7 My thanks to Farha Ghannam for pointing this out. Personal conversation, 26 January 2009. 8 All data on Singapore in this paragraph is taken from Wright 2009.