Business
Reducing rich petro-states to their oil exports, palace intrigue, or religion hides what actually drives them. They are major sites of capitalism whose firms and investments reshape whole regions. To understand them, follow where their money flows and who gains from it.
In these monarchies there is no sharp line between the state and the capitalist class. State funds and private investors accumulate wealth side by side. Class relations are reproduced through both at once, across the Gulf and the wider Arab world.
A decade of high oil prices left Gulf investors, both state and private, with surpluses they recycled into a worldwide asset base worth several trillion dollars. The result is ownership of everyday infrastructure abroad, from landmark buildings and stock exchanges to nursing-home chains. Petro-states thus become landlords and owners inside the economies that buy their oil.
In a world economy marked by persistent over-accumulation, too much capital chases too few profitable uses. Petro-surpluses feed record-breaking investment vehicles. One tech fund was larger than everything the entire US venture capital industry raised over the preceding thirty months.
A rich state's grip on its neighbours runs less through armies or aid than through the firms that own their basic sectors. Gulf companies hold major stakes in neighbouring countries' farms and food trade, property development, power, water, telecoms, and banks. Control of these everyday businesses shapes how other countries' cities and economies are built.
There are no natural geographic units under capitalism. Regions are produced as flows of capital are claimed, regulated, and fought over. A region's map is redrawn whenever the direction of its money flows shifts.
When oil prices fall, governments issue grand 'Vision' plans for economic diversification and present them as neutral technocratic fixes. Each plan should be read by asking which social and class forces it enriches and which it leaves behind.
Small states can become indispensable by acting as 'super-connectors'. Their airlines, ports, and firms join distant zones of production and consumption. Their weight comes from controlling the circulation of goods, money, and people, not only from what they produce themselves.
New economic giants are tied to those who fuel them. Gulf states supplied nearly a quarter of world crude by 2014 and about a third of China's crude imports. Despite this, debates about emerging powers ignore these states almost entirely.
Neighbouring rich states that expand their capital across the same region come into conflict with one another. Their competition helps explain splits inside the group, most sharply the blockade of one member by its neighbours. It also sits alongside the wars and mass displacement shaping the region.