Monday, February 05, 2007
Dubai - Part 2
I don't agree with the implied perception of how different nationalities in Dubai co-exist harmoniously. Anyone who has visited the desert state for even a day will begin to notice the segregation. At work, there is a hierarchical pay system based on the color of your passport.
Financial Times
Along its eastern edges on the Persian Gulf, the Arab world is undergoing a transformation more profound than any produced by its rival states, squabbling political parties or violent insurgencies.
Representing this transformation is Dubai, whose great wealth and extraordinary growth exists beyond oil, -construction and even the Middle East, since the United Arab Emirates imports the bulk of its population, -commodities and infrastructure from outside the region. But immigration is a non-issue here, along with nationalist hysterics and xenophobia, because the small number of Dubai citizens makes a national culture there impossible. Instead, Dubai's nationality exists in the form of advertising and commodities. It is to be found in the guise of leisure and entertainment, from shisha bars to desert safaris, whose designers, builders and consumers are foreigners.
Similar is the role of Arabic, whose formulaic presence in public signs and announcements serves only as a backdrop to the babble of Urdu, Russian, Persian and Tagalog that are the true languages of Dubai. There is only one common language - English - that even Arabs must use in their daily interactions with Chinese shopkeepers, Indian teachers and Iranian dentists.
Rather than representing a failure of modernity, Dubai's elimination of nationhood as a basis for identity portends a global future. It is the closest thing to a community organised by capitalism. Befitting a capitalist paradise, the UAE has a reputation for bad labour practices. But freed from cant about the national good, workers and management have recourse to a language beyond citizenship. It is not the greater good of the nation, but the good of the individual and of humanity at large that is invoked here. For in Dubai, even the state does not represent the collective will of its subjects but is only their arbiter.
Dubai is a technocracy, its ruling family the simulacrum of a monarchy. Having been granted their titles by the British in India, the UAE's rulers derive their glamour from the vanished world of the Raj, while functioning like presidents of corporations. Democracy is misplaced in Dubai, being possible only in a community of citizens. To confine democracy to the small minority of Emiratis is nonsensical and to offer citizenship to the country's majority absurd. Democracy means citizenship, citizenship means nationality and nationality means the creation of a majority. There is no ethnic, linguistic, religious or even political majority in Dubai, nor can there ever be one given its total reliance on a migrant and expatriate workforce.
If democratic representation is not part of Dubai's politics, public opinion certainly is, though its lively debates are not regulated by any national interest. But unchained from the collective ideal of citizenship, opinions, prejudices and identities remain disconnected fragments. Pakistani and Egyptian taxi drivers tell you of the bigotry they experience following the arrival of the most recent group of expatriates: whites from places such as Australia and South Africa. Many of these expatriates have been imported to Dubai precisely because they are white. Their contribution to the city is their colour, which fetches a high price in the bazaar, as it had in the slave marts of the past.
Dubai is heir to a long history of free ports, from Zanzibar to Hong Kong, providing the junctions along which international capital flowed. Crucial in opening up the ex-Soviet republics of central Asia to business, it is also important to countries already integrated into the global market. The Persian Gulf provides a huge country such as India with the bulk of its foreign revenue, in the form of labour remittances, keeps its national airline afloat and provides the world's largest film industry, Bollywood, with one of its major markets. The subcontinent's crime syndicates also operate out of here, with Dubai serving, among other things, as the transit point for pirated DVDs and other goods that are not allowed to move legally between India and Pakistan. Given the numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who live here, Dubai has even managed to reproduce the Raj by bringing its dispersed inhabitants together again.
The city is a junction for traffic of all kinds. Dubai plans to attract visitors who will outnumber its own shifting population more than 10 times over.It lives by re-exporting not onlyautomobiles and electronic goods, but also Russian dancers, Filipino lounge singers and British DJs, who have become fixtures in every Asian city worth its name. Along with its neighbours, Dubai even recycles the US; hence the fashion of building scaled-down versions of the White House, beginning in Kuwait after the firstGulf war and exported throughoutthe region. In Karachi, entire neighbourhoods are filled with WhiteHouse knock-offs, their pediments inscribed with gilded phrases fromthe Koran. Dubai also re-exports itself and may now be found in special economic zones across the world. But the most important thing it recycles is a global society that exists beyond the nation state.