The Congress of Vienna and the New Gulf Order: Sustaining the Status Quo

The latest Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit held this week is, in several ways, redolent of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 held in the aftermath of the French Revolutionary Wars that engulfed autocratic Europe in the early nineteenth century.

Since its outbreak in the late eighteenth century, the French revolution and subsequent declarations on the “rights of man and of the citizen” caused havoc in Europe and disturbed its existing hierarchies. The overthrow of the Directory in 1799 and Napoleon’s ascension to power did not improve things for Europe’s monarchs. His wars from 1803 to 1815 were brutal against those who opposed him as the French armies burned villages and executed civilians. However, more important for Europe’s monarchs was the fact that Napoleon’s wars disturbed the balance of power in Europe and spread the ideas of enlightenment and revolution throughout the continent. In lands he conquered, Napoleon ended serfdom and replaced arbitrary systems of justice with written legal codes granting rights and equality for all men (not for women though, who he considered “nothing more than machines for producing children”).

After defeating Napoleon, princes, dukes, and counts representing Europe’s sovereign powers (Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain) came together in Vienna, the Habsburg capital, to pacify a continent shaken by war and revolution. At the Congress of Vienna, monarchs, nobles, and clergy were to be restored to their dominant position. The representatives created an international mechanism (the Concert of Europe) to maintain the Conservative Order (based on the principle of dynastic legitimacy) and prevent their thrones from being swallowed up by future movements calling for political reform and civil rights. So pompous and ostentatious was the Congress that the renowned English poet Lord Byron called it “that base pageant.”

More absurd than the balls, fireworks, and ballooning that the Austrian hosts organized for their guests was the “Holy Alliance” that came out of the Congress. The Russian tsar, Austrian emperor, and Prussian king declared that, as “the delegates of the Providence,” they would repress any demands that would threaten the power that God, somehow, bestowed upon them.

Today, at the December 19 opening of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s two-day summit in Riyadh, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia proposed a union between GCC countries that aims at “economic integration,” “a customs union,” and “a common market.” However, there is something else that he is deeply anxious about and intends to tackle with this union.

This GCC summit is the first to be organized on the level of the top leaders in the aftermath of the Tunisian uprising that sparked the fires of revolution across the Arab world and reached, daringly, the Gulf region’s well-protected domains. Earlier this year, protests have spread in GCC countries where repression is rife and democracy is non-existent, and the GCC has ruthlessly put down the pro-democracy uprising against the Bahraini monarchy with military force and money.

Deep concern about this “virus” (to borrow Senator John McCain’s label for the Arab Spring when it knocked on Hosni Mubarak’s door) is evident in the Riyadh Declaration, issued at the end of the summit. The Declaration states clearly that the proposed union aims at developing a defense and security apparatus to ensure a “rapid, effective, united, and collective” response to any “danger or emergency.”

The union Abdullah is proposing is an attempt to institutionalize the tribal and sectarian solidarity shown against the Bahraini protesters with an international mechanism à la the Concert of Europe, hoping that it will crush any future protest in the region.

With the joint GCC zeal for maintaining the status quo, it is no wonder that among the Arab countries rocked by massive popular uprisings (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria), the Bahraini monarchy’s grip on power has been the least affected by the Arab Spring.

Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, and Ali Abdullah Saleh were all brutal in dealing with demonstrations but have now, in different ways, gone. Bashar Assad continues to display savagery in dealing with the Syrian protesters, but he is facing international and regional consequences for his despicable crimes.

The United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions and travel bans against his regime and called for Assad to step down. The GCC leaders and their controlled and subservient press and satellite television channels have done their share to expose the brutality of the Assad regime, hoping to replace it with a Sunni state more aligned with them and their Western patrons.

Meanwhile, shielded by the GCC and the hypocrisy of the Western nations that the Global South is very well accustomed to, the Bahraini regime’s grip on power remains more or less intact. In fact, GCC petrodollars are pouring into the kingdom like never before, and the US is rewarding it with tear gas rounds (which could not be exported without a license from the US government) and is now looking into rewarding it further with even more arms.

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Worse, instead of calling on the regime to step down after all its murder, torture, imprisonment of protesters, and destruction of houses of worship, the US Department of Defense touted the Bahraini regime as “a major non-NATO ally that has been, and continues to be, an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.”

With GCC and international support, the Bahraini regime has no qualms about keeping its aged prime minister at his post, even though the young Bahraini protesters have known no other prime minister in their lifetime.

The Saudi initiative for a union between GCC countries is just the latest effort to push back against the Arab Spring even beyond the Gulf’s frontiers. The GCC has shielded Ben Ali and Saleh from prosecution and vowed to bankroll the then-beleaguered Mubarak when the United States threatened to cut aid to Cairo. It has now created a US$5 billion fund for the Moroccan and Jordanian monarchies, supposedly to support “development plans” in those countries.

Despite all these efforts, more repression and attempts to close down political and social spaces to contain future pro-democracy protests are unlikely to succeed in the long term.

From the perspective of a political scientist, Marc Lynch argues in a recent post on his Foreign Policy blog that the “GCC's current position is a bubble, sustained by artificial conditions which are not likely to remain over the coming years.”

If history, including that of the Congress of Europe, were to teach us anything, it would be that the legitimate demands of the masses will sooner or later prevail over the interests of the few that rule over them. To go back to the case of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, the conservative political systems that European monarchs had developed after the Congress of Vienna collapsed within 35 years.

Between 1848 and 1849, Europe was once again rocked by revolutionary movements, and the streets of France, Austria, Germany, and Italy witnessed insurgency and barricades that forced Europe’s monarchs to liberalize their political systems. France, again, provided the stimulus for the “springtime of the peoples” in 1848 and 1849 after French protesters drove Louis-Philippe from his throne.

In the Gulf region today, no matter how much money the Bahraini regime pours into American PR firms to burnish its image, Bahrain remains the most fertile ground for a large-scale protest and will continue to be plagued with instability until the legitimate demands of the protesters are addressed.

After almost ten months of murder, torture, imprisonment, and destruction of houses of worship, “Down, Down Hamad” and “Death to the House of Khalifa” are becoming increasingly unanimous shouts among the Bahraini protesters. In the long term, Bahraini authorities can rest assured that more repression will threaten the very survival of their regime.

Regionally, any crime Bahrain’s regime will commit against the pro-democracy protesters has the potential of turning into a spark. That spark may be capable of igniting the fires of protest in the neighboring eastern provinces in Saudi Arabia and beyond, and no regional union will likely be able to subdue it.

Faisal Husain is a graduate student of history at Yale University.

The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect Al-Akhbar's editorial policy.