The transformation of Saudi Arabia’s rentier state and ‘the international’

ABSTRACT

The Saudi state is conventionally characterized as a neo-patrimonial rentier state that emerged out of a combination of traditional domestic social structures and oil wealth. However, the conceptualization of the rentier state as endogenously generated based on ‘traditional’ society is an example of Eurocentric institutionalism. In this article, I draw on literature that has sought to ‘internationalise’ the East Asian developmental state concept to show that Saudi rentier state formation has historically always been ‘international’. Thus, while Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman claims that his current economic reforms are opening up Saudi Arabia’s rentier economy to globalization, the restructuring of the rentier state is only the latest episode in this process, which was shaped by the colonial era in the Gulf and the transformation of an American-dominated global economy since World War II. The ‘internationalisation’ of the rentier state concept thereby also holds wider lessons for other neo-Weberian statist concepts such as failed or weak states.

KEYWORDS:

• Rentier state
• developmental state
• Saudi Arabia
• Middle East
• South Korea
• Eurocentrism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Christian Henderson, Toby Matthiesen, and Roberto Roccu for their comments on earlier drafts of the article. Previous versions of this article were presented at the EISA European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS), Cardiff 2017, and the BISA International Political Economy Group (IPEG) conference, Liverpool 2017. The author would like to thank the participants of both workshops for their perceptive comments and suggestions, as well as the organizers: Clemens Hoffmann, Cemal Burak Tansel, and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Hannes Baumann http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0100-1841

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship [grant number ECF-2013-308].

Notes on contributors

Hannes Baumann

Hannes Baumann is a lecturer in the politics department at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Citizen Hariri: Lebanon’s neoliberal reconstruction (Hurst: London/Oxford University Press: New York, 2017).