88WE HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEMcannot take away their benefits. According to Beblawi and Luciani, subsi-
dies, once extended, become rights. Weak and legitimacy- deficient rentier
states could neither retract them nor restrict them to the poor. “Cutting
subsidies,” they wrote, is “not qualitatively different from raising taxes:
either of the two is feasible only if the state enjoys solid democratic legiti-
mation, justifying the degree of repression which may on some occasions
be necessary.”^5
What I provide next is just a brief sketch of the academic “prohibi-
tions” on the kind of reforms advocated by al- Rumhy and other tech-
nocrats; I have also done a much deeper treatment elsewhere.^6 The view
of state welfare functions as “rights” was endorsed by the political sci-
entist F. Gregory Gause III in his 1994 book on the Gulf states. After two
decades of oil- derived state benefits, he argued, “a substantial part of the
citizenry has ceased to regard these benefits as temporary benefices from
their rulers, and has come to see them as rights of citizenship.”^7
Attempts to unwind social benefits, such scholars claimed, would
invite demands for democracy or incite opposition. “Were the Gulf mon-
archies to find themselves unable to meet their end of the economic
bargain with their citizens, the future of their political systems could be
called into question,” wrote Gause.^8 Cutting subsidies “holds the risk of
alienating large portions of their populations who have come to expect
extensive welfare state benefits as their right as citizens.”^9
Later scholarship only intensified the subsidy- as- rights theme.
Authors portrayed the state’s obligations as growing increasingly rigid,
alongside rising citizen expectations and incomes. “The Gulf Arabs
feel an entitlement to their share of the countries’ oil wealth,” wrote
Michael Herb in 1999. Citizens do not feel gratitude to ruling families for
sharing oil rents, because they “think that they themselves, as citizens,
own the oil, not the ruling families.... Few are particularly grateful on
receipt of something they think is theirs in the first place.”^10 Kiren Aziz
Chaudhry argued in a 1997 book that in Saudi Arabia, “welfare programs
defined citizenship.” She illustrated the principle by showing how citizen
opposition forced the Saudi government to reverse an attempt to cut sub-
sidies on fuel, water, and electricity during the oil bust in 1988.^11
Regime survival, these scholars agreed, entailed safeguarding patron-
age no matter what— even in the face of two decades of sustained low