THE TIDE TURNS 337
Certainly, governments could not depend on that tax base to fund their
ambitious development programs.
Once the ruling elite stopped depending on the traditional economy
for tax revenues, they no longer needed allies in that world. Even in total-
itarian dictatorships, the power elite have to propitiate some domestic con-
stituency. But in these oil-rich Muslim states, they could diverge from the
masses of their people culturally without consequence. The people they
did need to get along with were the agents of the world economy coming
and going from their countries. Thus did "modernization" divide these
"developing" societies into a "governing club" and "everyone else."
The governing club was not small. It included the technocracy, which
was not a mere group but a whole social class. It also included the ruling
elite who, in dynastic countries, were the royal family and its far-flung rel-
atives and in the "republics" the ruling party and its apparatchik. Still, in
any of these countries the governing club was a minority of the population
as a whole, and the border between the governing classes and the masses
grew ever more distinct.
People in the club were part of an exciting project, working to trans-
form their country. Those outside the club were passive beneficiaries of a
modernization that was simply happening to them. Suddenly a hospital
might go up nearby: good, now they could get better health care. Suddenly
a paved highway might appear nearby: good, now they could get to the
city quicker. But people outside the governing club had no role in mod-
ernization for good or ill, no share in decision making, no voice in how the
new money flowing into the country would be spent, no political partici-
pation in their country's transformation.
They also didn't get, as a by-product of modernization, enhanced
power to realize their personal dreams and goals, whatever those might
have been. In fact, even as oil-exporting nations got richer overall, those
outside the "governing clubs" grew relatively poorer.
For most people, the only hope of claiming a stake in their own coun-
try was to go to a government school, do well, go abroad (ideally), get a de-
gree, preferably in some technical field, and then break into the
technocracy. Anyone who took this route probably ended up wearing a
suit to work and living a life resembling that of people in the West. Their
time was regulated by clocks, their family tended to be "nuclear," their