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The oil-kingdoms of the Gulf have been very responsive to the Bush Administration's appeal to democratization. As a matter of fact, countries like Kuwait and Bahrain have quite a long experience in political participation as their regimes always had to deal with civil societies. However, while both countries have elected parliaments, their democratic institutions have always had to fight against the authoritarian tendencies of the rulers. Indeed, the latter conceive political participation as a way to strengthen their power. The need is all the more urgent for them now that the welfare state they set up following the oil-boom of the 1970s is on the verge of collapse, putting in question the notion of citizenship as a set of exclusively social rights.

Laurence Loüer is Research Fellow at the Centre d'études et de recherches internationales (CERI) and Permanent Consulting at the Centre d'analyse et de prévisions (CAP) of the French Foreign Affairs Ministry. Specialist in the Arab Middle East, she works on the Gulf area and has written Les Citoyens arabes d'Israël (Paris, Balland, 2003).