I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia, though now that I look at a map I see they’re not technically on the Persian Gulf.
I’ve heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries.
Ideally, Dubai and Singapore would both set up thalassocracies, competing in a friendly way for trade and citizens. Their cities could be adjacent to one another, kind of like Burger King and McDonalds.
Interestingly, one of your proposed colonial sites, Oman, already followed your plan, several centuries ago. They set up thalassocracies all down the coast of East Africa, and even moved their capital to Zanzibar, out-competing the incumbent Dutch and Portuguese thalassocracies. Those cities were indeed linked by trade routes, naval (but not air) power, and a common legal and administrative framework. Consider the career of Ibn Battuta, or indeed the entire Hadramawt.
What’s to stop your proposed thalassocracies being displaced in exactly the same way, by other, less capitalist, imperialists, or by violent nativist sentiment?
I’ve heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries.
(To do so would be a category error, because Dubai is in fact a city—and, unlike Singapore, not an independent one. The country it’s in is called the United Arab Emirates.)
As your own link says, Dubai is something equivalent to a principality. It seems to empirically cluster closer to Singapore than to, I don’t know, Istanbul.
You seem to be missing the point, which is about its political subordination to a larger entity. What I was attempting to correct was (possible) ignorance of the existence of the UAE.
Here are the first two sentences of my link (emphasis added):
Dubai (/duːˈbaɪ/ doo-by; Arabic: دبيّ Dubayy, IPA: [dʊˈbæj]) is the most populous city and emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the second largest emirate by territorial size after the capital, Abu Dhabi.[3] Dubai is located on the southeast coast of the Persian Gulf and is one of the seven emirates that make up the country
For all that an “emirate” may be similar to a “principality” (or, dare I say, a “count-y”), the fact remains that the political status of Dubai is different from that of e.g. the principality of Monaco, in the sense that Monaco is an independent country, and Dubai isn’t.
Dimensions along which Dubai is more similar to Singapore than Istanbul aren’t relevant to this point. (If someone pointed out that California was part of the United States, you wouldn’t argue with them by saying that it’s the seventh largest economy in the world [or whatever] and therefore “empirically clusters” with countries rather than states.)
In some legalistic sense Monaco may be more independent than Dubai. But in practical terms like “how different are its laws from France/UAE” I’d say it’s the opposite. My point about empirical differences wasn’t about economy, it’s that Dubai is much more like a sovereign city than like an ordinary city in a country, even in purely governmental terms like taxes and courts and so on.
Let’s pause for a moment for a meta-level reflection. You’re engaging in metacontrarianism, with the relevant uneducated/contrarian/metacontrarian triad being:
Dubai is a country / No, Dubai is part of the UAE / Dubai has a lot of power and autonomy within the UAE.
The trouble with metacontrarianism is that metacontrarians often seem to forget that even if they’re right—that is, even if the third level of the triad is true—the first level is still wrong. In some sense, you have to pass through the second level in order to legitimately claim the mantle of the third. (Here, “pass through the second level” means not “go through a stage of being at the second level” so much as “understand why, and in particular that, the second level is an improvement over the first”.)
I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she’s never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE’s version of Istanbul, Bob’s model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice’s, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it “might as well” be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.
Now, to return to the object level, I don’t actually see why Carol’s model is better than Bob’s. I don’t know that much about the internal politics of Turkey, but I assume that Istanbul, being a major city, is culturally and demographically different from most of the rest of the country, wields a lot of influence in the country’s politics, and has governmental policies that most other parts of the country don’t have. For that matter, the same is true of New York City, whether regarded as a part of New York State or of the United States. In neither of these cases do I see any need to give up the model that has these cities being politically subordinate to the nation-states (or states) that contain them, and I don’t see how the case of Dubai within the UAE is any different (or, anyway, different enough). And, conversely, even if Monaco is heavily influenced in its policies by neighboring France, I don’t see that as sufficient reason to remove from my model the notion that Monaco is an independent state, because otherwise we might as well say that Canada is part of the U.S., et cetera.
Dubai is a country / No, Dubai is part of the UAE / Dubai has a lot of power and autonomy within the UAE.
At this point in a discussion one would have to dissolve the word “country” and ask what properties of Dubai are important to the discussion. A glance at a few Wikipedia articles indicates that the UAE is a federation of kingdoms, in which all powers not explicitly granted to the federation are retained by the members, each of which has absolute sovereignty within its borders under a hereditary king. Before the UAE was created, the emirates were absolute sovereign entities (i.e. “countries”). After it was created what were they? Well, “are” the members of the EU “countries”? Yes. “Are” the states of the US? No. “Is” Dubai? Doesn’t matter, look instead at the question of substance, which was:
Ideally, Dubai and Singapore would both set up thalassocracies, competing in a friendly way for trade and citizens.
Dubai might want to first informally square things with the other members of the UAE (or at least, the one other member that matters, Abu Dhabi), but establishing overseas colonies, er, charter cities, would not necessarily be an activity that would officially concern the UAE federal entity.
At this point in a discussion one would have to dissolve the word “country” and ask what properties of Dubai are important to the discussion.
I never intended to enter the discussion in the first place; my original comment was parenthetical. I was simply pointing out a verifiable, objective, yet quite possibly tangential matter of fact that some participants (or readers) may have been unaware of.
Whether Dubai is a country or a part of a country is not a question that there’s any ambiguity about. It’s not a subject of dispute, as in the case of e.g. Taiwan. It’s a simple matter of looking the answer up in Wikipedia. If you want to question the answer you find there, fine, but then you have to question the notion of “country” in general, and acknowledge that you’re doing so, otherwise you’re not being intellectually honest.
if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she’s never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE’s version of Istanbul, Bob’s model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice’s, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it “might as well” be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.
I’m not trying to be metacontrarian. I disagree with this point. I think Bob’s model is less good than Alice’s in that it will make less accurate predictions of empirical facts (and potentially dangerous ones, given that e.g. alcohol is legal in some but not all of the emirates).
I think Bob’s model is less good than Alice’s in that it will make less accurate predictions of empirical facts (and potentially dangerous ones, given that e.g. alcohol is legal in some but not all of the emirates).
Forgive me, but this is preposterous. Neither model makes predictions about policy differences among the emirates, except insofar as Alice’s model predicts that the other emirates don’t exist. Different parts of a single country can have different policies, on alcohol or anything else, and do all the time. U.S. states have all kinds of differing laws. In California it’s illegal to have a pet gerbil; in other states it isn’t. You wouldn’t for one moment cite this as an argument that California is a country. Or would you?
On the other hand, here is an empirical question where the models do in fact differ: Alice’s model predicts that Dubai is a member of the UN and that the UAE (being nonexistent) isn’t, while Bob’s model predicts that the UAE is a member and that Dubai (being part of the UAE) isn’t. Which model’s prediction is more accurate?
Or how about this: which entity has embassies in other countries? Also an empirical fact. Which model predicts it correctly?
I suspect you know the answer as well as I do. I therefore don’t believe you when you say
I’m not trying to be metacontrarian....I think Bob’s model is less good than Alice’s
In California it’s illegal to have a pet gerbil; in other states it isn’t. You wouldn’t for one moment cite this as an argument that California is a country. Or would you?
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words (and the practical answer is that we have the word “state”, which usually means a country but also means California). But I’d certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country, and I’d warn people travelling there that the states of the US have some of the properties of countries and therefore it’s important to e.g. check state laws in a way that you wouldn’t do for subdivisions of more typical countries.
On the other hand, here is an empirical question where the models do in fact differ: Alice’s model predicts that Dubai is a member of the UN and that the UAE (being nonexistent) isn’t, while Bob’s model predicts that the UAE is a member and that Dubai (being part of the UAE) isn’t. Which model’s prediction is more accurate?
Or how about this: which entity has embassies in other countries? Also an empirical fact. Which model predicts it correctly?
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you’d want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you’re better off modelling it as a vegetable.
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words
However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an answer. The stopsign “that’s just an argument about the meaning of words” is useful in cases where a genuine ambiguity about the meaning of a word has caused a discussion to be diverted from its main topic, which was something else. But here, the meaning of words is the topic (as I noted in my reply to RichardKennaway, I entered this thread exclusively to point out the official political status of Dubai), and there’s no ambiguity about what the answer is. Indeed, there’s not even any argument. Rather, what we have is me pointing out a certain fact, and you (and others) evidently seeking to justify ignorance of that fact. To the extent there is any argument, it’s about how important the fact is, not about whether the fact is true.
The answers to semantic questions, when they exist, may not be ultimate or necessary or fundamental or even important, but they are still real.
But I’d certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country
Well, I suppose that depends on your point of view. For me, the US is the central example of a country, because it’s the one I live in and am a citizen of. I would in fact be curious to know what your idea of a “central” country is. One that’s smaller? Okay, but smaller countries still have political subdivisions (as indeed, do U.S. states themselves), and the whole point of political subdivisions is that policies may differ among them. France has a lot more centralization of policy than the US does, but I’ll still bet you that the municipal code of Paris is non-identical to the municipal code of Marseille. Spain’s “autonomous communities” definitely have differing laws from each other: Catalonia, for example, has banned bullfighting, which would be unthinkable in other parts of the country. Do you doubt that one could multiply such examples at will?
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you’d want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you’re better off modelling it as a vegetable.
“International-law technicalities” include things like what embassy you have to go to to get a visa to travel to the place. I dispute your implicit marginalization of these “technicalities”, just as I would dispute any notion that a tomato’s biological status as a fruit is mere pedantry. Biology is important, and so is international law.
But I didn’t intend to get into an argument about that, because I didn’t expect it to be controversial.
The answers to semantic questions, when they exist, may not be ultimate or necessary or fundamental or even important, but they are still real.
Language is a tool for communication. Daniel_Burfoot’s original post was clear (and “compare Dubai with other cities” would have been misleading); while a formulation like “compare Dubai with other zones where a particular legal and administrative system applies” might be technically more correct, I don’t think the difference justifies the verbosity.
Well, I suppose that depends on your point of view. For me, the US is the central example of a country, because it’s the one I live in and am a citizen of.
I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by “how distinct their political subdivisions are”, and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?
France has a lot more centralization of policy than the US does, but I’ll still bet you that the municipal code of Paris is non-identical to the municipal code of Marseille. Spain’s “autonomous communities” definitely have differing laws from each other: Catalonia, for example, has banned bullfighting, which would be unthinkable in other parts of the country. Do you doubt that one could multiply such examples at will?
A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical.
I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia...I’ve heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries
In the above, “the UAE” should replace “Dubai”. If the UAE is so heterogeneous a country that greater specificity is required, then it should read “the UAE (particularly Dubai)”, just as someone might write “the USA (particularly New York)”.
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is; they should be respectively “corrected” to {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, UAE} and {plane, train, boat, car}.
I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by “how distinct their political subdivisions are”, and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?
Mildly, but that disagreement is tangential. Even if the UAE has the most distinct political subdivisions of any country in the world, it is still a country, and its political subdivisions are still political subdivisions.
The distinction between a country and a non-country is pretty sharp as far as human societal constructs go. We have established institutions for adjudicating this question (such as the UN, international treaties, diplomatic relations, etc.), and the results they present on the specific case of Dubai vs. the UAE are pretty unambiguous.
A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical
I doubt it is, when adjusted for size (of both territory and population).
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That’s the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is
Again, I disagree; it’s a useful set for practical purposes, in the same way as {lettuce, cucumber, tomato}.
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That’s the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
Again, very much a US peculiarity. A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
To be explicit about something I wasn’t explicit about in my other reply:
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is
Again, I disagree; it’s a useful set for practical purposes
There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the “wrongness” of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists’ ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you’ve utterly failed since it appears you didn’t know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.
I am having a hard time understanding your motivation for vigorously defending ignorance of the UAE’s existence from my attempt to correct it. As far as I can tell, you’re worried that someone who thought Dubai was a country and knew that alcohol was legal there might, upon learning the indisputably true fact that Dubai is inside a country called the UAE, conclude that alcohol was legal in the rest of the UAE also—apparently on the assumption that products cannot be banned at any lower level of government than the national, in any country in the world. But anyone who makes such an assumption is likely to be suffering from a model of governance too fundamentally broken for this discussion to even matter to them. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine how a situation where someone practically benefited from ignorance of the UAE’s existence would even arise. After all, it would be unlikely for a foreigner to end up in Dubai without learning about the UAE in the very process of getting there. (If, as a result of this discovery, they hatched a plan to take alcohol from Dubai to some other emirate where it wasn’t legal, perhaps they would have been better off not knowing that the latter was in the same country; but it would be too late.)
Given this, I really don’t understand what the harm is in educating people about the existence of the UAE in a context like this, a discussion of hypothetical geopolitics on a sophisticated website. I didn’t even claim the fact was terribly important; the parentheses in my original comment were intended to be the functional equivalent of labeling the comment a “nitpick”. I do think that it is the kind of fact that readers of this site ought to know, if they don’t already. It’s not as if the cost of learning it were high.
A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
This is once again tangential, but what matters here is not whether policy contingently happens to be uniform throughout a country (because all localities agree on the correct policy), but whether the uniformity necessarily holds because localities don’t have the power to make their own policy. For example, the fact that alcohol is legal throughout Australia is presumably a mere consequence of the fact that none of the states or territories have chosen to ban it, even though they theoretically could if they wished. (EDIT: Actually, Australia does have dry zones, though this seems to refer to public or outdoor consumption.) It goes without saying that alcohol policy variations are not limited to outright bans; for instance, in the Netherlands, it is apparently true that
Drinking in public places is not banned by national law, but many cities and towns prohibit possession of an open container of an alcoholic beverage in a public place
(emphasis added). The point here is that practically-important policy is very often made at non-national levels of government, all throughout the world.
I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she’s never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE’s version of Istanbul, Bob’s model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice’s, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it “might as well” be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.
The difference is that the various Emirates of the UAE (including Dubai) have far more internal autonomy then even US states to say nothing of Istanbul.
Having a top-level domain doesn’t make an entity a country. Lots of indisputably non-countries have top-level domains. Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.
Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.
Well, it’s sufficiently independent of the UK to function as a tax haven. It’s definitely one of those entities that’s on the fuzzy boundary between country and non-country, along with Hong Kong and (in a slightly different way) Dubai.
If you follow your definition, rather than intellectually dishonestly changing definitions in every comment, you should stop calling Belgium a country. Or start calling Dubai one. If your point is merely to point out the existence of UAE and its small effect on the relative country-ness of Dubai, your original statement should not have been absolute.
You appear to be using as your definition of country “member of the UN.” If you want a canonical list of countries, that’s about all you can do. But I don’t trust authority to list countries just as I don’t trust authority to list poisons.
You appear to be using as your definition of country “member of the UN.” If you want a canonical list of countries, that’s about all you can do. But I don’t trust authority to list countries just as I don’t trust authority to list poisons.
We differ on that point, then. The concept of “country” as I intend it here is more or less entirely a matter of what authorities list (in contrast to the concept of “poison”, which involves the question of whether something kills you). The authorities here aren’t epistemic ones pointing to empirical facts, but are rather political ones making declarations that they intend to enforce.
“Member of the UN” is at least a sufficient condition for countryhood, and the sense of my original comment is approximately the same as if it read:
You’re talking about Dubai in a way that suggests you might be under the impression that it’s a member of the UN. But it’s not; instead, it’s part of a member called the UAE.
Well, in practical terms “setting up” a thalassocracy in such places would have to start with landing a pretty sizeable army on the shore and fighting it out with the locals. Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan (and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...).
“Nation-building” in the Middle East and environs has been a pretty miserable failure so far.
To be clear, I am definitely not advocating large scale military invasion and occupation. The external power would take over a tiny bit of land—say 1000 km2 - to set up a city.
Let’s do a quick comparison between Yemen and Singapore:
Land area (Km2): Yemen 5e5, Singapore 7e2
Population: Yemen 2.4e7, Singapore 5.4e6
Population density (person/km2): Yemen 4.4e1, Singapore 7.5e3
GDP (nominal $) : Yemen 3.6e10, Singapore 3.3e11
The point is that Singaporean institutions are vastly more efficient at turning land area (an intrinsically scarce commodity) into liveable and economically viable polity.
One way to formulate the goal of political development is to attempt to maximize the number of people living under good, efficient, non-corrupt governments. The thalassocracy concept is a way of implementing that goal without major political upheaval (e.g. revolution, war, massive immigration, etc).
I am definitely not advocating large scale military invasion and occupation. The external power would take over a tiny bit of land—say 1000 km2 - to set up a city.
So, a small-scale military invasion and occupation??
The issue isn’t land you will be taking over, the issue is people. Some of them (probably a lot) will not want your thalassocracy. Some of them (and in Yemen, pretty much all of them) will be adept with weapons.
without major political upheaval (e.g. revolution, war...
You want to come into the Middle East, set up an enclave completely different (politically, culturally, etc.) from anything around it and you don’t expect war? Um, may I suggest you ask the Israelis about how well it works X-/
The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy, i.e., hand over power to the locals as quickly as possible, I believe Daniel’s plan would avoid this.
(and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...)
The problem both the Russians and British had was interference by rival powers, the US and Russia respectively. The Russians also had the problem that the economic system they wanted to impose being dysfunctional.
The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy
I don’t think it mattered what the US attempted to establish and, actually, I don’t think it tried any such thing anyway.
In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority. Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times, I am pretty sure that’s not what OP has in mind.
actually, I don’t think it tried any such thing anyway.
They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.
In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority.
Old-style colonialism wasn’t based on crushing military superiority, during the British Raj the number of British born troops in India was a tiny fraction the the native troops. Thus the British relied on the cooperation of large numbers of Indians and Indian troops.
Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times,
What do you mean by this? Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?
They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.
Elections are no big deal. Mugabe holds elections, Putin holds elections, hey, even Assad recently held elections.
Old-style colonialism wasn’t based on crushing military superiority
Yes, it was. Certainly, it wasn’t just military superiority, especially once the colonies were established, and the British, for example, became masters of control through political and financial means as well. However the military strength was the underlying bedrock.
Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?
Which particular laws of nature do you have in mind?
Well, the US forces actually attempted not to rig them.
No need to, the locals can do everything necessary. The US forces just provided the money and prevented the “undesirables” from playing.
Whichever laws you invoked when you said implied that “old-style colonialism won’t work in our time” is a reasonable hypothesis.
I did not invoke any laws of nature. I think that in the current social, political, informational, military, etc. global environment the old-style colonialism is highly unlikely to work. No laws of nature are involved in this assertion.
The Gulf is impoverished?
Besides, isn’t Dubai just a better version of Singapore?
I was thinking of Yemen, Oman and Somalia, though now that I look at a map I see they’re not technically on the Persian Gulf.
I’ve heard good things about Dubai, but not enough to do a serious comparison between it and other countries.
Ideally, Dubai and Singapore would both set up thalassocracies, competing in a friendly way for trade and citizens. Their cities could be adjacent to one another, kind of like Burger King and McDonalds.
Interestingly, one of your proposed colonial sites, Oman, already followed your plan, several centuries ago. They set up thalassocracies all down the coast of East Africa, and even moved their capital to Zanzibar, out-competing the incumbent Dutch and Portuguese thalassocracies. Those cities were indeed linked by trade routes, naval (but not air) power, and a common legal and administrative framework. Consider the career of Ibn Battuta, or indeed the entire Hadramawt.
What’s to stop your proposed thalassocracies being displaced in exactly the same way, by other, less capitalist, imperialists, or by violent nativist sentiment?
(To do so would be a category error, because Dubai is in fact a city—and, unlike Singapore, not an independent one. The country it’s in is called the United Arab Emirates.)
As your own link says, Dubai is something equivalent to a principality. It seems to empirically cluster closer to Singapore than to, I don’t know, Istanbul.
You seem to be missing the point, which is about its political subordination to a larger entity. What I was attempting to correct was (possible) ignorance of the existence of the UAE.
Here are the first two sentences of my link (emphasis added):
For all that an “emirate” may be similar to a “principality” (or, dare I say, a “count-y”), the fact remains that the political status of Dubai is different from that of e.g. the principality of Monaco, in the sense that Monaco is an independent country, and Dubai isn’t.
Dimensions along which Dubai is more similar to Singapore than Istanbul aren’t relevant to this point. (If someone pointed out that California was part of the United States, you wouldn’t argue with them by saying that it’s the seventh largest economy in the world [or whatever] and therefore “empirically clusters” with countries rather than states.)
In some legalistic sense Monaco may be more independent than Dubai. But in practical terms like “how different are its laws from France/UAE” I’d say it’s the opposite. My point about empirical differences wasn’t about economy, it’s that Dubai is much more like a sovereign city than like an ordinary city in a country, even in purely governmental terms like taxes and courts and so on.
Let’s pause for a moment for a meta-level reflection. You’re engaging in metacontrarianism, with the relevant uneducated/contrarian/metacontrarian triad being:
Dubai is a country / No, Dubai is part of the UAE / Dubai has a lot of power and autonomy within the UAE.
The trouble with metacontrarianism is that metacontrarians often seem to forget that even if they’re right—that is, even if the third level of the triad is true—the first level is still wrong. In some sense, you have to pass through the second level in order to legitimately claim the mantle of the third. (Here, “pass through the second level” means not “go through a stage of being at the second level” so much as “understand why, and in particular that, the second level is an improvement over the first”.)
I submit to you that if Alice thinks Dubai is a country because she’s never heard of the UAE, and Bob thinks that Dubai is the UAE’s version of Istanbul, Bob’s model of the political geography of the Arabian peninsula is still better than Alice’s, even if Carol, who thinks that Dubai is so different from the rest of the UAE that it “might as well” be a country in its own right, has a better model than Bob.
Now, to return to the object level, I don’t actually see why Carol’s model is better than Bob’s. I don’t know that much about the internal politics of Turkey, but I assume that Istanbul, being a major city, is culturally and demographically different from most of the rest of the country, wields a lot of influence in the country’s politics, and has governmental policies that most other parts of the country don’t have. For that matter, the same is true of New York City, whether regarded as a part of New York State or of the United States. In neither of these cases do I see any need to give up the model that has these cities being politically subordinate to the nation-states (or states) that contain them, and I don’t see how the case of Dubai within the UAE is any different (or, anyway, different enough). And, conversely, even if Monaco is heavily influenced in its policies by neighboring France, I don’t see that as sufficient reason to remove from my model the notion that Monaco is an independent state, because otherwise we might as well say that Canada is part of the U.S., et cetera.
At this point in a discussion one would have to dissolve the word “country” and ask what properties of Dubai are important to the discussion. A glance at a few Wikipedia articles indicates that the UAE is a federation of kingdoms, in which all powers not explicitly granted to the federation are retained by the members, each of which has absolute sovereignty within its borders under a hereditary king. Before the UAE was created, the emirates were absolute sovereign entities (i.e. “countries”). After it was created what were they? Well, “are” the members of the EU “countries”? Yes. “Are” the states of the US? No. “Is” Dubai? Doesn’t matter, look instead at the question of substance, which was:
Dubai might want to first informally square things with the other members of the UAE (or at least, the one other member that matters, Abu Dhabi), but establishing overseas colonies, er, charter cities, would not necessarily be an activity that would officially concern the UAE federal entity.
I never intended to enter the discussion in the first place; my original comment was parenthetical. I was simply pointing out a verifiable, objective, yet quite possibly tangential matter of fact that some participants (or readers) may have been unaware of.
Whether Dubai is a country or a part of a country is not a question that there’s any ambiguity about. It’s not a subject of dispute, as in the case of e.g. Taiwan. It’s a simple matter of looking the answer up in Wikipedia. If you want to question the answer you find there, fine, but then you have to question the notion of “country” in general, and acknowledge that you’re doing so, otherwise you’re not being intellectually honest.
I’m not trying to be metacontrarian. I disagree with this point. I think Bob’s model is less good than Alice’s in that it will make less accurate predictions of empirical facts (and potentially dangerous ones, given that e.g. alcohol is legal in some but not all of the emirates).
Forgive me, but this is preposterous. Neither model makes predictions about policy differences among the emirates, except insofar as Alice’s model predicts that the other emirates don’t exist. Different parts of a single country can have different policies, on alcohol or anything else, and do all the time. U.S. states have all kinds of differing laws. In California it’s illegal to have a pet gerbil; in other states it isn’t. You wouldn’t for one moment cite this as an argument that California is a country. Or would you?
On the other hand, here is an empirical question where the models do in fact differ: Alice’s model predicts that Dubai is a member of the UN and that the UAE (being nonexistent) isn’t, while Bob’s model predicts that the UAE is a member and that Dubai (being part of the UAE) isn’t. Which model’s prediction is more accurate?
Or how about this: which entity has embassies in other countries? Also an empirical fact. Which model predicts it correctly?
I suspect you know the answer as well as I do. I therefore don’t believe you when you say
Whether we ultimately consider California a country or not is just an argument about the meaning of words (and the practical answer is that we have the word “state”, which usually means a country but also means California). But I’d certainly say that the US is a very noncentral example of a country, and I’d warn people travelling there that the states of the US have some of the properties of countries and therefore it’s important to e.g. check state laws in a way that you wouldn’t do for subdivisions of more typical countries.
Well of course the model that contains the correct the international-law technicalities is the model you’d want to use if you wanted to predict international-law technicalities. Just like if you want to predict where to find a tomato in a biology textbook, you should model it as a fruit. But if you want to know what to cook with it, you’re better off modelling it as a vegetable.
However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an answer. The stopsign “that’s just an argument about the meaning of words” is useful in cases where a genuine ambiguity about the meaning of a word has caused a discussion to be diverted from its main topic, which was something else. But here, the meaning of words is the topic (as I noted in my reply to RichardKennaway, I entered this thread exclusively to point out the official political status of Dubai), and there’s no ambiguity about what the answer is. Indeed, there’s not even any argument. Rather, what we have is me pointing out a certain fact, and you (and others) evidently seeking to justify ignorance of that fact. To the extent there is any argument, it’s about how important the fact is, not about whether the fact is true.
The answers to semantic questions, when they exist, may not be ultimate or necessary or fundamental or even important, but they are still real.
Well, I suppose that depends on your point of view. For me, the US is the central example of a country, because it’s the one I live in and am a citizen of. I would in fact be curious to know what your idea of a “central” country is. One that’s smaller? Okay, but smaller countries still have political subdivisions (as indeed, do U.S. states themselves), and the whole point of political subdivisions is that policies may differ among them. France has a lot more centralization of policy than the US does, but I’ll still bet you that the municipal code of Paris is non-identical to the municipal code of Marseille. Spain’s “autonomous communities” definitely have differing laws from each other: Catalonia, for example, has banned bullfighting, which would be unthinkable in other parts of the country. Do you doubt that one could multiply such examples at will?
“International-law technicalities” include things like what embassy you have to go to to get a visa to travel to the place. I dispute your implicit marginalization of these “technicalities”, just as I would dispute any notion that a tomato’s biological status as a fruit is mere pedantry. Biology is important, and so is international law.
But I didn’t intend to get into an argument about that, because I didn’t expect it to be controversial.
Language is a tool for communication. Daniel_Burfoot’s original post was clear (and “compare Dubai with other cities” would have been misleading); while a formulation like “compare Dubai with other zones where a particular legal and administrative system applies” might be technically more correct, I don’t think the difference justifies the verbosity.
I think we could form a reasonably uncontroversial ranking of countries by “how distinct their political subdivisions are”, and the US would be close to one end of the scale (though not quite as far along as UAE). Do you disagree?
A typical country has some minor variations within the country (though perhaps not if we restrict ourselves to law rather than administrative codes), sure. But I think the scale of variation seen in the US is very much atypical.
Here is more of the context:
In the above, “the UAE” should replace “Dubai”. If the UAE is so heterogeneous a country that greater specificity is required, then it should read “the UAE (particularly Dubai)”, just as someone might write “the USA (particularly New York)”.
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is “wrong”, for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} is; they should be respectively “corrected” to {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, UAE} and {plane, train, boat, car}.
Mildly, but that disagreement is tangential. Even if the UAE has the most distinct political subdivisions of any country in the world, it is still a country, and its political subdivisions are still political subdivisions.
The distinction between a country and a non-country is pretty sharp as far as human societal constructs go. We have established institutions for adjudicating this question (such as the UN, international treaties, diplomatic relations, etc.), and the results they present on the specific case of Dubai vs. the UAE are pretty unambiguous.
I doubt it is, when adjusted for size (of both territory and population).
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That’s the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
Again, I disagree; it’s a useful set for practical purposes, in the same way as {lettuce, cucumber, tomato}.
Again, very much a US peculiarity. A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
To be explicit about something I wasn’t explicit about in my other reply:
There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver’s-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the “wrongness” of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists’ ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.
But I can’t be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you’ve utterly failed since it appears you didn’t know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.
I am having a hard time understanding your motivation for vigorously defending ignorance of the UAE’s existence from my attempt to correct it. As far as I can tell, you’re worried that someone who thought Dubai was a country and knew that alcohol was legal there might, upon learning the indisputably true fact that Dubai is inside a country called the UAE, conclude that alcohol was legal in the rest of the UAE also—apparently on the assumption that products cannot be banned at any lower level of government than the national, in any country in the world. But anyone who makes such an assumption is likely to be suffering from a model of governance too fundamentally broken for this discussion to even matter to them. Furthermore, it’s hard to imagine how a situation where someone practically benefited from ignorance of the UAE’s existence would even arise. After all, it would be unlikely for a foreigner to end up in Dubai without learning about the UAE in the very process of getting there. (If, as a result of this discovery, they hatched a plan to take alcohol from Dubai to some other emirate where it wasn’t legal, perhaps they would have been better off not knowing that the latter was in the same country; but it would be too late.)
Given this, I really don’t understand what the harm is in educating people about the existence of the UAE in a context like this, a discussion of hypothetical geopolitics on a sophisticated website. I didn’t even claim the fact was terribly important; the parentheses in my original comment were intended to be the functional equivalent of labeling the comment a “nitpick”. I do think that it is the kind of fact that readers of this site ought to know, if they don’t already. It’s not as if the cost of learning it were high.
This is once again tangential, but what matters here is not whether policy contingently happens to be uniform throughout a country (because all localities agree on the correct policy), but whether the uniformity necessarily holds because localities don’t have the power to make their own policy. For example, the fact that alcohol is legal throughout Australia is presumably a mere consequence of the fact that none of the states or territories have chosen to ban it, even though they theoretically could if they wished. (EDIT: Actually, Australia does have dry zones, though this seems to refer to public or outdoor consumption.) It goes without saying that alcohol policy variations are not limited to outright bans; for instance, in the Netherlands, it is apparently true that
(emphasis added). The point here is that practically-important policy is very often made at non-national levels of government, all throughout the world.
The difference is that the various Emirates of the UAE (including Dubai) have far more internal autonomy then even US states to say nothing of Istanbul.
That is not a response to the paragraph quoted. (It is arguably a response to the paragraph following the one quoted.)
Same applies to (say) Hong Kong and yet I can’t recall anyone calling Hong Kong a country.
Well ICANN for starters.
Having a top-level domain doesn’t make an entity a country. Lots of indisputably non-countries have top-level domains. Nobody thinks the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a country, and yet .gg exists.
Well, it’s sufficiently independent of the UK to function as a tax haven. It’s definitely one of those entities that’s on the fuzzy boundary between country and non-country, along with Hong Kong and (in a slightly different way) Dubai.
A couple days ago I did see an article somewhere calling Jersey a country, though.
Belgium is more subordinate to the EU than Dubai is to the UAE.
So what? Dubai is still more subordinate to the UAE than you would have thought if you didn’t know the UAE existed.
If you follow your definition, rather than intellectually dishonestly changing definitions in every comment, you should stop calling Belgium a country. Or start calling Dubai one. If your point is merely to point out the existence of UAE and its small effect on the relative country-ness of Dubai, your original statement should not have been absolute.
You appear to be using as your definition of country “member of the UN.” If you want a canonical list of countries, that’s about all you can do. But I don’t trust authority to list countries just as I don’t trust authority to list poisons.
We differ on that point, then. The concept of “country” as I intend it here is more or less entirely a matter of what authorities list (in contrast to the concept of “poison”, which involves the question of whether something kills you). The authorities here aren’t epistemic ones pointing to empirical facts, but are rather political ones making declarations that they intend to enforce.
“Member of the UN” is at least a sufficient condition for countryhood, and the sense of my original comment is approximately the same as if it read:
Well, in practical terms “setting up” a thalassocracy in such places would have to start with landing a pretty sizeable army on the shore and fighting it out with the locals. Kinda like the US experience in Afghanistan (and the Russian experience there before, and the British experience there before that...).
“Nation-building” in the Middle East and environs has been a pretty miserable failure so far.
To be clear, I am definitely not advocating large scale military invasion and occupation. The external power would take over a tiny bit of land—say 1000 km2 - to set up a city.
Let’s do a quick comparison between Yemen and Singapore:
Land area (Km2): Yemen 5e5, Singapore 7e2
Population: Yemen 2.4e7, Singapore 5.4e6
Population density (person/km2): Yemen 4.4e1, Singapore 7.5e3
GDP (nominal $) : Yemen 3.6e10, Singapore 3.3e11
The point is that Singaporean institutions are vastly more efficient at turning land area (an intrinsically scarce commodity) into liveable and economically viable polity.
One way to formulate the goal of political development is to attempt to maximize the number of people living under good, efficient, non-corrupt governments. The thalassocracy concept is a way of implementing that goal without major political upheaval (e.g. revolution, war, massive immigration, etc).
So, a small-scale military invasion and occupation??
The issue isn’t land you will be taking over, the issue is people. Some of them (probably a lot) will not want your thalassocracy. Some of them (and in Yemen, pretty much all of them) will be adept with weapons.
You want to come into the Middle East, set up an enclave completely different (politically, culturally, etc.) from anything around it and you don’t expect war? Um, may I suggest you ask the Israelis about how well it works X-/
The difference is that the US attempted to establish democracy, i.e., hand over power to the locals as quickly as possible, I believe Daniel’s plan would avoid this.
The problem both the Russians and British had was interference by rival powers, the US and Russia respectively. The Russians also had the problem that the economic system they wanted to impose being dysfunctional.
I don’t think it mattered what the US attempted to establish and, actually, I don’t think it tried any such thing anyway.
In any case, you seem to be arguing for old-style colonialism based on crushing military superiority. Even leaving aside whether it will work in our times, I am pretty sure that’s not what OP has in mind.
They held elections and put the people who got majority into positions of power.
Old-style colonialism wasn’t based on crushing military superiority, during the British Raj the number of British born troops in India was a tiny fraction the the native troops. Thus the British relied on the cooperation of large numbers of Indians and Indian troops.
What do you mean by this? Are you saying that the laws of nature somehow changed over the past century?
Elections are no big deal. Mugabe holds elections, Putin holds elections, hey, even Assad recently held elections.
Yes, it was. Certainly, it wasn’t just military superiority, especially once the colonies were established, and the British, for example, became masters of control through political and financial means as well. However the military strength was the underlying bedrock.
Which particular laws of nature do you have in mind?
Well, the US forces actually attempted not to rig them.
Disagree. Military strength was based on a bedrock of competent management.
Whichever laws you invoked when you said implied that “old-style colonialism won’t work in our time” is a reasonable hypothesis.
No need to, the locals can do everything necessary. The US forces just provided the money and prevented the “undesirables” from playing.
I did not invoke any laws of nature. I think that in the current social, political, informational, military, etc. global environment the old-style colonialism is highly unlikely to work. No laws of nature are involved in this assertion.
Can you be specific about what you think is the relevant change?