Scattered thoughts about the Dubai project

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - 1:26 PM

I was very curious to come to Dubai. I kept hearing people describe it and then stumble on a lack of proper adjectives. In 2008 I wrote about how it was an exemplar entrepôt economy that others in the region would copy in order to diversify away from oil. The financial crisis burst the property bubble, however, and Dubai had to turn to much wealthier Abu Dhabi for a sovereign bailout and rename the Burj Dubai to the Burj Khalifa. Since then, the big picture has improved somewhat. What about the picture on the ground, however? Is Dubai still a model for the rest of the Gulf?

First, the picture on the ground. Ever since I arrived, I've been trying to figure out the best way to explain Dubai. Here's what I've come up with: If Stanley Kubrick had an unlimited budget and was making a movie about Las Vegas glitz, Dubai would be his set.

What do I mean by this? Well, like Kubrick's films, Dubai is underpopulated in an odd way, and the lack of people gives the place a very odd feel. There are shiny hi-tech malls, stores, and skyscrapers galore, but there isn't much else. From a citywide perspective, looking from the top of the Burj Khalifa, one sees all the new skyscrapers, a few blocks of the old part of town, and then … desert.

Even in the shiny parts of the city, there just aren't enough people to fill up the space. Everywhere I looked, there were way too many workers per customer. The Dubai Mall, for example, is truly massive, with every Western brand name that still exists and a few (Rainforest Cafe, Benetton) that I thought had gone under. There was an entire wing of racy lingerie stores. The mall wasn't empty by any stretch of the imagination, but neither was it really all that full. I don't honestly know if there's sufficient demand to keep these stores afloat, however.

Lest one think this is criticism, it isn't. I'm rooting for Dubai to succeed. If enough people come to the place, I think the Kubrickian oddness will wear off (though, not, perhaps, in the Armani Hotel. The hotel literature informs me that "every detail has been personally chosen by Armani to reflect his passion for stylish comfort and functionality." To your humble blogger, it seems like Mr. Armani has expended considerable sums of money to bring back the tacky wood finish of late 70s American suburbia, combined with the creeping isolation of Kubrick's The Shining). Any country that embraces the service sector with the same vengeance of North America is fine by me.

Can Dubai be replicated? Here I'm more skeptical than in 2008. I suspect Dubai will survive and thrive. Every region needs a world-class airport and service-sector hub, and Dubai has become that hub for this region. I'm not sure the market here is big enough to support similar hubs in Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, and Kuwait, however.

I'd be very curious to hear what other Dubai visitors and residents think in the comments.

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Your spring break travel plans are solved!!

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, January 15, 2010 - 3:51 AM

Mom!! Dad!! Kids!! Want to go somewhere fun for the winter, but tired of the same old vacation destinations?

Have I got the place for you!! Try.... Pyongyang!!

North Korea will allow more tourists from its arch-foe the US to visit this year, seeking alternative sources of hard currency as sanctions bite deeper.

North Korea at present allows US groups to visit only for the Arirang mass games, when tens of thousands of impeccably choreographed gymnasts and performers create colourful mosaics and slogans with painted cards. This year, the shows are scheduled to begin in August.

However, Pyongyang has said that it will also allow visits throughout the rest of the year, according to Simon Cockerell of Beijing-based Koryo Tours. Koryo, which says it escorts about 80 per cent of US travellers, was informed of the decision by its local partner in North Korea, he said. Koryo took about 280 US visitors into the country last year.

Somewhat more seriously, this appears to be one of several small signs that the regime in Pyongyang is not quite as secure as it used to be:

Further denting Pyongyang’s dollar income, Thai authorities last month detained an aircraft packed with arms being smuggled from Pyongyang. Diplomats saw this as a severe threat to the cash flow of Kim Jong-il, the country’s leader. Reports from defectors also suggest a recent currency redenomination has caused economic chaos during a bitter winter.

In a very rare admission that the country needed to improve its economic record, Mr Kim this month confessed that the nation had failed to deliver “rice and meat soup” to the people. He vowed to improve people's lives.

Just so I'm clear on this, in the past two months there have been protests in North Korea, and the country's leader has publicly admitted being unable to feed the country.

This is still the DPRK we're talking about, right?

Developing....

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Authoritarianism with exit options

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, June 16, 2008 - 12:30 AM

Clifford Levy writes about the rise in Russian tourism in the New York Times, and does a good job of bringing the stats:

The number of Russian tourists visiting countries outside the former Soviet Union grew to 7.1 million in 2006, the last year statistics were available, from 2.6 million in 1995, according to the Russian government. A record 2.5 million Russians visited Turkey in 2007, up 33 percent from 2006, Turkish officials said. Only Germany, that paragon of European wealth, sends more tourists to Turkey. (By contrast, in 1988, a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of 22,000 Soviet citizens visited Turkey.) The Russian tourism boom is happening as new low-cost airlines in Europe have spurred a sharp increase in tourism across the Continent. But for the Russians, the chance to travel is especially prized. For the first time in Russian history, wide swaths of the citizenry are being exposed to life in far-off lands, helping to ease a kind of insularity and parochialism that built up in the Soviet era. Back then, the public was not only prevented from going abroad; it was also inculcated with propaganda that the Soviet Union was unquestionably the world’s best country, so there was no need to leave anyway. People who desired foreign travel in Soviet times typically had to receive official approval, and if it was granted, they were closely chaperoned once they crossed the border. Even before they left, they often were sent to classes to be indoctrinated in how to behave and avoid the perils of foreign influence. Those who were not in good standing with the party had little chance of going.

Many of the states that the United States thinks of as authoritarian -- Russia, China, Saudi Arabia -- are actually pretty open about letting their citizens live, travel and study abroad. This stands in sharp contrast to the totalitarian regimes of the former Warsaw Pact or Myanmar and North Korea today). Ibring this up because it highlights how unusual those communist regimes really were. Citizens trapped in both authoritarian and totalitarian societies face mortal risks in exercising voice as a means of political protest. Citizens trapped in totalitarian societies, however, can use exit -- migration -- as an additional means of registering discontent. In sufficient numbers, migration can be just as powerful as protest in promoting regime change. One of the triggers behind the collapse of East Germany was the creation of a quasi-legal escape route through Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1989. Over the next month, more than 1% of East Germany’s total population fled the country –putting tremendous pressure on the East German regime to change its ways. Zimbabwe is near collapse now in part because of the same problem. Clearly, what we currently label as authoritarian states are a different animal. People can leave -- indeed, in some cases I suspect these governments are happy to have political dissidents depart their shores. What's interesting is that many people -- not just those personally invested in these regimes -- leave and come back. This is new, and as a political scientist, I find it pretty interesting. As a foreign policy analyst, it suggests that the lessons drawn from how the Soviet model do not travel into the here and now all that well.

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