ABSTRACT
Traditional accounts of Nile Basin politics tend to focus on the trajectories of the region’s key states – Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan – and the international legal context of disputes over water. For many, the central dynamic has been the classic conflict-cooperation dichotomy (Wiebe, 2001; Swain, 2002; Mekonnen, 2010), which has led to attempts to explain what conditions need to be met to transition from adversarial relations to more collaborative ones (Howell and Allan, 1994; Waterbury, 1997; Wu and Whittington, 2006; Salman, 2013). Those working in this vein have mostly concentrated, following the title of Waterbury’s classic contribution, on the national determinants of regional hydropolitics (Waterbury, 2002; Salman, 2011), with a supportive role for Western-dominated international financial institutions such as the World Bank, whose capital has often been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for transforming basin politics around the world. As the West has faced relative decline in the past ten years, scholarship has increasingly dissected the impact of emerging financiers of water resources development projects such as China (Cascão, 2009; Verhoeven, 2011a, 2011b). Concentrating on the Nile Basin states, Western powers (Britain as colonial hegemon and later the USA as global superpower) and more recently China has obscured the important longitudinal role played by Gulf states in regional relations generally and hydropolitics in particular. The mass provision of oil and gas to international markets is but one dimension of the Gulf’s rise to global prominence (Ulrichsen, 2011). The leading polities – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar – have long seen Africa’s north-eastern corner as a logical extension of their socio-cultural, economic and political sphere and have, through exchanges characterized by both animosity and partnership, influenced the fortunes of states and regimes there. This historical proximity has in the last decades very much been an asymmetric relationship with people and produce moving to the Arabian Peninsula from the basin, and capital and ideological currents flowing the other way across the Red Sea: an inversion of older trends. In a context of enduring statehood but simultaneous state fragility in the Nile Basin, this asymmetry has had profound
consequences in that both domestic political economies and intra-basin relations have been shaped by Gulf Arab interests in important ways. The Nile has for decades been not just the main ecological highway of Northeast Africa but also its most important political artery, with elites trying to harness its economic potential for state-building (Verhoeven, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c). The idea that control over water equals control over people and that, hence, water is power has proven deeply consequential: the question of how the river’s waters can be put at the service of internal power consolidation and economic expansion has throughout the modern period been a key determinant of the behaviour of ruling elites in their external policy. This has given rise to a zero-sum paradigm in the basin in which the relative gains of one party are seen to imply a material degradation and political humiliation for the others. In this unforgiving strategic environment, the fortunes of incumbents are heavily influenced by their ability to leverage outside resources for internal battles. While Ethiopian relations with the Gulf states have been antagonistic for most of the past 60 years almost regardless of the ideological disposition of governments in Addis Ababa, regimes in Egypt and Sudan have intermittently been isolated from the Arabian Peninsula, only to reverse the situation a few years later and to draw on Gulf Arab financial resources and politico-military backing to secure domestic hegemony and expand their regional influence. In recent decades, big hydro-agricultural initiatives in Sudan and Egypt have not just depended on Gulf funding but the very ability of secular, military and Islamist regimes to remain hegemonic in their societies and the region has been moulded by relations with Riyadh and, more recently, Abu Dhabi and Doha. This chapter is theoretically informed by the historical and international sociology approach to understanding states, their constituent social forces and their interrelations (Halliday, 2005). It opens with a brief sketch of the longue durée of relations between the Arabian Peninsula and the Nile Basin: after situating centuries of historical proximity, the focus moves to Egyptian ‘hydro-hegemony’, a term used to explore the subtle and not so subtle mechanisms underpinning a state’s dominance in basin politics (Zeitoun and Warner, 2006). Gamal Abdel Nasser’s bid for a revitalized Egypt via the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement (NWA) was initially supported by the Gulf Arabs. However, Cairo and Riyadh soon battled for leadership of the Arab world – a collision that ushered in a growing asymmetry between a stagnating Egypt and Gulf states bolstered by soaring oil prices. Following rapprochement between Sadat and the Al-Sauds, a different relationship emerged in the 1970s during which the Gulf became the Egyptian economy’s financier, funded hydro-agricultural state-building in Ja’afar Nimeiri’s Sudan and encouraged the containment of Marxist-Leninist and ‘Christian’ Ethiopia. Cairo’s hydro-hegemony was increasingly underwritten by petrodollars, which also paid for Sudan’s ‘Breadbasket’ vision to address exacerbating food security problems on the Arabian Peninsula. The latter parts of this chapter outline the limits of the rising prominence of Gulf Arabs and their ability to pursue political-economic objectives and
reshape the Nile Basin from the 1980s until today. Not only have the Gulf states increasingly vied for regional influence at each other’s expense, they have regularly been frustrated in the pursuit of their interests, politically as well as economically. The failure of the Breadbasket gamble and the Agricultural Revival Programme in Sudan, as well as the rise to power of the militaryIslamist Al-Ingaz regime in Khartoum, have generated security, commercial and political woes for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. It also contributed to the erosion of the hegemony of Egypt – Riyadh’s most loyal ally – in the basin, to the advantage of Ethiopia, an old rival long distrusted on the Arabian Peninsula. This is the other side of the coin of influence: growing exposure and involvement also imply growing disappointments.
