Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

CHAPTER HI
FORCES OF CHANGE IN SAUDI ARABIA: NATION-STATE
FORMATION, URBANIZATION AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
For all practical purposes Saudi Arabia is a closed country to the
Christian world. Fewer than a hundred Europeans or American
have visited its desert fortresses in modern times. No non-Moslem
journalist has ever been officially permitted to visit its capital at
Riad. Yet this huge country is the heart of the Arab world (it
contains Mecca) and its King, Ibn Saud, only a remote and mystery
figure to outsiders, is non of the world's strong men. 1
-Life Magazine, 1947
The intent of this chapter is to shed light on historical events and political
developments leading to the emergence of Saudi Arabia from a tribally-based and organized
society to one in which authority and significant decision making are increasingly assumed
by the central government. Since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of
this century, dramatic developments have taken place, culminating in the formation of the
new nation-state. The promulgation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on September 23,
1932, has ushered a dual reciprocal process in which the society has gradually
transformed, supplanting its millinea-long essentially traditional nomadic and agrarian
modes of living with a new process of institution building and the consolidation of national
authority. The financial resources available through oil revenues have been ploughed into
the development of the country's infrastructure and industrialization of the economy. In
Saudi Arabia, in 1950, only 16 per cent of the Saudi Arabian population was urban. By
1970, this figure had risen to 49 per cent, and to 77 per cent in 1990. Concomitant with
these major changes, Saudi urban structures and forms have mutated.
I. STATE AND SOCIETY
The state is the consolidation of dispersed authority of a traditional society into a
central power and control. "Nationalism is the belief that each nation has both the right and
the duty to constitute itself as a state." 3 According to C. E. Black, central authority and its
rationalized functions owe their existence to the rule of law, which is maintained by the
bureaucracy specifically created to facilitate its implementation, and to the improved rapport
between the state and the citizen. The replacement of capricious and arbitrary rule of
individual statesman with the rational legal system is the hallmark of modern developments