Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

attentions from the local level to the national level. 7 In other words, nationalization
coupled with modernization fuels mass mobilization and results in more political
participation, which distinguishes modem politics from traditional politics, and is a key
element in political development
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Such developments have triggered a phenomena of migration to the cities which, in
the lapse of a few generations, has resulted in the concentration of 45 percent of the
O
world's population in urban centers. Concomitantly, improvements in health provisions
have decreased the number of infant mortality and have prolonged the expected lifetime,
causing a sharp upward kink in world population. The social unit of the agrarian society,
the tribe, has drastically mutated into the mobile nuclear family as the new social unit, and
is more prone to migrate in pursuit of economic trends in the industrial age. Modernization
attempts have expanded the role of women as production relies less on muscular strength
and more on the machine. Improved communication systems have facilitated and increased
access to information, increasingly suffusing the society, while technological
breakthroughs in transportation have shortened travel time, hence allowing fast and easy
mobility. All in all, these and other complex developments encourage and reinforce the
process of social mobilization, which is spatially translated in the physical migration of the
population away from its rural habitat.
II. MODERNIZATION, URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND URBANIZATION: THE SAUDI
MODEL
A. The Saudi National Developmental Model
Like other nation-states, the Saudi Arabian government chose to modernize its
underdeveloped society, a process which threatens the integrity of traditionally based
regimes. Due to oil affluence, the Saudi government opted for a policy of rapid
development resulting in remarkable consequences causing dramatic shifts in the society.
This decision to pursue modernization hinged on the pressures to maintain internal integrity
and to stave off external threats aimed at destabilizing the fragile Saudi political system in
its early decades. Militarily, the state has followed a multi-throng policy, emphasizing the
strengthening of the country's defense capabilities to thwart outside hostilities and,
internally, to deter fragmentation of the nation's sub-regions, traditionally susceptible to
segregation by tribal affiliations.