Bahrain’s contested politics transcends almost everything to do with
national identity, historical narrative, and popular discourse. The uprising that
began in 2011 is an attempt to subvert all that is state imposed, everything
from road names to “national” days of celebration. The opposition has long
called for August 14, when the British officially withdrew from Bahrain, to be
the official national day. The ruling family however has designated the day
that the king first took the throne on December 17 to be the official national
day. It is no surprise, therefore, that August 14 has been chosen for Bahrain’s
Egyptian inspired “Tamarod” (Rebellion campaign). Analyzing the uprisings from
a different perspective, we can ask ourselves are the so-called Arab Spring
uprisings a quest for full sovereignty? And what do various foreign
interventions in Arab countries in response to uprisings say about sovereignty
of states?   

To say that the regime is afraid of planned protests is an
understatement. A raft of royal decrees sanctioning repressive measure have
been passed, from $1,000 fines for those not carrying ID cards or 6 month jail
terms, to prosecuting the parents of juvenile protesters, to automatic
revocation of citizenship for those convicted of terrorist-related charges (of which
hundreds of political prisoners are accused of committing), and the list goes
on. But more dangerously, there has been a formalized move toward
military rule. The Supreme Defense
Council, made up of 100 percent Al-Khalifa members including
the king, now oversees all of state security and the national guard. It is
above the law and continues to use violence.

Celebration of the country’s independence (or hopes of it) is
constitutionally outlawed. The king, earlier this year, jokingly told a British
audience “Who asked you to leave?” and then announced that he was to award 240
British citizens with Bahraini nationality. To many this was not a funny dinner
table joke given the history
of British involvement in Bahrain’s internal security. Bahrain’s perennial
sovereignty crisis is at the core of the current conflict and is coming to head
on August 14. This contested narrative of history raises important questions
about Bahrain’s sovereignty: where does it lie and to whom does Bahrain belong?

“Sovereignty” is a concept widely seen as key
to understanding international conflicts. In conventional thought, national
sovereignty is where every nation is supposedly supreme inside its own borders
and acknowledges no master outside them. Bahrain’s sovereignty has been especially
contested since the empire officially left in 1971. This clip from a popular
nationalist magazine at the time states, “After the English and the Americans:
the Bahraini people will not allow Saudi military presence.”

In a 2005 Wikileaks cable, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa alluded to the
sovereignty crisis, “Bahrain has worked hard not to become a vassal of
Saudi Arabia, and we’re certainly not going to let ourselves become a vassal of
Iran.” But on March 14, 2011 a Saudi Arabian-led army entered Bahrain
across the causeway without prior announcement. The Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) Peninsula shield remains in Bahrain today. The counter-revolution had
taken stealth hold in a brute show of force and peaceful protesters occupying the
Pearl Roundabout were removed and the landmark monument at the center dramatically
destroyed.

Initially, a joint statement by several of the opposition societies described
the entry of Saudi-led troops as an “occupation”
and an unofficial declaration of war against the people. In a television
interview, Ibrahim Sharif, the president of Waad, a liberal leftist society,
stated that if the troops had come to Bahrain to suppress the protests, then
Bahrainis should consider this an invading army. A few days later, he was
arrested, the society’s headquarters was burned down, and he was forced to apologize.
Sharif was later sentenced to five years imprisonment in a military court for
crimes against the state. Major General Mutlaq bin Salem Al Azaima’a, commander
of the GCCPSF, said “it was
illegal and illegitimate to ask about the entry of the peninsula shield force
into Bahrain” and that whoever considers the peninsula shield troops in
Bahrain as an invasion, is probably “someone
with an agenda and hostile tendencies.” The officially recognized
opposition societies avoid this very sensitive topic. But on the streets, chants of “Bahrain hurra hurra, dur’u Aljazeera barra” (Bahrain is free,
Jazeera Shield out) are heard in the near-daily protests around the island.

Robert Fisk wrote in
the Independent, “Bahrain didn’t invite the Saudis to send their troops; the Saudis
invaded and received a post-dated invitation” and the “Al-Khalifa dynasty has become a confederated province of Saudi Arabia“
echoing the fears of the crown prince six years earlier.

The Bahraini regime
went further and led calls for a GCC Union which didn’t gain much support
amongst the tribal monarchies, and was later reduced to calls for a
Saudi-Bahraini confederation and a GCC security pact to formalize Bahrain’s
shared sovereignty arrangement. Economic support came in the form of a $10
billion Marshall plan to fund projects in the less resource-endowed states of
Bahrain and Oman. Its limited resources, minority rule status, and weak, centralized, and
rigid structures of power forced the ruling family to become, in the crown prince’s
own words, a “vassal state” of Saudi Arabia.

The ruling family’s ties with the British
establishment have never been stronger. Prime Minister David Cameron almost secured
the sale of $1 billion contract for British Typhoon jets, and announced the following year
plans to celebrate 200 years of bilateral relations. A former British
ambassador tweeted quite brazenly that British jobs
are more important than Bahraini human rights, creating an angry response on
Twitter, and helping British popularity in the country to no end. Domestic
policing in Bahrain has always been the long
arm of the British whilst external security is guaranteed by the United States
(the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in Bahrain). The United States guarantees
security of these states in return for access to oil resources, which explains
the presence of many military bases. This was first articulated by former
President Jimmy Carter in 1980 in what has become known as the Carter Doctrine,
“An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region
will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of
America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including
military force.”

Under this “strategic alliance” military,
security, and logistical support is sold to the Bahraini regime in exchange for
external sovereignty; the legitimacy conferred through the recognition of the
“sovereign” by other states. International silence on Bahrain was taken as quid
pro quo for GCC support for resolution 1973 for military intervention in Libya
in 2011. These contradictions (Gulf states interfering but not allowing others
to do the same) are some of the by-products of the Arab revolutions that
exposed the weaknesses and fears of Arab rulers. Bali and Rana (2012) suggest
that there is a vision of Arab political sovereignty as provisional and
dependent on the state’s position in existing regional alliances. This
provisional sovereignty is a wider feature of the current global order, and
speaks to pervasive substantive limitations on the capacity of weak states to
shape domestic decision-making.

The sovereignty crisis thus is summarized
as the ruling family’s inability to establish internal sovereignty in the
traditional sense (authority through domestic legitimacy achieves a state of
domestic sovereignty that lies beyond the power of the ruling elite and locates
ultimate sovereignty in the people) or to defend against encroachment on its
external sovereignty by global powers, the United States, Britain, and Saudi
Arabia. Over the course of half a century, there have been four key
opportunities to solve the sovereignty crisis and to avert the current
situation by introducing a popular constitution in 1956, 1973, 2002, 2011; all
opportunities were lost in favor of tribal and colonial self-interest. Bahrain
has yet to arrive at a sovereignty settlement with itself or its own people and
therefore cyclical unrest will continue. Bahrain’s uprising is about liberation,
social justice, and democracy through the complete and unquestioned sovereignty
to the people. This means that future regimes must be accountable domestically,
as well as internationally, establishing their countries’ ties with the West on
equal footing.

The Arab uprisings overall highlight several
key questions on sovereignty: the propensity of weak states, such as Bahrain, with
limited resources to invite occupation, and the appetite of strong states to
intervene in resource-rich countries where their interests are at stake such as
Libya. The Arab uprisings are being seen by many as an end to the post-colonial
period if they succeed in establishing truly independent sovereign states. In
addition the uprisings are re-conceptualizing the meaning of popular and
internal sovereignty. However, as things have panned out across the Arab world,
Krasner’s (1999) conception of sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy” — the
paradox that though there is an informal understanding that states are
sovereign, they can still be subject to constant intervention — continues to
be the reality. From the militarized struggles in Libya and Syria, to the non-militarized
struggles in Bahrain, the so-called Arab Spring has offered gleaning examples of
Krasner’s “organized hypocrisy” but none more so than the Saudi intervention
and continued presence in Bahrain to fight the will of the people. It is within
this nuanced context that Bahrain’s Tamarod on its Independence Day needs to be
understood.

Dr. Ala’a Shehabi is a Bahraini
researcher and  founding member of Bahrain Watch www.bahrainwatch.org. She has a PhD in
economics from Imperial College London and previously worked as a lecturer at
the Bahrain Institute for Banking Finance and as a social policy analyst
at RAND Europe. Follow her on Twitter @alaashehabi.