Previous Entry | Next Entry

A rose by any other name

  • May. 21st, 2009 at 12:26 PM
xmas
Saudi is a kingdom; Oman is a sultanate; the UAE is a federation of emirates. Qatar has an emir, but if you call it an emirate most people will say, "No, it's a state," which is odd because "state" is not a type of government.

Is there any real difference between an kingdom, a sultanate, and an emirate? Or are these just different words for the same thing? Obviously they have different etymologies, but is there any difference in the powers of their rulers?

I always thought there was some actual difference between the three forms of government, but here's how the CIA World Factbook defines them:
  • monarchy: "a government in which the supreme power is lodged in the hands of a monarch who reigns over a state or territory, usually for life and by hereditary right"
  • sultanate: "similar to a monarchy, but a government in which the supreme power is in the hands of a sultan (the head of a Muslim state)"
  • emirate: "similar to a monarchy or sultanate, but a government in which the supreme power is in the hands of an emir (the ruler of a Muslim state)."
That makes it sound like these are just different words for the same thing. But if that's the case, why doesn't the CIA just classify them all as monarchies? After all it classifies Thailand as a monarchy and not as a "Ratcha Anachak," so why use the local terms for the Arab versions?
  • Mood:perplexed

Tags:





Comments

( 12 comments — Leave a comment )
(Anonymous) wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 10:18 am (UTC)
I guess it's because the government of Qatar is a partly elected and the country's laws are made by the council of ministers (even though most of them are from the ruling family) and the advisory council.
| Reply | Thread
[info]qatar wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 10:33 am (UTC)
That's also true (to a much larger extent) in the United Kingdom, but it's still a monarchy. The monarch doesn't have to have absolute power to be a monarch.

I had thought, much as you say, that the emir is the head of a ruling family, whereas a sultan is more like a king in ruling personally. But I can't find evidence of that distinction anywhere.
| Reply | Parent | Thread
[info]gh4acws wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 11:18 am (UTC)
another thing might
be law of succession. and power distribution between the monarch and the noble families .

Apart from it being both impolite and misleading in using a foreign name for the governmental system. If one uses Kindom one is tempted to assume the powers of the king are derived like and similar to (for example ) the British monarch - if One calls the Monarch Emperor this implies a King of Kings and an empire. Giving the monarchy the name 'emirate' makes one at least wonder what the power distribution is - how the current emir got to power; who does he need as support; who will become his successor
| Reply | Thread
[info]qatar wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 03:28 pm (UTC)
Re: another thing might
That's what I thought when I moved here -- a king becomes king because he's the eldest son of the previous king, but the emir is the most powerful member of the most powerful family. But I'm not sure if that's inherent in the terms or not...
| Reply | Parent | Thread
[info]dubaiwalla wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 12:22 pm (UTC)
Best I can tell, the Arabic roots referred to different levels of power (emir < sultan < malik), but the distinctions between states are mostly irrelevant now that they are all sovereign entities. (Anyone who knows better should feel free to correct me.) A few years ago, when Bahrain was considering a transition to the status of 'kingdom,' people wondered aloud if Riyadh would mind Manama using that term.
| Reply | Thread
[info]qatar wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 03:27 pm (UTC)
Huh, I didn't know they changed. What were they before that? And why did they switch?
| Reply | Parent | Thread
[info]dubaiwalla wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 06:27 pm (UTC)
It was previously the State of Bahrain. If memory serves, the switch came as a result of the referendum on the National Action Charter. The timing seems about right.

I think it was my Gulf history instructor who told me that nobody was entirely sure of the significance of the shift in titles beforehand. Afterwards, however, it became clear that the king had used it to cut back drastically on the number of royal family members dependent on the state. This was no small matter given the relative sizes of the country and its ruling family.
| Reply | Parent | Thread
[info]shmuelisms wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 01:32 pm (UTC)
I think
I think it's a combination of various factors:
  1. Long established practice of deliberately using more-obscure terminology in order to gloss over 'inconvenient facts', such as the government supporting two-bit despots, often directly against various policies, laws and congressional dictates. "We're not supporting the 'government' of a vile oppressive dictator, Country X is [just] a sultanate..." As many of these governments become more moderate and democratized, this is less relevant, but the practice is established. It would be interesting to compare the specific terminology used to describe the forms of each government, between countries the USA wants to pander to, and those it considers hostile.


  2. Political Correctness. I most strongly disagree with [info]gh4acws that it's "impolite and misleading in using a foreign name for the governmental system". That's just moral relativism in disguise. Words have specific meanings, so if North Korea (or whoever) wants to call itself a Democracy, do we accept that, or do we call a Spade a Spade?


  3. I think that the typical Western perception of the term 'monarchy' as a form of government, is rather different than that in the specific countries you are referring to. Europe is chock full of monarchies, but other than looking nice and symbolic, they have no real function or power. Isn't this what comes to mind for most people? Isn't this rather unlike the [semi] absolute power many of these Arab rulers have? So using 'monarchy' would IMO, be misleading.
| Reply | Thread
[info]qatar wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 02:13 pm (UTC)
Re: I think
But the CIA does refer to absolute monarchs as monarchs, too.

Here's the breakdown of their list:

  • constitutional emirate: Kuwait
  • constitutional monarchies: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Bhutan, Denmark, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Monaco, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Thailand, Tonga, United Kingdom
  • constitutional sultanate: Brunei
  • emirate: Qatar
  • monarchies: Oman, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland
.

(North Korea, for what it's worth, is listed as a "Communist state one-man dictatorship")
| Reply | Parent | Thread
[info]roseandsigil wrote:
May. 21st, 2009 05:29 pm (UTC)
I think this is the result of hundreds of years of tradition, more than anything else. Europeans have been in contact with the Middle East for a lot longer than they have, say, Thailand, and I think that it was considered fairly exotic. They probably just used the local terms because the various ME monarchies were alien to them. (Or maybe because the Muslim rulers were not Christian, so they couldn't "really" be kings?)
| Reply | Thread
(Anonymous) wrote:
Jun. 28th, 2009 12:48 am (UTC)
I guess it depends on what they call themselves. Bahrain defines itself as "Al Mamlaka Al Bahrain"- the Kingdom of Bahrain. And the UAE literally calls itself the United Arab Emirates. So, who are we to call them something else, I guess?
| Reply | Thread
(no subject) - [info]csrthusisna - Dec. 7th, 2009 10:33 pm (UTC) Expand
( 12 comments — Leave a comment )