I’ve just come back from a working weekend in Dubai. I arrived finding it weird and alien. I left realising that I’ve been living in Dubai most of my life and if you’re reading this, you probably have too.
In Dubai, the citizens are a minority, outnumbered 3–1 by foreign workers who do not only all the dirty work, but pretty much all work that isn’t high-status. I spoke to taxi drivers working 10-12 hour days, six or seven days a week. Compared to those charged with cleaning hotel toilets after every use or erecting huge skyscrapers in blistering desert heat, they are the lucky ones. Such foreign workers typically earn between $200–500 a month. Given that the GDP per capita in Dubai is about $25,000, you can imagine how enormous the wealth gap is between them and the Emiratis they toil for.
It’s enough to make a middle-income visitor from a developed country uncomfortable. But that’s how we should feel, because the inequality on display here is little more than a stark representation of the way the world is.
We in the west are also kept comfortable by people working for a fraction of what we spend. The only difference is that most of those people are working overseas, out of sight and out of mind. I’m writing this on an iPad, made in China. Most of the clothes I’m wearing were probably made in Asia, but even though I profess to be concerned about such things, I can’t honestly tell you which ones.
That doesn’t make me a completely heartless exploiter. As long as I buy from retailers who have high ethical standards, I can reassure myself that my purchase makes the people who made them better off. The Emiratis can use essentially the same argument. The migrant workers only come because they can have a better life than the ones in Uzbekistan, Pakistan or Ethiopia, where some of the people who served me came from. It’s a win-win but some win much more than others and like us, the Emiratis are not going to choose the more radical option of making themselves much poorer to spread the wealth more evenly.
The Emiratis only have their wealth because of an accident of geology and history: they were sitting on huge oil reserves just when the world started to burn them at an enormous rate. That also makes their current eminence unsustainable. Again, that’s rather like our own situation. Our wealth was not entirely built on resources expropriated by empires, but that certainly helped. We can congratulate ourselves on the dynamism and innovation of our culture, but those alive today are simply fortunate to be the descendants of those fortunate enough to have been born in a society ripe for the Enlightenment.
Deserved or not, our place at the top of the global pecking order is already under threat. We cannot keeps ourselves in the manner in which we have become accustomed when the rest of the world wants and can afford meat, wines, cheeses and quality flat-pack furniture too. We’ll have to start sharing and there’s no guarantee the future distribution will treat us as generously as we haven’t treated others.
Of course there are differences between life in Dubai and Bristol, some important. I would prefer democratically elected governments over absolute monarchs, even if the latter seem to serve the citizenry better than the former. I’d also be wary about a nation which enshrines religious freedom in law but under a definition of “religion” that only includes Islam, Christianity and Islam.
But there are too many similarities to be ignored. Even some small details have echoes back home. You see men wearing the traditional white kandura sipping cappuccinos, using iPhones and smirk at the pretence of tradition. But there isn’t a country on Earth that isn’t clinging to outdated ideas about what it is. The gargantuan malls sit uneasily besides the often new mosques but even as you realise that the very name of the nation is a homophone of the consumerist imperative “do buy” you realise that these are just bigger, better models of the temples to shopping we flock to back home.
To say Dubai is a castle built on sand is to fruitfully mix the literal and the metaphorical. If Dubai seems vulgar and grotesque it is only because it is the world in microcosm. You don’t need to go to Dubai to understand it. Pay more attention and you’ll see you already live in a version of it.
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