Page 27 - UAE Truncal States

Introduction

foreigners. The first census of the Trucial States, in the spring of
1968, counted 180,000 people a few years after oil exports began. A
modern State has since emerged where an urbanised population of
just over one million people lives a life which at first sight differs only
in climate from life in the shadow of multi-storey buildings in most
other parts of the world. The material transformation and modern­
ization even produced some unprecedented and superlative mani­
festations of the sudden wealth of the Stale, as well as of some
individuals. The beholder may be equally astounded to see the
traditional Arabian vista of palms against a background of sand or sea
dwarfed by apartment blocks, as to be confronted with the par­
ticularly complex political structure of the UAE, comprising the
federal and the seven very unequal local governments.
If one compares the environment, both material and socio-political,
of the Trucial States in earlier decades of this century with that of the
United Arab Emirates during the initial years of the 1980s, it may
seem as though one is comparing two entirely different worlds. Yet
the most important strand in the fabric of the UAE, the society of the
native population, has itself changed remarkably little. Attitudes,
values, behaviour and customs which were formed under quite
different circumstances continue to be essential to the family’s life;
they are equally essential ingredients in the interaction of today’s
multinational society and the newly created State.
In the following chapters, the various factors which influenced
and shaped the society are studied to prepare the ground for an
analysis of the current internal structural transformation of this
society.
When the first major development projects brought hundreds,
later thousands, of foreigners to the coast from about 1965 onwards,
society ceased to function as one homogeneous body of basically
the same ethnic origins, bound together by one common religion
providing a common understanding of morals, behaviour and law.
The present day society is heterogeneous, multinational, multi­
religious and anonymous; it needs institutions to compensate for the
disappearance of traditional direct rule and response to that rule.
How the various groups of the new society live, and to what extent
the required institution-building has been tailored to each phase in
the structural transformation from the tribal to the multinational era,
will be the subject of further chapters.
The country under observation falls into a number of familiar
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