David Commins: belief

Transcript context

…Now, I know it’s hard to tell in autocratic societies, but how complete has Saudi nation-building been? You still have the Shiites, you have some radical groups, you had al-Qaeda. We’re not sure what’s going on now, but is it a truly solid here forever nation-state in terms of the borders and who rules? Well, I would say yes. I think that there are definitely groups that would like to dismantle the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but my impression is that generations of Saudi kings and princes and technocrats have succeeded at integrating the population into a nation that looks to certain institutions, looks at outsiders and sees them as different from themselves, which is an essential part of being a nation, and thinks of themselves as sharing common values. Yes, I do think that they are a nation. I think that if by some totally unexpected event, which of course, unexpected events happen, the kingdom were to fall, I don’t think the country would disintegrate. I think that the different parts have too much at stake in each other to stick together to disintegrate. I don’t see it at all similar to Syria or Iraq, I’ll put it that way, or Lebanon, which do have much stronger tendencies pulling those countries apart. The greater stability of many of the Gulf states, not just Saudi, to me, is quite striking as an outsider. If you had to boil that down to as abstract an explanation as possible, to what do you attribute that? Again, this is not only Saudi, but a number of other places.…

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