Description
Abstract: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) offers a unique field for the research of modernity, a fundamental question in IR theory. When confronted with the UAE, a paradox emerges: whilst the country has, during the last years, reified traditions through practices that Hobsbawm and Ranger called invented traditions, it has also insisted on the moral and political importance of their “passage” from tradition to modernity, embedded in a teleological narrative (in the words of their Crown Prince, “a patriotic spirit to pursue the drive towards development and modernisation that knows no limits”).
The purpose of this paper is twofold. Based on our ethnographic research in Abu Dhabi, we first rethink Hobsbawm and Ranger’s concept of the “invention of tradition”, to show how an invented tradition can be mobilised in favour of political legitimacy not only through continuity but also as a discontinuity with the past. Secondly, by analysing the case of the UAE through the heuristic of (dis)continuity, we contend the dominant idea in disciplinary IR that holds that modernity can only be performed vis-à-vis a traditional Other. These two moves, in turn, allow us to account for the “Emirati Paradox”, and to shed some light into the opposition tradition/modernity.
