The UAE has similarly been involved in urban regeneration projects, With Abu Dhabi having signed an agreement worth a reported $1.5 billion with Manchester City Council and regeneration body New East Manchester in 2011 to develop an 80 acre site close to the soccer stadium, thus tying in with Abu Dhabi’s ownership of Manchester City Football Club. There are plans to build a cluster of new sporting facilities in addition to a swimming pool with the aim of ‘using sport to inspire and transform the lives of children in an area with massive deprivation — and some of the lowest life expectancies in Britain’.[386] In September 2009, at the exact time when the UAE was waiting for the US Congress to ratify its civilian nuclear deal (which had been delayed due to allegations concerning the Abu Dhabi ruling family, as discussed later), a large donation was made to the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Amounting to $150 million — reportedly the largest ever grant given to paediatric surgery — the money has been channelled via the Abu Dhabi government-backed Sheikh Zayed Institute and, according to the Center’s president, will ‘…allow us to serve the world for the next 100 years’.[387] Connecting the strategies of development assistance to the West and support for Islamic credentials, both the UAE and Saudi Arabia have also been building new mosques in Western Europe. Most recently, in late 2010 construction work was completed on Europe’s largest mosque, in the Netherlands, financed by Dubai’s Al-Maktoum Foundation — named after the emirate’s ruling family. Located in Rotterdam, the mosque can accommodate 3,000 worshippers, boasts two fifty metre tall minarets, and also houses a centre for ‘charity, mutual understanding, and forgiveness’. Strongly opposed by Dutch far-right movements, which have stated that ‘this horrible thing doesn’t belong here but in Saudi Arabia’, the mosque is nevertheless likely to prove extremely popular with Rotterdam’s substantial Muslim population.[388]
Elsewhere, however, opposition has been more robust, and the mosque financing strategy in Western Europe may prove increasingly awkward for the Gulf monarchies involved. In Norway, for example, attempts by Saudi Arabia’s Tawfiiq Islamic Centre to spend tens of millions of dollars on building new mosques have been blocked by the government. Explaining in 2010 that ‘…it would be a paradox and unusual to accept funding from sources in a country where there is no religious freedom’ and that ‘…the acceptance of such money would be a paradox since it is a punishable crime to establish the Christian faith in Saudi Arabia’,[389] Norway’s minister for foreign affairs has seemingly closed the door on further Saudi funding.
Soft power in the West: cultural institutions
In some ways an extension of the development assistance model, especially when the Western institutions involved have run into financial difficulties, and in others a more subtle example of the sponsorship and naming rights strategy, the Gulf monarchies have been increasingly active in supporting well known museums, art galleries, and other cultural institutions. The UAE has been financing a new art research centre in Paris and is providing $32 million to help the Louvre repair a wing of the Pavilion de Flore. When complete, the latter will host a new gallery of international art named after the former ruler of Abu Dhabi.[390] Moreover, Abu Dhabi has reportedly been paying for the $10 million restoration of Chateau Fontainebleau’s Napoleon III theatre — controversially to be renamed after Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the current ruler. Following the signing of the deal in 2007 Abu Dhabi’s representative stated that ‘This is proof to the deep-rooted cultural and tourism relations between the UAE and France. We consider it as an additional pillar of our bilateral relations’ before explaining that ‘Sheikh Khalifa’s initiative is part of a long history of cooperation between France and the UAE and is set to be followed by other cultural partnerships’. Despite allowing the renaming of a building that is part of a classified UNESCO World Heritage Site and was home to more than thirty French monarchs and emperors, the French minister for culture claimed that ‘…this current cultural cooperation is proof to the approach the two counties adopt in further boosting cooperation and peaceful rapprochement among the world’s cultures and civilisations’.[391]
As part of the same strategy, although in reverse, some Gulf monarchies have imported the biggest western cultural institutions into the Gulf itself, often by providing massive financial inducements which have clearly been used to bolster the resources of the home institutions. Most astonishingly, at a total cost of over $27 billion, Abu Dhabi’s Tourism and Development Investment Company is currently developing Saadiyat—‘the island of happiness’. Intended to become the emirate’s main cultural hub, it is being linked by ten bridges to the mainland and will host branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim in addition to a new Sheikh Zayed National Museum, a performing arts centre, a maritime museum, and a nineteen-pavilion cultural park. The Louvre Abu Dhabi will alone cost $110 million to build, and TDIC has agreed to pay a further $520 million for the Louvre brand name and the loan of various exhibitions and collections. Being built at similarly great expense, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be the sixth international branch of the renowned New York museum. Designed by Frank Gehry, described by Vanity Fair as ‘the most important architect of our age’,[392] the new building will cover over 30,000 square metres and become one of the world’s largest exhibition centres.[393] When the French president visited Abu Dhabi in 2009 to open a new French military base in the emirate — as discussed later — he went out of his way to state that ‘…relations between the two countries go beyond economic issues … there are rich cultural relations between the two countries in light of innovative, promising initiatives such as Louvre Abu Dhabi’ before assuring that ‘…France is on your side in the event your security is at risk. France… is ready to shoulder its responsibilities to ensure the stability in the region. This region is strategic for the world balance’.[394]
Although the Sheikh Zayed National Museum is not a product of western branding, it is nonetheless being designed by Norman Foster’s Foster and Partners of London, and the British Museum is being paid to be the project’s primary consulting partner, advising on a range of issues from design, construction, and museography, to educational and curatorial programming as well as training. Upon completion, the British-designed museum will feature at least five different galleries dedicated to glorifying aspects of the former ruler’s life, namely his ‘interest in protecting the environment’, his commitment to heritage and the ‘traditional values close to his heart through his life’, his ‘role in the political and social unification of the Emirates’, his role in ‘establishing education for all of the UAE’, and his ‘humanitarianism… and support of Islamic values and religious tolerance’.[395]
As with building mosques in Europe and other development assistance to Western countries, the funding of such high profile cultural institutions by Gulf monarchies has also on occasion generated opposition. The various Saadiyat Island developments, which were originally scheduled to be completed in 2013 but which have now been delayed pending a government bailout of TDIC,[396] have recently been boycotted by 130 leading artists on the grounds that the expatriate workers involved in constructing the museums are being routinely exploited. Published in March 2011, the artists’ pledge states that ‘[they will] refuse all co-operation with the project until the Guggenheim and its partners guarantee enforcement mechanisms to reimburse workers for any recruitment fees paid, and hire a reputable independent monitor that will make its findings about working conditions public’. Meanwhile a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch has stated that ‘this leading group of artists is making it clear that they will not showcase their work in a museum built by abused workers, and that the steps taken to date by Guggenheim and TDIC are inadequate… if the Guggenheim and TDIC fail to address the artists’ concerns, the museum may become better known for exhibiting labour violations than art’.[397]
395
87. AME Info, 11 June 2007; Tourism Development Investment Company press release, 25 July 2009.