The Middle East Politics of Entrepreneurship: A Brief Review on Entrepreneurship as a Foreign Policy Tool in Gulf Cooperation Council Countries

Abstract

Entrepreneurship could be used as a foreign policy tool in the world of politics. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is a politico-economic alliance of six Arab states in close proximity to the Persian Gulf. The council embraces the states which actively apply entrepreneurship for the promotion of their national foreign policies through ‘bait-and switch,’ 1 i.e. by showing economic incentives (baits) they prepare the ground for the involvement of foreign partners through investment or getting loans, which is then used for other politico-economic motives (switches) under numerous strategies in service to their foreign policies, e. g. with the intention of increasing foreign direct investment, political legitimacy, domestic job generation, etc. In the following, each move toward state sponsored entrepreneurship by a GCC state will be unfolded as a potential motive for foreign policy advantage(s). A state’s support of any issue, especially when it is done or motivated by those high in the hierarchy of political decision-making and has absorbed great quantities of public investments, is not independent of pushing forward the state’s political strategies and policies. Moreover, a strategic interpreter is not the oracle of Delphi, unfolding rather than predicting the latent and plausible scenarios. The application of entrepreneurship to gain or facilitate the acquisition of strategically pre-defined visionary goals of foreign policy is the exertion of the ‘soft power’ of appeal and attraction. It is killing two birds with one stone, i.e. the generation of entrepreneurship inside, and reinforcement of foreign policy outside.