Kuwait Feature: Explaining This Week's Occupation of Parliament (Diwan)

On Wednesday night, a group of protesters took over the main chamber of the Kuwaiti Parliament while a crowd demonstrated outside. Kristin Smith Diwan, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, offers the essential context for the event:

The world awoke to a new front in the Arab Spring as thousands of protestors fought through guards to occupy Kuwait's Parliament on Wednesday night. Chanting "this is our house" and "the people want the removal of the Prime Minister" the youthful crowd, accompanied by opposition parliamentarians, certainly looked the part of Arab revolutionaries. Yet Kuwait has been working toward this climax since before Tunisians took to the streets of Sidi Bouzeid. And while drawing momentum from Arab brethren in Egypt and elsewhere, Kuwait activists are not seeking regime overthrow but rather something even more rare -- a genuine constitutional monarchy in the Gulf.

Kuwait is a natural candidate for such a distinction. Its proud tradition of civic activism goes back to the 1930s when prominent merchant families formed their own municipal council and then forced upon the governing sheikh the first elected Majlis in the Gulf. With its independence in 1961, Kuwait's elite gathered in a constitutive assembly, which established Kuwait's ruling order: an emir who stands above the fray appointing a government headed by the ruling al-Sabah family, but with significant powers of legislation and oversight held by an elected parliament. Twice the ruling family has done away with the nuisance of parliament through its unconstitutional dissolution. But since its reinstatement following Kuwait's liberation from Iraq, the Parliament has assumed a central position in Kuwaiti life. It is fair to say that the National Assembly is essential to Kuwait's very identity.

Yet there remains a key distinction between Kuwait's order and a genuine constitutional monarchy -- a distinction that maintains the primacy of the ruling al-Sabah, and generates endless friction with elected representatives. The elected political factions (Kuwait has no legal parties) do not select the cabinet, whose members stand as ex-officio members of parliament (MPs), providing the government with a key voting bloc. Elected MPs are thus unable to set pro-actively the policy of government, having only the power to call the ministers to account through parliamentary grillings, and to dismiss them if they can summon the majority in a vote of no confidence -- a vote to which ex-officio members are excluded.

This "negative" power has been used increasingly in the post-liberation order....

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