Keyword

As one of the oldest surviving absolute monarchies today, and as the only one which lacks even a pretence of electoral democracy, Brunei looks like an anachronistic relic from the past. In Western media, the Sultan is often portrayed as an oriental despot, whose excesses used to appear in the gossip columns back in the 1980s, and who has nowadays re-appeared in the political pages as a religious fundamentalist. Yet Brunei has proven itself to be surprisingly resilient in the contemporary world. Not only is the ‘Bolkiah dynasty’ one of the longest surviving royal dynasties, but since the deaths of former Thai King Bhumibol and British Queen Elizabeth II, the Sultan has become the longest reigning monarch in the world.Footnote 1 In his role as prime minister, he also enjoys the somewhat dubious distinction of being the longest-ruling political leader of any nation. This chapter examines the reasons for the resilience of such a seemingly anachronistic monarchy, as well as the emerging fault lines and potential breaking points in the institution and ideology of the monarchy.

The Pre-colonial Period (–1906): The Patrimonial State

Given its resilience today (Talib, 2002), it may come as a surprise that in 1904 Malcolm McArthur, then the British Consul to Brunei, wrote that “to talk of a government seems ridiculous” in Brunei, because there is “no Government in the usual sense of the term - only ownership”. What McArthur referred to here was the absence of a separation between political office and incumbent, and with that the lack of a separation of the public resources of the state and the private resources of its officials. It is “difficult to differentiate income from ownership of land and the government revenues as ‘in a properly governed country’” and as a result those in positions of power were “valuing their position solely as a means of self-indulgence and extravagance” (McArthur, 1904).

Far from being a case of oriental despotism, pre-colonial Brunei was a decentralised, segmentary (some would say feudal) state prone to rebellions by renegade members of the nobility and overtaxed subjects. The royal rituals of recognition, loyalty and obedience provided ideological legitimacy but vastly overstated the Sultan’s actual powers, and what he lacked in political power was compensated for by his putative mystical powers (daulat tuanku). His authority was absolute only in its symbolic representation and enactment in rituals and their concomitant symbolism but hardly acted upon in practice: “The Sultan has no real power except over his own districts and people” (Brown, 1970).

A fiscal practice that offended McArthur's notions of a  properly governed country  was tax-farming. The collection of taxes requires an effective administration, but such an administration requires an efficient system of revenue collection. By the nineteenth-century Brunei had neither, and tax collection was outsourced to tax-farmers who bought the right to collect taxes, for example on the opium trade, in return for a fixed annual payment. For the tax-farmer it was risky but potentially highly profitable financial speculation; for the Sultan it provided a stable source of income which turned tax collection into a kind of rent-seeking.

Indirect Rule (1906–1959): The Colonial State

McArthur's claim that Brunei lacked a “government in the usual sense of the term” says as much about his own notions of government, as it does about the ‘traditional’ government he was describing. His characterisation of the sultanate consisted of negatives: “no salaried officials, no police, no coinage, no roads, no public works (except a wooden mosque) and only the ‘semblance’ of a judicature” (McArthur, 1904).

Two years after he wrote the Report, McArthur became the first British Resident in Brunei following the 1906 Residency Agreement. He immediately set about to fill the institutional vacuum that he identified by laying the foundations of a ‘modern’ administrative state (Horton, 1986). The first step had to be to establish a revenue system that could support an administration by buying back tax-farms. Since there was no money for this in state coffers—or more accurately, there were no state coffers—the necessary funds were raised through loans from the Malayan sultanates, which were eventually repaid from oil revenues following the discovery of petroleum in 1929.

The 1906 Residency Agreement was a classic example of Indirect Rule. The Sultan was obliged to follow the Resident’s advice in all matters except religion. Moreover, he was financially dependent on the British who paid him an annual allowance about whose meagre size he regularly complained. But despite McArthur’s claim that the sultanate had no government, the Resident and his administration showed public deference and scrupulously acknowledged the Sultan’s supreme position in ceremonies and court rituals (Hussainmiya, 2006). The British left what they considered the ‘traditional’ system intact, but behind the scene it was the Resident who had far greater power than the Sultan ever had in the past. While outside of Brunei the Resident occupied a position in the lower echelons of the colonial hierarchy accountable to the High Commissioner in Singapore, from the perspective of the people of Brunei he had seemingly absolute power: “…within Brunei there was no check on the Resident. Appeals over his head could only be made outside the country. The authority and power of the Resident - from the viewpoint of Brunei - was [sic] decidedly greater than that formerly possessed by the Sultan” (Brown, 1970: 120).

Self-Government (1959–1984)

The residency system came to an end with the Constitutional Agreement of 1959, which transferred most of the Resident’s powers (except foreign affairs and defence) to the Sultan as the highest executive authority, but it also laid the foundations for a constitutional monarchy with an elected Legislative Council.

In the 1950s and 1960s Brunei was a highly politicised society in a volatile political environment. Externally, it was surrounded by forces that were competing to draw Brunei either into Malaysia or towards a Greater Indonesia. Internally, the monarchy was challenged by the anti-British and pro-Indonesian “Brunei People's Party” (PRB), which called for a merger of Brunei with its former territories of Sabah and Sarawak under the name Union of Northern Borneo (Negara Kesatuan Kalimantan Utara) as a constitutional monarchy. From the Sultan’s point of view, both the British plan for Brunei to become part of the Federation of Malaysia, and the PRB plan for it to join a pro-Indonesian Union of North Borneo would lead to the same end result: Brunei would disappear as a sovereign state with a parliamentary democracy, and his sultanate would become a constitutional monarchy.

When the PRB swept all seats in the 1962 elections for the Legislative Council and the Sultan ignored the result, a rebellion broke out which was defeated by British troops brought from Singapore. Following the rebellion, the Sultan sought to delay independence and the British became more cautious in pushing for it (Hussainmiya, 1995). It was only in 1984 that Brunei finally gained independence as the last British-controlled territory to do so and the only one that did so as an absolute monarchy without even a pretence of democratic institutions, something the British had insisted on in their other former colonies.

By the time of independence, the political turmoil of the 1960s had become almost forgotten history, although one may add, actively forgotten. The time was auspicious for the Sultan because soon after his accession, Brunei began to transform itself from a fragile political relic that was almost swallowed up by neighbouring post-colonial nation states into a wealthy rentier state that appeared to be the region’s most stable nation today.

The Rentier State (1973–?)

Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien’s decision in 1963 to preserve his sultanate rather than see it become part of Malaysia or North Borneo, was influenced by another factor: keeping control over its oil wealth, at the time still modest but significant for the country with such a small population and with few other resources. Two global energy crises, following the 1973 Middle East War and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, fundamentally set Brunei’s political economy in a new direction.

Under the Constitutional Agreement of 1959, Brunei’s financial reserves and foreign investments continued to be managed by the Crown Agents. The British were ostensibly concerned that Brunei’s oil wealth would be mismanaged, or perhaps they used that as a pretext to continue exercising control over Brunei’s financial reserves, some of which were invested in British assets. But prior to independence, the Sultan took control of the financial assets by establishing Brunei Investment Agency (BIA). No transparent distinction was made between the Sultan’s personal wealth and the state’s assets. While the annual national budget is discussed and approved by the Legislative Council,Footnote 2 financial details of the national reserves and external investments are not published and to discuss them publicly is illegal. Given this lack of a separation between the Sultan’s assets and those of the state, he soon came to be mythologised abroad as “The World’s Richest Man” (Bartholomew, 1989) and, at least statistically, Bruneians suddenly enjoyed one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world.

Oil revenues quickly transformed the political economy of the sultanate into a rentier state (Cleary & Wong, 1993, de Vienne, 2015). While rent-seeking as such was not entirely new to Brunei (e.g. in pre-colonial Brunei the practice of tax-farming), the oil rents were enormous relative to the small population (150,000 at the time) and came from external sources in the form of profit-sharing with Brunei Shell (of which the government owns 51%) and a 55% corporate tax levied on oil companies. Income from oil exports came to make up 90% to 95% of government revenues.Footnote 3 Unlike ‘normal’ states that tax citizens, rentier states on external rents and Brunei has at present no personal income, payroll, sales, export, capital gains and business taxes on single-owner and partnership companies.

The “Shellfare” State

In a rentier political economy, the state does not redistribute wealth, but distributes it: instead of levying unpopular taxes on citizens and redistributing them in the society, it transfers external rents in the form of populist cradle-to-grave social welfare and other social benefits. From the perspective of its citizens, Brunei is a generous welfare state that provides free education and health care, land grants and interest-free housing loans, as well as subsidised essential commodities such as petrol, electricity and water and staple foodstuffs. The state also provides employment for the majority of the local workforce, either in the public sector or indirectly in Government-Owned Companies (GOCs) in the oil, airline, banking and telecommunications industries. In 2016 almost half of the workforce was employed in the public sector (not including GOCs) compared to an average of 15% in other ASEAN countries (OECD, 2019). Salaries in the public sector are also higher and the retirement age is lower (at 55 years) than in the private sector. External rents therefore give the state an autonomy—and popularity—that enables it to dominate society. For ordinary Bruneians the “government” (“govemen” in Bruneian English) is most likely the most significant force in their lives after their immediate family.

Much of the Sultan’s public role consists of “distributing things” (as one Bruneian put it to me). Given the lack of a clear legal separation between his private fortune and the state’s reserves, many are inclined to accept his public image as the “Caring Monarch” (as he is often referred to in the local media) who generously shares his wealth with his subjects in the spirit of noblesse oblige.

The social contract of Shellfare state is based on the “rentier bargain”: while power and wealth are entitlements of a ruler, they also impose obligations and responsibilities on him vis-à-vis his subjects, who in turn reciprocate his largesse with gratitude, loyalty and obeisance. The slogan of the American revolution “No taxation without representation” becomes “No representation without taxation”. Generally, Bruneians consider themselves to have gotten a “good deal” under this social contract, particularly when comparing themselves to their neighbours, such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, which have parliamentary democracy, but whose ruling class is thought to be self-serving and corrupt. Singapore, on the other hand, has minimal corruption but life is expensive, competitive and stressful. Interstingly, its former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once observed that Singapore would never have been so successful, if it had oil: in the absence of natural resources, Singapore had to develop its human resources into a globally competitive workforce. The unspoken implication behind this argument is of course that a society dependent on oil revenues will become uncompetitive because it fosters a culture of entitlement among its citizens. Lee was diplomatic enough not to give an example to support this theory.

Comprehensive social security and burgeoning prosperity have fostered a culture of conspicuous consumption not just among the royal family. In a culture in which traditional status symbols are important in articulating rigid social hierarchies, the status symbols of ‘modern’ consumer culture have become weapons of intense status competition under conditions of rapid social mobility. Given the dearth of public spaces, malls have become the temples of consumerism not just for shopping, but as sites for socialising and staging displays of brand fetishism and the fashionisation of everything.

Given the relative prosperity most of his subjects have enjoyed during his reign, it is not surprising that the Sultan’s domestic popularity probably exceeds that of any democratically elected leaders in Southeast Asia. Voices calling for a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, which were so loud at the time of the 1962 rebellion, have fallen silent and the PRB has disappeared. While there have been occasional attempts to set up ‘opposition’ parties, these were also supportive of the monarchy, and—given that there are no elections—it is not clear what their role is, apart from serving as of a democratic fig leaf for the Sultan’s New Clothes. By the 1980s Brunei had been transformed into a thoroughly depoliticised consumerist society, if we understand politics in the classical sense as public discussion and participation in decision-making rather than as court politics about who gets the Sultan’s ear. For many of his subjects, “politics” seems to have become a dirty word that implies disunity and conflict, i.e. the signs of doom that would undermine the harmony and stability of the status quo on which their well-being and prosperity depend.

Personality Cult

More than 80% of his subjects were born during the current Sultan’s reign, and only about 5% are 65 years of age or older, i.e. old enough to remember his father Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien. Therefore, some 95% of them never knew a Brunei without him, and for them a Brunei without Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah is a difficult to imagine and unsettling scenario.

During his long reign the Sultan has become the monarchy personified, partly due to habituation, and partly as a result of a carefully constructed personality cult, with all the typical characteristics of such cults; including his portrait on coins, banknotes and stamps, framed portraits in offices, shops and restaurants and his image on huge banners, billboards and arches all over the country during national celebrations. Not only is his image ubiquitous in public, but in many private homes a photo of the Sultan takes pride of place, often depicting a family member receiving one of the many symbolic honours, such as decorations, certificates or awards from him. The ubiquitousness of his presence has something of a panoptic quality: he is perpetually seen by his subjects, but he also seems to be watching constantly.

The media are under instruction to give priority to reporting any of the public engagement of His Majesty, irrespective of the importance of the occasion. Newspapers’ reports about the Sultan’s official engagements are always on the top of the front page and on television they are always the first news item, however minor they may be compared to whatever else happened elsewhere in the country or indeed in the world. These engagements usually involve religious rituals or official state and royal court ceremonies. They are therefore not really “news” in any conventional sense of the word because they are highly predictable and repetitive events, they are actually the very opposite of “news”: instead of reporting what is new, they are merely ritual affirmations of continuity and stability.

Interaction between the Sultan and his subjects is subject to strict rules established and enforced by the Department of State Ceremonial Customs (Jabatan Adat Istiadat Negara). Depending on the nature of the ceremony, the Sultan will wear a Bruneian version of ‘traditional’ Malay dress (baju melayu) or a picturesque military uniform bedecked with decorations. In terms of spatial structure, the attendees are seated at a distance to the Sultan relative to their social rank, and nobody is allowed to sit higher than he does. In traditional court ceremonies, where participants sit on the floor, dignitaries approach the Sultan by crawling towards him. Moving away from the Sultan on ceremonial occasions entails crawling or walking backwards to avoid showing him one’s back. When speaking to the Sultan a special register is used (bahasa dalam) which includes elaborate rules of address that elevate the addressee and deprecate the speaker. In a tightly knit society of 330,000 citizens, these royal ceremonies symbolically create and reproduce vast structural distances between the Sultan and his officials and subjects. In his role as Sultan, Hassanal Bolkiah is elevated to a level where he has not just secular but also sacred powers.

But there is a very different side to the personality cult that appears only to Bruneians. There are probably only a few of his adult subjects who have not met the Sultan in person and shaken hands and perhaps exchanged a few words with him. Brunei is a country on a very different scale from its neighbours. In terms of its population size of about 330,000 citizens, Brunei is by far the smallest country in Southeast Asia and social networks among Bruneians are tightly knit. There are probably no more than two degrees of separation between most Bruneians, whether as kinsmen, neighbours, classmates,Footnote 4 colleagues or even as in-laws of members of the royal family. These roles often coincide so that individuals are linked in multiplex relationships.

The tightly-knit nature of society promotes compliance and social control. There is very little of a ‘public sphere’, and the lack of anonymity conveys a sense of intimacy and safety, but also of a lack of privacy and personal liberty.Footnote 5 Brunei is experienced very differently from the outside and the inside: while it stands shoulder-to-shoulder with other nation states in the region, from the inside it has a small-town atmosphere. It is not uncommon to encounter the Sultan—rather like a small-town mayor—on “surprise visits” to pray at a local mosque or inspect a government department, school or university, or visit a mall and marketplace enquiring about people’s well-being. In such contexts, he dresses informally, wearing ‘normal’ clothes, such as jeans with a polo shirt or a camouflage uniform with his name “H. Bolkiah” stitched on the breast pocket like any other soldier, drives himself in a ‘modest’ German luxury car rather than being chauffeured in an outlandish-looking golden Rolls Royce as at royal ceremonies. The image conveyed is not one of a Sultan with his subjects, but of a populist leader among his people. In recent years he has let himself be photographed like a pop star with his adoring fans for ‘wefies’, which they post on their social media accounts as a digital version of the framed photos of him in living rooms.

This familiarity between ruler and ruled does not always square easily with the strict requirements of royal protocol. Some years ago, a photograph of him at a housekey-handing-over ceremony walking arm-in-arm with two clearly very happy recipients caused unease in conservative circles, where it was seen as inappropriate, even disrespectful, despite the fact that he appeared to enjoy his popularity and the spontaneity of the gesture.

This personal side of the personality cult is difficult for outsiders to understand. During a state visit in 2004 by the Swedish King, the latter expressed his admiration for how close the Sultan was to his subjects in an interview with the Swedish media (Sverigesradio, 2013). This caused a political scandal back in Sweden when human rights organisations and republicans took it as an opportunity to demand the abolition of their monarchy because the King is constitutionally barred from making political statements, and it was scandalous of him to praise an undemocratic, autocratic monarch like the Sultan as being close to his people (KUNA, 2004). When it became known in Brunei that the King’s admiring comments about the Sultan had led to demands for the abolition of the Swedish monarchy, the reaction in the social media ranged from incomprehension to outrage over depicting their ruler as an oriental despot lording over his submissive subjects, an image of their society that even many liberal Bruneians do not easily recognise. Similar media reports, rather than damaging his standing often have the opposite effect: a defensive, nationalist reaction against ‘ill-informed’ foreign commentators ‘meddling’ in Brunei’s internal affairs.

While in all political systems, those in power have to negotiate a delicate balance between the semantics of hierarchy and of solidarity, the Sultan’s public performances seem like a dazzling display of juggling contradictory roles: a Sultan who as prime minister is the head of a government and public administration, a role inherited from the British Resident; as Yang di-Pertuan Negara, a ‘traditional’ Malay Sultan who is the heir to an ancient dynasty and appears as a remote and inaccessible figure with a mystical aura; as raja yang prihatin (“the caring monarch”), a popularist Sultan who acts like a father figure devoted to the well-being of his subjects whom he listens to and speaks for.

Brunei is not alone in trying to be a ‘traditional’ patrimonial sultanate and a ‘modern’ Malay nation state.Footnote 6 Kessler (2014) argues that in Malaysia “these two things––ancient cosmological status and modern constitutional standing––are clearly different. They are matters deriving from two distinct and mutually incommensurate universes of meaning. The connection between them––in the person of the ruler who represents an old cultural institution and its underlying beliefs, but who also occupies a modern constitutional position and discharges a correspondingly circumscribed formal role––is purely contingent. Two different things are done, or symbolized, by the same person, or personal incumbent of two institutional positions. But they are different and distinct”. While his distinction may apply in the Malaysian context, where the Constitution defines the role of the sultans who are therefore subject to the Constitution, in Brunei it is the other way round: the Sultan is above the Constitution:

The Constitution contains none of the concepts on which modern constitutionalism is based: popular sovereignty, a bill of rights, limited government, separation of powers or the rule of law… ‘main task of the Constitution is to put the unfettered powers of the Sultan on a statutory basis... It is a Constitution in name only, but not in essence’.Footnote 7

In effect, the Constitution does not serve to protect the people, but to protect the Sultan. Under the revised 2006 Constitution “His Majesty can do no wrong” in either his personal or his official capacities, i.e. he cannot be held accountable under any law, because he makes the law (by decree). In this sense, the Sultan is not just the monarchy personified, but he is—like Louis XIV—the state.

On 15 July this year (2023) Bruneians will celebrate the Sultan’s 77th Birthday, and in October his 56th anniversary on the throne. While so far both the Sultan and his state seem relatively healthy, there is muted concern about what a future scenario without the Sultan will look like. His eventual departure will leave a huge void in the collective consciousness, political culture and institutional landscape that will not be easy for his son, the Crown Prince, and the next generation of members of the royal family to fill. While the Sultan was born in 1946 in a modest wooden ‘palace’ not much different from the neighbouring houses of his subjects, his children grew up in the Istana Nurul Iman, the world’s largest palace, worlds apart from his subjects’ everyday lives. Brunei without the current Sultan is an unsettling thought for many Bruneians, but there is hope that history might repeat itself, after all at the time of his accession the Sultan himself was only 21 years old and inexperienced, when he was unexpectedly called back from Sandhurst to succeed his father.

However, for the Sultan’s successor circumstances are unlikely to be as auspicious as they were at the start of his own reign which coincided with Brunei’s transformation into a rentier state, and whose end may well turn out to be the beginning of the end of the Shellfare state. While reliance on external oil rents has freed Bruneians of the burden of taxation, and allowed the state to adopt populist social welfare policies, it has also made the state highly dependent on the vicissitudes of global commodity and financial markets. Oil was first discovered in 1929, and by the 1990s both the quantity and quality of the crude oil produced were in decline and no longer justified major new investments in oil production facilities. Although the claim that Brunei’s oil reserves would only last for another 25 years has been around for decades, that scenario has so far failed to materialise because increased LNG production has to some extent compensated for the decline in oil production. But fluctuations and uncertainties in global energy markets have shown Brunei’s vulnerability to external forces. Apart from oil and gas exports, another source of revenue is returns on overseas investments of Brunei’s financial reserves, but the country’s financial self-confidence suffered a major blow in the wake of the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis when its investments incurred heavy losses, though relevant data are not published.

There is a growing realisation that the Shellfare state is unsustainable in the long term. Over the last fifty years the citizen-population has more than doubled, and the public sector will not be able to continue absorbing more than half of the local workforce (Labour Force Survey, 2019), especially since among the younger generation education levels have risen and with that their career expectations. While the official unemployment rate is 7.65%, the youth unemployment rate was 31.5% in 2018, 21.5% in 2019, 27.1% in 2020 and 24.3% in 2021 according to World Bank data. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the real unemployment rate may be higher as many of the young unemployed take up low paid temporary jobs while waiting for the government to allocate them a public sector job which can take years, if it ever comes. Increasingly one sees young Bruneians in low paid jobs formerly performed by foreign labour. After two generations of upward social mobility, many in the current younger generation are now downwardly mobile.

Attempts to grow the economy through diversification by expanding the private sector have not met with significant success. Like other rentier states, Brunei suffers from the “Dutch Disease”: the expansion of the public sector at the expense of the private sector. As the resources of the state grow exponentially, it becomes the dominant economic actor in society at the expense of a shrinking private sector. Brunei has virtually no manufacturing and agricultural sector, because its domestic market is too small, and its overvalued currency makes imports cheaper and exports uncompetitive. The local market is almost totally dependent on imported consumer goods and in the absence of a productive sector, the economy is dominated by a service sector which caters for the demands of a consumerist society fed by the Shellfare state.

Unlike Arab oil states, Brunei does not have an indigenous merchant class that could drive private sector expansion. Historically, and to some extent until today, the Chinese minority has been strongly represented in the business community. But Brunei is the only country in Southeast Asia that did not give citizenship rights to its Chinese residents, and many of them have emigrated reducing the percentage of Chinese in the population from almost 30% in 1959 to just over 10% today. While some Chinese have been naturalised as citizens on a case-by-case basis, the majority are stateless and their official status is that of Permanent Residents. As non-citizens they are only indirectly or marginally part of the Shellfare state and are mostly active in the private sector. However, the private sector is dominated by large Government-Owned Companies (GOCs) and by companies controlled by various members of the royal family.Footnote 8 Effectively, what Brunei has by way of a ‘private’ sector is largely dependent on the public sector through government contracts.

One way the state is seeking to divest itself of the responsibility to provide employment for the bulk of the local workforce is by promoting youth entrepreneurship. If young entrepreneurs create their own jobs as well as jobs for others by growing their businesses, then the public sector would no longer need to absorb the growing population of educated youth. However, at present the private sector finds it hard to compete with more attractive salaries, generous vacation entitlements and job security in the public sector. Moreover, since the private sector is largely limited to services, there is intense competition and a high failure rate due to the proliferation and duplication of businesses in the retail and hospitality sectors. The promotion of private sector entrepreneurship, however, has the effect of putting the blame for business failure on the individual rather than on the state’s economic policies.

Another symptom of the “Dutch Disease” is the overvaluation of the national currency driven by massive financial reserves. Economists reckon that the 1967 Brunei–Singapore Currency Interchangeability Agreement which pegs the Brunei dollar to the Singapore dollar has led to a 25% overvaluation of the Brunei dollar making foreign investment in such a tiny domestic market unattractive.Footnote 9 In the face of adverse conditions for attracting foreign investment, the government has welcomed several major Chinese projects as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but these seem to be in part guided by political rather than purely economic motives (Lawrence, 2021).Footnote 10

Brunei has also tried to find a niche in the expanding global Islamic economy in such fields as Islamic finance, halal certification and religious tourism. However, attempts to use its religious credentials as a selling point for the Brunei Islamic brand have not been very successful either, given that it has to compete with much bigger and better-known regional operators in this market. Brunei’s Islamic financial institutions are too small compared to much larger and better-connected competitors in Malaysia or Singapore. Similarly, Brunei halal certification for commodities, such as Australian cheeses, may build brand trust in Brunei itself, but it has gained little currency outside the country.

Malay Islamic Monarchy (MIB)

Although under the “national philosophy” of MIB, Islam had been an official pillar of legitimacy for the monarchy since independence, in recent years there has been a noticeable push to give religion a higher profile in the public sphere of the nation and in the everyday lives of its citizens. Initially, this manifested itself in education reforms making religious education compulsory in school and establishing two Islamic universities. On closer inspection, these were partly cosmetic changes: the great majority of children already attended religious schools in the afternoon, one of the new Islamic universities had previously been the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the national university, and the other was the upgraded Religious Teachers University College. Various decrees imposed new rules on everyday life that mainly affected non-Muslims, such as closing commercial establishments during Friday prayers, banning restaurants from serving food during Ramadan and prohibiting the public celebration of non-Islamic religious events. The overall effect of such regulations was to increase the visibility of Islam in the public sphere and to restrict the presence of other religions to the private sphere.

The most significant of these moves was the introduction of an Islamic legal code in 2019 (Muller, 2016). This was not a particularly popular move, especially among the younger generation of Bruneians, many of whom did not really see the need for it, but it also did not cause a strong counter-reaction in the country. Inside Brunei there was limited enthusiasm for the move but also little criticism, even in the anonymous world of social media. The dominant reaction was indifference based on doubts that the government would really implement such laws (Khan, 2020). It seemed hard to imagine that in such a tightly knit society punishments such as stoning and amputations would really be carried: For a start, who would throw the stones and which surgeon would amputate the hands?

Domestic disinterest in the Syariah Penal Code Order 2013 (SPCO), contrasts markedly with the hostile reaction abroad. Bruneians suddenly found their country categorised with Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, rather than with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which have similar laws, but where hudud sentences are not carried out—a scenario with which Bruneians would feel quite familiar. Although Brunei never repealed the death penalty which it inherited from British Indian law, the last execution was carried out at the time of the Residency in 1957, and due to the lack of an executioner it was carried out in Singapore. Following widespread international outcry about the SPCO, the Sultan spelled out what many in the country had already assumed: that the existing moratorium on capital punishment would stand, but that the SPCO will not be repealed either.

Although he did not comment on the other hudud punishments, there was official backtracking on the issue, such as the claim that the mere announcement of the SPCO already had a deterrent effect on the crime rate, alcohol offences and the number of illegitimate children; or that the standards of evidence required under Shari’a law were much higher than under the civil code, in fact so high that they were almost impossible to meet. Adultery, for example, requires four male witnesses to the act of penetration.Footnote 11 Each potential SPCO case requires an initial judicial determination of whether it is to be tried under the Shari’a code or the common law. So far not a single case appears to have been tried under the SPCO, and all offences, such as rape cases, that one might have expected to be tried under it, were referred to the civil courts.Footnote 12

This raises the question of why the Sultan so publicly called for the introduction of Islamic law when there was no intention of actually implementing it. After all, domestically it was not a popular move, and if hudud sentences had really been implemented, it would probably have diminished the Sultan’s popularity. Internationally it did considerable damage to Brunei’s and his own standing by scaring foreign investors and tourists away and negatively impacting Brunei’s investments abroad through highly publicised public protests and boycotts. A common explanation heard in Brunei is that as the Sultan is getting older, he is also becoming more religious. Indeed, it appears to be true that he has become more religious in his personal religious observances, but while such life-cycle stereotypes may make common sense, it is hardly a satisfactory sociological explanation. What is at stake here is not only his own fate in the afterlife, but also the future of his state.

Right from the start the Sultan had played a very conspicuous role in the turn towards religion. Preparing his citizens, he had called for the introduction of Islamic law several times over the years. Only when the Sultan began to publicly berate the judicial authorities for having ignored his calls three times already, was the process initiated. While this delay may have been due to bureaucratic inertia or resistance to change on the part of the concerned officials, it clearly cast the Sultan into the role of a faithful Islamic ruler determined to implement and uphold a social, political and legal order in conformity with divine will.

Although the Sultan is by no means a very charismatic personality by himself, his turn to religion has had the effect of routinising the personality cult around him by shifting the monarchy away from his long shadow and anchoring it more deeply in religion and, in turn, rooting religion more deeply in the society. While the Sultan is, as we have seen, above the Constitution of Brunei, he is subject to God’s law. As the concatenation of royal titles expresses it: in relation to God, he is Kebawah Duli Yang Maha Mulia (“He Who is the Dust of The Almighty”), but in relation to his subjects he is Yang di-Pertuan Negara (“Lord of the State”). The amended social contract is not just between the Sultan and his subjects, but between them and the khalifah, God’s representative on earth, as he is referred to in this context (Muller, 2022).

But the politicisation of religion (or the Islamisation of politics) cuts both ways. While religion can be a source of legitimacy for the monarchy, it can also be used to challenge its legitimacy. The introduction-sans-implementation of Islamic law, for example, lays the monarchy open to accusations of a Machiavellian (ab)use of religion to shore up its religious credentials for political purposes. This is where the introduction of Islamic law could turn into the legal equivalent of leaving a loaded gun on the table, which in future somebody else might decide to actually use.

As the case of Malaysia demonstrates, the game of competitive religiosity opens the door to a dynamic in which competing political forces seek to out-Islamise each other. The religious elite in Brunei is aware of this and keeps tight control over religious activities by censoring all religious literature and requiring all religious preaching and teaching to be licensed. The Ministry of Religious Affairs Brunei sends its elite personnel to study et al.-Azhar University in Cairo and employs Egyptian religious teachers in its Islamic schools and universities. But the Internal Security Department (ISD) also sends officers for training with Egyptian State Security “because they know the latest developments among Islamist movements”, as one senior ISD official told me.

“A Nation Devoted to God”: Negara Zikir

A recent response to the dilemma of the ambivalence of the Islamisation has been the propagation of the concept of Brunei as “negara zikir” (Mazlan & Yusof, 2019), a uniquely Bruneian concept neither found in any other Muslim society past or present nor in classical Islamic political philosophy. Not uncharacteristically, it also remains unclear what exactly it means. But its very vagueness gives it the ambiguity that allows it, on the one hand, to convey the notion of Bruneian exceptionalism, while on the other hand, also claiming to be based on “pure Islam” (Islam tulen). There is an unintentional irony in the fact that this supposedly authentic, literal reading of Islam is supposedly unpolluted by mere interpretations that falsify and instrumentalise religion for political purposes. “Negara zikir” seeks to square the circle: it asserts Bruneian exceptionalism in order to pre-empt possible comparisons with alternative Islamic social models (and therefore criticisms), while at the same time claiming to be the one and only authentic understanding of Islam (and therefore beyond questioning).

The propagation of negara zikir also implies a greater emphasis on spiritual values and rewards in the afterlife as compared to the rewards of this world, i.e. the values of the mosque over the values of the mall. As such, it fortifies Brunei Malay identity (which revolves around the monarchy) against the temptations of materialism and consumerism of the nouveaux riches whose sense of entitlement and expectations of material rewards the Shellfare state will no longer be able to fulfil indefinitely.

Conclusion

Is Brunei a resilient monarchy or a fragile rentier state? What will the future hold for this unique and paradoxical political system? Given the current Sultan’s popularity, legitimacy and financial means, it seems unlikely that anything very dramatic will occur during the remaining years of his reign.

As for the longer-term future, it is difficult to identify any alternative forces that could—or would—challenge the status quo. What Brunei has by way of a working class are mostly migrant workers imported from South Asia and its poorer Southeast Asian neighbours. The Chinese business class has been decimated demographically and excluded politically as Permanent Residents. The private sector is dominated by Government-Owned Companies and private companies owned by members of the royal family, and what is emerging as a new Malay business class is dependent on government contracts. The middle class is mostly composed of so-called “government servants”: bureaucrats and technocrats, teachers and lecturers. The military is well-funded and by providing employment to about 7200 soldiers on active duty, it is very much part of the Shellfare state. The numerous institutions of the religious elite provide employment to a large religious workforce in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Office of the State Mufti, the Syariah Court, as well as religious schools and universities. Their role in providing the religious (wo)manpower for the turn to religion is secure. While Brunei is by no means free of relative poverty, the social forces that might be in a position to challenge the status quo are beneficiaries of it, and have so far little incentive to change it.

The real question is, however, what will happen once the Sultan’s reign comes to an end. One possible scenario could be similar to that emerging in Thailand following the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Like the latter, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah’s reign has outlasted most of the subjects’ memories of a predecessor, and like him he has also become a deeply revered and larger-than-life, almost mythical figure. Both monarchs have awoken high expectations among their subjects that are difficult for their successors to fulfil. Not only is there a new generation of rulers emerging, but there is also a new generation of subjects: younger, more politically conscious, more educated and with higher expectations, they are beginning to look at their country’s politics more critically than their parent’s generation, whether from a liberal-progressive or a religious-conservative perspective.

Unlike the Thai King, however, the Brunei Sultan is not a constitutional monarch. He has exclusive executive and legislative powers—and he has complete financial control. As long as the rentier state was strong and almost everybody’s share of the oil wealth was growing, he could take the credit, and only a few asked questions about how exactly that wealth was being distributed. But when the rentier economy begins to contract, and everybody’s share of the wealth becomes smaller, awkward questions are asked and scapegoats are needed. While in the past this might have happened between trusted friends and relatives in private, today it happens in full view of the public in the social media, which is the closest thing Brunei has to a public sphere. In fact, Brunei has the highest social media penetration rate in Southeast Asia, and after the UAE and Qatar, the third highest in the world.Footnote 13

Meanwhile, the Sultan has been trying to put some distance between himself and the machinery of government by adding an oppositional voice to his repertoire: In his role as “Man of the People”, he also acts as their representative vis-à-vis the government that he himself heads. In a now famous phrase, he criticised members of his own cabinet as “robot ministers” for not showing enough initiative. On other occasions, he has regularly spoken of abuse of power among public officials and has called for “government servants” to become “God-fearing bureaucrats”. Until 2005 there were no term limits for ministers and cabinet reshuffles were rare, but since then ministers are subject to reappointment after five-year performance reviews, and several times ministers have even been unexpectedly removed in the middle of their terms. In late 2017, for example, the Sultan gave a speech in which he criticised the “abuse of power” by government officials around the same time as the Minister of Health was mysteriously removed. A couple of months later several other prominent ministers were unexpectedly replaced, while among the new appointments was that of the former Director of the Anti-Corruption Bureau to the post of Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s (i.e. the Sultan) Office.

The individuals caught up in these cases may just have been convenient scapegoats because corruption and abuse of power are systemic. However, there has been a change of winds in the face of the growing realisation that in the future the Shellfare state may no longer be able to fulfil its side of the rentier bargain. In a speech the Sultan gave to the new cabinet in 2018, he admonished them to “really focus on matters that are beneficial for the country and not for self-interest or for the interest of any parties” (Ward, 2018). Whether or not the Sultan has ever read the McArthur Report of 1904 we do not know, but there is an echo of the Report in his words to his ministers: “Do not become drunk with power that you will do anything for your own self-interests above the needs and interests of the country. Leaders who have become drunk with power have a tendency to practice nepotism and cronyism. This must not be allowed to happen” (Hazair, 2018).