THERE IS NO UAE:

The United Arab Emirates has peaked. The social, political and economic model that initially worked for the UAE so well carries within it the seeds of its own demise. The model of a rentier state in which citizens are a tiny privileged minority is internally coherent, but dangerously unsustainable, and is moving towards an inevitable moment of reckoning. The coming years, I predict, will see this distressing reality become far more urgently manifest.

When the UAE was founded, it had a population of less than 300,000. Today, it is home to over 10 million - and 88% of those are non-citizens. Officially, these non-citizens are labelled "temporary migrant workers", but many are in fact life-long residents. Since the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Arab and Asian families moved to the country, contributing significantly to its success story, and founding most of its key development sectors. But the UAE did not provide a path to citizenship and decades later, a significant and growing demographic in the country is second and third-generation immigrants, who have never known another home. They are still referred to as "temporary". Notwithstanding their inferior legal status, these non-citizen natives are undeniably an integral part of the UAE's history and of its multicultural, modern society.

The government often refers to the country's striking population make-up as a "demographic imbalance" (or a "defect in demographic make-up") - but more than just being a defect, it's a solid trend. The UAE's rapid advancement in human development has predictably caused its family size to plummet - more education and more fulfilling careers for women came with a delayed age of first marriage and delayed child bearing. The UAE's birth rate has plummeted from nearly seven births per woman before the union, to 1.82 today (the replacement birth rate is 2.1). Local Emiratis, in short, cannot bridge the demographic gap through natural birth.

But this demographic defect is actually the cornerstone of some of the UAE's most important political and economic models. The local population is small enough to allow a generous and moderately sustainable cradle-to-grave welfare system - a system that would not scale up well if the population was much larger.

The vast majority of Emirati citizens work either directly for the government, or for semi-government corporations (99% of the private-sector workforce are non-citizens). For the vast majority of Emiratis, the government is - literally - their boss. The significance of this cannot be overstated - it sets the dynamic for the relationship between Emiratis and their government.

The model has been stable so far but can it continue? Studies project that by 2050, the UAE will be made up of only 4% citizens, and 96% non-citizens - which by then would include third and fourth-generation immigrants. The current regime cannot subsume such a big and diverse population as citizens without serious social, cultural, and political transformation; it cannot make up the difference via natural birth; it cannot "deport" nine-tenth of its population; and it cannot continue down the path of "demographic imbalance" without something or the other giving way. How sustainable is a country in which only 4% of the population are citizens?

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