Try as it has to burnish its reputation as a guardian of human rights and clean government, FIFA World Cup host Qatar has once again come under a negative spotlight. Belgian authorities this week arrested six people, including a vice president of the European Parliament, in connection with an apparent cash-for-influence plot allegedly involving the Arab Gulf state.
Scandals have a way of emphasizing what is going wrong. But they also beg asking what is going right.
For the European Union, which is defending its moral and liberal values amid Russia’s war in Ukraine and the rise of autocratic tendencies within its own member states, the arrests have stirred urgent new calls to reform the organization’s rules on ethics and lobbying. “This is about the credibility of Europe, so this has to trigger consequences in various areas,” German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock observed.
In Qatar, persistent and credible concerns about official bribery and abuse of migrant workers overshadow evidence that one of the world’s most closed societies is gradually bending toward international standards of accountability.
One measure of that is an increasingly open diversity of civic activity. Qatari youth, the United Nations notes, have formed a vibrant grassroots movement to promote policy responses to climate change. In the arts, Qatari filmmakers are becoming more willing to tackle sensitive cultural issues like marriage and women’s rights.
This opening of public expression partly reflects exposure to liberal ideas through the local campuses of Western universities. College newspapers, for example, have tackled thorny issues like treatment of migrant workers with more freedom than the country’s professional media, which operate under tight censorship rules.
“The developments currently happening in the areas of filmmaking and higher education are promoting civic engagement and have the potential to actualize more significant changes down the line,” noted Hind Al Ansari, a doctoral student at Cambridge University, in a post on the Wilson Center website. “As more people become involved, over time, others will feel inspired to take part in the project of building vibrant, civically-engaged societies.”
That bottom-up social change is growing increasingly hard for the government of Qatar to ignore. As Ghada Waly, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, noted last week at the 2022 Anti-Corruption Excellence Awards in Doha, Qatar’s capital, “In order to truly counter corruption and the myriad forms it can take, we must inspire and engage the whole of society to tackle corruption.”
The effect of dishonesty is ultimately to magnify its remedy. No one has been charged with a crime yet, and the Qatari government rejects allegations of misconduct. But each in its own way, Europe and Qatar are being nudged toward greater integrity.