Kingdom is creating an architecture of national identity

There is a particular blindness that afflicts commentary on ambitious infrastructure projects in the developing world. When Western journalists survey a grand railway station rising from the Kazakh steppe, a gleaming airport terminal in Rwanda, or Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah project, they reach instinctively for a familiar verdict: white elephant. The calculation seems obvious — cost divided by utilitarian return yields a number that does not add up. But this arithmetic misses an entirely different ledger, one that records not steel and concrete but something harder to quantify and far more consequential: the construction of national consciousness or identity.

When a government builds a metro system, it is solving a mobility problem. When it builds a port, it is encouraging commerce. These are horizontal investments — they extend the productive capacity of systems that already exist. But there is a second category of investment, one that operates vertically, into the psychological foundations of a society. This is mental infrastructure: the deliberate construction of collective identity through the symbolism of ambitious, visible, national achievement.

Nations that have spent centuries building their identity rarely need to think about this. France would not build an Eiffel Tower today, because France does not need to remind its citizens — or itself — that it exists as a coherent civilization with a claim on their deepest loyalties. The British national identity today does not require the construction of a Ferris Wheel or a Crystal Palace to stabilize it. All of these expensive, non-utilitarian projects were constructed over 100 years ago for the sake of World Fairs that were meant to project technological sophistication and national pride. In addition to these ambitious projects, these societies have millennia of myth, literature, shared memory, and institutional continuity doing the work of national cohesion quietly in the background.

France would not build an Eiffel Tower today

Nabil Al-Khowaiter

But consider the situation of a country that arrived at statehood within living memory, or whose population was scattered across tribal, regional, or sectarian identities before a modern national project attempted to unify them. For such a country, national identity is not a given. It is an aspiration. And aspirations, to become real, require symbols.

This is why the Western critique of “impractical” infrastructure in younger nations so fundamentally misreads the situation. Media outlets with Raj-like pretensions, including the Wall Street Journal and Economist magazine, apply a cost-benefit framework to national prestige projects in recently formed nation states that are calibrated for societies where national cohesion is already a fixed cost that was paid centuries ago. The “white elephant” accusation assumes that the only valid output of a construction project is a service delivered to a citizen. It cannot account for a project whose primary output is the citizens themselves — transformed, enlarged, made newly proud of and committed to their country.

The argument for mental infrastructure is not merely symbolic. It has a rigorous economic logic that its critics consistently underestimate.

The quality of a state depends, more than almost any other single variable, on the quality and dedication of its civil servants. Bureaucracies are the capillaries of governance — they are where policy meets reality, where the intentions of political leaders either translate into outcomes or quietly die. And the dedication of civil servants is not primarily a function of their salaries. It is a function of their relationship to the institution they serve.

A civil servant who is proud of their country, who feels that they are a participant in something larger and more significant than their own career, will behave differently from one who views their position as a rent-extraction opportunity. The proud civil servant processes your application because the system working well reflects on their nation, and their nation’s reputation is bound up with their own sense of self. The demoralized civil servant tries to extract a bribe because the institution commands no loyalty and the transaction is therefore purely personal.

This is not a minor variable. Corruption in public services is not primarily a function of low wages — many of the world’s most corrupt bureaucracies are not especially poorly paid. It is primarily a function of institutional identity and national pride. Where those are strong, corruption rates fall. Where they are weak, no wage increase will compensate.

Saudi Arabia offers a case study in national transformation. No contemporary example illustrates this dynamic more vividly than the Kingdom over the past decade.

Before the launch of Vision 2030 in 2016, Saudi Arabia’s border and passport procedures were a byword for tedium and inefficiency. International travelers learned to budget hours for passport queues staffed by officials who embodied through their demeaner and their pace a bureaucratic culture of minimal effort. 

Then something happened. Not overnight, and not without enormous effort, but the transformation was real and is now remarked upon by virtually everyone who passes through Saudi airports. Today, Saudi border processing is among the most efficient in the world. Digital document scanning, facial recognition, seamless movement — a system that makes the entry procedures of most European countries seem 20th century by comparison. Where once there were long queues and bored officials, there is now fluid, technology-enabled processing that reflects genuine institutional pride in getting it right.

What drove this? The salaries of passport officials did not increase tenfold. The answer lies elsewhere: in the cultural shift ignited by a national project that asked Saudi citizens to see themselves differently — as builders of a future-facing civilization, as participants in an ambitious national story. The civil servant who stays current with new biometric systems, who takes pride in a tourist’s smooth arrival experience, who troubleshoots problems rather than ignoring them, is not responding to financial incentives. They are responding to a new understanding of what their country is becoming and what their role in it means.

Bureaucracies are the capillaries of governance

Nabil Al-Khowaiter

This is the actual return on investment of projects such as the restoration of AlUla or the transformation of Diriyah into a monument to Saudi origins. The Western press looks at these projects and calculates the cost per kilometer of utility delivered. But the real calculation is different: How much is it worth to transform the self-conception of a civil service, to replace the culture of passive state employment with the culture of national mission?

The answer is: a great deal.

There is something ironic in the confidence with which Western commentators dismiss national pride projects in the developing world. The nations from which that commentary emanates were themselves built, in decisive moments, on exactly such projects. The building of Washington, a capital city designed to announce the arrival of a new nation, was not a utilitarian exercise. Haussmann’s reimagining of Paris was partly sanitation, but mostly grandeur, a deliberate project of national self-assertion. 

The difference is that those projects happened long enough ago that their nation-building function has been forgotten. What remains in memory is only their eventual economic productivity, which is retrospectively taken to have been the whole point. The mental infrastructure they built — the national pride they embedded in populations that were themselves newly consolidated — has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that it is invisible.

The distinction between utilitarian infrastructure and mental infrastructure is real, but it is not a distinction between the practical and the impractical. It is a distinction between two different kinds of practical — the kind that delivers services and the kind that builds the human capacity to deliver services well.

Nations that are young, or that are undergoing rapid transformation of their national identity, face a challenge that older nations have forgotten: the challenge of making national membership feel meaningful enough that citizens invest themselves in the collective project rather than simply free-riding on it. The ambitious, sometimes extravagant, and symbolic infrastructure projects that provoke Western skepticism are, in many cases, the most rational investments available to such nations.

• Nabil Al-Khowaiter is a former senior adviser to the Saudi minister of energy.