Abu Dhabi is the capital, Dubai the merchant city

The United Arab Emirates are a federation whose capital is called Abu Dhabi. Dubai is the city named first. The state is built the other way: the capital decides, the merchant city trades, and each emirate keeps its own ground.

Abu Dhabi lies on the Persian Gulf, Dubai a stretch up the same coast. Land neighbours are Oman and Saudi Arabia. Fujairah faces the Gulf of Oman. Between them is desert, gravel and a few oases. The political fact is not the skyline. It is that several emirates share a flag and do not share the subsoil. The constitution leaves natural wealth with the emirate under whose ground it lies.

Abu Dhabi decides, Dubai trades

The emirates have 11,513,149 inhabitants on 83,600 square kilometres. The figure counts the resident population, including many people who are not Emirati citizens. No share is stated here. Abu Dhabi is the large emirate by territory and the seat of the federation. Dubai is, in ordinary speech, the merchant city and not the capital. Swap the two and you swap a coastal city for the state.

The Supreme Council of the rulers elects the president of the federation. In practice that office comes from Abu Dhabi. That is the habit of the federation since its founding, not a sentence that would strike Dubai out of politics. Dubai has ports, an airline and a name that reaches farther than its territory. Decisions about the state as a whole still sit in the capital. The division of labour is the form of the country: one emirate provides the seat, another the market.

The subsoil stays with the emirates

On 2 December 1971 Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah founded the federation. Ras Al Khaimah joined on 10 February 1972. Since then these emirates are the state. They are not districts of a capital. Each has its ruler, and the Supreme Council is the assembly of those rulers. The area of 83,600 square kilometres is the sum of their territories, not the sheet of a unitary state that would have recut the map.

The constitution provides that the natural resources and wealth of each emirate are the public property of that emirate. Oil and gas therefore do not fall into a common treasury of the soil. They belong to the emirate under which they lie. Abu Dhabi's fields are the fiscal core of the federation. More important than any volume is the sentence itself: Sharjah, Fujairah and the smaller emirates remain owners of what lies with them. The federation unites foreign policy more firmly than it unites the subsoil.

The federation shares a flag. It does not share the subsoil.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

A coast that is not smooth

The official language is Arabic. English is the working language of business and of a numerous foreign resident population, not a second official language. Payment is in the dirham. It is pegged to the US dollar. The rate does not belong in this profile. The peg itself does: a federation whose population figure reaches well beyond the citizenry has tied its currency to the currency of foreign trade and still left the language of the state Arabic.

The coast is not a smooth block. Madha is an Omani exclave inside the federation, and Nahwa, a place of Sharjah, lies inside Madha. To the north Oman holds the Musandam peninsula on the Strait of Hormuz. The tip that narrows that strait is therefore not an emirate. The federation has the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and it has the neighbour in the middle of its own area. That too fits the thesis: even the outer line is assembled from pieces of the emirates and from Oman.

Name Dubai and you name a merchant city. Name the state and you name Abu Dhabi, and a constitution that leaves the ground under each emirate in that emirate's hands.