100

This article seeks to shed light on the vision of King Abdullah II of Jordan and to analyze it based on the “Royal Discussion Papers” (RDPs)—seven papers published between 2012 and 2017. The RDPs were articles that the king published in the newspapers under his name, through which he expressed his ideas and proposals to everyone (the government and the people), while giving the people the freedom to reflect on them and discuss them prior to their becoming a “roadmap” for the government, or so was the stated intention. These RDPs may be considered one of the methods and tools used by the Jordanian monarch to tackle the issues and crises facing the Jordanian state. The RDPs reflect the perception of the Jordanian state on the one hand, and, on the other, the impact of political, economic, and security transformations in the region and the rest of the world, particularly in the post-Arab Spring context. However, the repeated promises in these RDPs—particularly in the first five papers—to achieve “political reform” by opening the horizons for Jordan to create a political system similar to the UK model (a parliamentary government, under which the monarch “reigns but does not rule,” as the opposition has constantly demanded) have not been fulfilled. As the winds of the Arab Spring have calmed down and the “existential threat” to the king and the kingdom has lessened, the reforms have become less urgent. This means that the RDPs were no more than a “tool” for overcoming the difficult political, economic, and security conditions the kingdom was experiencing, rather than a long-term “strategy” for “political reform” aimed at addressing the challenges of the future.