The association between "Gulf countries" and "culture" is new, and it astonishes so much that it contradicts the image usually associated with the principalities of the Persian Gulf. Increasingly, the number of announcements of museums with high international visibility in Qatar and Abu Dhabi has been the most striking in recent years. However, these "mirror museums" did not emerge in a cultural desert. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is not a "Louvre des Sables". As early as the 1970s, all the states on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf had already had at least one large national museum. In comparing these two models of museums, the second Gulf War (1990-1991) emerged as a major political turning point in which a new regional order was born which not only undermined Saudi hegemony on the Arabian Peninsula but also modified the balance of power between the ruling families and their subjects. Less than a month from the inauguration of a Louvre in Abu Dhabi, this conference will try to show from the case of the Principalities of the Persian Gulf how the adoption of the cultural brands of liberalism can nourish the political exclusion of the middle classes in an authoritarian regime.