Can state leaders use nationalism to build a more business-minded, entrepreneurial citizen identity? State leaders are increasingly attempting to compete in the global economy by building more knowledge-based domestic economies, driven by science-based innovation and private sector entrepreneurship. Yet citizens may lack business initiative and the entrepreneur’s appetite for risk, especially in rentier states and other societies with strong traditions of citizen reliance on government employment. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one approach to this dilemma has involved the strategic use of nationalism to reshape citizen identities along more market-friendly lines. Instead of expecting a job from the state, the new nationalist ideology argues, citizens should participate as leaders in the country’s growth by creating jobs for themselves as entrepreneurs and innovators. This paper investigates the market-oriented recalibration of state-sponsored nationalism in the UAE, with an emphasis on unintended consequences for citizen formation that have not been fully anticipated by existing theory. First, I document the ways in which UAE ruling elites together with their foreign advisors are projecting a new nationalist ideology that valorizes hard work, business initiative, and entrepreneurship “for the nation.” Second, I introduce a quasi-experimental case study of the effects of a public school reform embodying the new nationalism on Emirati youth attitudes. I use a difference-in-differences (DD) methodology to estimate the effects of the school reform on youth attitudes, comparing individual level survey data (n = 2001) that I collected in 2011 and 2012 within control and treatment school types across younger and older grade cohorts. Third, I present the results, supplemented with evidence from interviews and focus groups. The findings suggest that while ruling elites are succeeding in creating citizens with stronger nationalist sensibilities, they are failing to produce citizens with a greater interest in business and entrepreneurship. The data also point to a striking set of unintended consequences in the opposite direction from that desired by ruling elites: “treated” students reported dramatically greater support for the right to a government job, and significantly less inclination to start a business, compared to students who were not exposed to the school reform with its new business-centered nationalism. The last section concludes with a discussion of the hazards of using nationalism to motivate entrepreneurship, especially the idea of heightened citizen entitlement as yet another “genie in the bottle” associated with state-sponsored nationalism.