COMMENTARY

Summer 2010

by Senén Florensa

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The European Union has provided its members with economic and social stability, enviable conditions that spread out towards its Mediterranean neighbours and are also seen as an example by such regional blocs as the Gulf region. The EU also has the capacity through its foreign policy to influence the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The EU has important strategic interests in the region and can certainly play a more committed role in advancing a regional security framework. This, as Abdulaziz Sager points out, would be a near-essential prelude to greater regional integration in other areas, and Europe here can offer itself as a role model to be followed.

But further progress on economic and other co-operation cannot be made dependent only on improving security conditions. The political environment of the whole region is complicated by instability in Iraq, the Middle East conflict and the tensions being generated by Iran. That said, relations between GCC members are not contaminated by disputes between one another, so there may well be room for broader co-operation.

And here, again Europe can serve as a guideline. Although the EU’s foundations were the need to bring peace after two world wars, it is also true that at the early stages of the European construction its commitment to security was flawed. The European Defence Community that was established in 1952 disappeared after only two years because of France’s opposition, and its successor the Western European Union had a no more than symbolic role. Security occupied an inferior position among Europeans’ co-operation priorities, and in 1957 the treaty of Rome gave a massive boost to European integration on the basis of economic, political and social co-operation, a process that would be further strengthened in the following decades.

This change of direction by European nations forced them to confront two key issues honestly. The first was that from the outset they had to accept that the road they were taking went beyond inter-governmental co-operation and would oblige them to sacrifice degrees of sovereignty to a shared new supranational body. In other words, they summoned up the political will to abandon the unchallengeable rights of a nation-state to ensure the success of the European Communities, later the European Union. The second issue was that this decision meant leaving behind the policies of hegemony and instead guaranteeing that even the smallest member countries would enjoy the same respect for their institutions and participation in decision-making as the largest ones.

According to Abdulaziz Sager, the civil societies of the Gulf countries now seek to emulate what Europe represents in terms of stability and economic progress. But he maintains that in the region’s current conditions their governments can only work to begin with a co-operation agenda based on their common perceptions of security. We should therefore question how far it will be possible to set more ambitious objectives that go beyond co-operation to economic, social and cultural integration? We must, in short, ask how far the Gulf States will be willing to follow the European model by beginning to cede sovereignty to a new shared supranational body rather than just to an intergovernmental organisation like the GCC region.