More details on GCC union plan are required

Debate over whether and how the Gulf Cooperation Council should upgrade its status will be among the tricky items on the agenda at its summit tomorrow, but more information needs to be made public.

When the Gulf Cooperation Council meets in Kuwait for its summit tomorrow, the agenda will include a series of difficult topics ranging from the council’s response to the conflict in Syria, to Iran’s interim deal with the P5+1 group curtailing its nuclear programme and to the faltering Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. But one of the most contentious topics might prove to be an internal one: should the GCC upgrade itself to a union of some kind and, if so, what should its priorities be?

An indication of the contentiousness of this process emerged last week, when Omani foreign minister Yusuf bin Alawi suggested the sultanate would rather exit the Gulf Cooperation Council entirely than be part of the proposed upgraded version of it. The comments, made at the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, came just after the Saudi assistant foreign minister, Nizar Madani, had delivered a speech saying that the upgrading of the council from one of cooperation to one of union was "no longer a luxury, but has become a necessity" because of the challenges facing the region.

Saudi Arabia has been a driving force behind upgrading the role of the GCC, including proposing in 2011 a union of the six nations. But while the shared interests and challenges faced by the Gulf nations were what originally prompted the the formation of the GCC in 1981 at a meeting hosted by Sheikh Zayed in Abu Dhabi, the dilemma since has always been how the group can be best organised to meet those challenges.

In this, the difficulty has been the paucity of detail available to the outside world. There are many useful international models for how nations can work together for their common benefit – such as Europe’s common market, the European Union which succeeded it, or the Association of South East Asian Nations – but the question is which one, if any, best fits the unique situation in the Gulf. Even as the group seeks to balance its shared interests against each member state’s national sovereignty, there is also the question of priorities.

This seems to have been the sticking point at the Manama Dialogue, with Saudi Arabia giving priority to the GCC’s combined defensive capability while Oman saw that issue as subordinate to improving economic integration within the GCC, which Mr bin Alawi said would bring prosperity to the member states and help them deal with issues like youth unemployment.

Both are legitimate concerns, but the region and the world needs much more detail about how an upgraded GCC would deal with these and other issues before it can make an informed view about plans for this new union.