Europe & Middle East / Op-Ed/Article
Europe and the Gulf: strategic neglect
17/09/2007 By Ana Echagüe, Richard Youngs
In the fifty years since the signing of the Treaties of Rome, European foreign policy
coordination and presence has gradually, if often unspectacularly, augmented in
most areas of the world.
Many observers would insist that the North African and Middle Eastern states included within the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) could be defi ned as one area that has witnessed to such positive trends — that despite the manifest shortcomings of the EMP this initiative has slowly facilitated a more coordinated and embedded European strategy towards the southern Mediterranean.
However, in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates) the trend over the last half
century has been in the opposite direction.
The Arabian Peninsula concentrates several pivotal issues of international concern, including energy security, counterterrorism, Middle Eastern regional security, and debates over Arab democratic reform.
But overall European weight in this region has incrementally diminished, and the EU as a collective entity has palpably failed to establish an influential purchase over this crucial part of the Middle East.
This failing is explained by two European judgments: first, that the Gulf does not present the kind of acute geopolitical urgency that would merit paying the costs associated with a greater engagement in the region; second, that the EU has negligible capacity to affect social, economic or political change in the Gulf and that its interests are thus best served by stability-oriented caution.
Such judgments might contain a healthy dose of realism; but the EU has also paid a price for its passivity in the Gulf.
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Keywords
Bahrain EU Foreign Policy European Union Kuwait Middle East Oman Qatar Saudi Arabia United Arab EmiratesRelated publications
Bio author: Ana Echagüe
Graduate in International Relations and Art History from Tufts University and obtained her Masters in International Relations from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Prior to joining FRIDE, she was Deputy Director at the University of the Middle East Project in Madrid. She has also worked as a financial analyst at Lehman Brothers in London.
Bio author: Richard Youngs
Richard Youngs is Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Democratisation programme at FRIDE. He also lectures at the University of Warwick in the UK. He studied at Cambridge (BA Hons) and Warwick (MA, PhD) universities.
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