This was stated by academic scholars and diplomats who converged here yesterday for a seminar on promoting EU-GCC dialogue on foreign policy issues.
The two-day international workshop is organised by Qatar University’s Gulf Research Centre (GRC) and the Institute for European Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussels as part of a European Commission’s project to promote deeper EU-GCC relations.
An increase in political cooperation was particularly seen after the 2010 diplomatic programme, with convergence on crisis issues such as Libya and Yemen.
“The points of contact between the EU and GCC have increased over the years. Now, there are many high-level meetings that discuss issues and exchange,” Dr Christian Koch, Director of the Geneva-based Gulf Research Centre Foundation, told The Peninsula.
He said that both sides had done a commendable job of preventing Yemen from deteriorating further as nobody wanted to see a further disintegration of the security situation.
Some experts, however, were sceptical of the extent to which the relations would grow because of a failure to negotiate terms of the free trade agreement (FTA) for almost 25 years.
Breaking the negotiation impasse was difficult in what regional experts said was EU’s inability to understand the human rights issue from a GCC perspective, one of the important clauses of the FTA. Dr Koch argued that human rights issue had already been settled by the EU and GCC.
“As far as the GCC is concerned, the discussion over human rights has been done. There is no more discussion going on,” Dr Koch said.
“It’s a basic agreement that one abides by the United Nations charter on human rights and neither the EU nor the GCC have a problem with it,” he added, arguing that it is more a technical issue now as far as the Free Trade Agreement is concerned, which is about export duties.
Yet GCC countries may now not be keen to sign the FTA with EU over the European economic crisis and an emerging interest in the Asian markets.
“The real market for the GCC now is Asia. We have seen the trade volumes increase much more exponentially (with Asia) than with the EU,” Dr Koch said, stressing that FTA may no longer be as important as it was 10 years ago, especially from a GCC perspective.
He also said that the sovereign wealth funds from the Gulf region were critical in supporting certain industries and financial institutions in Europe in the wake of the 2008-09 crisis.
As trade volume between both sides continues to grow on an annual basis, one of the key issues that the EU is going to decide by the end of this year will be on the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP).
Experts also said that an increase in socialisation among the youth of both regions was very critical to breaking a cultural distrust that had stalled EU and GCC negotiations over the years.
