The European Union is pulling out all the stops for its first-ever summit with the Gulf Cooperation Council on Wednesday. Despite initial appearances of ambivalence, Saudi Arabia made a last-minute announcement that its Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is set to attend.
The participation of the de facto Saudi leader adds heft to the meeting, but also controversy.
The EU-Gulf Cooperation Council summit is meant to be a kind of opening act for this week’s European Council summit – bringing together the 27 EU heads of state, along with the likes of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as well as outgoing Council President Charles Michel and foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.
At last count, four of the six GCC countries are sending heads of state or government. Bin Salman's presence signals Saudi Arabia’s ongoing efforts to rehabilitate its image on the world stage, following the 2018 killing of journalist and Saudi critic, Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence believes the crown prince was behind.
Any softening of the EU position reflects the bloc's need to lean more on Gulf states for its petrochemicals as Russia's war in Ukraine rages on, experts widely believe.
“The Saudis are a driving force within the GCC,” said Abdullah Baabood, a nonresident senior scholar at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Centre, said ahead of the summit. "Having him there will help the [EU-GCC] relationship.”
‘Missed opportunities’ for Gulf, EU cooperation
Though the meeting is the first formal EU-GCC summit, relations between the two blocs, at least on paper, go back to the 1980s.
A 1989 cooperation agreement between the then European Economic Community and the GCC established a regular dialogue between the two sides with the aim of building up joint trade and investment.
Progress since then has been scant. In 2022, the Commission appointed former Italian foreign minister Luigi Di Maio as the first EU Special Representative for the Gulf region. But for most of the past 35 years, the relationship has been largely characterised by missed attempts to forge common ground across a range of issues, including a free trade deal that faltered in 2008 on sustainability and human rights concerns from the European side.
Now with Russia’s war in Ukraine raging on the EU’s doorstep and Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon escalating, there is a renewed impetus for both sides to work more closely together to manage spiralling conflicts, experts say.
“There's been a momentum that's been building up towards this,” Baabood said of the upcoming summit. He added: “There’s been a lot of missed opportunities between the two sides. Had an EU-Arab dialogue or an EU-Gulf dialogue succeeded earlier, we would perhaps have seen a different Middle East now.”
Geopolitics vs. economics
Still, one major obstacle to the EU playing a greater role in the geopolitics of the Middle East is the lack of a coherent European stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, leaving individual member states to stake out often contradictory positions. For its part, the GCC has suggested it would like to see the EU recognise a sovereign Palestinian state before forging deeper ties.
“From the GCC’s side, I think expectations to have any kind of substantial cooperation with the EU are quite low,” said Sebastian Sons, senior researcher at the Germany-based Centre for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO). “They consider the EU a toothless tiger."
The Gulf countries may look to the EU for a clearer stance on foreign policy, with Sons adding that they view the bloc as “driven by double standards" and lacking a coherent policy on Israel's assault on Gaza and Lebanon.
Yet there are also trade ties to consider. The EU is the GCC’s second-biggest trade partner after China, with total trade in goods in 2023 valued at roughly €170 billion, according to the Commission.
And as the EU pivots away from dependence on Russian oil and gas in the wake of the war in Ukraine, producers in the petroleum-rich Gulf stand to benefit further – a potential point of cooperation expected to be on the agenda on Wednesday.
“Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s increasingly aggressive stance, we must do everything possible to develop more options for energy suppliers,” MEP Reinhold Lopatka (EPP, Austria) told The Parliament. He added that he saw the summit as an opportunity to strengthen Europe’s energy security.
From that perspective, the GCC is going into the summit with the upper hand. “The Gulf states understand they can play a very important role in all of this,” Sons said. “They are not the junior partner of the West anymore.”
GCC ‘frustration’ towards the EU
But for the Gulf countries the stakes appear to be lower.
There is an understanding among GCC members that they can coordinate with Europe on issues relating to research, technology and cultural exchange. But regional security and military cooperation are not high on the Council’s Europe agenda. Mostly, Gulf states “want to see their exports, especially in petrochemicals and plastics and so on, being treated fairly in Europe through a free trade agreement, or something similar,” said Baabood.
He added that the GCC could also benefit from EU technology as the region digitises, along with better access to European education for its youth population.
Beyond economics and geopolitics, the Arab countries that make up the GCC may also be holding the EU at arm's length due to the rise of far-right parties across parts of the continent – including the Alternative for Germany and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom – that often espouse explicitly anti-Islam rhetoric.
“Islamophobic movements and parties across Europe are both an emotional and strategic concern for GCC states,” said Sons. “And, therefore, I think there is reservation and also frustration from the GCC side towards the EU as an instrument, as an institution, but also towards Europe as a principle.”
This story has been updated to reflect the latest developments.