As part of its project "Promoting Deeper EU-GCC Relations", the Gulf Research Center (GRC) is releasing a Gulf Paper entitled “EU and GCC Countries’ Foreign Policies and the Mediterranean Neighborhood – Towards Synergetic Cooperation?” by Tobias Schumacher and Irene Fernández Molina. This paper was presented and discussed at an international workshop “Promoting an EU-GCC Dialogue on Foreign Policy Issues” organized by the GRC, the Institute for European Studies from Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, and Qatar University. The workshop was held at the Qatar University, Doha in April 2013. This paper aims to provide a comparative analysis of the EU’s reinforced, yet ongoing, foreign policy engagement in the Arab Mediterranean and the GCC monarchies’ widening foreign policy activism in the region with a particular emphasis on the period after the outbreak of the Arab Spring. It discusses both the extent to which collaboration between the EU and GCC countries in the Arab Mediterranean is possible and the reasons why such collaboration has not yet materialized and is unlikely to occur in the near future. The paper also looks at the evolving role of the EU and GCC countries in their Mediterranean neighborhood and the prospects of EU-GCC cooperation in their common neighborhood space.
