Next week will be held in Bahrain's capital Manama the annual GCC Summit, which Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Abdullatif Al-Zayani asserts to coincide with “a highly sensitive and delicate situation and circumstances, of which the repercussions on the GCC need to be examined". Yet it is not external situations and circumstances alone that need to be examined, as dangerous as they might be, but also the methods of joint GCC action, which remain far below ambitions and expectations more than three decades after the Council was established. Indeed, with the exception of Saudi Arabia's call last year to move the GCC from the phase of cooperation to that of a union, the outcome of successive GCC summits over the past few years have been devoid of anything new, with nearly the same agenda being discussed every year and put off from year to year, while the peoples of the Gulf, and other Arab peoples, expect more action and dynamism to confront the numerous campaigns that threaten the security and stability of the Gulf, and of the broader Arab World, whether on the part of Iran or of terrorist and extremist movements. As a matter of fact, the countries of the GCC give the impression that they are moving slowly and cautiously while events around them accelerate at a growing pace. Even matters agreed upon take a long time to be implemented, as has taken place with numerous decisions that have never found their way to being implemented or fully applied. And although there are not many discrepancies between the political, economical and social systems in place in the six countries, normal joint projects that get ratified in principle nevertheless still face the same obstacles and hindrances since they began to be discussed. Examples of this include projects such as the common GCC market, the unified currency, economic unity, economic citizenship and the interconnected electrical network. This is also what happened to the twenty billion dollars that were agreed upon to fund development projects in Bahrain and Oman, or what happened to the recommendation of membership for Jordan and Morocco. It would be unfair of course to assume that the Gulf Cooperation Council has not achieved any actual progress towards becoming unified, but it has progressed much more slowly that would be required to ensure success, or to resolve details specific to every country. Suffice it to look at how Iran tries ceaselessly to breach the GCC's network of safety and stability, whether by interfering in the neighborhood of GCC countries, such as in Iraq and Yemen, or inside its countries themselves, such as Bahrain, the UAE islands or even Saudi Arabia, to realize that what is required of GCC countries is not merely to confront and fend off such attempts at the security level, but rather to intensify their efforts to strengthen the shared GCC structure, reinforce GCC political unity, develop the notion of shared action, implement its plans faster, close the loopholes that allow for attempts at sabotage, and move to taking action instead of merely reacting. The summit in Bahrain is invited to take practical steps to adapt to the wave of change taking place in part of the Arab World by ratifying additional unifying measures that would ensure effective solidarity among GCC countries, and this can only take place if some of its members abandon their reservations towards the project of the Gulf Union, which does not breach the sovereignty of any of its countries, but rather reinforces it within the framework of complementarity. Indeed, moving into the phase of a union would provide the internal immunity required to confront external threats.
