What GCC is and how it works

Where the name comes from

The instrument was signed at Abu Dhabi on 21 Rajab 1401, which the text also dates 25 May 1981, and its first article establishes a council and names it: the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf. Nothing in that title qualifies the Gulf. Article 2 puts the headquarters at Riyadh. Article 4 sets the purpose as coordination, integration and interconnection between the member states in all fields, and asks them to formulate similar regulations across economic and financial affairs, commerce and customs, communications, education and culture, social and health affairs, information and tourism, and legislative and administrative affairs.

How the charter closes the list

Most founding treaties describe the state that may accede and leave the door on the latch. This one does not. Article 5 identifies the members by an event: the states that took part in the meeting of foreign ministers at Riyadh on 4 February 1981. There is no test to satisfy and no application to file, because the charter provides for accession nowhere in its text. It provides for withdrawal nowhere either. Article 20 allows the charter itself to be amended on four months of notice and with the unanimous approval of the Supreme Council, which is the one route by which that list could move, and it has not been taken.

Jordan's request to join and an invitation to Morocco were both taken up in May 2011, and neither has produced an accession. Yemen sits in institutions of the Council without sitting in the Council: the GCC Standardization Organization has counted it a member since January 2010.

How a decision is reached

Article 6 gives the Council three organs, the Supreme Council, the Ministerial Council and the Secretariat General, and lets each of them create subsidiary bodies. The Supreme Council is composed of the heads of the member states, its presidency rotates in the alphabetical order of their names, it holds one ordinary session a year, and two thirds of the members make a quorum. Decisions on substantive matters need the unanimous agreement of the members present and voting; procedural matters pass on a majority. The Ministerial Council is composed of the foreign ministers and meets quarterly. The Secretary General is appointed by the Supreme Council for a renewable term of three years.

Where the charter is disputed, Article 10 provides a Commission for the Settlement of Disputes that the Supreme Council constitutes for each case as it arises, and its work ends in a recommendation.

What the members went on to build

The Unified Economic Agreement followed the charter on 11 November 1981. The agreement now in force is the one the Supreme Council approved at its session at Muscat at the end of December 2001, which set out a customs union, a common market and a single currency, each with a date attached. The customs union took effect on 1 January 2003 and applies a common external tariff. The common market followed on 1 January 2008, giving the citizens of every member state the same standing as nationals in work, residence, social insurance, the ownership of property and education.

The currency did not follow. Oman said in December 2006 that it would not meet the date of 2010. The United Arab Emirates withdrew in May 2009, after Riyadh was chosen to seat the monetary institution, and Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia constituted a Monetary Council in December 2009. Nothing has been issued, and every member state still puts out money of its own.

Machinery that is less argued about did get built. The GCC Standardization Organization was created by a resolution of that same Muscat session, opened at Riyadh in May 2004, and issues the Gulf standards and the conformity mark that carries a product into every member market at once. The electricity systems of the member states have run interconnected since 2009 under an authority the states hold together. The Peninsula Shield Force dates from 1984 and is stationed in Saudi Arabia; it entered Bahrain on 14 March 2011 across the causeway opened on 26 November 1986, which is the only fixed link the island has to anywhere.

Where the rift ran

Between 2017 and 2021 the quarrel the Council had to sit with was among its own members. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates severed relations with Qatar on 5 June 2017. Kuwait and Oman did not, and Kuwait carried the mediation. A substantive decision of the Council needs everyone in the room to agree, and no member may be removed under a charter that never provided for one to leave. The declaration signed at AlUla in January 2021 closed the quarrel, and the roster stands as it was written.

What the member records hold

Arabic is the only official language on every member record, and every one of them files a monarchy. The catalogue files them all in one subregion, and the coasts leave it: the lowest point on Saudi Arabia's record is the Red Sea, and Oman's is Majlis al Jinn, a cave, where the other four give the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is the member whose neighbours include all of the rest, and the neighbour it reaches by causeway is Bahrain.

The ground is not what these states hold in common. Jabal Sawda on Saudi Arabia's record stands at 3,133 metres and Jebel Shams on Oman's at 3,018, while Qatar's high point is Qurayn Abu al Bawl at 103 metres and Bahrain's, the Mountain of Smoke, at 134. The dates of statehood the records carry are as far apart: 1727 for Saudi Arabia, 1870 for Qatar, 1970 for Oman, 1971 for Bahrain and for the United Arab Emirates, and 26 February 1991 for Kuwait, the day the occupation of it ended.