The Gulf Railway… A Little Light in the Dark

Detailed summary

Cooperation among the Arab states has taken, and continues to take, more than one form. Yet its form within the Gulf Cooperation Council has remained the strongest and the most…

Cooperation among the Arab states has taken, and continues to take, more than one form. Yet its form within the Gulf Cooperation Council has remained the strongest and the most successful.

A broad look at the experiments in cooperation undertaken across the Arab world shows that all of them set out on a road they did not finish, except the Gulf Cooperation Council, which set out and has kept going. It has not only kept going: those in charge of it understood from the beginning that it would need to take new steps continually if it wished to follow the path of, say, the European Union.

The EU did not take its present form overnight. It began as a coal and steel community among some European countries, not all of them, then moved to a stage in which it was a European common market, and only then, once the conditions were in place, did the union in its present form arrive.

Something of this is to be found in the news of the signing of the general agreement for the Gulf railway project, which will cross all six Gulf states, starting in Kuwait in the far north and ending in the Sultanate of Oman in the far south, after covering 2,117 kilometers and passing through Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.

The agreement was signed in the Bahraini capital, Manama. It was stated that work on the project had in fact begun some time ago and is more than half complete; that 2030 is the deadline for its completion; that Gulf citizens will then be able to board the train in the north and travel from country to country along the Arabian Gulf; and that each Gulf state will build its own section.

A train of this kind is not merely a set of carriages carrying people or goods among the six states. Its timing signals that there is a Gulf Arab hand in the region capable of building and developing, at a time when so many other hands are demolishing, sabotaging, destroying, and killing the very means of life.

The governments of the six states could have waited for the gloom hanging over the…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from Asharq Al-Awsat. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.