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 region to lift, and so ambitious a project could have been kept off the list of priorities in these turbulent days. But through their Cooperation Council the six states wished to say that the turbulence of the times does not preclude orderly progress, and that air filled with everything that breeds despair does not prevent the same air from carrying signals of hope.
Among the signals of hope in this project is this: if the eastern shore of the Arabian Gulf will not cease its malign acts in the region, the western shore is able to do the opposite and to build what lays a foundation for stability. And if the eastern shore will not understand that the Gulf is a space shared by the states on both its shores, and that it can be so only if its deeds match its words, the western shore's words and deeds have matched all along. Nothing demonstrates this better than this train, which will carry people and connect them, so that no tie between them is cut and no bond broken.
In the period following the American-Israeli war on Iran, it became clear that there is a party that wishes to use the Strait of Hormuz for its own benefit alone and to serve its interests in isolation, even though the strait is governed by the same rules that govern navigation through straits the world over. The control exercised over the strait was extended and prolonged until it appeared that the party on the eastern shore had much behind it, and that it imagined that by closing or opening Hormuz it could control the destinies of the peoples on the western shore, and their economies before their destinies. That will certainly not be.
The launch of so ambitious a railway project at precisely this moment is strong evidence of it. The six states became convinced early in this war, which refuses to end, that the fate of their peoples must not be held hostage by anyone, that their economies must be freed from whatever might constrain or slow them, and that if any party imagines it can do so by controlling the strait, then let it keep its strait.
Let it keep its strait and take it wherever it likes, for the Gulf states have alternatives already in place, such as the Saudi East-West pipeline and the UAE's port of Fujairah. Alongside these there are alternatives on the way, among them this railway, which, as it covers the ground along its route, will also put an end to the fantasies of control harbored by the party on the Gulf's eastern shore.
That party was much displeased to find the East-West pipeline ready and operating, and capable of pumping 7 million barrels a day. But when the government in Riyadh built it, it was thinking of a future it had to meet prepared. It did not lay a line of nearly 1,500 kilometers to displease any party here or there, but because the issue is one of a future that must remain in the hands of its owners and must not be seized by another party skilled only in scheming against its neighbors.
The Gulf railway is a project that thinks of what benefits people, and when it sets off, it will carry what serves human beings. It says that the language of hope can find a foothold among the languages of destruction and despair. It is a little light, and before long its circle will widen amid the great darkness of the region around us.
