The irrelevant innovator and the capable clone? Regional organization in the Gulf Patrick Theiner∗ University of G¨ottingen March 8, 2016

International Studies Association 57th Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA

Abstract

The Gulf region has been a pioneer of regional integration, from its participation in the creation of the League of Arab States (AL) to today’s cooperation in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The paper looks at the AL and GCC as regional venues for cooperation, and shows how these two organization’s agendas and governance have changed over time, and how the distance between their approaches has increased or decreased. In comparing the two, it shows that their story is not one of strict convergence or divergence, but can only be understood through their often co-dependent pathways: the GCC’s institutional design can be attributed to the lessons learned from the AL, while the League’s recent push for renewed relevance is a direct answer to the GCC’s continued success. Lastly, the paper shows how diffusion as a theoretical framework highlights the importance of institutional innovation, and can help untangle how path dependencies and institutional choices can create positive outcomes, or lock in negative ones. It presents some preliminary observations about the explanatory power of two particular diffusion mechanisms – learning and legitimacy-driven mimicry – for the institutional design choices of both regional organizations.

Keywords: Regional organization; Middle East and Northern Africa region; MENA; League of Arab States; Gulf Cooperation Council; diffusion; institutional design

∗

Lecturer in International Relations, Department of Political Science. Early conference draft, please do not cite without permission. Contact: [email protected]

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Introduction The past decades have seen regional cooperation emerge as a powerful tool for states to

coordinate policies with their neighbors and shape their socio-economic environment. Such regionalism has accelerated both in quantity and quality: today there are more than 70 regional organizations (ROs) worldwide, and the integration between their members has never been deeper. Rather than be an exception to this trend, the Gulf rather was a pioneer of regional integration with its participation in the creation of the League of Arab States (AL) in 1945. Since then, the Gulf states have fostered their micro-regional cooperation mostly in the form of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which has successfully created a customs union and an intergovernmental military force, begun work establishing a common market, and is planning a monetary union. With leaders’ statements even supporting the idea of a ‘Gulf Union’, the endpoint of this regional cooperation does not seem to be in sight. Despite the history and ambition of Gulf cooperation, it remains an understudied area. The paper will look at the AL and GCC as regional venues for cooperation. Its purpose is firstly, to show how these two ROs agendas and governance have changed over time, and how the distance between their approaches has increased or decreased; and secondly, examine how the cooperation models and policies championed by both AL and GCC compare to those of other ROs. The overarching question is whether there is a ‘Gulf style’ of regional cooperation - has the Gulf produced some unique institutional designs, or does it follow the pathways established by other, more advanced ROs such as the European Union? And can this indicate whether regional cooperation in the Gulf will remain at the status quo, head towards a more fully realized union, or even collapse under the weight of member states’ expectations? Taking into account the Gulf’s unique socio-political traditions, the paper argues that the similarities between Gulf regional cooperation and cooperation elsewhere can best be understood by diffusion. Diffusion is a situation of interdependent, uncoordinated decisionmaking that is characterized by the voluntary adoption of specific institutions and policies. 2

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The concept rejects the notion that actors take their decisions in isolation and hence independently - instead, they observe each other and react to decisions made by their peers. Whether or not this interdependence arises is contingent on the level of interaction occurring between ROs. Diffusion can occur through several mechanisms such as social learning, legitimacy-driven mimicry, or soft coercion. The paper argues that these mechanisms can account for institutional similarities between the Gulf and elsewhere, and that identifying which ROs have predominantly served as the inspiration for the institutional design of Gulf regional organization allows us to predict which form this cooperation will take in the future.

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Regional organization in the Gulf The Gulf does not feature a particularly large number of regional organizations. Latin

America, for example, has more than a dozen ROs for a region with around 20 countries yet with roughly the same number of states in the Arab world, only two have emerged in the Gulf. What it lacks in numbers however, the Gulf makes up for by boasting the oldest RO still in existence, the AL, and a younger organization with far-reaching plans for deep integration, the GCC.

2.1

The Arab League

At first glance, the League of Arab States certainly broke new institutional ground at its inception at the end of World War II. Meeting in 1944 in Alexandria, the representatives of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan shared deep concerns about the question of Palestine and the future of the larger region. Spurred on by the realization that the end of the war might provide Arab states with increased independence from their former colonial masters, their twelve-day negotiations at Faruq I University produced the Alexandria Protocol. Although light on the institutional details of the planned regional organization, the Protocol included far-reaching stipulations concerning the conduct of its members. Its

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central organ, the Council, was to make decisions that were binding on its members; “in no case” would the use of “force [...] between any two member states [...] be allowed” (League of Arab States 1944, article 1); foreign policies deemed detrimental to the League or individual members were forbidden; and the Council was granted the right to intervene in disputes between the members, and even between the members and external actors. Equally ambitious was the scope of the project: the League was not only to deal with matters of economic cooperation, but also with communication, culture, nationality, health, and even “social questions” (League of Arab States 1944, article 2). The idea of an institution with a clear focus on organizing cooperation in the Arab region was an appealing one. Less than six months later, the initial group had already attracted two further states, Saudi-Arabia and Yemen, who became founding members of the organization set up by the Alexandria Protocol – the League of Arab States. The choice of the term ‘League’ is itself interesting. The previous decades had seen much debate between ‘idealists’ advocating for one Arab nation, and ‘realists’ wanting to first consolidate state power after gaining independence (Khadduri 1946) . The latter were understandably loathe to delegate authority to a supranational organization, especially if they had in fact recently acquired the reins of power. While pan-Arabist leaders like those of Iraq and Syria suggested an ‘Arab Alliance’ and even an ‘Arab Union’, realists would only support an organization whose title, structure, and ambition left ample room for national sovereignty – thus, a ‘League’ (Kutscher 2012). In the end, the chasm between the two positions was too great for compromise, and the founding treaty emphasized the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of member states, instead of a drive for federation or unification. As shall be shown, this chasm is key to understanding the dynamics and dysfunction of the League. The AL is somewhat of a special case among ROs, in that its “region” is defined culturally, rather than geographically. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to describe the AL as anything but rooted in a common culture - its member states reach from the Maghreb to the Arabian Peninsula, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, across two continents, and ten time zones.

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Consequently, the AL’s founding treaty only specifies its current and prospective members as “independent Arab States” (article 1). What this means is that the common denominator of these states as a cultural region is Arabic as a language, Islam as the dominant religion, and the shared historical experiences, traditions, and values at the intersection of these two factors. Among states where Arabic is an official language, only Chad, Gambia, and Israel are not a part of the AL. All member states have overwhelmingly Muslim populations. From its original seven members, the League doubled its membership during the 1950s and 1960s, and admitted a further eight members during the 1970s. Somewhat controversially, this also included the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1976, even though the Palestinians lacked an independent state. Since then, membership has – for all intents and purposes – been frozen. Almost 40 years have passed since the expansion of the 1970s, yet only the Indian Ocean state of Comoros was admitted as a member in 1993. However, the AL expanded its circle in the 2000s by making arrangements with a number of observer states, all of which have significant communities with Arab roots.1

2.1.1

Military cooperation as an afterthought?

In its main organs, the AL has remained largely unchanged since its founding treaty was ratified. The League’s three major organs are the Council (League of Arab States 1945, article 3), its Specialized Permanent Committees (article 4), and the Secretary-General (article 12). In the world of regional organization, this division of labor is instantly recognizable from many other cases: a main decision-making body composed of state leaders or foreign ministers, which determines the direction of the organization, and has the final say about policy and budget; a body composed of issue-area ministers or experts, tasked with the coordination and implementation of policies; and an administrative body for the preparation of meetings, day-to-day operations, and limited external representation of the organization. The AL has expanded its original structure by creating almost 30 specialized agencies over 1

As of 2016, these states are Armenia, Brazil, Chad, Eritrea, India, Turkey, and Venezuela.

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the years, such as the Arab Labor Organization, the Arab Satellite Communications Organization, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, or the Arab Postal Union. More change can be seen in the League’s aims and areas of competence. At its inception in 1945, the focus was on coordinating member states’ political, economic, social, and cultural policies, and offer the means for dispute settlement. In 1950, this was augmented by the signing of the Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation Treaty, as a consequence of which the AL created the Joint Defense Council (JDC), a standing committee tasked with mutual defense efforts. Despite the framework for military cooperation, the first two decades saw the AL concentrate almost exclusively on economic, cultural, and social cooperation. For implementation in specific issue areas, the League relied mostly on its specialized agencies. Military cooperation mechanisms were tested for the first time in 1961, when the AL authorized a peacekeeping force of 3,300 troops2 to protect newly independent Kuwait – not yet a member of the League at the time – against the threat of invasion by Iraq – an AL member state. With Kuwait consolidating its sovereignty as the newest Gulf state, and Iraq relaxing its territorial claims, the force was disbanded in 1963, its goals accomplished (Mays 2011). At its outset in 1961, the mission was the first regionally mandated peacekeeping force in the world. During the second civil war in Lebanon, the League deployed the so-called Symbolic Arab Security Force (ASF) in 1975, in an attempt to pacify the conflict. Due to an intensification of the hostilities, lackluster support from the Lebanese government, and disagreements with parts of the civilian population, the ASF (Mays 2011) remained literally a symbolic gesture. The AL tried to rectify this by mandating the much larger Arab Deterrence Force (ADF) at a special meeting in Riyadh in 1976. The 30,000-strong ADF was to supervise a cease-fire and keep the hostile forces apart, yet was prevented from operating in the south of Lebanon by the Israeli military, and in eastern Beirut by Christian forces. In response to the ongoing 2

Soldiers were mainly provided by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic, a short-lived political union between Syria and Egypt.

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conflict and the tensions with Israel, the United Nations established its own peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, UNIFIL, which dwarfed the AL’s efforts (Bercovitch and Fretter 2004). Its forces outnumbered by Blue Helmets, and a resolution of the conflict seemingly out of reach, the League finally withdrew the ADF in 1982 – a clear failure of regional peacekeeping. In the 35 years since the end of the ADF mission, military cooperation within the League framework has not resulted in another peacekeeping mission, despite frequent civil unrest and conflicts between AL members and other states, such as the Gulf War in 1990, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Moran 2005), or the Arab Spring in 2010-2011. The League has remained involved in security matters, but not through peacekeeping or peace enforcement, but rather regional mediation, or the occasional endorsement of third party intervention, such as in Libya in 2011 (Bercovitch and Fretter 2004).

2.2

The Gulf Cooperation Council

In a series of high-level meetings during the course of 1981, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) agreed to create a new organization specific to their region – the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, or Gulf Cooperation Council for short. Its composition of six dynastic Arab monarchies remains unchanged to this day. Founded more than 35 years after the League, the GCC seemingly lacks the latter’s originality, its breadth of mission, or geographic and political variety. Indeed, one could ask why the GCC is necessary all, given that its members are already part of the AL. The main reason is both historical and tied to its specific region. When the leaders of the Gulf states assembled in 1981, Iraq had invaded Iran eight months prior, driven by a struggle for regional primacy in the Persian Gulf, and fears that the Iranian Revolution would lead to Iraq’s Shiites rising up against Saddam Hussein’s Sunni government. The war of attrition would last for another eight years, cost the lives of around one million people, and see no side emerging as the clear victor. Anxious about the conflict at their doorstep, and about possible further regional ambitions of an eventual winner, the 7

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Gulf states saw an alliance among themselves as the only reliable way to balance against both warring parties (F¨ urtig 2004). Furthermore, Gulf leaders were keenly aware of the interest that outside powers like the Soviet Union or the US were taking in their region. As much as they would have liked their alliance to be an effective deterrent against regional aggression and foreign involvement, it was clear that none of them were in a position to adequately defend the region against this probability (Qureshi 1982). The Gulf states thus attacked their strategic problem from two sides: create a forum for cooperation and mutual assistance among themselves, but then use this organization to consciously engage with partners outside the region – such as the European Union, or the US (Maddy-Weitzmann 2012). The assessment of the situation and their own weakness was proven correct when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. In the face of Iraq’s aggressive quest for oil and ocean access, the Gulf saw the very existence of a GCC member depend on intervention by Western forces. Even more worryingly, even Saudi Arabia, the Council’s economic and military powerhouse, had to rely on external actors to guarantee its safety against Saddam Hussein’s armies.

2.2.1

An military alliance in the guise of a regional organization?

At barely ten pages, the GCC’s 1981 Charter is light on almost all details, both in terms of institutional structures, and of concrete policies or areas of cooperation. Filling the treaty and its organization with life was thus largely left to the member states. The Charter makes no reference to the security impetus of its creation, or indeed, any strategic or military aims of the organization. The Council’s basic objectives are stated as being cooperation and integration in economic affairs, trade, education, culture, and science (Gulf Cooperation Council 1981, article 4). Instead – and much like the AL – the Charter emphasizes members’ common cultural roots as both Arabic and Islamic states. Its institutional structure is equally familiar and consists of a decision-making ‘Supreme Council’, a coordinating and policygenerating ‘Ministerial Council’, and a supporting secretariat. Notably, the Council is to

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have a dispute settlement mechanism, but its only explicit competence is the adjudication of conflicts over the interpretation or implementation of the Charter (Gulf Cooperation Council 1981, article 10). Due to the leeway provided by its founding treaty, Gulf states used the Council from the very beginning as a venue for regional security cooperation, even though this was not necessarily codified as an organizational goal. It was, however, the most pressing concern of its members (Cammett 1999). Already at the third GCC summit in 1982, leaders agreed to form a combined force of 5,000 soldiers, to be named ‘Peninsula Shield’. Despite periodic joint exercises and centralized training facilities, observers judged the force to be largely symbolic, especially in light of the GCC’s “confused and ineffectual” response to the invasion of Kuwait (Alajmi 2015). With the Gulf Security Agreement of 2000, the GCC moved beyond security cooperation towards collective self-defense: an attack on any one member was to be treated as an attack on all, and the renamed ‘Peninsula Shield Force’ (PSF) was to be significantly strengthened. Despite some back-and-forth on the size and status of the PSF3 , it remains one of the very few examples of a standing military force that can be called upon by a regional organization. On top of this, the GCC already used it successfully in the case of the 2011 Bahraini uprising, during which King Hamad called on the PSF to control the situation and protect key installations (Dalacoura 2012), despite Western calls for engagement with the protesters (Maddy-Weitzmann 2012). The GCC framework has enabled members to pursue two more far-reaching projects of military integration. The first is a joint military command, and with it, a unified defense strategy for the Gulf. This is tied to the creation of rapid intervention units within the Peninsula Shield Force, which allows member states to bridge gaps in military capacities (Alajmi 2015; Goldberg 2015). The second initiative is a regional missile defense shield, which is primarily aimed to counter Iran’s offensive capabilities, but would also afford Gulf states 3

The PSF was strengthened in the 1990s in response to the Gulf War, and enlarged again before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet after Iraq collapsed, the GCC discussed disbanding it altogether in 2005. In 2006, Saudi Arabia reversed its position, and came out in favor of maintaining the PSF. It was subsequently upgraded once more.

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greater protection against actors external to the region, such as Russia. Pushing especially hard for a missile defense system is the United States, which made the issue the top priority of the U.S.-GCC Strategic Cooperation Forum launched in 2012 (Rose 2014). Despite slow progress amidst concerns over sovereignty and problems of interoperability (Mustafa 2015), the commitment to a regional air defense architecture is a sign of remarkably high security integration in the region. Despite this preoccupation with collective regional security, the GCC has also made significant progress on cooperation in the areas of ‘low politics’ featured prominently in the Charter, most of all in trade. This is to be expected, given that economic incentives are the main drivers of integration for almost all regional organizations (Jetschke et al. 2016). What is noteworthy is the lag between the issue areas of security and trade: 20 years passed between the creation of ‘Peninsula Shield’ and the first major initiatives of economic integration. This reverses the picture seen in other regional organizations, where economic integration comes first, and security cooperation at some later point – if it happens at all. Nevertheless, the GCC has launched a number of far-reaching economic initiatives in a comparatively short time frame. A customs union between the member states was agreed in 2002 and became fully operational in 2015 (Al-Shafi 2015). 2008 saw the launch of the GCC Common Market, with the aim of a single market enabling free movement of people, goods, and services. Perhaps most significantly, some members of the Council have begun pushing for a monetary union with a single currency and central bank. The initiative is fueled by the similarity of economic challenges faced by GCC members, and their relatively high degree of interconnectedness (Gurrib 2012). Once completed, it would make the Gulf one of the most highly integrated economic areas in the world.

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Diverging and converging pathways Due to the nature of their overlapping membership and sphere of interest, the Arab

League and the Gulf Cooperation Council had numerous points of contact during the decades of their co-existence. Neither organization’s development can be properly understood without considering their often co-dependent institutional pathways.

3.1

Divergence

From its inception, the AL was torn between the opposing forces of state sovereignty and pan-Arabism. On the one hand, it seemed to represent a chance at collective decisionmaking in a region suffering from weak state structures and frequent outside meddling. On the other hand, the diverse views and loyalties of its members, coupled with the weaknesses of its institutional structures – chief among them the need of consensus in its main decisionmaking body, and the fact that policies are only binding on those who voted in favor of them, not all members – meant that more ambitious integration projects were often doomed to fail (Dakhlallah 2012). This was especially true for maximalist visions of Arab unity and the eventual erasing of state borders advocated by AL members like Egypt or Iraq. Embracing this less-than-ideal mandate of regional organization instead of unification would take the League several decades, even though astute observers noticed the downgrading of pan-Arabic ideas within the AL framework as early as the 1950s4 (Little 1956). The deadlock between opposing views and the consensus requirement negatively affected all possible areas of integration, not just only security cooperation. The League’s decline in importance and status continued unabated through the 1970s, 1980s, and much of the 1990s. Mirroring the Arab world, the AL was weak, racked with internal disagreements, and marginalized (Dakhlallah 2012). It was this situation that led 4

As Little (1956) points out, even in the six months between the Alexandria Protocol and the signing of the Charter, the language used to describe the League changed significantly: “[B]etween the Protocol and the Charter, the ‘ties’ have ceased to ‘bind’ the Arab states; they only ‘link’ them. And, what is more, the League is now only intended to ‘support and stabilize’, not ‘strengthen and consolidate’ those ties.”

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to the creation of three sub-regional institutions: the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU)5 , and the Arab Cooperation Council (ACC)6 , the latter two founded within a day of each other in 1989. All three were intended to address the problem of fragmentation among AL members by catering to sub-regional groups of actors with – it was hoped – much more homogeneous interests. Both the AMU and the ACC never really got off the ground, in large part due to fundamental disagreements between its members (Cammett 1999). In the AMU, Libyan and Moroccan leaders regularly refused to even attend meetings in Algeria (Martinez and Paoli 2006). The ACC’s contradictions were so deep that during the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990, Iraq and Egypt went from alliance partners to military adversaries practically overnight. The organization ceased to exist 1991 when its charter expired (Ryan 1998). Bucking the trend was the GCC (Barnett and Solingen 2008). What separated the Gulf states from other sub-regions of the Arab world were sufficiently similar political systems and economies, and more importantly, compatible strategic interests (Pinfari 2009). As described above, the central security question for the monarchies in the Persian Gulf was not the ArabIsraeli conflict, but the dual threat of the sub-region’s military powerhouses of Iran and Iraq. This re-calibration of high-level priorities would have been all but impossible in the League, given how central the Palestinian question had been since its founding. The same was true for effective collective security: due to their proximity and small group size, the Gulf states could much more credibly commit to mutual assistance. The AL’s weaknesses thus provided the Gulf states not only with the initial impetus to form their organization, but also with valuable lessons on membership and strategic goals. The idea of a small, homogeneous group with convergent strategic goals undoubtedly took inspiration from the experience with the opposite arrangement within the Arab League. Interestingly, at least during the GCC’s early years, the Gulf states remained rhetorically committed to the League as the highest 5 6

The AMU’s members are Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The ACC’s members were Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen.

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decision-making forum for all Arab nations7 (Ramazani and Kechichian 1988). While the GCC thus ascribed to the AL the sole legitimacy to discuss issues affecting the wider Arab world, it was happy to coordinate and cooperate sub-regionally where sufficient security and economic incentives existed.

3.2

Convergence?

For the last decades, the pathways of the AL and the GCC had been diverging: the one seemingly locked in a state of suspended animation, the other consolidating and integrating at a brisk pace (Dakhlallah 2012). However, recent years have seen the League attempting to claw its way back from the brink of irrelevance – with the main proponents, perhaps ironically, being the Gulf states. The first push for renewed relevance came during the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had already been isolated in the region for his sometimes bizarre policies and frequent clashes with other leaders8 , making the decision to condemn him for the crackdown on the protestors, and suspend Libya from AL meetings, an easy choice. Nevertheless, the League’s relatively quick decision-making, and support for international intervention, came as a surprise to observers and Western allies (Khouri 2011). In the case of Syria, the League showed similar signs of life. After denouncements of the Assad regime by several members, the AL first suspended Syria, and then brokered a peace plan to be monitored by an observer mission (Masters and Sergie 2014). Frustrated with Syria’s non-compliance with this mission (Bhardwaj 2012), the League approved unprecedented economic and political sanctions with a 19-3 vote (MacFarquhar and Bakri 2011). Finally, it publicly called for Assad to step down, paved the way for a possible non-Arab intervention 7

Ramazani and Kechichian (1988) show Gulf officials like the Bahraini foreign minister asserting in 1982 that “[the Iran-Iraq conflict] will be discussed on the Arab level and not on the GCC level. [...] The place for making a decision on this matter is the Arab League” (p. 149), and the GCC’s Secretary-General emphasizing in 1986 that the organization did not “wish to appear to be a group separate from the Arabs. We are operating within the framework of the Arab League and as a part of it” (p. 186). 8 Gaddafi and Saudi King Abdullah had traded personal insults at several Arab summits, sometimes in full view of the media; Libyan state media regularly called Abdullah’s father King Fahd “the pig of the peninsula” (Maddy-Weitzmann 2012).

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in Syria (Danin 2012), and allowed the Syrian opposition to attend ministerial meetings in place of the government, although it did not win the right to fully occupy the Syrian seat (Abdulrahim 2014). What led to the League’s uncharacteristic decisiveness? First, both regimes found themselves mostly friendless, facilitating agreements between member states. Second, they had run afoul of the Gulf states9 , who attempted to elevate their role in Arab League. With a number of traditional candidates for Arab leadership – such as Egypt, Iraq, or Libya – temporarily out of the picture due to conflict or unrest, the GCC states had noted the power vacuum, and Saudi Arabia saw an opportunity for its own leadership bid (Lynch 2015). Their success in removing one adversary from power, and putting sustained multilateral pressure on another, is a testament to both the weakness of other actors, and the influence that a united Gulf can exert, and thereby jolt the seemingly moribund League awake. After successfully shifting – even if just for a time – the League’s gaze away from the Palestinian cause and towards Iran and its supposed proxies, the Gulf states were the main drivers behind a second unexpected change in long-standing AL policy. At the 26th AL summit in March 2015, member states agreed on the creation of a ‘Joint Arab Force’ (JAF) of up to 40,000 troops (Mourad and Bayoumy 2015). The JAF was to be commanded by a Saudi general and headquartered in Egypt; similar to NATO, troop costs were to be covered by the sending countries, while the integrated command structure was to be financed by the Gulf Cooperation Council. Military elements were to remain stationed in their own countries, but be ready for rapid deployment. Its main mission was peacekeeping at the invitation, or at least the consent, of the affected country. If the structure and goals sound strikingly familiar, it is no accident: the proposed JAF is practically a carbon copy of the GCC’s established Peninsula Shield Force. However, in contrast to the League’s reaction to Libya and Syria, there are signs that the Gulf’s moment might already have passed. After the JAF’s much-publicized announcement 9

In Syria’s case, this was mostly the result of its ruling Ba’athist government’s close ties to constant regional irritant Iran (Levinson 2012).

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in March, it was already postponed indefinitely in August, when erstwhile initiator Saudi Arabia refused to sign the necessary documents to advance the process. Its blockade was supported by the four GCC partners Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE (Middle East Eye 2015). The reason for the sudden change of heart lies in disagreements between the Saudi kingdom and Egypt over what the actual role of the JAF should be. As Gaub (2015) points out, the joint force was supposed to counteract outside aggression, inter-state aggression within the Arab world, and address internal security concerns like terrorism – it was “seeking to become NATO, the UN, and the EU in one go”. It remains to be seen whether further negotiations can solve the differences between the Gulf states and other AL members, some of which are regaining their strength.

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Irrelevant innovator and capable clone? The Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council are situated in the same region, have

overlapping membership, and share a common language and culture – yet as organizations, they seem vastly different. The League is generally seen as a sprawling, “failed” organization (Abusidualghoul 2012; Barnett and Solingen 2008; Solingen 2008) full of disagreements, a monument to the lost cause of pan-Arabism, with so little to show for its long existence that its own secretary-general called it “impotent” (Masters and Sergie 2014). In comparison, the Council appears as a successful attempt of a small, homogeneous group of states to provide collective security (Maddy-Weitzmann 2012), with the prospect of deep economic integration within reach (Gurrib 2012). The picture sketched above and in the previous sections is surprising for three reasons: First, as Mattli (1994) and much of the research on regional organizations have shown, integration takes time. Quick integration processes are the exception, not the norm. All else being held constant, we would expect a mature organization like the AL to be more fully integrated than one barely half as old, like the GCC. Second, the path to regional

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integration has historically started from economic cooperation (Hurrell 2007; Jetschke et al. 2016). Security integration normally requires a much higher level of trust between partners, and a greater acceptance of sovereignty losses, than economic matters. Yet the GCC – and the AL up to a point – are seemingly trying to put the cart before the horse. Third, the League’s concept was strikingly innovative at its creation: there had simply not been a regional, institutionalized bloc of independent states before10 . The AL even famously predates the United Nations by 216 days. In contrast, the GCC’s contribution to institutional innovation is negligible, its design much more functional and less articulated, and borrowing heavily from other regional organizations (Pinfari 2009). But why has the innovator slipped into stasis and irrelevance, while the clone has enjoyed integrational and operational success? The answer to these questions, I argue, comes into much sharper focus if one employs the analytical concept of diffusion.

4.1

Theoretical framework: Diffusion

The core features of diffusion (Busch and J¨orgens 2007; Gilardi 2013; Holzinger and Knill 2005; Levi-Faur 2005) are that it describes a situation of interdependent, uncoordinated decision-making that is characterized by the voluntary adoption of specific institutions and policies (Aldrich 1979; Rogers 2003). ‘Interdependent’ means that the decision of actor A alters the likelihood of actor B making a similar decision (Simmons and Elkins 2004). Neumayer and Pl¨ umper (2010) similarly define spatial dependence as existing whenever “the marginal utility of one unit of analysis depends on the choices of other units of analysis” (p. 146). At its core, the concept of diffusion rejects the notion that actors take their decisions in isolation and hence independently of each other. Instead, actors observe each other and react to decisions made by their peers. Whether or not this interdependence arises is contingent on the level of interaction occurring between regional organizations. Most studies that focus on forms of cultural or policy transmission conceptualize the 10

Even though there had been plenty of international and intergovernmental organizations, of course (Singer and Wallace 1970).

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channels through which it occurs as ties or connections existing between units of a system. In the social sciences, these channels are usually grouped together into particular causal mechanisms of transmission (Elkins and Simmons 2005; Holzinger, J¨orgens and Knill 2007; Simmons and Elkins 2004). The different mechanisms can be categorized into several broad groups – Jetschke et al. (2016) identify these as learning, peer-based ‘social’ learning; legitimacy-driven mimicry, competition-driven mimicry, and soft coercion. Some authors distinguish between even more mechanisms. However, the purpose of this paper is not to give an exhaustive overview, but merely to demonstrate the possible explanatory power of the approach. Thus, two of of the mechanisms have been selected to shed light on the case of regional cooperation in the Gulf: learning, and legitimacy-driven minicry.

4.1.1

Learning

Rational theories of diffusion emphasize the lessons that can be learned from following the example of a more successful regional organization. Learning refers to the change in beliefs, or the change in ones confidence in existing beliefs, that results from exposure to new evidence, theories or behavioral repertoires (Haas 1990; Sommerer 2011). Actors assume institutional designs from elsewhere because they obtain information about the effectiveness of other institutions and policies, allowing them to better evaluate the consequences of making their own policy innovations. Actors can acquire new beliefs that only affect their evaluation of the appropriate means for achieving a goal (simple learning), but they might also acquire new beliefs about these goals themselves (complex learning). Actors not only respond to ‘who does what’ but also to ‘what happens when they do it’ (Lee and Strang 2006). Especially if they need to solve cooperation problems or face external shocks, they are likely to look to other actors’ experiences (Meseguer 2009). In this theoretical perspective, actors are Bayesian updaters who change their evaluations of the probability of an outcome based on any new information that they receive – the classical example of Bayesian updating is learning from success. In the case of regional organization, ‘success’ can often be approximated

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through economic prosperity and peaceful change, with the European integration process providing a good illustration (Powers and Goertz 2011; Schiff and Winters 2003). The learning mechanism lets us expect that policies and changes adopted by organization A will be mirrored by organization B, if A is being perceived as being highly successful at reaching its goals.

4.1.2

Legitimacy-Driven Mimicry (Legitimation)

Constructivists and organizational sociologists employ a different mechanism of diffusion: mimicry. Mimicry is the conscious adoption of a policy or policy innovation out of a concern for status and legitimacy. Meyer and Rowan (1977) have shown that many organizations routinely adopt innovations that do not correlate with their capacities or endowments. Here, adopters take up innovations because they value the resulting prestige and legitimacy, rather than their efficacy to reach their (material) goals – they follow a logic of appropriateness. Rather than expressing functional necessity, adoptions symbolize the commitment made to the values of the community. Proponents of the mimicry mechanism point to the widespread adoption of institutional designs that are associated with quasi-universal values, like bureaucratic rationalization and modernity (Finnemore 1996). On the national level, several studies (Cao 2009; Fink 2013; F¨ uglister 2012) find that membership in international organizations influences policy convergence among states. The mimicry mechanism lets us expect that policies and changes adopted by organization A will be mirrored by organization B, if A is being perceived as highly legitimate.

4.2

Diffusion and organizational pathways

How can a diffusion perspective help explain the varying states of function and dysfunction of the League and the Council? Looking at the Arab League first, we find an organization that was an early innovator. The idea of cooperation and dispute settlement by a regional group of independent states 18

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itself was not entirely new (regional security arrangements were older than the Westphalian system), but the AL was the first organization to put all the pieces together in a recognizably modern institutional structure. When the United Nations Charter was drafted, the League was consulted, and played a central role in the formulation of Chapter VIII – the provisions for the interactions between the UN and regional organizations (Bercovitch and Fretter 2004; Waters 1967). But such a role also carries risks. Pioneers might get to their destinations first, but getting lost is a real possibility where the terrain ahead is insufficiently mapped out. Early decisions can create path dependencies that make turning back practically impossible, even if the eventual point of arrival is unsatisfactory. It is easy to see the much-criticized unanimity requirements, weak sanctioning mechanisms, or excessive proliferation of specialized agencies in this light. What is more, the necessity of consensus meant that the institutional design was inflexible and hard to change, a desperately unfortunate arrangement in an organization with a heterogeneous membership. The League of Nations, the AL’s partial institutional design inspiration, had learned this lesson the hard way only a few years previously (Goodrich 1947). The vastly different national systems, regional aspirations, and strategic goals of its member states meant that the AL was caught in an institutional straitjacket made in 1945, even as a changing environment necessitated innovation in process and policy (Solingen 2008). However, these failures of design were not merely oversights. They were also a logical consequence of the AL’s multiple personality disorder between the diametrically opposed roles as the unifying center of the Arab world, and as an inoffensive forum posing the least possible threat to national sovereignty (Pinfari 2009). The first role had been the aspiration of the Alexandria Protocol, but the League Charter prescribed the second role. Nevertheless, the aspiration, not the reality, constituted the League’s main source of legitimacy. As Barnett and Solingen (2008) argue, the AL was founded on an Arab identity – it was never a ‘regional’ organization “to the extent that geography itself determined eligibility for membership. Turkey or Iran were never considered as possible members. Israel, sitting in the

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middle of the Arab world, would never be invited to the table” (p. 191). This had major consequences: the League became an organization synonymous with its cause, founded on a non-negotiable distinction between insiders and outsiders. Do explanations based around diffusion add anything of value to these manifold reasons for institutional stagnation? Looking at the case of the AL through the theoretical lens can help us understand why the mechanisms described above did not lead to innovation; why the diffusion of institutional features did not manifest itself. Learning presupposes that actors show an interest in, and are able to judge, what makes other organizations ‘successful’. Bayesian updating is expected to occur because actors observe others reaching similar goals in a more effective or efficient manner. Mimicry, on the other hand, is centered around the concept of legitimacy: goals and means that are being perceived as appropriate will be emulated by others. Yet the League’s founding myth was that it was an idiosyncratic organization, the one and only forum for cooperation and fraternity throughout the Arab world. The League, despite the watering down of its rules, was always supposed to be the only game in town, the only legitimate organization in its region. The chance of learning was thus greatly reduced: at the League’s creation, there were no other organization to learn from. And during its existence, there was rarely another organization with the similar ultimate goal of regional unity, let alone one based on a cultural region, rather than a geographic one. Without similar goals, there was little immediate pressure for a Bayesian updating of means. In the same vein, legitimacy-based mimicry could not bring about institutional diffusion because the concept of legitimacy was tied up within the League itself. Indeed, in claiming legitimacy for the Arab world, its members had explicitly rejected outside influences and pledged to look inward (Abusidualghoul 2012) – as an institutional choice, this did not lend itself to emulating others. Turning to the Gulf Cooperation Council, we see an almost diametrically opposed picture. Where the AL is a highly articulated institution with a far-reaching explicit and implicit mandate, the GCC initially was conceived as little more than a coordination forum (Pinfari 20

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2009). Far from being innovative, the GCC has an almost cookie-cutter structure popularized by a number of regional organizations preceding it: two main intergovernmental organs, one of heads of state, one of ministers, and a supporting secretariat. Even 35 years ago, this institutional design would not have excited scholars of regional integration. What is more, the GCC’s basic structure strongly resembles the European Community at the time, the GCC’s ‘Supreme Council’ being functionally equivalent to the European Council, and the ‘Ministerial Council’ to the Council of the European Union (Guazzone 1988). In addition, the GCC’s main goals were limited, and key parts of its Charter worded vaguely enough to allow member states ample room of maneuver11 . Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that collective security – the GCC’s main area of cooperation for 20 years – is not even mentioned in the Charter, let alone institutionalized in a specific organ. Rather than overburden the institution with a grand mission or preset work plan, its founders thus created a stripped down, highly functionalist organization. And rather than collect as many members as possible from a region with the goal of federation, the GCC was designed for a small, homogeneous group of states with identical or highly compatible strategic goals. The arrangement has clearly played a large role in the GCC’s success, first in collective security, later in economic cooperation. In a volatile and historically conflictual region, it has managed to avoid open war between its members, and has moved “rapidly and efficiently toward creating diplomatic and legal mechanisms for the adjudication of their territorial differences” (Tow 1990). In an interesting twist on the usual history of regional integration, successful security cooperation created spill-over effects into other issue areas. With a customs union, common market, and a monetary union on the horizon, the GCC seems to have outperformed the expectations of its members. On the transnational level, the GCC seems even to have encouraged, however unintentionally, mutual recognition and regional aware11

One example is article 4 of the Charter, which specifies the Council’s objectives. It consists of four sentences so general they are almost devoid of meaning: The GCC should “effect coordination [...] in all fields”, “deepen relations [...] in various fields”, or “formulate similar regulations in various fields”. Another example is article 10, which allows for the possibility of setting up a dispute settlement mechanism – but neither does it create this organ right away, nor provide a definition of ‘dispute’, nor specify which areas of cooperation the mechanism could be used for (Gulf Cooperation Council 1981).

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ness at the societal level (Barnett and Gause III 1998). Undoubtedly, its institutional design modeled on the European Community played a role in these results – a case of ‘diffusion gone right’ ? In contrast to the League, the Council shows both diffusion mechanisms at work. At its creation, the Gulf states had clearly paid close attention to the dysfunction of the League in what seems to be a case of ‘learning from failure’ (Meseguer 2009). But they had also noticed the successes of Europe in its attempts at regional cooperation. While European security cooperation was managed separately through NATO, the fact that Europe had seemingly entered one of the longest phases of interstate peace in its history, and the role that regional integration played in this, certainly did not escape the Gulf states. What is more, the European Community had also begun to show the economic power vis-a-vis external actors, and positive internal externalities, of regional groups – something that had to at least be on the long-term agenda for the highly oil-dependent Gulf states. Further proof of the willingness to interact and learn from the European Union is provided by the intensive region-to-region relationship between the two institutions, including cooperation agreements, regular ministerial meetings, and a special EU delegation to the GCC. A similar case could be made for legitimacy-driven mimicry as an explanatory mechanism. Given the previous experience with the stasis of the Arab League, and as shown by the later failures of the ACC and the AMC, there was no immediate reason for the GCC states to assume a sub-regional organization would fare any better. The European Community member states were in almost every way different from those in the Gulf – politically, economically, culturally – and their strategic situation was not comparable. It could thus be argued that the Gulf states simply adopted the gold standard of the time, as there was no more integrated regional organization. It was, in other words, a classic case of “If you build it, they will come”.

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5

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Conclusion The Gulf’s two existing regional organizations share many similarities among its members

– values, traditions, religion, language – yet have produced very different outcomes. The Arab League has for much of its life been an organization with its handbrake on, torn between the powerful idea of pan-Arabism and the resulting ambitious goals on one side, and the realities of a conflictual region full of states wary of surrendering any sovereignty to a supranational institution on the other. The Gulf Cooperation Council has found unexpected success in providing collective security for its small membership, and has begun to leverage this trust building into economic and cultural cooperation. The paper is part of the larger Comparative Regional Organization Project (CROP) at the University of G¨ottingen. The three-year project will manually code over 450 founding and amending treaties of 100 regional organizations in order to gather systematic knowledge on their institutional design. CROP will not only allow us to show the degree of similarity between any two organizations, but also how these relationships change over time. Once completed, the project will further be able to show which diffusion mechanisms explain best the patterns of similarities between regional organizations. This paper will then be able to revisit its central questions: Is the League indeed all that innovative, and have others copied it despite its failures? Is the Council really just a European Community clone, airlifted into the Gulf? And do converge on other institutional models? But what these two cases show even at the current stage is threefold: Firstly, that regional organization still is, perhaps not surprisingly, a complex task carrying a significant risk of failure. The fact alone that members are located in the same region does not guarantee success, not even in the case of a shared history, value system, religion, or language. Secondly, diffusion as a theoretical framework highlights the importance of institutional innovation, and can help us untangle how path dependencies and institutional choices can create positive outcomes, or lock in negative ones. Thirdly, being innovative is not always a good thing for institutional success, and copying shamelessly from others is not a recipe for failure. 23

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