The Gulf Co-operation Council and security in the Arabian Gulf

For many years the Arabian Gulf was an area which ranked high in the list of British overseas interests, so high in fact that Britain was the protecting power of the Gulf states by virtue of exclusive treaties. In the years following the second world war the economic importance of these states increased enormously with the dramatic exploitation of their single asset, oil. This development was parallelled by the decline in the ability of Britain to maintain stability as protecting power, culminating in her complete withdrawal in 1971. Stability was seen as the prerequisite for access to oil; old disputes between the Gulf states threatened stability as well as the possibility of Super-power involvement leading to confrontation. This thesis deals with the way the Gulf states themselves addressed these problems by establishing the Gulf Co-operation Council in 1981. Internal threats to stability were resolved, institutions and procedures drafted to harmonise economic policies and to tackle the social consequences of the exploitation of oil. External threats, however, continue to cause international concern; analysis of the aims and performance of the GCC leads to an assessment of the likelihood of its success in replacing Britain as the protecting power in an area which will continue to be of international concern as far as can be reasonably forecast