European and Gulf officials increasingly meet around the same tables, discuss the same strategic challenges, and speak of shared interests. Yet cooperation between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) often moves at different speeds. Agreements that appear urgent to one side can seem premature or overly cautious to the other, creating a sense of misalignment even when objectives broadly converge.
These frictions are not simply the product of geopolitics or competing interests. They also reflect deeper differences in how political actors assess urgency, risk, and effective action. How long constitutes a reasonable timeframe for a decision, and where caution ends and delay – or flexibility – turns into inconsistency are interpreted differently across contexts. Insights from behavioral science help illuminate these questions by drawing attention to decision-making styles, time horizons, and sources of political legitimacy.
How Europe Thinks and Acts
Seen through a behavioral lens, the EU’s normative stance grows out of a post-war political identity anchored in the longue durée of constitutionalism, welfare-state building, and technocratic governance. These roots help explain why it has long favored multilateral frameworks and regional integration in its external relations. Beyond Europe’s immediate neighborhood, however, this approach has often met caution or resistance, especially when partners view it as carrying implicit expectations of political change. In such contexts, compromise can be read not as flexibility but as a loss of identity.
This logic can slow decision-making when partners expect faster adaptation. Loss aversion plays an important role: policymakers tend to worry more about reputational damage from inconsistency than about the potential gains of acting quickly. As a result, it relies heavily on regulatory consistency across trade, technology, climate, and finance. These rules help stabilize action in a political system shaped by coalition politics, electoral change, and fragmented authority.
Distinct cognitive frames also affect how legitimacy is understood. In this governance model, legitimacy comes mainly from procedure, transparency, consultation, and adherence to shared standards. These requirements, in turn, influence political behavior by tying decision-makers to formal processes and clear lines of accountability.
Furthermore, economic structure reinforces the same orientation. As a mature, high-income bloc, the EU prioritizes financial stability and fiscal discipline, drawing on accumulated institutional capital rather than pursuing disruptive leaps. This trajectory also influences responses to technological change. Europe hosts a strong research ecosystem, yet it often struggles to commercialize frontier technologies such as artificial intelligence. Innovation is expected to advance through deliberation and ethical safeguards, showing an institutional preference for governance before velocity.
From the Gulf perspective, these traits produce a partnership that feels slow and process-heavy. The long path toward formal EU-GCC engagement illustrates the point: the first summit took place only in 2024, with the next scheduled for 2026 in Riyadh. For GCC actors accustomed to rapid strategic adjustment and decisive policymaking, the Union appears predictable and principled, but not consistently responsive.
The broader consequence is strategic. The Union’s present zeitgeist stands in contrast to the Gulf’s forward-leaning modern vision of economic transformation. Successive crises such as the war in Ukraine, migration pressures, and energy security challenges have narrowed Europe’s ability to convert norms into strategic influence. Internationally, this retrenchment has weakened agenda-setting power, reduced credibility as a decisive actor and increasingly confined it to a reactive posture.
The Gulf’s Pragmatism
Gulf states, buoyed by substantial resource-derived liquidity, have expanded their strategic autonomy with increasing confidence in recent years. They have recognized shifts in the international order and acted decisively to pursue their interests beyond traditional alignments. As the EU’s ability to project influence has diminished, Gulf actors have stepped into emerging diplomatic and economic spaces.
These actors do not seek to replace Europe, but to relativize its influence. By diversifying alliances, avoiding rigid alignments, and prioritizing pragmatic decision-making, Gulf monarchies have reduced their dependency. They now engage from a position of strength, as strategic partners rather than subordinate recipients.
A notable trend is the growing willingness of several states in the region to take on mediation roles in regional conflicts and crises with global implications. This behavior has strengthened their credibility as effective intermediaries in a fragmented international system, reinforcing their role as essential diplomatic interlocutors.
Divergent temporal orientations continue to create friction in negotiating and implementing partnerships.
These mediation roles rest on a different understanding of political legitimacy. In the Gulf, legitimacy is closely tied to performance and visible delivery, bolstered by hereditary authority and the ability to manage rapid modernization without social disruption. Political credibility is demonstrated through swift implementation, responsiveness to societal expectations and the preservation of stability. Where Europe has prioritized procedures, conditionality and normative standards, Gulf states offer financing capacity and tangible outcomes. This combination has proven highly appealing across regions of growing engagement, particularly in Africa, Asia, and parts of the Middle East.
The same logic of delivery extends beyond diplomacy into long-term state strategy. National development frameworks known as the “Visions,” including Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the United Arab Emirates’ Vision 2031, Qatar National Vision 2030, and Oman Vision 2040, articulate integrated narratives that look both inward and outward. They align foreign policy priorities with investment and technological development, signaling coordinated statecraft.
In the economic and financial sphere, these countries are pursuing growth models built on large-scale investment in infrastructure, technology, and strategic sectors, supported by innovative financing tools. In this context, Islamic finance plays an important operational role, based on risk-sharing and close ties to the real economy. This approach influences how new economic initiatives are designed, financed and implemented across the region.
These dynamics illustrate how Gulf states are shaping their strategic behavior by seizing opportunities created by global geopolitical reconfigurations and technological change. They actively diversify partnerships and pursue hedging strategies to reinforce strategic autonomy and expand room for maneuver.
Aligning Temporalities for Effective Cooperation
Many of these differences also reflect contrasting views of time. In Europe, time is often approached as linear and plan-driven, with efficiency measured by meeting deadlines, predictability and anticipating future scenarios. In parts of the Arab world, temporal orientations have been shaped by accelerated modernization, resource-based economies, and political systems conscious of finite horizons, particularly the long-term decline of oil revenues. This produces a sense of urgency in which decision-making unfolds quickly, yet with close attention to context, relationships, and the opportune moment (waqt), often expressed through the phrase inshā’ Allāh.
This points to a structural and cultural divide in how each side understands time. These nuances have direct implications for public policy, investment, and economic and strategic cooperation. From this perspective, EU-GCC relations are shaped by mismatched time horizons, which generate friction in coordination and implementation. At the same time, these differences also create opportunities for complementarity, particularly where Europe’s regulatory depth and long-term planning can align with Gulf speed, capital mobilization, and implementation capacity.
Meanwhile, the European project is built on institutions designed for the long term, complex decision-making, institutional fragmentation, and the need for broad consensus limit political agency. The result is a system that is institutionally stable but politically slow-moving and often reactive to changes in the international environment.
Conversely, GCC states operate within predominantly medium-term strategic timelines, set out in their national transformation visions. More centralized governance, alongside clearly defined strategic orientations, encourages rapid decision-making and action. This behavioral configuration supports agile policy implementation and flexibility in allocating resources, particularly in investment-driven and innovation-led sectors.
Different views of time also influence economic preferences and incentives in the two regions. These differences lead to distinct approaches to mobilizing capital and prioritization, revealing contrasting ideas of economic modernity. The effects extend to labor markets, capital allocation, and the design of regulatory and trust frameworks.
Addressing how time horizons influence decision-making is increasingly important as economic interdependencies between these blocs acquire heightened strategic significance amid great-power rivalry. Divergent temporal orientations continue to create friction in negotiating and implementing partnerships, as perceptions of time impact diplomatic behavior and expectations. Institutional adaptation, combined with a more refined understanding of the future-oriented imaginaries guiding each side, can strengthen the effectiveness and durability of EU-GCC cooperation.
© IE Insights.
