ABSTRACT
That there are costs as well as benefits involved in the establishment of a GCC MU should now have begun to become clear from the analysis in the previous chapters. Whether these costs become actual obstacles to its establishment depends on two crucial factors. First, whether the collective gains to the GCC states are perceived as outweighing those costs (the subject of our next chapter) and, second, whether the costs are shared collectively and uniformly throughout the region: because if the latter were indeed the case, it is much less likely that the project would go ahead. Fortunately, as this chapter will clarify, this is not the case; different GCC states encounter different costs in joining an MU and in such a situation, the door is left open for a process of discussion, bargaining and, hopefully, compromise, in which wise counsel may come to predominate over narrow nationalistic instincts and the greater good prevail over sectional interests.
