Do you, per chance, remember what the next big things in 1990 were? The World Wide Web had just been born and the internet was still more of an academic playground than a ubiquitous communications universe. The European Community was a club of 12 nations and the euro was a concept waiting to be discussed in the 1991 negotiations of Maastricht. Introduction of the world’s first commercial GSM 900 mobile phone network was two years away. It also was the time when Europe and the six member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council started talking about a free trade agreement (FTA). Seventeen dusty years after the beginning of negotiations in 1990, talks between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council in the past few weeks seem to have regained momentum toward finally signing the long-awaited FTA this year. Touring the region at the end of February in support of
