The two items under review here, an account of the First Euro-Arab Arbitration Conference held in Tunis in 1985 under the auspices of the Euro-Arab Chamber of Commerce and a set of reports of arbitration cases, are part of the proliferation of international arbitration materials produced over the last 15 years. Prospective purchasers (in practice, for reasons of price, libraries) have to ask two questions before buying arbitration materials: (1) does this work fill a gap in our collection? and (2) is it worth reading? This review will examine the two items concerned in the light of these two questions.

There is certainly a need for books written in English and French dealing with Arab approaches to arbitration, such as Euro-Arab Arbitration aims to be. Perhaps, the principal black spot on the considerable growth of arbitration in the 1960s and 1970s was the number of well-publicized acrimonious arbitrations involving Western and Arab parties. The latter, in particular, have not infrequently been reported as having refused to participate in or alleged violations of its public policy by the arbitral process. (For examples, see the Libyan petroleum nationalization arbitrations, and the account of General National Maritime Transport v. Götaverken Arendal A.B. in J. Gillis Wetter, The International Arbitration Process (1979), Vol. II, 178–230).

There is an essential contrast between the Arab approach to public policy and that of Western states which seems to have proved the key stumbling block to a number of arbitrations in the recent past. The former countries, sometimes inspired by religion (notably in the case of Saudi Arabia) but often also by a limited number of central policy goals (as in the case of the Israel boycott relied upon in General National Maritime Transport Co. v. Götaverken Arendal A.B. [1980] Rev. Arb. 524, 528 (Cour d’appel de Paris)) have a strong and detailed notion of public policy which affects many facets of trading relations with them. Such countries are also highly conscious of their colonial past and their hard-won sovereignty. By contrast with their Arab counterparts, the content of public policy in Western states on the commercial front tends to be limited to devices to make trade flow freely. As a result, European parties have on a number of occasions been left to bemoan the inability of their Arab commercial partners to obey the rules of the arbitration “game” and the cost of litigation that this has entailed.

In addition, many of the angry interchanges between Arab and Western participants in arbitrations seem to demonstrate basic communication problems (a classic example is the correspondence in the Götaverken case, in particular the letter of the Libyan arbitrator Mr Tashani of 5 April 1978, reported in J. Gillis Wetter, supra, at pp. 200–208) in particular a failure on the European side to understand the dissatisfaction expressed by Arabs with the arbitral process. One of the possible explanations for this is that, prior to 1980, there was precious little material in Western languages on Arab arbitration law and attitudes. In fact,