Every journey, as Mao Tse-tung remarked before what became a great military epic of the 20th century, must start with a first step. The EU-Arab meeting hosted by Malta is best seen as that. The distance that needs to be travelled by both sides is long, the track uncertain and the obstacles, legion.
Still, it is a credit to Malta's Foreign Minister Michael Frendo that representatives from the EU's 27 member states and 22 from the Arab League met under one roof to participate at a meeting - held on the initiative of Malta - that has been recognised by those concerned as some form of kickstart to more formal get-togethers.
They did not meet to solve the Middle East situation, which is, fundamentally, at the root of so much divergence between the Western and Arab world and which cannot be solved without Israeli participation. The aim was for Eurabia to discover just what it is that can be achieved by the two sides that make it up to increase understanding and cooperation between them; and to promote, with a slowness that is inevitable, an increase of political and economic stability in the volatile region of the Middle East.
There can be little doubt, in macro-economic terms, that the two sides need one another. Access to Arab oil is important to the EU; perhaps will become more important still should relations with a prickly Russia sour further. Access to EU know-how and EU investment is similarly vital to the Arab component of the dialogue that must flow between the two.
That step one taken in Valletta should be a matter for great satisfaction to this small land with a big vision.
The EU-LAS conference had its own primary agenda - climate change, illegal immigration, sustainable economic development, energy - and, clearly, was so vast an undertaking it could not do more than place these problems on the table in order to initiate the structured dialogue that is becoming more and more necessary in a world that displays so many fissiparous tendencies.
Perhaps Dr Frendo got it just right when he remarked that he was not expecting any groundbreaking decisions to come out of the meeting. But, he added: "The event itself is ground-breaking since it is the first time this European Union-League of Arab States meeting will be held". This is surely the point.
To bring together Britain and Libya, the Czech Republic and Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Lithuania, Dubai and Slovenia, to name but eight of the countries that attended, is itself a significant step in the world of international relations. To create a forum where each will learn more about the other and from the other, where each can contribute to the long-term goal of some form of unity in an environment that is characterised more often by disunity, where the dialogue of the deaf is replaced with more meaningful interaction, is truly ground-breaking.
For Malta it is not being crude to say it was more than that. By being held here, the conference gave an opportunity to 49 high representatives of their country to get a taste of the island not only in culinary terms.
It opened Malta up to them as a strategic investment location, as a place where business can be done and here, one imagines, the opportunity to tout Malta as the location for Dubai's SmartCity was not lost, either by Malta or by Dubai. Dr Frendo was right to observe that "We cannot underestimate the ripple effects such a conference will have on the country's economy".
For this alone, the government deserves a pat on the back and the recognition from all that Malta outside the EU could not have hoped to bring together the countries that sent their representatives over to attend this conference.
It would have lacked the stature that membership has given it and the success registered by the event is yet another measure of just how vital to Malta's profile has been its membership of the EU.