The EU’s Global Gateway strategy rests on the premise that development cooperation and the EU’s own geostrategic interests can be mutually reinforcing. Genuine synergies do exist: a renewable energy project can expand electricity access while creating markets for European technology; digital infrastructure built on EU standards can advance local governance while embedding European norms abroad. But the EU’s official narrative has increasingly stretched the idea of ‘mutual benefit’ to near-total, obscuring cases where tension and potential trade-offs emerge between the two sets of objectives.
The brief looks at ‘Global Gateway 2.0’ and shows how recent EU policy documents – on digital strategy, climate and energy, critical raw materials, economic security, and preparedness– have further shifted Global Gateway’s attention towards EU competitiveness, resilience and economic security interests. Critical raw materials illustrate the tension concretely: whether processing should happen within the EU for European strategic autonomy, or in the partner country for local value addition and jobs, is a real and legitimate trade-off that cannot be dissolved by mutual-benefit language and must instead be weighed case by case.
The brief cautions against two related risks: development institutions and funding being redirected towards geostrategic ends, and governance- or poverty-focused programming being redefined around short-term EU commercial payoff. It stresses that the EU’s dual ambition remains credible only if it explicitly acknowledges where interests align and where they don’t. Naming these trade-offs honestly, rather than presenting every EU external investment project as serving both agendas at once, is what makes genuine, durable overlap possible.
About the Author:
Dr San Bilal isthe executive director of ECDPM.