Since its launch in 2021, the Global Gateway strategy has been positioned as the EU’s primary partnership tool, among others, to project European influence and values abroad and/or to safeguard European contributions to industrial value chains. Three years later, the strategy needs to show some concrete outcomes if it’s to fulfil its ambitions.
However, the Global Gateway suffers from a lack of unambiguous objective(s), leaving partner countries uncertain about how they would benefit from partnering up with the EU. The shift towards focusing more on EU geopolitical interests, notably clean tech and critical raw materials dependency, doesn’t do away with the need for both more reflection on the benefits for partner countries and more structured discussions and consultations.
One starting point for reaching a real ‘win-win’ situation would be to put resilience or – as some of Europe’s partners prefer to call it – ‘strategic autonomy’ at the Global Gateway’s core. This will have important implications for the external dimension of EU climate and energy policy.
About the authors:
Christian Dietz is a Researcher in the Energy, Resources and Climate Change (ERCC) Unit at CEPS.
Christian Egenhofer is Associate Senior Research Fellow within the CEPS Energy, Resources and Climate Change Unit, which he has been heading from 2000 to 2019.