Global Gateway: Advancing European Capital at the Expense of People and Planet

As contemporary statements of imperialist ambitions and intent go, the European Commission’s Global Gateway Programme is right up there with President Putin’s rambling faux-historical claims that Ukraine’s proper place in the world is that of  a tributary state in a revived Russian Empire; with President Xi’s grand strategy of entangling Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe within a China-centric “community of common destiny”, woven together through infrastructure projects funded under the trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative: or with President Trump’s death star strategy for “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere” through declaring “drug cartels and savage foreign gangs operating in our region as Foreign Terrorist Organisations”, attacking Venezuela and kidnapping its president to get control over the world’s largest oil reserves, as well as pushing for regime change  in Europe because the European Union’s institutionally racist member states are not racist enough for him.

Common to all four imperial projects is a presumption that bigger powers have natural “spheres of influence” (“our region” in Trump’s words); and that the countries within those spheres are there to service the imperial centre and work to its rules. Central to that intrinsically unequal and exploitative relationship (as under previous imperial regimes) is capital’s quest for what world-ecology scholar Jason W. Moore has termed the four cheaps – cheap labour, cheap energy, cheap food and cheap resources; and their delivery, in an age of multiple clashing imperialisms, through secure “ally-friendly” supply chains. Unsurprisingly, “re-secur[ing] our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life” is an explicit core priority of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy. The European Commission’s Global Gateway Strategy may be less brash in how it sets out its imperial fiat (unlike with the US strategy, there are no references to “the God-given natural rights” of its citizens) but the programme is clearly cut from the same cloth:  the purpose is to keep the EU flag firmly planted all over those countries deemed to be part of the EU’s sphere of global influence; and to put those countries to work on behalf of the EU.  

Launched in 2021, the Gateway is billed as the EU’s contribution to narrowing the estimated annual $1.3 trillion “global investment gap” in infrastructure financing by mobilising private sector funding for the “digital, energy and transport sectors”. That, in itself, says much about the EU’s priorities. For the simple truth is that the “infrastructure financing gap” is capital’s problem, not that of ordinary people. There is more than enough public funding available to ensure heating, lighting, healthcare, clean water and other amenities for ordinary people, the more so were governments to replenish their depleted coffers by abandoning the low-tax regimes beloved of neoliberals, or by clamping down on tax evasion and capital flight. No, the ‘deficit’ lies elsewhere: in the finance for the infrastructure that European capital needs to expand – in particular, roads, railways and high-speed cables to speed up the extraction and delivery of goods, data and digital labour from the Global South to the EU: the securing of critical raw materials, such as lithium, for Europe’s (not Africa’s or Asia’s or Latin America’s) transition away from fossil fuels; and the expansion of digital services to provide European tech companies with new markets.

Under the Global Gateway Programme, the EU is using development funds, which should by law be used to improve the everyday livelihoods of the poorest in the world, to provide European capital with a helping hand heaped with give-aways. In a massive corporate welfare programme that will primarily benefit companies such as Siemens¹ (which posted record net profits of €9 billion in 2024) and water supplier and waste-treatment giant Suez² (profits of its UK subsidiary up 680% in 2024), the funds will be used to “de-risk” private sector investment in infrastructure in the South, primarily by pushing guaranteed commercial loans that the host countries (29 of which are already highly indebted) must then service.

The programme has been designed by European Commission bureaucrats, EU national governments and a handful of top corporations (many of which have picked up associated contracts) without the involvement of the 85+ African, Asian and Latin American countries where the projects will be carried out, let alone input from those who will be directly affected. Bismarck, Leopold II of Belgium and other organisers of the 1884 Berlin Conference where the European colonial powers divvied up Africa are no doubt toasting the single-minded European Union First imperialism of their modern-day counterparts in the European Commission’s Berlaymont Building.

The companies will get their “four cheaps” in abundance. A slate of projects will deliver new or improved infrastructure corridors (notably the Lobito railway corridor in Central and East Africa, with another ten corridors elsewhere in Africa identified for development) to speed up the export of copper, lithium and other strategic minerals (not to speak of agricultural crops grown by smallholders – oh! such cheap labour) to Europe. To further the EU’s transition towards renewables (not Africa’s or Asia’s or Latin America’s), the Gateway Programme is also backing lithium mining in Argentina (together with measures to reduce the risks “for EU private investment in lithium exploration and production”); copper and lithium development in Chile; and “critical raw materials” development in Namibia (“to ensure a secure and sustainable supply of raw materials to support the green transformation of the EU”).  In the same “let-the-global-South-furnish-the-sacrifice-zones-for-our-energy-transition” vein, land grabbing, water-intensive projects are planned or underway to furnish the EU with hydrogen, with hydrogen export corridors or plants being developed in Brazil, Tunisia and Algeria, Argentina, Morocco and Namibia and (the latest to be approved) Egypt. Other projects - from dams to bauxite mining and agricultural export development - are being supported in countries where the EU is competing with China (gotta get the EU flag planted!).

Europe’s tech sector is also a major beneficiary (and driver) of the Gateway programme, as European companies seek greater access to data – “earth observation data” is specifically mentioned – in countries of the global South. Under the auspices of the EU-Latin America and Caribbean Digital Alliance, for example, the Gateway’s flagship “Green Amazon” project will bring “digital connectivity” to remote communities. The technologies that are explicitly being rolled out through the project – for example, “environmental sensors” and satellite connections – are exactly the technologies needed to turn forests into Big Data factories. Indeed, it is unlikely that the project would be commercially viable without monetising data that connectivity will yield – and data on forest biodiversity is a potential digital treasure trove.  Other projects being promoted under the Digital Alliance include a scheme to enable the commercialisation of bioeconomy products from Ecuador and their export to the EU. The scheme is, naturally, preconditioned on Ecuador making its regulatory regime comply with that of the EU (or, more accurately, to let the EU decide what rules and regulations are acceptable). Heaven forbid that the Imperial Centre should instead adopt Ecuador’s potentially capitalism-busting constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature. Imperialism is always a one-way street.

To date, some 256 Gateway projects have been approved by the European Commission worldwide.  The Commission describes these as “win-win” initiatives. And, for European capital, they certainly are. Not only will the countries of the Global South pay through the nose by taking out commercial (not concessionary) loans “to build infrastructure that powers European prosperity”, as Hikma Bachegour, an academic researcher at the university of Fez also representing MENAFem, a feminist organisation in North Africa, pithily puts it; but, by using public-private partnerships to deliver the projects, Southern governments (not the host governments of European investor companies, let alone the companies themselves) will be forced to pick up the tab for any losses.  But for those directly affected, the projects – like so many “development” projects before them – mean displacement, land-grabbing, over-extraction of water, the diversion of food that could be eaten locally to the already well fed in Europe, and whole areas being turned into wastelands by the mining of critical raw materials. The racialised extractivist model that has devastated communities around the globe will not only remain in place: it will be supercharged. Indeed, the Global Gateway’s racist underpinning is not even hidden by EU bureaucrats who openly offer cash to countries such as Mauritania if they keep migrants on their soil and off boats heading to Europe.

Like all imperialisms, past and present, that of the EU inevitably claims to be different. And many are taken in. “We haven’t invaded anyone!” goes up the cry (why would one need to when you can get what you want by other means?). “Unlike China, our Gateway comes with human rights!” (rich coming from EU member states, such as France, Italy and The Netherlands, which have turned a blind eye to decades of human rights violations in the Niger delta by oil companies headquartered in their jurisdictions – violations which have been deemed sufficiently serious for an unprecedented number of UN Mandate Holders recently to express their “grave concerns” in letters to the companies and to the national governments). Or “EC funding spreads the Rule of Law!” (tell that to the billions of people whose wealth has been pilfered by corrupt politicians, with the connivance of European partners, and salted away in European banks).

Indeed, the actual implementation of the Global Gateway partnerships reveals time and again how human rights and the rule of law are secondary to the Commission’s economic priorities - and that the EU is willing to partner with invaders and land grabbers where the reward is access to strategic minerals. Both the Commission and the European Investment Bank, for example, have entered into a partnership with Rwanda to get access to raw materials, even though the vast majority of these minerals are being stolen by the Rwanda-backed M23 militia from lands they have occupied in the east of Congo. Even when M23 forcibly took control of major cities in the region early last year, neither the Commission nor the EIB halted their cooperation on raw materials with Rwanda.  Or, to cite another example, the EU has consistently supported energy partnerships (to the benefit of companies such as Italy’s Eni and SNAM) with Egypt, Tunisia and Israel, regardless of the genocide in Gaza and the repression of regime opponents in Egypt and Tunisia.

So here is an alternative proposal. If the European Commission were really serious about “mobilising private sector funding” to finance a just transition away from fossil fuels, it could mandate a concerted effort by EU member states to seize the proceeds of crime currently held in their jurisdictions – and return that stolen wealth to its countries of origin. Or, again, the EU could help to ensure private investors make a significant contribution by pushing them to cancel or at least significantly reduce the massive amount of often high yielding public debt they are holding in the Global South. Since 2022 foreign private creditors have extracted nearly $141 billion more in debt-service payments from public-sector borrowers in developing economies than they have disbursed in new financing. Finally, together with the European Parliament, it could legislate to require all European oil and mining companies to pay into a fund to clean up their toxic legacies worldwide, without which no transition away from fossil fuels can ever be described as “just”. Instead, the Commission and the Parliament have stood by while oil companies cut and run from the Niger Delta without cleaning up.

But simply calling out the hypocrisy of the European Union and the imperialism of the Global Gateway, though necessary, cuts no political ice if the call rests simply on a naïve hope that change will come by speaking truth to power. Nor will the Gateway’s imperialism be countered by a sprinkling of health and gender projects, or by add-on environmental and social safeguard policies whose limitations lie in the very fact that they are intended to maintain not to change the overall structure and purpose of the Gateway programme, namely the expansion of European capital. If the imperialism of the Gateway is to be confronted, the challenge for environmental and social justice movements is to build new alliances in Europe and internationally, particularly with labour, that not only recognise imperialism as the driver of the Gateway, but which also build countervailing practices and ways of living that support the collective right of all (rather than the few)to dignified survival. It is through supporting the foundational economy(which focuses on the provision of everyday universal basics on which we all rely, like food, housing, health services and transport, without destroying the environment) rather than capital’s economy, that justice lies.

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¹ The Hari Onu e-fuel project in Chile is supported by the Global Gateway. See: https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/document/download/ba1fc52f-d01e-4de8-844f-32a62ea73a3e_en?filename=EU-Chile-partnership_en.pdf&prefLang=es

² The Hann Bay waste water treatment plant is supported by the Global Gateway. See: https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/document/download/2c9bee0f-cfd2-41da-8597-e04c1664fa59_en?filename=EU-Senegal-partnership-infographic-v03.pdf&prefLang=ga