Promoting the EU Global Gateway in the shadow of the Belt-and-Road Initiative: What role for perceptions and strategic narratives?

The Global Gateway is an initiative that has received public attention unthinkable for EU development policy initiatives of the past. Much of the ensuing discussion focused on the relevance of the initiative for the (geo)strategic role of the EU in the world in line with the European Commission’s ambitions. It reveals the strong EU-centric nature if not of the initiative, but of the debate itself. In contrast, our paper starts from the assumption that the effectiveness of the Global Gateway initiative partly depends on how third countries perceive it. This perception is also shaped in the context of competing initiatives, most notably, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The EU seems to understand the relevance that its narrative has on external perception, for example, by promoting it in marked contrast to the BRI. While debates around the Global Gateway pick up the EU’s promotion thereof, they are often EU-centric and mainly aim at criticizing the EU’s inadequacies, such as the lack of additional resources. Instead, our paper suggests that the promotion of the narrative is analytically valuable. This paper, therefore, asks how the EU seeks to shape the narrative of the Global Gateway initiative in the eyes of third countries and how this affects the initiative’s promotion. This work is relevant for anyone analysing the external perceptions of the EU as well as the effectiveness of the Global Gateway initiative, which should be considered independently from how it affects the EU as a geostrategic or foreign policy actor.