“This is largely a rebranding exercise,” said Barry Andrews, an Irish member of the European Parliament with the Renew Europe political group.
It’s not even clear how much of the promised money will actually materialize. Almost half of the headline-grabbing 300 billion euros are, in fact, private investments that the EU is hoping to generate with a system of financial guarantees.
“Looking at the attitude of investors, I’m pretty confident that they see the opportunity,” said Reinhard Bütikofer, the chair of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with China. He said involvement by the European business community will also receive a boost from a business advisory group that is expected to be set up in the coming months as part of Global Gateway’s governance.
However, previous EU attempts to involve the private sector in development projects have hardly been smashing successes, with very little evidence about the actual impact of the financial tools that the EU is using to woo businesses. “There is a huge gap of trust between the development community and the investment community, and a lack of understanding in both directions,” Andrews said.
That isn’t a problem for China, which has a constant surplus of productive capacity and a government that can use its influence over state banks and private companies to enlist them in its geopolitical endeavors. Private tech giant Huawei has reportedly built some 70 percent of Africa’s entire 4G network.
Half of Global Gateway’s resources are earmarked for Africa, but leaders on the continent have also been quick to notice the lack of new funding and the uncertainty over private cash that mar the EU scheme, said Ovigwe Eguegu, a Nigerian expert on China-Africa relations at Development Reimagined, a think tank based in Beijing. “The messaging indicates that the European Union is going to match China, but in Africa there is a lot of skepticism,” Eguegu said.
At an EU forum on Global Gateway last summer, sitting next to Urpilainen, Senegalese Economy Minister Amadou Hott urged Africans to “manage expectations.” A few months later at the G-20 summit in Bali, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and U.S. President Joe Biden hosted an event about their joint efforts to compete with Belt and Road. Indonesia and India were the only emerging-market countries present.
Africans can see that their relevance in the eyes of Europeans boils down to the immigration issue, Chatelard said, while for China investing in foreign infrastructure is a fundamental component of its own economic model. “Europe just doesn’t have that kind of skin in the game,” she said. “The whole Global Gateway initiative is cosmetics to make the European Union feel better about themselves, whereas Belt and Road, for all the bad things you can say about it, has an agenda; it’s about getting things done.”
Among the bad things that Western governments do say about Belt and Road is that China burdens recipient nations with unsustainable debt in order to take control of their infrastructure and increase its influence; many cite the Chinese takeover of the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka as an example.
“Our approach is based on openness, sustainability, and it doesn’t want to create dependency,” Sannino said.
Chinese loans do tend to come with higher interest rates than Western ones, but according to many analysts the “debt trap” narrative is largely unsubstantiated and rings hollow to African leaders. “It’s not all rosy when it comes to China’s finance on the continent. Far from that. But the intentionality on the part of the Chinese to saddle countries with debt and seize their infrastructure has no credibility whatsoever,” Eguegu said.
Even Global Gateway’s advocates admit that the program would benefit from more clarity about what its priorities are and that there is a risk that it boils down to a simple repackaging of existing programs.
“Whenever there is a new promising concept, there is always a tendency within every bureaucracy to reframe what they have been doing for many years under the new headline,” Bütikofer said. “New label, but old wine in new wineskins. That is obviously not what the Global Gateway initiative is supposed to amount to,” he said.
But even fresh optics could help Europe stake a bigger claim to global influence. By many indicators the EU as a whole is the largest world provider of foreign aid for development. Between 2014 and 2018, the bloc disbursed 350 billion euros in grants, but that came via initiatives at the EU and national levels, which failed to steal the spotlight from China’s Belt and Road.
“Europe has been very frustrated that it dishes out billions of euros to Africa and everybody talks only about China,” said San Bilal, a senior executive at ECDPM, a think tank focusing on Africa-Europe ties.