The following article is appearing in the EIR Strategic Alert, no. 1, 2023
As we said from the beginning, the EU “Global Gateway Initiative” aimed at competing with China’s Belt and Road policy, was an empty shell doomed to fail. Now, the GGI is exposed as a failure even from inside the European Commission.
On Nov. 30, 2022, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament held hearings on the Global Gateway and the Indo-Pacific Region, where lawmakers learned from EU officials that very little of the €300 billion of the GGI was spent, and what was spent was not “new” money.
“Global Gateway does not bring new financial means – there is no additional money when it comes to the EU level,” said Vincent Grimaud, an acting director in the commission’s Department for International Partnerships. “There’s no new money. And I’ve always held the view that if there’s no new money, there’s no new policy,” said Barry Andrews, an Irish lawmaker with the centrist Renew group. ‘This is a communications exercise. It’s a strategy to put together what was already going to happen and present it as something new. And if our partners are tricked by this, then more fool them.”
Perhaps, behind the candid admission of the high Commission official, there is, as the German economic daily Handelsblatt reported, a disagreement on using the GGI as a strategic weapon against China. “Hildegard Bentele, a German member from the European People’s Party, said she had been trying to find German companies who are ‘part of this adventure,’” but had failed to locate any. ‘If I talk to journalists, journalists are asking me what are these Global Gateway projects? If I go on the website of the European Commission, I do not find it – this is really difficult,’” she is quoted saying in the Dec. 31 South China Morning Post. (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3204431/one-year-eu-alternative-chinas-belt-and-road-fails-deliver )
Nobody knows how much of the promised €300 billion was spent. Commission spokesman Anna Pisonera said there is no list of projects available: “We do not have a list of predefined Global Gateway projects and investments worth €300 billion at this stage; we are taking forward projects and flagship programmes with our partner countries under Global Gateway agreed on a rolling basis.”
