It’s been four years since the creation of the EU Global Gateway – the European Commission’s flagship trade and development strategy towards lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
To reflect on progress made, the second Global Gateway Forum, held in Brussels on 9 and 10 October, took stock of what the Global Gateway means in a vastly changed geopolitical environment. How sustainable is this outward-looking strategy at a time when the EU is focused inwards, on its own global competitiveness in future key technologies?
This is a question of acute importance to universities. The Global Gateway rests on five priority pillars: digital, climate and energy, transport, health and education and research. Research, innovation and higher education are not only pillars of their own but also transversal enablers of the other pillars.
Indeed, research and education ensure that the EU Global Gateway is aligned with the priorities of other continents, including the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which aims to create an African knowledge society.
A focus on business and global partnerships
The Global Gateway Forum focused very much on business, leading President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa to remark wryly that in the Forum he ‘could smell money’.
And indeed, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s big announcement was the creation of an investment hub where companies can propose investments and where EU ‘member states, development banks, export credit agencies and businesses come together to craft coordinated offers’.
Still, Von der Leyen and her Executive Vice-President Kaja Kallas were at pains to emphasise that the EU was not aiming at ‘quick wins’, but at mutuality and long-term partnerships. The EU’s approach was not about extraction but about supporting local value creation for mutual benefit.
These assertions were significant. They signalled that the EU’s internal focus on competitiveness does not mean an inward turn away from the global stage. Instead, the EU continues to recognise the importance of close global partnerships, more than ever.
Moreover, the Commission had foregrounded three key thematic areas for the Forum: the green transition, digital transformation and transport. And if digital transformation was clearly a particular concern for speakers, it was the urgency of the climate crisis that underlay the entire debate.
LMICs are clearly particularly affected, and climate crisis denial – practised by a number of populist leaders around the world – is not an option for most. In the current geopolitical context, the EU holding onto its climate priorities is far from anachronistic – it is clearly a major area of international distinction.
Key global priorities
In her opening keynote address, Von der Leyen emphasised that the EU Global Gateway was also about listening to partners. If this is true, then there were three key messages that emerged loud and clear from the EU’s visitors.
The first was the importance of health, a topic relegated to just one closed session on EU support for Africa’s vaccine production.
Speakers like President João Manuel Goncalves Lourenço of Angola and Chair of the African Union and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa stressed the critical importance of this topic. Improving public health, they insisted, is a matter of investing in the public good. But it also underlies all economic growth.
Second, win-win partnerships need trust to be nurtured and built up over the long term, as Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Luc Frieden noted.
As Ghana’s Vice-President Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang affirmed, they require all voices to be heard. And they are incompatible with the weaponisation of economic transactions, highlighted by Jozef Síkela, Commissioner for International Partnerships.
And third, Grenada’s Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell clearly caught the moment as he emphasised that the Global Gateway should not just be about capital goods: it had to be about people, about strengthening education, skills and knowledge for the future.
His appeal was echoed with urgency by the President of the World Bank Ajay Banga and by Amina J Mohammed, deputy secretary general of the United Nations. As Opoku-Agyemang asked, how can we ensure that when LMICs invest in technology, it is genuinely cutting edge?
Clearly, then, for the Global Gateway to succeed, it must invest in research and education. This means articulating concrete ways in which research and higher education actors become part of the investment hub. It will not be acceptable if they are included, at best, as an afterthought to investment.
Moreover, research and education, clearly mentioned in the proposed €200 billion (US$231.26 billion) Global Europe programme for 2028 to 2034, must translate its commitment to research and education as the Global Gateway’s distinct fifth pillar and an enabler of the other four.
Notably, Erasmus+ has proven to be a unique global brand for Europe, serving LMIC students and institutions alike: a contribution of €6bn from the Global Europe programme to Erasmus+ to strengthen higher education partnerships, brain circulation and capacity building is a sorely needed strategic European investment in skills and capacities.
Similarly, in research we must strengthen successful existing instruments for collaboration in Horizon Europe.
This includes the hugely successful European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), the Africa Initiative III in Horizon Europe and the ARISE programme. Moreover, practical hurdles of collaboration for researchers from poorer institutions must be removed.
Finally, the EU must find new ways to ensure the Global Europe, Horizon Europe and Erasmus+ programmes align to foster excellent, sustainable and long-term investment in skills, competences and knowledge creation.
How can we ensure that Global Gateway commercial investments in health, climate resilience or digital transformation are always accompanied by innovative partnerships in research and higher education?
This is as much a question for the EU as for its LMIC partners – for such investments can only be sustainable if each partner contributes in equitable ways.
Seize the day
The Global Gateway Forum showed that research and higher education are currently not at the forefront of the Commission’s thinking about the Global Gateway. Yet it also underlined that now is precisely the time for universities to ensure political and economic partnerships in climate change, health or the digital transition are underwritten by sustainability, mutuality and trust.
For universities to succeed, they must not baulk when they ‘smell money’ but demand that they are part of the discussion. Long-term commercial partnerships must be underwritten by investment in skills, capabilities and common knowledge creation.
Despite so much gloom around geopolitical shifts and disruption to research collaboration, the EU Global Gateway offers a real opportunity for partnership, with universities occupying a key position. We should seize it!
This article was originally published in University World News.
Jan Palmowski
Secretary-General of The Guild – A contemporary historian, he started his career at the University of Oxford before moving to King’s College London where he taught European politics and EU integration. He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Warwick from 2013 to 2017. In this blog space, Prof. Palmowski engages with some of the wider questions around research, education, innovation and the EU. The views expressed here are his and not those of The Guild.