In the room of Global Gateway Forumthe buzz stopped when Ursula von der Leyen announced the figure:
“Team Europe has mobilized over €306 billion in just four years.”
Composed but heartfelt applause swept through the auditorium. It wasn’t just approval for an objective achieved: it was the awareness that something in European identity was changing.
The objective of 300 billion euros, set in 2021 as a target for 2027, was achieved two years early. And now the Commission is looking beyond: 400 billion by the end of the cycle, with projects in over 130 countries and partnerships ranging from Africa to the Indo-Pacific.
This is not an accounting exercise, but a political transformation: Europe is learning to use capital as an instrument of power, not dependence. No longer a simple “donor”, but a trusted investor in a world where infrastructures are the new geopolitics.
From the Belt and Road to the European way
In the years when China was building the Belt and Road Initiativeinvesting in ports, railways and power plants from Pakistan to Greece, Europe watched with a mixture of admiration and anxiety.
The Global Gateway was born from that awareness: the EU could no longer limit itself to regulating, it had to go back to building.
But Brussels has chosen a different path. Where Beijing tends to act in a vertical and centralized way, Europe proposes an open, multilateral and transparent model, based on market rules and social sustainability.
It’s not about replicating the Silk Roadbut to offer an alternative that brings together economic interests and democratic principles.
As an EIB official explained,
“Global Gateway is the answer of those who believe that cooperation should not leave behind debts, but capabilities.”
It is a phrase that summarizes the essence of the project: not just building infrastructure, but also trust, governance and healthy interdependencies.
Capital, trust and transparency: the new grammar of European power
For decades the European Union has been portrayed as a regulatory power: excellent at dictating standards, less effective at projecting economic strength. With Global Gateway this paradigm shifts.
The 306 billion already mobilized are not a symbol of spending, but the indicator of a Europe that is learning to speak the language of capital, without betraying its own ethics.
There is a precise logic behind the figures: activate the private sector, catalyze investments, reduce dependencies on critical supply chains, particularly in the energy, digital and healthcare sectors. The challenge is to build autonomy without closure, partnership without subordination. It is the economic translation of a political principle: open strategic autonomy.
In a world that uses finance as a weapon, Brussels seeks to make it a language of shared trust.
This is where the European difference manifests itself: not in aggression, but in the coherence between values and tools.
Infrastructures that tell an idea of the world
Each Global Gateway project is a story in itself — economic, technical, but also political. Behind the investment maps there are corridors, ports, cables and networks that rewrite the routes of trade and cooperation.
In Eastern Europe, Solidarity Lanes keep the logistical arteries between Ukraine, Moldova and the European Union open, ensuring the export of Ukrainian grain even in times of war.
In the heart of Africa, the Lobito Corridor unites Angola, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo: a railway project that transforms isolated mining regions into hubs of industrial development and intra-African trade.
In the Mediterranean, the MEDUSA submarine cable promises to bring broadband and cyber security from Lisbon to Cairo, connecting two continents via fiber optics.
And in Latin America, programs for electricity integration between the Andean and Caribbean countries favor the spread of renewable energy and cross-border exchanges of green energy.
There is a coherence in these projects: each infrastructure is also a political message.
Europe does not limit itself to connecting territories, but intertwines economies and destinies, offering partners a form of growth that does not sacrifice sovereignty on the altar of efficiency.
The Investment Hub: the laboratory where economics and diplomacy meet
At the operational heart of the Global Gateway is the new Investment Hub, a hybrid financial instrument that combines grants, subsidized loans and public guarantees to support private investments in strategic projects.
It is the meeting point between European industrial policy and its external projection: a platform where the economy becomes active diplomacy.
Over 150 large European companies and hundreds of SMEs participate in the programme. Sectors such as digital, clean energy, sustainable transport, healthcare and education are at the center of the agenda, but the real added value is the chain of trust that is being created between companies, institutions and partner countries.
For many small and medium-sized businesses, Global Gateway is an opportunity to internationalize without losing the anchoring to European values: transparency, social rights, sustainability.
And perhaps it is precisely this – the reputation as a geopolitical asset – that is the true currency of Europe in the 21st century.
From competition to strategic coexistence
In today’s international system, marked by the rivalry between the United States, China and Russia, the European Union is experimenting with an alternative path: strategic coexistence.
It does not seek to replace other actors, but to expand the space for choice of partner countries.
The implicit message is: Europe does not ask for alignment, but reciprocity.
This posture translates into a fluid political model: open to alliances with those who share democratic values, but pragmatic with those who pursue compatible development objectives.
In Africa, in Latin America, in South-East Asia, the Global Gateway projects become laboratories of geopolitical balance, where diplomacy is built through power lines, cables and digital networks.
It’s a less visible, but perhaps more lasting approach: the power of connection rather than coercion.
In a fragmented world, Europe is betting on collaboration as a political force.
The return of global Europe
Beyond the numbers, the Global Gateway represents a test of leadership and collective vision.
For a European Union often perceived as slow, bureaucratic or reactive to global events, the initiative makes a mark a reconquest of protagonism.
After a decade of crisis – from austerity to the migratory emergency, from Brexit to the war in Ukraine – Brussels is finally trying to rewrite its role: no longer a “defensive” power, but economic actor capable of orienting the direction of the world.
The transition from regulatory soft power – based on rules, standards and moral suasion – to one self-aware economic power is not just semantic: it is cultural.
It means recognizing that, in a world where power is measured in infrastructure, energy and data, values also need to be translated into projects, not just treaties.
In this sense, Global Gateway it’s there the EU’s first real industrial foreign policy, and perhaps also the most ambitious gamble of the European decade.
In his closing speech at the Forum, von der Leyen wanted to condense this vision in a sentence destined to carry weight: “Global Gateway is not an investment plan. It is a shared vision for a connected, sustainable and sovereign future.”
Building a cooperation architecture
Behind those words we can glimpse a Europe that wants to return to being a generator of order, not a simple mediator between powers.
The goal is not to build a capital empire, but an architecture of cooperation in which prosperity and autonomy reinforce each other.
It is an implicit response to an era in which globalization has fragmented into spheres of influence, and trust has become the new currency of power.
In this scenario, Europe seems to rediscover its most authentic vocation: that of transforming vulnerability into vision.
After years of introspection, the EU returns to the world with a different awareness – not that of expansionism, but of interdependence as a strategic force.
And perhaps for the first time in its recent history, the continent manages to reconcile realism and idealism: build power without giving up ethics, invest not to dominate but to make the world a little more symmetrical, more cooperative, more humane.
Cross the bridges that are built
The Global Gateway it is not just an investment plan nor an exercise in economic diplomacy: it is an experiment in political identity, an attempt to redefine the very meaning of European presence in the world.
Behind the technicality of financing, partnerships and guarantees lies a deeper question: What kind of power does Europe want to be in the 21st century?
Its success will not just depend on the billions mobilized or the number of projects completed, but on ability to maintain coherence between founding principles and geopolitical ambition.
Because the real challenge is not to mobilize resources, but to demonstrate that prosperity can arise from freedom, not from constraint; that interdependence, if governed with transparency, can become an instrument of mutual emancipation.
Building bridges, after all, is the simple part: you need capital, engineering and a logistical vision.
But crossing them – really crossing them, bringing with them values, risks and vulnerabilities – requires a political maturity that Europe has long hesitated to recognize.
Crossing one’s own bridges means exposing oneself, accepting that every cooperation entails responsibility, that every investment also becomes a declaration of trust in the future of others.
Yet this is where the decisive game is played.
If Europe knows how to unite investments and values, competitiveness and solidarity, interest and vision, then he will be able to look in the mirror and recognize that he has overcome his own geopolitical inferiority complex.
It will no longer be the power that “reacts” to global events, but the one that orients them, patiently building the grammar of a new world order — one in which strength coincides with coherence and capital with trust.
And if that day comes, then yes: Europe will be able to say, with sober pride, that it has not limited itself to building bridges – he learned to cross them.
