The EU global gateway and energy infrastructure: navigating varieties of economic statecraft

The EU Global Gateway is often presented as a new geoeconomic tool to counteract China’s attempt to seize infrastructural investment abroad to project influence and gain strategic advantage. However, the EU’s willingness and ability to deploy geoeconomic statecraft faces several normative and practical challenges. To investigate how these tensions play out in practice, this article examines whether and how the Global Gateway infrastructure projects are underpinned by geoeconomic goals and means. The article focuses on energy projects, which amount to half of the Global Gateway flagships. Theoretically, it builds on governed interdependence approaches to conceptualize geoeconomic statecraft, and the state-society relations and external pressures underpinning it. Leveraging an own-gathered database of 117 projects, the article conveys a mixed picture: while geoeconomic intent is partially visible in the choice of projects and effort in reinforcing state-market relations, other forms of liberal economic statecraft (in embedded and neoliberal variants) continue to prevail.