Mutual Interest, Unequal Power: Reclaiming EU’s partnership with the Global South

“We will not enjoy security without development, we will not enjoy development without security, and we will
not enjoy either without respect for human rights.” — Kofi Annan, 2005

Annan’s words captured an ambition to connect development, security and human rights. They sound
distant from the language heard at this year’s Munich Security Conference, where US Secretary of State
Marco Rubio urged Europe not to be “shackled by guilt and shame” over the West’s imperial past. The EU
is not the US. But the contrast brings into view a harder debate about power, interests and the terms on
which countries cooperate. It is in this context that Global Gateway has taken shape and the future Global
Europe Instrument is being negotiated.

In Brussels, development cooperation is increasingly described as “partnership”; poverty eradication now
sits alongside the language of mutual interest and geopolitical ambition. Global Gateway offers investment
and infrastructure as well as aid, while asking Europe’s external policies and actors to pull in the same
direction. These changes respond to real questions about what development requires. They also bring an
older question back into focus: what makes cooperation and partnership meaningful under unequal
conditions of power?

This series does not ask Europe to set aside its interests, or treat development policy as separate from
foreign policy. It starts from the fact that Europe and its partners have interests of their own, and that their
power to shape the relationship is unequal. It asks how those interests can become the basis of a
partnership that both sides can recognise as their own.

The series follows that question in four steps. The first piece revisits the history of EU aid and its place in
Europe’s wider external action. The second examines Global Gateway and the future Global Europe
Instrument. The third asks what partnership looks like from the perspective of the countries and societies
the EU calls its partners. The final piece returns to Europe’s own position in a multipolar world and asks
what kind of partnership offer it can sustain.