Partnership under unequal power: who defines mutual interest?
“This economic order constitutes the major obstacle standing in the way of any hope of development and progress for all the countries of the third world.”
— Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, UN General Assembly, 1974
More than fifty years later, Boumediene’s warning still exposes a gap in Europe’s partnership offer. The EU speaks of development and mutual benefit; countries in the Global South insist on something political independence alone did not secure: the power to choose their own development paths and shape the conditions on which they pursue them.
This piece looks at partnership under unequal power from the other side. Where does the EU’s promise of mutual benefit meet—or miss—partners’ priorities? It traces the claim to a right to development, tests the partnership offer against climate and debt, and finally asks what the EU’s own record reveals about building partnerships on those terms.
Where partnership begins: the right to development
Seen from the Global South, development is not only an economic agenda. It is a claim to justice, sovereignty and the right to shape the rules that govern interdependence. That is the line running from Bandung in 1955 to the Non-Aligned Movement, from UNCTAD and the G77 to the New International Economic Order, and now to BRICS+. These are not identical projects, and the countries behind them are deeply diverse. But they share a political root: resisting a world economy built around Western dominance, where formal independence did not end dependence over trade, finance, technology, debt and natural resources. This is the source of unity that many European debates still underestimate.
In 1974, newly independent countries brought that claim to the UN through the New International Economic Order (NIEO). They wanted more than aid: greater control over their resources, fairer terms of trade and a stronger voice in the institutions that shaped their economies. The declaration was adopted without a vote, avoiding an open split with Western countries that opposed much of its agenda. Three years later, World Bank president Robert McNamara asked Willy Brandt, the former West German chancellor, to lead an independent commission through the North–South impasse. Its 1980 report returned to Pearson’s central insight: development depended on the whole economic relationship, and changing that relationship was in the interests of North and South alike. Western resistance, debt crises and structural adjustment frustrated that ambition, but did not erase the demand. In 2022, a renewed NIEO resolution passed the General Assembly. This time the divide was recorded: most of the world voted for a different economic order; EU members and much of the wider North voted against.
That history now returns in the forums where Europe claims to build partnership. In the FfD4 negotiations, the EU dissociated itself from final paragraphs on debt and climate finance after working to weaken them. On the UN Tax Convention, the EU’s insistence on consensus, avoiding duplication with OECD processes and further technical analysis was procedural attempts that reflected a deeper reluctance to accept a Global South push to reclaim multilateral rule-making. This is where partnership begins: in the international rules that govern debt, tax, climate finance and fiscal space. If the EU calls countries partners while resisting the coalitions they build against inherited privileges, partnership becomes politically hollow. These processes reflect a deeply rooted claim to the right to development. Any serious EU partnership agenda has to start there.
Climate: rebuilding the Paris bargain
Climate is the counter-example that proves Europe can build partnership when it has a coherent strategy. In Paris, the EU did not win by lecturing the world into ambition. It helped build the political conditions for a universal bargain: a joint strategy with 79 ACP countries, the High Ambition Coalition with vulnerable states, and a French presidency that combined inclusive diplomacy with a clear direction of travel. The agreement balanced sovereignty and ambition through nationally determined contributions, a bottom up approach, differentiation and finance. Paris worked because Europe did what partnership requires: it connected its own climate ambition with the survival claims of countries facing sea-level rise, drought, heat and loss. It did not ask global south countries to choose between development and survival, or between climate action and the means to deliver it.
That achievement has since become a credibility test. In Baku, at COP29, the same least developed countries and small island states walked out, India objected after the deal was forced and gaveled through, and Nigeria called the package an insult and a joke. Commissioner Hoekstra qualified the deal as “ambitious”. UNFCCC negotiations are now faltering because that convergence is missing: developing countries are asked to choose between development and a European-defined transition, mitigation ambition and resilience needs, affordable growth and debt-driven decarbonization, industrial transformation at home and climate value chains controlled elsewhere. LDCs, SIDS and emerging powers such as India and Nigeria are called strategic partners in Brussels.
Just Energy Transition Partnerships could similarly have made mutual interest concrete. In South Africa, support for coal phase-down could have gone hand in hand with reliable electricity, grid investment, jobs and industrial development. In Indonesia, it could have helped replace coal-powered growth with cleaner energy while supporting domestic processing of the minerals needed for the transition. Europe has a stake in both: credible climate partners and more resilient clean-energy and critical-materials supply chains. Yet the offer was thin on the finance needed to make the transition just: grants accounted for only about 4 per cent of South Africa’s initial $8.5 billion package. Delivery has lagged too. More than four years after South Africa’s partnership was launched, $5.80 billion of $13.92 billion pledged had been allocated by the end of 2025; more than three years after Indonesia’s launch, around $3.1 billion of $21.4 billion committed had been utilized by early 2026. A real partnership would provide affordable finance for grids, public capacity, jobs and local industry—not just assemble an investment pipeline—so partners can govern the transition and capture its value. That is the political potential still missing from JETPs’ record.
Debt: partnership starts with fiscal space
Debt is where Europe’s partnership language most visibly collides with partner realities. At the AU-EU summit in Luanda, AU chair João Lourenço called for a new financial relationship that would let African countries invest in development instead of being “stifled by unsustainable debt”; António Guterres called for an end to the “crushing debt cycle”. The Holy See made debt relief a call of the 2025 Jubilee year. This brings Pearson back to the centre: aid cannot build partnership if the debt architecture removes the fiscal space that makes development possible in the first place. More than any project or budget line, debt decides whether partnership can exist at all.
Europe knows this from its own history. In 1953, the London Debt Agreement cancelled half of West Germany’s external debt — 15 billion Deutschmarks out of 30 billion — and tied repayment to the country’s capacity to earn through exports. The moral inversion is striking: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt, Argentina, the Belgian Congo, Cambodia, Cameroon, New Guinea and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland were among those that helped cancel Germany’s debt. Europe’s largest economy was rebuilt through a debt bargain that treated recovery as the condition for repayment, not the casualty of it.
The UN puts the wider problem bluntly: the international financial architecture was built in 1945 by and for industrialized countries, and it is now failing a historic stress test. The issue is not only debt stock, but the price and governance of money. African countries paid an average 9.8% on dollar bonds between 2020 and 2025, compared with 2.8% for the US; the same solar project can cost up to four times more to finance in Africa than in Europe. That is not a technical market fact. It is the defining political reality of the countries Europe claims to treat as partners. Reforming debt workouts, MDB lending terms, SDR access and tax rules would require the EU to negotiate difficult trade-offs, including over the influence and advantages it holds in the current system, but these are the conditions for partnerships that are mutually owned, durable and capable of giving countries the space to choose the EU as a genuine partner.
Where partnership becomes politically owned
The right to development, climate equity and fiscal space are not abstract claims. They are the political realities that define what partner countries expect from cooperation. This is where EU development policy can still matter most: not as a moral cover for wider bargains, but as the part of the relationship that helps people, public services and institutions carry the weight of those bargains. The EU has produced its strongest development value when aid supported political dialogue, sector-wide reforms and public systems. European Parliament research gives precious insights: traditional aid modalities have contributed to health, education and poverty reduction, especially in least-developed countries. This is legacy the EU can be proud of and should build on.
That is also where the EU is still valued. In Guinea, Kenya and Zambia, EU support to human development was appreciated because it responded to recognised needs, aligned with national priorities and strengthened systems people rely on — not because it carried the language of Global Gateway or geopolitical competition. Wider evidence points in the same direction: leaders in low- and middle-income countries dislike tied aid, prefer partners that align with local priorities, and value long-term support that helps address systemic barriers such as corruption, weak public financial management and poor service delivery, particularly in social and environmental infrastructure, where China is perceived weaker. They do not reject conditions as such; they often value social, economic and democratic standards when these strengthen national reform agendas rather than impose a donor bargain. That is the side of development policy Global Europe should protect.
No mutual benefit without mutual ownership
From a partner’s perspective, partnership becomes possible under unequal power when countries can own their development paths, shape their transitions and retain the fiscal space to act on their choices. The right to development asks who sets the course; climate cooperation asks who defines the transition and bears its costs; debt asks whether countries have the means to pursue either. These are not demands to accommodate after the EU has designed its offer. They determine whether partner countries can help shape that offer in the first place.
EU aid has financed real needs, but it has also helped sustain wider bargains whose terms limited partners’ development choices. Global Gateway recognises, rightly, that aid alone cannot deliver development; it will repeat that history if investment, trade and geopolitical interests are brought together without giving partner priorities greater force over the whole relationship. Development policy can help turn an unequal partnership towards mutual benefit when development effectiveness gives countries ownership of their own priorities, and policy coherence requires the EU to answer for how its other policies affect them. Neither principle erases unequal power, and neither works by declaration alone. Their political purpose is to give partners influence over the rules and terms of interdependence—not just the projects financed within it. That is what makes a partnership possible for them, and worth sustaining for Europe.
