Advancing European Capital at the Expense of People and Planet
Nicholas Hildyard
11 February 2026
Launched in 2021, the European Commission’s Global Gateway Programme is billed as the EU’s contribution to narrowing a purported annual $1.3 trillion “global investment gap” in infrastructure financing. In aiming to mobilise private sector funding for the “digital, energy and transport sectors,” the programme furthers the Trumpish doctrine that bigger powers have natural “spheres of influence” whose constituent countries are there to service the imperial centre and work to its rules.
