The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union defines poverty reduction and, in the long term, poverty eradication as the primary objective of EU development cooperation. Yet recent initiatives by the European Commission, notably Global Gateway and the proposed Global Europe instrument, place an increasing emphasis on competitiveness, strategic autonomy, infrastructure, migration cooperation, critical raw materials and geopolitical influence. This Policy Note, based on an in-depth study (Schlögl et al., 2026), argues that European interests have always been part of EU development policy, but that the current shift changes both their visibility and weight. The emerging policy challenge is to keep development objectives operational when they compete with other priorities.
Schlögl et al. (2026) studied this question.