Check against delivery!  

Dear Friends, as we say in Brussels, “tout protocole observé”, thank you for coming to our first Global Gateway Forum. 

When we discussed about geopolitics of Global Gateway at the Foreign Affairs Council in November [2022] - one year ago, last year - I pointed out that 2023 was going to be the credibility test, in which we need better to over-deliver instead of over-promising. Promise less and deliver more. That is what we have tried to do. 

Today we are in a very tense geopolitical context. And especially for that, because we live in troubled times, the Global Gateway has become a central part of our strategy to reach out to the so-called “Global South”.  

We are not only in a “battle of narratives”; we are in a “battle of offers”. Not only the nicest stories, but the best actions.

With our Global Gateway, we want to support the economic and social development of our partners by helping them build better connectivity infrastructure, accelerate their green and digital transition, and enhance their intangible infrastructure, which is done [for the] health and education of their people. Healthy and educated people is the best infrastructure of any society. 

We want to be green, we want to be digital, but we also want coherent, cohesion societies. Do not forget that it is the final purpose: healthy, educated and prosperous citizens.  

We are trying to [make] our contribution to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  

That is what we are doing to help produce vaccines in Africa, as a crucial part of the Global Gateway endeavour, for instance.  

The green and digital transitions can only succeed if they are just – if they are not just, they will not happen. They will only happen if they benefit everyone, everywhere, and, in particular, the poorest and the weakest. Otherwise, societies will reject the needed transformation, and the world will be in greater trouble. 

Our Global Gateway should [also] contribute to our economic security strategy. We need more security and for that we have to “de-risk” our economy by diversification of our supply chains.  

We want to make the European Union’s supply chains less vulnerable. We learn from the pandemic, and we have learnt from the war in Ukraine. We need to improve our access to resources, from energy to Critical Raw Materials (CRM), breaking [with] the old style extractivism - that today is being rejected rightly so around the world - and joining our partners in adding value; adding value - not just taking minerals or food or wood from the land – [but to] add value where the resources are in order to create jobs locally, not only by exporting raw materials, but exporting [added] value.  

I think that we are trying to achieve these ambitious goals with partners of all continents from Central Asia to Africa, North and Southeast Asia, [and] from Latin America and the Caribbean. 

But Global Gateway must also be a tool to deepen our cooperation with other regional organisations. The European Union is an important regional organisation, but it is not the only one in the world. You have the African Union [AU], you have the CELAC [Community of Latin American and Caribbean States], you have ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] and the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]. All these regional organisations are new poles in this new multipolar world that has to be both multipolar and multilateral. Otherwise, the world will become a more dangerous place.   

This Forum has allowed everyone to discuss the progress that we have done in implementing the 90 flagship projects that were identified last March. [L]et us be concrete: 90 projects [since] March [and] 100 more [projects] will be endorsed at the next [Global] Gateway Board later this year. 

The important question today, my dear friends, is: What is the real impact of these projects? We know them, we name them. We know which is the political will behind them. But which is the real impact of these projects? 

This will be explained by my colleague Commissioner [for International Partnership] Jutta Urpilainen, [who] will offer a summary of what has been discussed at the different parallel sessions. Then we will go into the guest speakers’ debate. 

Thank you very much. Thank you, Jutta.  

Link to video (starting at 1:45): https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-248012  

Closing remarks 

Thank you, dear Honourable Guests, thank you to everybody for your interventions.  

It is a great honour for me to close this Forum with a few observations.  

I promise to be brief because a lot has already been said.  

Can we conclude that we are on the right path? That we are doing what has to be done? Yes. Can we conclude that we have to do it faster and better? Yes. But faster and better sometimes don’t go hand on hand. Maybe you can go faster but not doing [it] better. And this happens. “Quickly, quickly” doesn’t mean always good.   

So, we have to go faster but keep in mind that quality matters because infrastructures are there to stay, to last centuries. They cannot be finished overnight, letting behind us a waste of money. So yes, we have to do more. We have to take care of the environment. We have to take care of the different socio-economic levels of the people around the world.  

Here we see someone that has never had access to internet. Never. He doesn’t know what is a webpage. And he has never seen an electric [light] bulb. And you [tell] him: You have to be green and digital. He will look at us saying: what do you mean by that? Green and digital? He will not understand us because he has never seen an electric [light] bulb and he has never seen a screen to go through the gateways of the world.  

We have to understand that many people around the world are still not at our level of development. So, we have to talk with them according to what they can understand because their existential problems, many times, are not measured in years, they are measured in days. Because their survival is measured in days, not in years. We have to keep that in mind If we want to be understood.  

We have done a lot – I am not going to [give] the figures - President [of the European Commission, Ursula] von der Leyen already said we committed to €66 billion – 66, it is quite a lot. Half of them will be funded by grant funding from the European Union.  

But committed it is still not done. It is the will, the commitment, and then the implementation. So, there is a lot of work to be done in order to build this passerelle. 

How do you say “Global Gateway” in Spanish? I am asking that, because I am Spanish, and because Spanish is the second most spoken [language] in the world after Chinese – good to remember. 

It is not easy to translate Global Gateway to Spanish. “Global” is clear, but “Gateway”? 

Let’s go to French first, and the Prime Minister of Luxembourg [Xavier Bettel] told us [that] “Gateway” means “passerelle”, a way of linking, a way of going, overcoming obstacles, linking people above the borders, above the mountains, the rivers [and] the seas that separates them. 

The most important obstacle to link people, are not the mountains, are not the rivers, are not the seas, are the borders. 

The borders are artificial creations of the humankind. The borders are the scars that history has led [left] on the skin of the earth. Yes, they are the scars of the history. And our Global Gateway has to go over the borders - most of the time artificial limits around human people - in order to make them be part of a world common project.  

We have to build roads, but the most important thing that we have to build is a political environment that ensures a shared prosperity. This is our greatest challenge. For that we need: us, Europeans, to work more coordinated among us. Team Europe is not only among the European Union Institutions. There are European Union Member States. Our offer sometimes comes too divided in small pieces. We need to work together, not to have 20 aspirins but the whole hospital. This means working together among us much better and quicker. 

With respect to the rest of the world, we need to work [with] the G7, the G20, and the United Nations. We need the United Nations, and in this crucial moment, I want to send a message of support to the United Nations, and its Secretary General [António Guterres]. 

Thank you. 

Link to the video (starting at 1:03:22) : https://audiovisual.ec.europa.eu/en/video/I-248012