What is the connection between lithium, democracy, and silk? The 2025 EU–Central Asia Global Gateway Initiative that committed 12 billion Euro to a strategic partnership between the EU and the five Central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan). Lithium is one of the many critical raw materials (CRMs) that the EU’s investment in Central Asia aims to extract and develop sustainably. Democracy is one of the core EU values that guide and underlie the new partnership, and its foreign policy in general. Silk is a poetic historical link to today, having made its way through this region to Europe for over 15 centuries, through places like Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where the EU-Central Asia summit was held in April 2025. At an operational level, this deepened cooperation aims to aid the region’s economic growth by bolstering new and improved trade routes beyond Russia, developing sustainable extraction and development of CRMs, advancing digital connectivity, and building climate-resilient water and energy infrastructure. At a higher level, however, these practicalities of the EU’s investment aim at “regional and global stability, particularly in Afghanistan and Ukraine, and to the promotion and protection of the rule of law, human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
When a political union links an economic partnership to a set of shared values, the choice itself is worth pausing on: why connect the two at all, and what does the EU hope that connection will do? What follows does not try to answer that question but lays out three possible framings for it – as a hollow signal, as geopolitical strategy, or as an attempt to self-repair through building a stabilising feedback loop between the outside and the inside of the EU (however this bordering is built and practised). It is a first step, meant to raise questions and sketch frameworks that further research can test.
Why has the EU chosen to tie a 12-billion-euro partnership to its own values, and what does it actually hope that choice will achieve? Three ways of reading it follow, each pointing to a different future for the partnership, and for the EU itself.
“This is the European way. We bring investment, transparency and good governance. We bring local benefits and long-term partnership,” stated Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who was on the Silk Road in Samarkand in 2025. “The European way” is, in this case, the EU’s legal principle that any external action is rooted in its core values (Art. 2, Art 3[5], Art. 21 TEU). It is a morally-based way. Democratic values, human rights, the rule of law, gender equality, sustainable development, and fundamental freedoms are placed at the core of this initiative and as the end goal of the 12 billion Euro investment. The economic growth and prosperity of the region are closely linked to its enduring democratic growth, and vice versa. However, does this ‘European way’ still exist in the EU? Or, is the foreign policy rhetoric a hollow signal projecting coherence abroad as a substitute for looking under the hood at home?
Europe and especially its Western side has distanced itself more or less forcefully, in narrative and practices, from its 19th century ‘standard of civilization’ principle and abandoned its ‘family of nations’ views (mostly Western European). Nonetheless, the legacies it carries with it somehow still cloud the waters of its current dealings with the ‘outside’ world. The critiques raised about the EU’s response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis compared to the EU’s treatment of Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi, or African asylum seekers (see the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’), remain poignant. The invisible yet palpable wall between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ of Europe continues to call into question the ‘shared values’ and the glue of the union itself.
Does the EU practice what it preaches abroad? And does it matter if ‘at home’ in 2026, a far-right party that wants to mass deport migrants, non-ethnic-German citizens, and even Ukrainian refugees, has recently scored a major win in the elections? Or, that in one of the member states, the near-total abortion ban just celebrated its sixth anniversary? Does the EU have the legitimacy to ‘bring’ gender equality in Central Asia, when one of its member states registered 66 femicides in 12 months?
Is this, then, the promise and promotion of the ‘European way’ of reputational management? If we say it abroad and loud enough, maybe they’ll believe us (at home and abroad)? One could argue that no place, union, or country is perfect. They could further point out that the EU has been building and sustaining legal mechanisms, systems, and practices that enable citizens’ voices to demand change, that foster healthy civil societies, and that support sound legal structures. Nonetheless, the issues haunting the EU at home are worrisome, and thus its mechanisms, systems, and practices need critical self-reflection. Can a partnership with Central Asia offer this space for self-reflection?
A second reading sets belief aside. Central Asia sits at the centre of a new contest for critical raw materials, transport corridors, and energy routes that bypass Russia, and the EU has watched as China secures global processing capacity for the minerals that its own green and digital industries depend on. As von der Leyen put it at the Samarkand summit, “new global barriers arise” and “powers worldwide are carving out new spheres of influence.” Viewed this way, the language of shared values is less a settled belief than a currency, something the EU can offer that Moscow and Beijing cannot, attached to a partnership whose real centre of gravity is the Middle Corridor, uranium, and lithium. One analysis of the summit put it bluntly: the priority is no longer the export of democracy but the search for trustworthy trade partners and suppliers. Others describe something more cautious: an EU not trying to confront Russia and China outright, but offering alternatives where it can compete. If this reading holds, the value of language survives only as long as it remains useful. The real test comes the moment democratic principles and strategic interests pull apart, over a human rights record, an election, a crackdown, and whether the partnership bends toward the values it names or quietly absorbs the deviation for the sake of the lithium.
If the first two readings sound like opposites, performance versus interest, a third possibility asks whether they are actually the same move seen from different angles. Perhaps the EU connects partnership to values because it needs that connection to hold, both abroad and at home, and ‘exporting’ the language is one way to make sure it survives the trip back. Von der Leyen’s own words point in this direction. In her 2026 State of the Union address, she said Europe “must urgently rethink partnerships and build global coalitions for our resilience and for our democracies.” Days later in the same speech, inviting Canada to become the EU’s first associate member, she told Prime Minister Mark Carney that the two shared “an ocean, a set of values, a world view.” If a partnership with Canada can be framed as proof that European values still hold, the same logic may be at work further East: a partnership pursued partly for what it proves to the EU about itself, not only to its partners.
As we know, democracy is not a finished, static product, but a constant practice, struggle, re-examination, and re-imagination. Will the EU embrace the opportunity of this new partnership for self-repair, to encourage and support the (co-)creation and re-imagination of practices, systems, and institutions for the flourishing of democracy, human rights, gender equality, and fundamental freedoms both in the EU and abroad? Can the same investment in the extraction and processing of lithium for electric cars be matched by an equally urgent commitment to self-examination and to building durable democratic practices both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the EU?
None of these three readings excludes the others. They coexist, layered rather than sequential, each pulling in its own direction at once, and no single lens can say on its own which is doing the most work at any given moment. Untangling that is not something a speech or an investment figure can settle. An existing working group of scholars from both the EU and Central Asia is designing research to examine the views of the people who will inherit this partnership: surveying young people across Europe and Central Asia to understand how they actually perceive and hold the values their governments invoke on their behalf. This could also be an invitation for a more informed perspective from Central Asia on the new partnership and its value-based approach.
Lithium, democracy, and silk were never separate threads to begin with. They are bound together by the same choice: the decision to tie a partnership to a set of values rather than leave it a matter of trade alone. That choice says as much about what is happening inside the EU as it does about what the EU wants from the region it is courting. Foreign policy, read this way, is never only about the partner abroad. It is also always a mirror turned back on the one making the offer.
