The six stories the European Union tells about Trans-Caspian transport

Attention to the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor, often referred to as the Middle Corridor, has risen sharply in recent years. Transport connectivity has become a central pillar of the EU’s engagement with Central Asia.

Why this renewed focus is less obvious. The corridor faces clear geopolitical and economic constraints, and critics often dismiss it as inefficient, fragmented, and marginal compared to established routes. Yet it is precisely these limitations that define its appeal. With a capacity of roughly 5 percent of the dominant Northern Corridor through Russia, the Middle Corridor compels experimentation: new forms of coordination, investment in logistics hubs, and regulatory alignment across multiple states.

Over the past two years, this strategic interest has translated into tangible financial commitments. Under its Global Gateway strategy, the European Union and its partners pledged around €10 billion in 2024 to support sustainable transport infrastructure and logistics across Central Asia. These commitments were reaffirmed and expanded at the first EU-Central Asia Summit in Samarkand in April 2025. The funding targets both hard infrastructure (i.e. railways, roads, ports, and logistics hubs) and softer measures, including digitalization, harmonized border procedures, and reforms to tariffs and customs regimes.

Read closely, EU strategies, speeches, and policy documents, including analysis by the EBRD, reveal that this effort is underpinned by a set of distinct but overlapping narratives. Across EU institutions and member states, the messaging on transport connectivity has been relatively coherent, an exception rather than the rule in EU external policy. Six such narratives can be identified, each offering a different rationale for how and why the EU seeks to legitimize its expanding engagement with Central Asia through connectivity.

Diversification strategy as an emergency measure

The first and most prominent narrative presents the corridor as an alternative. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, most overland trade between Europe and Asia passed through Russian territory. This northern route is now politically, ethically, and practically constrained. The Trans-Caspian route is therefore framed as a geopolitical necessity, a way to reduce dependency and protect Europe’s economic resilience. Connectivity is no longer a technical issue but a strategic one, that helps justify public investments. Even when cargo volumes remain modest and maritime routes dominate EU-China trade, the corridor decreases dependencies and vulnerability but accentuates Central Asia as a transit hub.

Bringing Europe and Central Asia closer together

Another narrative focuses on trade between the European Union and Central Asia itself. Here, the emphasis is on making trade between Europe and Central Asia easier, faster, and more predictable. EU officials argue that improved infrastructure would allow the region to make fuller use of existing trade instruments, including preferential access under the EU’s GSP+ scheme. Long-term projections suggest rising volumes if investment and regulatory reform materialize. Still, this argument rarely carries the weight of the diversification narrative and often falls short of establishing a compelling case.

Aligning partnerships and coordination along the corridor

The third narrative widens the scope beyond bilateral ties. The corridor is described as a chain that strengthens confidence-building and creates “wins on the way through cooperation”. United on coordination platforms, the EU links Central Asia with the South Caucasus, Türkiye, and beyond, as proposed on the EU-Central Asia Joint Roadmap. This narrative aligns connectivity in Central Asia with the Eastern Partnership and the EU’s Black Sea strategy. It opens space to look beyond basic trade numbers and conveniently aligns EU priorities along the route, but it still falls short of bringing all countries along the route on the same frequency.

Regional cooperation mechanism

The fourth EU narrative emphasizes the added value of regional cooperation in relation to Trans-Caspian connectivity in Central Asia. The EU opted for prioritizing a transport route that reaches major economic and population centers across the region. EU communications encompass all five Central Asian countries, even if much of the physical infrastructure remains concentrated in Kazakhstan and benefits elsewhere are expected to emerge indirectly. That shifts the goal from “transit” to “regional network effects”: more internal trade, better planning, and stronger coordination across borders. In this narrative, regional cooperation is presented as both a condition for and an outcome of larger goals.

Boosting investment potential

The Trans-Caspian route is also a way to attract capital and business. In this narrative, the corridor’s value is partly financial: it creates a pipeline of projects that can attract development banks and private capital, not only for the corridor itself, but for broader, long-term economic development. To this end, EU Commissioners have presented the corridor as a boost to competitiveness and to the region’s economic attractiveness. However, investment is not portrayed as an end in itself, but as the mechanism that makes broader developmental ambitions viable.

Sustainable development agenda through connectivity

The sixth ambitious and comprehensive narrative frames the corridor as a development project that aligns transport with social progress, including digital and environmental components. EU Commissioners have noted that the corridor will support the creation of local jobs and connect people to services. This narrative builds on the EU’s 2018 EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy and the EU’s 2019 Central Asia Strategy, which call for partnerships that promote rule-based connectivity, improving economic, social, fiscal, and environmental sustainability.

What this means for transport connectivity in Central Asia

Taken together, these stories form a multidimensional narrative, but two stand out.

The first is geopolitical, driven by the need to diversify away from Russia, in support of international law. Especially inside the EU, it helps to justify why resources and political attention should be invested in Central Asia. But if this strategic framing becomes too dominant externally, it can make Central Asia look like a transit zone rather than a partner.

The sixth is developmental. Rather than treating the corridor primarily as a bridge to Asia, the EU increasingly presents it as a stepping stone through which it can advance an already existing, long-term agenda of engagement with Central Asia. In this sense, the development narrative is not a cosmetic addition or a piece of policy window dressing. It is the narrative that gives the overall approach coherence, even when the corridor performs poorly in terms of cost and speed.

For Central Asian countries, the corridor seems most beneficial when it is treated as a regional enabling project, not only as a transit route. That requires coordination among all five states and practical steps, such as harmonization of border procedures and digitalization. While EU-China ties are tense, the EU should be more explicit about the role of China in Central Asia. Central Asia–China cooperation on transport is growing quickly, and the European approach is less realistic if it ignores this.

For the European Union, the Trans-Caspian route has increasingly been framed not simply as a “corridor” in the narrow sense of a passage enabling movement from one place to another, but as a longer-term project of connectivity. This shift matters. A corridor suggests transit, speed, and volume; connectivity implies institutions, standards, and relationships built over time. From this perspective, the route’s significance lies less in immediate throughput than in the regulatory alignment, coordination practices, and political ties it helps to foster across Central Asia. Seen this way, the EU’s engagement is not merely about moving goods, but about shaping the conditions under which trade, cooperation, and regional integration can deepen, making “Trans-Caspian Transport Connectivity” a more accurate description of what is at stake than the language of a corridor alone.

This article draws on a larger ongoing research paper by Juan Carlos Leunissen, ‘The EU’s Discursive Framing of Transport Connectivity in Central Asia’. The paper examines how the European Union frames the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor in response to shifting geopolitical, economic, and regional dynamics.

Juan Carlos Leunissen is an independent researcher and policy professional on EU – Central Asia relations. He resided with CAPS Unlock between September and December, developing research on EU-Central Asia transport connectivity and economic ties. He can be reached at jcleunissen@gmail.com