Description
Why are major European donors increasingly restructuring their foreign aid policies - cutting official development assistance (ODA) budgets or redefining priorities around national interests and military spending? Despite its historical role as a geopolitical instrument, foreign aid has been deprioritized relative to other foreign economic tools. Furthermore, geopolitical imperatives are frequently presented as the main rationale for ODA cuts, but they cannot fully explain the marked divergence in European preferences toward foreign aid policy. I argue that these preferences - though seemingly aligned in their framing - are primarily shaped by divergent domestic interests and societal ideas, with geopolitical rationales often invoked as post hoc justifications. European governments thus selectively emphasize geopolitics rather than responding directly to prevailing economic demands or value-based expectations within their societies. To illustrate this claim, I examine the foreign aid policies of Germany and the United Kingdom, contributing to debates on the geoeconomic turn in European foreign economic policies by unpacking the domestic determinants underlying these shifts.
