Astana: The Middle Corridor is no longer a project that Europe can claim for itself. On 16 September 2026, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung hosted the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan in Seoul, and the summit produced a 30-year cooperation framework, a Seoul Declaration on mutually beneficial value chains and 19 memorandums of understanding. For Brussels, which has spent two years courting the same capitals, the message is that Central Asia has many suitors.
The Korean offer is aimed at the same needs that drive European interest. Participants set a goal of 20 billion dollars in bilateral trade by 2030, and the agreements cover critical minerals, industry, infrastructure and digital technology. Central Asia has a combined economy of nearly 550 billion dollars and more than 80 million people, and Kazakhstan reportedly holds all ten of the minerals that Seoul classes as strategic. Leaders agreed to meet every two years, with the next summit due in Kazakhstan in 2028.
Europe’s own pitch rests on money and routes. At the April 2025 EU-Central Asia summit the EU announced 12 billion euros of investment under its Global Gateway strategy, and about 3 billion euros of that is earmarked for the Middle Corridor, the 6,500-kilometre route that links China and Europe through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus while bypassing Russia. Brussels has backed port upgrades in Aqtau and supported planning for a deep-sea port at Anaklia in Georgia. The EU’s special representative for Central Asia, Eduards Stiprais, has said that the money exists and that the missing ingredient is political decisions.
That diagnosis is the heart of the matter. The Middle Corridor suffers less from a shortage of pledges than from slow customs procedures, thin shipping capacity on the Caspian and uneven cooperation between the states along the route. A Korean investor who builds a battery plant in Uzbekistan or a logistics hub in Kazakhstan will want those bottlenecks fixed as much as a European one. In that sense Seoul’s arrival could help, because every serious investor adds pressure on governments to harmonise rules.
Yet competition on the Middle Corridor carries risks for Europe’s economic security aims. China remains the region’s dominant trading partner, with Central Asian trade reaching a record 94.8 billion dollars in 2024, and Russia retains deep influence through energy, labour and security ties. Central Asian governments practise a deliberate multi-vector foreign policy, and they will take Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Gulf and European offers in parallel. Brussels cannot expect loyalty in return for funding, and it should not frame its approach as a contest it must win.
A better strategy is to turn the Middle Corridor into a platform on which partners can compete and cooperate. The EU can contribute standards, financing guarantees and its experience in cross-border transport regulation, and it can coordinate with Korea and Japan on projects where their capital complements its own. It should also be honest that critical raw materials partnerships need local processing and fair benefit-sharing, or they will simply repeat the extractive patterns that Central Asian leaders say they want to avoid.
The Seoul summit shows that the Middle Corridor has become strategic real estate for every middle power with a supply chain to protect. Europe still has an early lead in funding and political attention, but it will keep that lead only if it delivers faster customs, working ports and finished projects before rivals do.
