Blue Waterways: reconnecting Europe through its rivers

Europe has spent decades building connectivity on land. High-speed railways, motorways, bridges, tunnels, ports and logistics hubs have transformed the continent into one of the world’s most integrated economic spaces. Yet one of Europe’s oldest connectivity systems—the network of rivers and canals that historically carried people, goods and ideas across borders—has remained strangely peripheral to the strategic debate.

It is time to bring Europe’s blue waterways back to the centre of its connectivity agenda.

This is not simply about moving more cargo from roads to barges. It is about recognising Europe’s rivers as strategic infrastructure: economic corridors, ecological systems, energy assets, water reserves and spaces of territorial cooperation. The Rhine, Danube, Main, Elbe, Seine, Rhône, Po and their tributaries form a continental network whose importance extends far beyond navigation.

The 2026 summer has provided an uncomfortable reminder of this reality. Prolonged drought and extreme heat pushed several of Europe’s major rivers—including the Rhine and Danube—to exceptionally low levels. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre reported in August that the Rhine and Danube had reached record-low levels in places, after months of deficient rainfall and repeated heatwaves. The consequences were immediate: restrictions on navigation, reduced vessel loads, disruption to logistics and pressure on energy and industrial systems. In parts of the Rhine-Danube system, water became not merely a transport variable but a strategic constraint.

The lesson should not be that Europe cannot rely on its waterways. Quite the opposite. The lesson is that Europe must govern them as a system.

This is where the GAFG Connectivity Doctrine offers a useful conceptual departure. Connectivity is not a collection of individual infrastructure projects; a corridor is an ecosystem, its effectiveness shaped by the interaction of infrastructure, regulation, logistics, institutions, energy, digital systems and the communities it passes through. The doctrine sets this out through five operating principles—systems over projects, governance as the multiplier, interoperability as the binding constraint, complementarity over competition, and an ecosystem logic of connectivity—each insisting that coherence, not capacity, is the true measure of a corridor’s strength.

The geographical map, however, tells only half the story. A river may provide physical connectivity without producing functional connectivity. This distinction is central to the GAFG Connectivity Doctrine: connectivity is not merely the existence of links; it is the coherence of the system in which those links operate.

The Volga offers a striking illustration. Europe’s longest river, it forms a major north–south axis linking the Russian heartland with the Caspian Sea and, through the Volga–Caspian system, the wider International North–South Transport Corridor towards Iran, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean—a role it has played historically, and one that contemporary INSTC plans explicitly build on.

Yet geography here collides with geopolitics. The physical corridor remains, but the war in Ukraine, sanctions and the deterioration of relations between Russia and much of Europe have fragmented the wider connectivity environment in which it might otherwise operate: infrastructure survives while the political and institutional coherence that makes a corridor function as a system breaks down. The Volga belongs in Europe’s blue-waterway debate not because it can simply be folded into a common network under present circumstances, but because it demonstrates the limits of infrastructure once geopolitical coherence disappears—a reminder that connectivity is as much a question of governance as of engineering.

The distinction matters because connectivity should not be measured simply by kilometres of navigable water, railway track or motorway. The relevant question is whether the different components of a corridor can operate together. A corridor is only as connected as its weakest political or institutional link. This is what the doctrine calls interoperability as the binding constraint: in corridor after corridor, the real bottleneck turns out to be misaligned institutions, documentation practices and liability regimes rather than missing infrastructure.

The same principle works in reverse. Where political cooperation, common standards, interoperable infrastructure and institutional trust reinforce one another, a river becomes more than a waterway: it becomes a corridor ecosystem. Where those elements fragment, even a great river can become a series of disconnected national or geopolitical segments. This is the doctrine’s principle of complementarity over competition in practice: corridors function best when governed as a portfolio of mutually reinforcing routes rather than treated as rivals competing for the same traffic.