The well-known ‘Trojan Horse’ myth refers to a stratagem employed by the Greeks to conquer the city of Troy around the 12th century BC. Nowadays, the term has become a metaphor for a kind of hostile entity introduced from the outside but not recognised as such at first, just like the Greek soldiers who hid inside the wooden horse presented as a gift to the Trojans. It is, of course, entirely reasonable to use this metaphor to describe a computer virus that initially appears to be a harmless app, but why would we use this to describe European Union (EU) cohesion policies? Is it necessary to be ‘hostile’ towards domestic public administrations or other spheres in order to achieve compliance with EU policies? Are the European and the domestic level at war? Although anti-EU populist movements might indeed seek to create the impression that the EU is an enemy that diminishes domestic power and threatens democracy, this is, of course, not what Danuta Hübner means when she calls EU cohesion policies a ‘Trojan Horse’. Rather, she is obviously referring to the particular design of cohesion policies, where funding is linked to a number of programmatic and organisational features – ‘levering in’ and trying to achieve compliance with EU strategies in fields where regulatory competence and hierarchical power do not exist. EU policies might not be enemies in a wooden horse seeking to take over the member states, but they could very well be seen as monetary incentives in a ‘gilded horse’, seeking to bypass regulatory pathways for imposing influence on member states.