“Are you okay?” asked a concerned reporter last Monday to Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief. Three times the Spaniard had caused uproar in international media the week before, each time with plain words.
It started on October 10 with Borrell’s frank speech to his own EU ambassadors. “Sometimes I heard more about world events from the newspaper than from your reports. Your reports are coming too late”, he told his staff. The stern message: we are in crisis, the world has changed and act accordingly.
A few days later, Borrell said to a student audience in Bruges“A nuclear attack on Ukraine will lead to a strong non-nuclear Western response that will destroy the Russian military.” Again unprecedented strong language, certainly by Brussels standard. Sarcastic reactions were not forthcoming, because the EU High Representative is not about bombs.
The third and largest media storm arose because of a metaphor in the same Bruges speech: ‘Europe is a garden’ and the world around us ‘is a jungle’. Colonialism, racism!, it sounded all the way The New York Times and on Al Jazeera: why garden? Didn’t European states ever wreak havoc on other continents? The fact that Borrell introduced the jungle metaphor at the official opening of the European Diplomatic Academy made matters worse for critics: this should not become the guideline for young diplomats.
What is going on here? This seems to me to be more than a series of slips of the tongue. The speeches were written in advance, in Borrell’s own style. The scolding to the ambassadors, which could have remained behind closed doors, was deliberately published. It is war in Europe, the world is on fire. Borrell, 75 years old and two more years in office, apparently thinks: if I don’t speak freely now, then when? He takes slips into the bargain.
Strategic power politics is hard on the EU. The recipe for peace and stability thanks to economic interweaving – from trade with China to the gas pipelines to Russia – has been worked out. Borrell wants to give the whole thing an electric shock. Breaking habits, changing working methods, making policy less naive.
Even tougher than habits is language. You feel frustration with the Spaniard about technocratic texts he receives from officials. (One appeared this week academic study shows how bad the situation is, based on 45,000 press releases from the European Commission.) Semantic taboos from the past also live on. Just as you are no longer allowed to say ‘leader’ in the Federal Republic since 1945, the words power and importance are banned in Brussels. Then strategic judgment becomes difficult.
For several years now, Europe has been seeking vocabulary that fits the geopolitical epoch of Putin, Xi and America First. Since 2017, President Macron has claimed the word ‘sovereignty’ for Europe, until then reserved for the nation states. We must learn “the language of power”, Borrell himself said in 2019. Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel came in 2018 with his own metaphor: “As vegetarians, we Europeans struggle in a world full of carnivores.”
Borrell’s stupid imagery of garden and jungle – of paradise civilization versus barbarism – is false and insulting. Use gratefully Moscow and Tehran the rhetorical misstep to discredit ‘colonial’ Europe in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The irony is that no one in the EU has insisted more than Borrell on the enormous importance of words and stories in the global power struggle – in 2020, early in the pandemic, and now in the information war with Moscow. He should have known better.
At the same time, it would be a shame if the Spaniard gave up his mission to shake up the European language and returned to the technocratic straitjacket. Let that jungle be a one time case of trial and error to be. The big question that Borrrell awkwardly answered remains.
How can we as the European Union internally guarantee and expand what has been built up since 1945 and 1989: an atmosphere of relative democratic freedom, prosperity and security between 27 states on the continent? And at the same time keep us going outwardly, in dealing with other power blocs and civilizations in the world, not all of which have the best interests of us and some of which surpass us militarily, economically and technologically?
In other words: to master the language and mentality of Machiavelli and Hobbes where necessary, without forgetting that of Kant.
Luke of Middelaar is a political philosopher and historian.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 19, 2022 newspaper