“Having all of you around the world, I should be the best informed person in the world – at least as much as any Foreign Affairs Minister. I am ‘Foreign Affairs Minister of Europe’. Behave as you would behave if you were an Embassy: send a telegram, a cable, a mail – quickly. Quickly, please, react.”
Josep Borrell’s stimulating speech to the annual meeting of EU ambassadors this week in Brussels contains this frank advice for them to up their game on its behalf in a far more competitive and uncertain world. He dealt with what is going on in this world, how the EU should respond to protect its interests and values and why these need to be communicated more effectively.
His account of global politics is realistic and critical about the EU’s relatively weak role. It has decoupled its sources of prosperity from its sources of security by depending on Russia for cheap energy, China for cheap manufacturing and the United States for military power. None of these can continue in a period of greater self-sufficiency as every interdependency is being weaponised between competing powers. While the bipolar US-China competition is the primary driver of geopolitical change, a “messy multipolarity” is emerging with Turkey, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil as middle powers which swing between them. The global south feels excluded and neglected, rightly so given its population and economic weight.
These other world players do not believe the EU has the best model and they should not be preached at by EU diplomats as if that were true. As Borrell puts it, “we think that we know better what is in other people’s interests. We underestimate the role of emotions and the persisting appeal of identity politics”.
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His diagnosis of world change is acute and refreshingly direct. But he is not really a foreign affairs minister because the EU is not now, nor is it becoming, a state. Its agreed foreign policy positions urgently need, as he says, to become much more focused, self-reliant, active and communicative.