Josep Borrell’s ‘jungle’ trope was no slip of the tongue

EU’s foreign policy chief suggests Europe has to unite to tame what’s outside its own tidy garden, raising awkward colonial connotations.

OCTOBER 26, 2022

Written by
Jan Eijking

“Europe is a garden.” With this odd choice of words  on October 13, Josep Borrell, the foreign affairs chief of the European Union, inaugurated a Bruges-based pilot program for a new European Diplomatic Academy, or EDA.  

“We have built a garden,” Borrell continued, where “everything works.” But the lush lawns are under threat: “most of the rest of the world is a jungle” and, as neoconservative thinker Robert  Kagan once put it, “the jungle grows back.”  

Unsurprisingly, the speech was met with indignation among the public, government officials, and  diplomats. Ethiopia’s national security adviser Redwan Hussien wondered: “Is Africa still a jungle only meant to furnish someone else’s Garden”? Canada’s ambassador to the UN Bob Rae likewise concluded: “What a terrible analogy Mr Borrell has made. Surely history and our own lived experience teaches us that no part of the world is free from violence.”  

That Borrell made these remarks is particularly significant: prior to his current post as EU foreign affairs chief, he served as a member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, as president of the European Parliament, and as president of the European University Institute.  Borrell is, in other words, a figure currently at the forefront of the European project. 

The metaphor’s legacies, of course, go back very far. Characterizing world politics as a tidy division between peaceful garden and violent jungle has obvious imperialist connotations. Indeed, the Western cultural gaze teems with jungles: from the Jungle Book to Tarzan to Indiana Jones, again and again we are invited to follow a white hero’s journey into deep, dark forests peopled by savage natives. 

In all these stories we return home to the wood-paneled tea rooms of one or another metropolitan safe haven. The metaphorical garden, in these fantasies, is the ultimate refuge from the literal jungle. Its cultivation, predictability, and tameness serve as constant reminders of the human interventions and control at the heart of “civilization.” 

Invoking such a cultural framing in 2022 is unsavory at best. It is also diplomatically counterproductive: EU and U.S. efforts to galvanize support among nations of the Global South against Putin’s Russia are thus far losing what Borrell himself has called a “battle of narratives.” In the midst of this, it is, to put it mildly, unwise when a top EU official depicts those very same nations as “jungle.” 

And yet tellingly, this was no mere slip of the tongue. Borrell has previously expressed his  intention to “clarify the narrative we [the EU] want to spread.” To do so, he repeatedly uses  historically blind language as in a keynote last spring on defending “our civilization.” Even his half-hearted apology for last week’s remarks appeared only to repeat the core message: after all, Borrell stressed, we are currently facing a choice between world order “based on principles accepted by all” and “the law of the jungle.” 

We might ask why Borrell is able to say all this without real repercussions. But the more important question we ought to ask is: what kind of European self- understanding makes this imagery plausible to the speaker, his Bruges audience, and his fellow EU officials?  

The EDA pilot is another step in the direction of establishing a formal diplomatic pipeline for  the European Union. It is intended to strengthen the EU’s foreign policy profile by means of a trained corps of EU diplomats. It is also the logical culmination of a development that has been underway for over a decade. In 2010, the EU established the European External Action Service, the EU’s very first common diplomatic body — under Borrell’s leadership — with the aim of advancing the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, or CFSP. 

But the exact legal status, diplomatic authority, and scope of the EEAS are not yet clear. Is it a “quasi diplomatic corps”? Will it transform “European sovereignty, diplomacy and national identities”?  What’s more, having a corps of EU diplomats at all is not uncontroversial to begin with. The idea of EU diplomacy presumes an internal cohesion or a common European point of view on a host of  geopolitical and economic matters. This internal cohesion may be, as critics such as Perry  Anderson or Stefan Auer contend, more wishful thinking than reality. 

International Relations scholars have wrestled with the prospect of a common European foreign policy ever since ideas for the CFSP were first floated. Much of the academic debate has centered on the idea of Europe as a “normative power.” Its principal exponent, political scientist Ian Manners, ascribes the status of an “ideational actor” to the EU: according to Manners, the EU is  characterized by common principles and, as such, poised to diffuse and uphold norms for the international community. 

The problem with this view, as with Borrell’s speech, is that it claims a total separation between European foreign policy today and European “foreign policy” in the past. What is most worrying is thus not only the crude colonial dichotomy Borrell conjures up, but also his warning that  “the jungle could invade the garden.” 

This is in fact the whole point — “my most important message” — of the speech: “The gardeners have to go to the jungle.” It is what the EU foreign policy chief means by intensifying European engagement “with the rest of the world.” If the EU doesn’t act more proactively, “the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.” 

This is, it seems, the EU’s own brand of missionary liberal internationalism. EEAS foreign policy is not about building walls: to Josep Borrell, walls are not enough. As he puts it, building walls around a nice little garden won’t fend off the specter: “the jungle has a strong growth capacity.” 

The irony of Borrell’s vision of European-led world order is that it is equally based on the “will  of the strongest” that he is so worried about. Centering EU foreign policy on European strength, autonomy, and greatness not only reminds us of a painful history — it is also a stance that only serves to undermine the very foundations for international cooperation. Borrell would do well to heed his own advice: “We need to do our homework to define more clearly what kind of world we want to build and the role Europe wants to occupy in it.”

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/10/26/josep-borrells-jungle-trope-was-no-slip-of-the-tongue/