LETTER FROM BRUSSELS
It is a speech that will make a mark in Brussels. And European apprentice diplomats, whom the European Union (EU) now intends to train in its own academy being deployed, will now be able to study it. On Monday October 10, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative, addressed some 135 EU ambassadors for the opening of their annual conference, which ends on Friday October 14. And he gave them both a lesson in geopolitics, lucidity in the face of the EU’s weaknesses, but also a motivational session, with a few spades that were sometimes quite undiplomatic.
“This is not a time to send you flowers, to tell you that you are beautiful and that you work well. (…). It’s a time when we need to talk together about what didn’t work ‘enough’.attacked the Catalan diplomat, head of the European External Action Service of the EU since 2019.
And one thing seems clear: the European diplomatic corps is not reactive enough today. “I should be the most knowledgeable man on the planet, [mais] sometimes I know more about what is happening by reading the press than by reading your reports. » And to drive the point home: “I am the ‘Foreign Minister of Europe’. Act as if you were working for a national embassy: send a telegram, a cable, an email – quickly, quickly, please. React. »
On the substance, the High Representative of the European Union gave a geopolitical master class of the challenges facing Europe. He unfolded his analysis of a continent caught in a “radical uncertainty” and today too dependent on American, Chinese and… Russian powers. “We have decoupled the sources of our prosperity from the sources of our security”, he said, citing analysis by researcher Olivier Schmidt, a professor at the Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.
“The adjustments will be very hard”
Recalling how the EU has built its wealth and its recent development on a very low price of energy – most often from Russia – and on trade – exports of machines and imports of goods at low prices – with China. “I think Chinese workers, and their low wages, have done more to contain inflation than any central bank actions” global…
The war in Ukraine is of course calling into question the ties of dependence with Russia, as Europe is already experiencing by seeing energy prices explode. After the crisis due to Covid-19 and the reappointment for a third term of Xi Jinping, ties with China are also greatly weakened. “The adjustments will be very hard”he predicted.
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