Eduardo González
The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell, warned yesterday that Europe does “many more things” in the world than it is recognized for, including the universal management of vaccines, but does not know how to “put it in value” because “it has lost the battle of the narrative.”
“We have the stigma that we are banning the export of vaccines, when in fact we are the ones who export the most,” Borrell said during a telematic event of the Elcano Royal Institute to present his book European foreign policy in times of COVID-19, edited by the European External Action Service and which reviews the main events of 2020 and the EU’s response to the pandemic crisis, with special attention to issues such as the repatriation of Europeans, the creation of Team Europe and the agreement on the recovery fund.
“How many vaccines does the United States export? How many are exported by the United Kingdom? How many are exported by China? Much less than Europe,” Borrell continued during his conversation with Charles Powell, director of the Elcano Royal Institute. “Europe dedicates half of the vaccines for its citizens and the other half to export, no one has done more than us nor do we use vaccines as instruments of political power,” he said. “Europe has done more than it is recognized for,” but “in the battle of the narrative we are not the best” and what the EU does “is not valued because we lack a more solid narrative,” he lamented.
This problem of the lack of narrative is related, according to Josep Borrell, to the lack of a true common European external vision, which affects debates on such important issues as strategic autonomy, the defense of Europe’s specific interests on the world stage or the EU’s influence in conflicts or in areas such as Russia, the Middle East or Latin America.
Strategic autonomy
“The issue of strategic autonomy brings out discrepancies and divides us,” he explained. “Every time I put strategic autonomy on the table, someone automatically comes out in defense of NATO,” when this proposal “is not against NATO,” he said. “It’s not about a move away from NATO in terms of territorial defense, it’s about the EU having its own capabilities to solve its own problems that NATO is not going to solve,” he warned. In this debate, “Germany and France are not the problem, since they defend strategic autonomy in very advanced terms, and even speak of European sovereignty,” but rather it is “a problem between East and West,” Borrell continued.
“Europe is a great trading power that is interested in a world open to trade”, but it must also “learn to protect itself without protectionism”, because “the pandemic has demonstrated its vulnerabilities and its dependencies” and that Europe needs “safety nets to avoid a vulnerability that can create overdependence”, he added.
China and the USA
This same lack of a common European position (“a common foreign policy does not imply a single foreign policy”) is also reflected in the EU’s relations with other parts of the world, according to Borrell. In the case of China, the high representative is quite clear that Europe’s place “is closer to the US in terms of values”, but “the EU also has its interests, which do not always coincide with those of the US”. “The U.S. defends its interests, why can’t we defend ours?” he asked.
In this regard, Borrell gave as an example the criticism received by the negotiations on the investment agreement between the EU and China, whose ratification process is currently “stuck” in the European Parliament. “We have to defend our interests and combine the interests of 27 Member States”, and although the agreement with China “does not solve all the problems”, especially those related to labor or human rights, “are we going to stop investing in China, trading with China and having relations with China?”, he said.
Latin America, Middle East
The lack of a common European position is also reflected in relations with Latin America (“Europe is not aware that European companies have invested more in Latin America than Russia, India, China and Japan combined”, in spite of which there are “three major association agreements with Chile, Mexico and Mercosur lying dormant for lack of attention on our part”), Southeast Asia (“we have no strategic partnership with ASEAN) or Sub-Saharan Africa.
It is also seen in the case of the Middle East, he explained. “Europe has no mediating capacity between Palestine and Israel, it hasn’t had it for a long time, only the US really has it,” he warned. “EU limits itself to iconic repetition of the two-state solution, which is becoming more difficult with each passing year, if not still exists,” but “you can’t ask for pears from an elm tree, the EU as such has no capacity to resolve the conflict, to begin with because the member states are very divided on this issue,” he added.
Russia
Regarding Russia, according to Borrell, “relations are complex and involve containing them and at the same time working with them on things on which we need to collaborate, such as climate change and energy supply”. Regarding democratic values, human rights and the arrests of dissidents, he warned, the only real possibility for Europe is to “discuss openly, show its rejection and go there and tell them to their face”, as he did himself last February, when he personally went to Moscow to ask for the release of Russian opponents, including Alexey Navalni.
That trip, according to Borrell, “showed that Russia does not accept that the issue of human rights or the Navalni case be raised, because for Vladimir Putin’s regime it is an existential issue”. In fact, he recalled, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Serguei Lavrov, “warned me clearly: if you bring up the issue of Navalni, I will bring up the issue of Catalonia to show that you also have an internal problem of human rights and freedoms”. “I did not go to Moscow to start discussing whether the situation of (Oriol) Junqueras, who was campaigning for elections at the time, is the same as that of Navalni, who was before a court risking many years in prison in a very different penitentiary regime,” he added.
Indeed, Lavrov said after meeting with Borrell that in the EU and the United States there have been cases of police abuses and “politically motivated judicial decisions” and gave as an example “the Catalan pro-independence leaders” who “are in prison for organizing a referendum”. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, later responded that “Spain is one of the 23 full democracies in the world”, while “Russia is ranked 124th out of 167 countries”. Days later, the then second vice-president, Pablo Iglesias, declared that “there is no situation of full political and democratic normality in Spain when the leaders of the two parties governing Catalonia, one is in jail and the other in Brussels”.
