The EU ventures into the strategic “jungle”
The EU ventures into the strategic “Jungle”
WRITTEN BY MOHAMMADBAGHER FOROUGH
27 October 2022
In a speech at the European Diplomatic Academy on 13 October, the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell described the EU as a “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle”. He cautioned that “the jungle could invade the garden”. Then he called for the “gardeners” to go out into the world and engage it. These comments immediately backfired. There are multiple levels — moral, historical, logical, and diplomatic — on which this is an extremely misguided analogy.
While the moral failure of such remarks is (hopefully) clear to everyone, there are also strategic and geoeconomic aspects. Borrell is not an outlier in this discourse, because his views are “not fundamentally different from how the [European] Commission thinks more broadly”. This kind of discourse seriously undermines the overall enterprise of European strategic autonomy and specific EU initiatives such as the Global Gateway, because it profoundly upsets many non-Western countries which were subjected to colonialism through such tropes.
The EU in search of a soul in a brave new world
The EU finds itself at a historical juncture. Since the Second World War, Europeans have lived with cheap US security and cheap Russian energy. With the 2011 US pivot to Asia, the former is no more. The Biden administration believes that the future of global geopolitics will be “most acutely” determined in the Indo-Pacific region rather than in transatlantic relations. Cheap Russian energy is also no longer available, mainly thanks to the Russian war against Ukraine.
In this context, the idea of European strategic autonomy has resonated with European policymakers. In simple terms, this autonomy means that the European ‘vacation’, as some call it, from geopolitics is over and the EU has to fend for itself in the world. According to Ursula von der Leyen, strengthening the ‘EU’s soul’ as a unique actor and reducing its reliance on the US for security and on China/Asia for trade and technology (demonstrated, for example, by the EU’s Chips Act) is indispensable to this autonomy. “Call the world,” John Keats said, “a vale of soul-making”.
While tropes such as ‘values’ and ‘standards’ are promoted as the main feature of the Global Gateway’s connectivity agenda, African countries (and many others in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America) will not overlook the fact that this promoted feature contrasts uneasily with neo-colonialist-sounding dichotomies like ‘garden/jungle’.
This is not an easy balance to strike as demonstrated by the tortuous debates in Germany about how it should develop an independent China strategy. Defending globalisation, Olaf Scholz argues that “decoupling is the wrong answer”. However, his economic ministry is trying to make business with China “less attractive”, a policy that has been met with strong resistance from the German business lobby. One way or another, the EU and countries like Germany and France must learn how to live with this tension and venture into the world of the “jungle".
A major upshot of European strategic autonomy has been the formulation of the Global Gateway, as a specifically European geoeconomic response to the rise of China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The latter is currently the world’s most significant geoeconomic initiative, involving nearly 140 countries. By mobilising USD 300 billion between 2021 and 2027, the EU aims, according to Borrell, “to build shared communities of interest and reinforce the resilience of our supply chains”. Von der Leyen adds that the European model is about “both hard and soft infrastructure” and that this initiative is going to be a “template for how Europe can build more resilient connections with the world”. There is a clear emphasis on values and standards.
The “Garden”, the “Jungle”, and the Global Gateway
The ‘garden/jungle’ dichotomy (and similar tropes) will seriously damage the prospects of the Global Gateway succeeding globally. This is particularly true in Africa, which is important to the EU for several reasons: a) the EU borders Africa; b) several major European states were the main colonial powers in Africa; c) China is the top economic actor and largest investor in Africa; and d) the continent is supposed to be the main focus of the Global Gateway as USD 150 billion of the total USD 300 billion the EU hopes to raise is supposed to be invested in Africa. Finally, the major factor giving Africa crucial importance is the projected rise in Africa’s population and thus its global economic significance. It is estimated that the continent will have more than 4.2 billion inhabitants by the end of this century.
With a projected population of this size, Africa is likely to become an indispensable part of the global economy. It is predicted to be the world’s manufacturing hub given the population size and the comparatively cheap labour, especially after the Chinese and Indian populations begin to plateau or decline. An overwhelming majority of African countries are embracing the BRI and more generally the rise of China on their continent. Unlike many major European countries, China does not have a colonial past in Africa. It touted itself as a champion of anti-colonialism during the Cold War and still rides on that self-proclaimed reputation, especially in private conversations — but increasingly publicly in recent times.
With analogies like ‘garden/jungle’, the EU is seriously undermining its initiatives such as the Global Gateway. Especially in the early stages of their development, these initiatives need positive reinforcement in places such as Africa which are full of potential and hope. While tropes such as ‘values’ and ‘standards’ are promoted as the main feature of the Global Gateway’s connectivity agenda, African countries (and many others in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America) will not overlook the fact that this promoted feature contrasts uneasily with neo-colonialist-sounding dichotomies like ‘garden/jungle’.
In competition with China in Africa, the EU and its member states are already at a disadvantage. First, Europeans have neglected Africa since the collapse of the USSR, which also facilitated the rise of China on this continent. Second, Europeans have the disadvantage of being the former colonisers in Africa, whereas actors such as China, India, and the US do not have that specific problem. And third, the EU is playing catch-up with China, which is not only ahead in terms of economic investment in Africa but also in promoting the so-called ‘people-to-people exchanges’ as a pillar of the BRI in Africa and elsewhere. The question is why the EU, with all these historical and geoeconomic disadvantages in places like Africa, is unintentionally adding yet another fundamental disadvantage to its portfolio by promoting such neo-colonialist-sounding tropes as ‘jungle’ and ‘garden’.
Going outwards vs looking inwards
On 18 October, Borrell issued a defence of his metaphors by arguing that they were given “a certain spin” and that by “jungle” he meant the abstract notion of “the law of the jungle”. However, one cannot blame the widespread backlash on “spinning” when so many people worldwide find such remarks offensive. Not only are such tropes used by contemporary neo-conservative thinkers such as Robert Kagan but they are also reminiscent of the much older and more systematic racist representations of Africa in European colonial discourses — such as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. Such misrepresentations reductively described Africa as a place of primitive ‘vegetation’ and wild ‘animals’, inhabited by the ‘savages’ — basically as ‘the jungle’. One cannot mobilise concepts with such a history and then accuse the audience of associating them with that history.
Such tropes are a profound blunder: morally as a failure to honestly come to terms with one’s colonial past; historically in forgetting that the ‘garden’ colonised the ‘jungle’, not vice versa; diplomatically in being oblivious to the history of such concepts; tactically in terms of dissuading non-Western countries from seeing Europe’s problems — like Putin and his brutal aggression against Ukrainians — as the world’s problems; geoeconomically by undermining the prospects of initiatives such as the Global Gateway; and, more broadly speaking, strategically by negatively affecting the EU’s strategy for going out and venturing into the non-Western world.
The EU has to learn (at least) three interlinked lessons. First, every concept or trope has a history and at the highest level of diplomacy one should be aware of this conceptual history. Second, (neo)colonialism is not only about soldiers, tanks, and hypersonic missiles, or the forcible extraction of another nation’s resources, but also about words, analogies, metaphors, and what Edward Said called “images and imaginings”. Third, the EU’s strategic plan of going out into the world and developing a strong autonomous ‘soul’ will fail spectacularly if it’s not accompanied by a decolonial look inwards and a serious dose of soul-searching — so that Europe does not once again lose its soul in the heart of darkness.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Mohammadbagher Forough is a research fellow at The German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, Germany. He is also a research associate at Clingendael - Netherlands Institute of International Relations (The Hague). From 2016 to 2021, he was an assistant professor of International Relations at Leiden University (The Netherlands). He holds a PhD in International Security from Groningen University (The Netherlands). His research interests include global geoeconomics, infrastructure-security nexus, techno-geopolitics, China-Middle East relations, and Iranian foreign affairs. Image credit: Flickr/Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación.