The EU’s foreign policy chief has accused his top diplomats of being slow, ineffective and patronising towards the countries they work in, also berating them for failing to anticipate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“This is not a moment when we are going to send flowers to all of you saying that you are beautiful, you work very well and we are very happy,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, told ambassadors who work for the EU’s external action service.
Borrell, a Spanish former foreign minister, who has a reputation for bluntness, lamented that the EU’s global diplomatic network was less informative than reading the papers. “Sometimes, I knew more of what was happening somewhere by reading the newspapers than reading your reports,” he said.
“I should be the best-informed guy in the world,” Borrell complained, instructing them to be more reactive to unfolding crises. “Behave as you would behave if you were an embassy: send a telegram, a cable, a mail – quickly. Quickly, please, react.”
The EU, he said, had failed to predict that Russia would attack Ukraine, leaving him reliant on warnings from the US, notably a phone call from US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, two days before the invasion. “I have to recognise that here, in Brussels, the Americans were telling us ‘they will attack, they will attack’, and we were quite reluctant to believe it.”
As his audience sat in silence, Borrell accused his diplomats of lacking empathy and patronising counterparts in their host countries. “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.”
A person in the room said that some took offense, while others found it pertinent, adding: “I think [it] was well-received overall, for he spoke substance.”
The comments come amid growing concern among senior EU officials that the EU’s dash for alternatives to Russian gas has alienated African countries by pushing up prices.
Reprising a long-term concern, Borrell said the EU was losing the “battle of narratives” to Russia and China, who deployed troll farms to amplify their messages around the world. “This is a battle that we are not winning, because we are not fighting enough,” he said, criticising EU diplomats for not retweeting his blog posts or tweets. “I am still surprised that, in some delegations, it seems that they do not take enough consideration of our communication, and they do not tweet and retweet the messages that we are delivering from the centre. You have to be a network that is repeating, transmitting, insisting.”
Borrell, who once described the EU’s monthly foreign ministers’ meetings as “more a valley of tears than a centre of decision-making”, has never held back in his criticism of what he sees as the EU’s foreign policy shortcomings, but it remains unusual for a senior European official to launch such unbarred criticism against their own staff.
