More or Less Borrell? A Critical Analysis of Josep Borrell as the European Union's High Representative
本文回顾了博雷利2019至2024年担任欧盟外交与安全政策高级代表的任期，分析其如何通过REPowerEU等政策提升欧盟全球影响力，并应对乌克兰战争、加沙冲突等危机，揭示欧盟外交政策的一致性与领导力挑战。
This article reviews Josep Borrell's tenure as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission (HR/VP) from December 2019 to June 2024. It focuses on his efforts to enhance the European Union's (EU's) global influence and stability amid challenges such as Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, shifting EU policies towards China and the United States and the conflict in Gaza. Key EU policies during this period include the Strategic Compass in defence and REPowerEU in energy security. In surveying these policies, the article examines Borrell's effectiveness in mediating foreign policy responses from EU member states and fostering a unified stance during crises. It further explores how Borrell's approach enabled him to maintain or enhance his leadership role through the ‘performance’ of key policies like REPowerEU, reflecting ‘leaderisation’ (Aggestam and Hedling, 2020). Leaderisation in this sense involves leaders engaging in sense-making of their role to connect with different audiences (Aggestam and Hedling, 2020, p. 306). Borrell's successes and challenges provide insights into the EU's capacity to develop a cohesive foreign policy framework and influence regional and global politics. We conclude that Borrell's tenure involved both tacit and active contributions, from moderate efforts to advance Commission President von der Leyen's 2019 ‘Geopolitical Commission’ agenda during Brexit and COVID-19 to successful alignment of energy policy with EU foreign policy and a unified response to the invasion of Ukraine. The 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, effective May 1999, established the position of High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, initially held by Javier Solana. Solana's role was more limited than today's HR/VP as defined by the Treaty of Lisbon (European Parliament, 2009). Solana's tenure shaped the role for future HR/VPs by balancing member states' differing foreign policy views with a value-based approach, enabling the EU to act effectively (Helwig, 2015, p. 87). In his term, he stressed the importance of aligning EU responses to global events, particularly in complex regions like the Western Balkans. The 2009 Lisbon Treaty expanded and clarified the HR/VP role a bit further. Veteran British politician Catherine Ashton was the first to hold this expanded position. She oversaw the establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS), balancing member state sensitivities with the need for coherence in EU foreign policy. Ashton's behind-the-scenes consensus-building methods enhanced the HR/VP role's capacity to strengthen relations between the Council, Commission and EEAS and secure successive rounds of sanctions (Tallberg, 2006). Federica Mogherini, who succeeded Ashton in 2014, developed the EU's first global strategy since the 2003 European Security Strategy. Mogherini's expertise in authoring the EU Global Strategy (EUGS) was symbiotic to her leadership style, described by Aggestam and Hedling as ‘leadership as an ongoing process of performance’, involving key policy artefacts and the use of performative acts in the launch and promotion of key policies. As discussed later, Borrell's own use of REPowerEU mirrors Mogherini's approach, but is starkly contrasted with that of the Strategic Compass (Novotná, 2015). Following the 2019 EU elections, Borrell, an experienced politician with a background in both national and European politics, succeeded Mogherini in the office. Borrell, like his HR/VP predecessors, hailed from the political left, having begun his political career in the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the 1970s and being closely associated with Spain's transition to democracy as a member of the PSOE. At the national level, he served as the General Secretary for the Budget and Public Spending from 1982 to 1984 and as the Secretary of State for Finance from 1984 to 1991. He then became a member of the Council of Ministers as the Minister of Public Works and Transport from 1991 to 1996. Following the 1996 election, Borrell won the PSOE primary in 1998 and became the Leader of the Opposition until his resignation in 1999. He served as a member of the Spanish Parliament, representing Barcelona, from 1986 to 2004. He subsequently shifted his focus to European politics, serving as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) during the 2004–2009 legislative session and as President of the European Parliament until 2007. Afterwards, he returned to national politics and was appointed as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the EU and Cooperation in the Sánchez government in June 2018. However, his return to national Spanish politics was short-lived. In July 2019, the European Council nominated him for the position of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR/VP), and he took office in December 2019 (Socialists & Democrats, n.d.). As Foreign Minister of Spain, Borrell made a number of controversial statements that caused diplomatic tensions, referring on one occasion to Russia as ‘our old enemy’, prompting a diplomatic spat between Moscow and Madrid. Another instance was when he claimed that the Americans had only ‘killed four Indians’ before independence and criticised the US approach to Venezuela as ‘cowboy’ diplomacy, drawing criticism from US indigenous rights groups and the United States, respectively (Torres, 2019). In terms of his external reputation, Borrell (2024) stands in contrast to Ashton but is similar to Mogherini, with his long-standing reputation of sharing his personal ideas via op-eds, commentaries and books, whilst his ‘A Window on the World’ (EEAS, 2020) blog comments routinely on his own HR/VP activities and European foreign policy. In this respect, the EU itself has provided Borrell with enormous amounts of raw material, allowing Borrell to cultivate a clear, even pugnacious ‘voice’ regarding the EU's external actorness. Borrell (2022) has, for example, drawn a comparison between Europe as a ‘garden’, characterising the rest of the world as a ‘jungle’, arguing, ‘yes, Europe is a garden, we have built a garden. Everything works. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden’. Criticised for its indelicacy at best and racist undertones at worst, this and similar observations sat poorly with politicians around the globe, who denounced Borrell as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘colonialist’ (Walker and Chiappa, 2023). When Borrell assumed office in 2019, he inherited Mogherini's 2016 EUGS1 and was effectively ‘co-responsible’ for the six strategic priorities set by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for 2019–2024 (von der Leyen, 2019). These included the European Green Deal, aiming for climate neutrality; A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, promoting digital transformation; An Economy that Works for People, fostering economic growth and job creation; Promoting Our European Way of Life, safeguarding EU values; A Stronger Europe in the World, enhancing the EU's global role; and A New Push for European Democracy, strengthening democratic processes and protecting against external threats. These six strategies are crucial in evaluating the EU's foreign policy effectiveness or ineffectiveness, Borrell's own ability as HR/VP to position the EU as a responsive, materially capable and diplomatically credible global actor and the overlap – and possible conflation – of EU external engagement between Borrell as HR/VP and EEAS chief on the one side and von der Leyen as Commission President on the other. Throughout his tenure, Borrell has witnessed a series of major global events through which he has tried to forge a unified EU foreign policy. The Commission's response to the COVID-19 crisis at the beginning of 2020 was poorly co-ordinated, with unclear leadership and ineffective regional and global articulation by the HR/VP. The situation worsened with the slow vaccine delivery under von der Leyen's procurement programme (Fleming, 2023). However, the joint proposal by French President Macron and German Chancellor Merkel for a recovery fund led to the NextGenerationEU, a €750 billion initiative marking progress towards EU fiscal integration and collective action. This allowed the EU to swiftly implement measures including rapid vaccine development and distribution through the EU's vaccine strategy, the establishment of the NextGenerationEU recovery fund and enhanced global aid through the COVAX programme. This demonstrated the EU's ability to lead co-ordinated health and economic strategies at regional and even global levels and, subsequently, to integrate health crises into its own public and foreign policy framework (Bartzokas et al., 2022). In ‘European Foreign Policy in Times of COVID-19’, Borrell described NextGenerationEU as a critical turning point for the EU, emphasising its role in limiting additional debt from the crisis and viewing the virus as an external enemy requiring a collective response (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2020). Borrell argued that NextGenerationEU significantly enhanced Europe's global standing and stressed the need for improved co-ordination to address future crises, avoid internal conflicts and maintain credibility. This has been a lesson for the EU's future crises. In 2021, still in the teeth of regional upheaval sparked by the pandemic and a few months before the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, the EEAS produced a document entitled the Strategic Compass, designed to evaluate the EU's security and defence environment, identify explicit and tacit threats to the EU and explore opportunities to enhance the EU's strategic autonomy. Touted by the EEAS (2022a) and Borrell alike as ‘an ambitious plan of action for strengthening the EU's security and defence policy by 2030’, and following months of debate by EU foreign ministers, Borrell was instrumental in having the Strategic Compass quickly adopted as the EU's officially updated official strategy in late March 2022, less than a month after the invasion of Ukraine. Europe is in danger …. The purpose of the Strategic Compass is to draw an assessment of the threats and challenges we face and propose operational guidelines to enable the European Union to become a security provider for its citizens, protecting its values and interests. (Borrell, 2021, in EEAS, 2022b) Cautioning against treating the Strategic Compass as ‘just another EU paper’ with limited practical follow-through, Borrell outlined his concern that without strong implementation and member state buy-in, the policy would fail to live up to its strategic promises. Reviewing the strategy, Witney (2022) argued that the Compass ‘underlines the collective action problem at the heart of European attempts to pool defence efforts and resources: everyone agrees that closer integration is essential, but everyone wants someone else to go first’. The Compass is therefore something of a paradox. It is singularly radical on the one hand in being able to kickstart EU co-ordination, but possibly overly bureaucratic in effectively leveraging the minimum member state collaboration required. It outlines Borrell's requirement for the EU to operate ‘in a collaborative way and not in a fragmented, national manner’ to confront ‘the costs of inaction – of “non-Europe”’, and the need for ‘a quantum leap forward on security and defence’; yet it is ‘full of the usual process-heavy gradualism, to be implemented over a decade and wrapped in conventional reflections on the dangerous world we live in and the ever-popular bromides about the EU's need to “partner” with all and sundry’ (Witney, 2022). Indeed, from a chronological perspective, the Strategic Compass appears to have been awkwardly overlaid with the onset of the war in Ukraine, the conflict itself serving to justify retrospectively the EU's perceived threat environment and the intense limitations of EU defence capabilities. From a positive perspective, the Russian invasion of Ukraine provided the EU with an ideal, if bittersweet, opportunity to at last lock in its strategic blueprint as a senior strategic partner in Europe, in co-ordination with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), laying out structures by which to accelerate member states' and EU institutional commitment and deepen co-ordination mechanisms. … we cannot rely on the American support and on the American capacity to protect us. We have to build our common defence capacity. But inside NATO we have to build a strong European pillar. A war is not going to start tomorrow against us. But, we cannot deny the reality: a rising competition among big powers, high intensity conflicts between states, weaponisation of economic interdependency, cyber warfare and disinformation are part of our reality. (EEAS, 2024) If the Strategic Compass proves to be the policy blueprint that finally catalyses the EU's ability to move from crisis-induced ‘strategic responsibility’ to operable forms of strategic autonomy in key areas including defence and perhaps energy security, then Borrell's role at HR/VP in articulating this opportunity may remain as part of his ‘leaderised’ legacy. If not, the Compass may fade from sight or morph into the sequence of EU strategic policies. In February 2021, Borrell visited Russia, the first occasion that an EU High Representative had visited the country since 2017. Set against the backdrop of heightened tensions surrounding the poisoning and subsequent arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Borrell's visit – riddled with diplomatic gaffes and clumsy approaches – was castigated by MEPs as a ‘predictable mistake’, ‘ill-advised’, ‘ill-executed’ and, for some, ‘a complete disaster’ (EuroNews, later, Borrell was on the with the EU's of the invasion of Ukraine a critical in EU foreign by and unified of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Borrell a joint on Ukraine (European Commission for and 2022). Ukraine, this war has a energy crisis in Europe, from strategic use of energy as a that the EU's on Russian would the EU and its support for Ukraine. the he to Russian to the EU as as 2021, ongoing with European This into a of economic following February (EEAS, The of the EU's energy to Russian at the heart of the Commission's From Borrell's perspective, the EU swiftly to its on Russian energy in the term, it a possibly from towards energy designed by the REPowerEU Borrell's chief policy by which to the first of EU strategic autonomy the of energy security. as the EU in articulating energy security and then the policy as a key of EU foreign policy Russia, REPowerEU provided Borrell with a of personal ‘leaderisation’ as HR/VP. The European Commission's REPowerEU and by HR/VP Josep Borrell, energy security a of the EU's foreign as as a key part of its policy responses to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in REPowerEU to EU on Russian in key enhancing the EU's energy and the of EU the at In this REPowerEU and may the EU's long-standing energy security by energy energy and the of less energy (European 2022). In on of the Commission as the of REPowerEU and the EEAS over which he Borrell has been the and public for The for Borrell's support for the policy was made of the in which he argued that not the defence of rights and we are on Russian the EU's commitment to rights and and the strategic opportunity to energy security as a by which to Russian in Ukraine. REPowerEU enhanced Borrell's role as HR/VP by energy security EU strategic autonomy and foreign policy. it allowed Borrell to the EU energy policy tensions, his usual the EU a collective for and enabled him to the EU's in like Mogherini with the 2016 REPowerEU provided Borrell with opportunities to the enhancing his ‘leaderisation’ However, Borrell's activities as HR/VP be and whilst and with policies like REPowerEU, his personal than the EU's collective These official and and be as such in terms of have been in the EU's approach to following invasion of Ukraine in Borrell has his views on these the In an address to the European Parliament on for example, Borrell the of EU member states towards China and the importance of aligning these with EU External Action In the last of his tenure, Borrell to with a possibly more approach to EU foreign overlaid with his for a unified EU stance in including Russia and this to the European Parliament, Borrell outlined the areas that him including economic security, and Ukraine, and was in his criticism of stance on the economic between the EU and In Borrell for strategies similar to that up the approach of the REPowerEU energy security, including EU strategic and to Borrell stressed that relations could not progress China itself Russia more effectively to its in Ukraine, that in this conflict to with the 2023). the challenges by Borrell crucial role in global like climate and debt the need for and adopted the of EU HR/VPs in the need for a unified EU stance to maintain effective with remain In the European Commission an into to protect EU from tensions remain high as with to the conflict in Ukraine. The EU's responses to the conflict during Borrell's more and demonstrated the challenges of a unified stance member state and the EU for and the of its responses as than The of the with differing views the EU on the approach to and led to a of a This the in member states' policies into a cohesive foreign policy stance in conflicts with and This was not only in between member states but the Commission to tensions between Borrell and von der Leyen, as Commission President von der Leyen visited in response to on on with the However, her sparked European who that had to their for to to in as as to the that is a part of the position of European and 2023). This in led to a in European diplomatic including between von der Leyen and the EU's in foreign including Borrell, EU member states as to the and effectiveness of EU towards the foreign policy statements on of the EU is a even when statements are and between and member to the at best and could have at worst, as by the of von der Leyen's visit to on 2023). the such to the and a or to the by it this Borrell criticised von der Leyen, that was not entitled to the EU's views on foreign which are co-ordinated between member and by the leaders of the EU's at and by foreign in by et al., 2023). Borrell led a of the EU's foreign in to address the ongoing conflict in Gaza. At a following the Borrell discussed the the on the need for a in to the delivery of aid the He that such a not be with a and that the on the EU's stance would be made at the in these the foreign to on a a the situation as in the and Borrell the problem as von der of 2023). a to in foreign policy. In a senior official from the EEAS was to to member states Borrell had claimed that was EU when – to EU on of – this not to be the and surrounding Borrell's approach to EU have included both with Commission President von der Leyen and EU leaders the EU in March for example, a between German Chancellor Chancellor and Borrell a for a the leaders of and Borrell, particularly over his and criticism of in Gaza. As with von der Leyen, that Borrell not their on the and The situation not only the of the HR/VP position in an EU position by institutional and member state leaders but the that this HR/VPs on the one to in the unified position of the EU to a but to leadership in for the EU, a of personal may be HR/VP Borrell has produced with of and have been of and articulation of EU by Borrell in the of REPowerEU and, to a the Strategic Compass, have the are Borrell has his own and his own in official EU to internal tensions and external The is that Borrell's approach to HR/VP is associated with criticism of the EU When it as with REPowerEU, both diplomatic When it as with the and perceived inaction of the EU regarding the are at a point made by a political for (2024) that EU for and on foreign policy in the term, as a possible the EU's of leadership in the The period of 2019–2024 has been a in world politics, marking challenges and turning for EU the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, with Josep Borrell external relations as by the EU Council, the EU both and awkwardly through these with both from crises and diplomatic still the EU's ability to its even Borrell has in policies like REPowerEU by which to and EU in global politics whilst opportunities to the EU towards strategic autonomy in including the Strategic As are a number of that Borrell to and the have been in the of a common foreign policy for the EU in possibly in areas his own views with of key member In more Borrell has to to his own and then to a common stance EU the HR/VP cultivate a similar approach and the this has on EU foreign global to be The have to