Josep Borrell served as High Representative/Vice-President (HRVP) of the European Union from 2019 to 2024. In this role, he helped shape the EU's image in the world through the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), worked to build consensus among Member States, and led the European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU's diplomatic corps with 144 representations worldwide. This past spring, we were honored to welcome Mr. Borrell as a visiting scholar at SAIS Europe, where he also delivered the keynote address at the 2025 Alumni Weekend. While in Bologna, he sat down with SAIS students Antonella Navarro and Jurek Wille to reflect on his term as HR/VP and to share his views on the role the EU can play in an increasingly disorderly world.

SAIS INTERVIEW WITH JOSEP BORRELL, FORMER HIGH REPRESENTATIVE/VICE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION.
By Antonella Navarro and Jurek Wille

Question: Mr Borrell, your term as HR/VP was marked by many crises that had a profound effect on the EU, including Russia's war against Ukraine, democratic backsliding in Georgia, the Israel-Hamas war, and the Sudanese civil war. Do you consider your successful?
Borrell:Not on everything. And certainly not from everybody's perspective. My term has been much more difficult than I had expected. I knew it was going to be difficult because building a foreign and security policy among 27 independent countries is very challenging. But I didn't count on external factors like the Covid pandemic, Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine or the dramatic situation in the Middle East. All of this has created a real shock. And we didn't expect President Trump. But my most important success was to keep the Member States united on supporting Ukraine militarily, not only with economic sanctions. At the beginning of the war, people were saying that we have to put restrictive measures on Russia. But I said that this was not going to stop Russia. If you want to support Ukrainians, provide them with arms. The fact that Member States agreed on doing that, providing arms for a country at war and keeping this unity for years has been my most important success. And my most important failure is not being able to make the Members understand that what's going on in Gaza is a horror that require more than words. We have not been united in front of what is a traumatic situation.

Question: One of the buzzwords in international affairs at the moment is geopolitics. Everyone seems to agree that you need to be a geopolitical actor when you want to address these external factors. But you once said that geopolitics begins at home. Can you explain what geopolitics means to you and how the EU is doing on its path to becoming a geopolitical actor?
Borrell: You cannot be a geopolitical actor if you are not an actor. To be an actor, you have to have the capacities built at home. Some countries could be political actors, but they don't want to be. The question is what do Americans want to be with Trump, and what do Europeans want to be? Do they just want to preach trade and human rights, or do they want to be more influential? This is a political choice. The problem is that there are 27 different political choices.

Question: Making the choice requires unity. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen likes to talk about "Team Europe", and the advantages greater cohesion can offer internationally. But some powers external to the EU are seducing Member States with the promise of short-term gains through bilateral cooperation. How do you build "Team Europe" when others are trying to divide-and-conquer?
Borrell: China, Russia and the US have always been trying to divide the EU by choosing which institution or member states they want to deal with. For example, the Trump administration doesn't want to deal with the EU, Russia has never been willing to discuss with the EU. It's enough for Russia to have a good relationship with Germany and France and not necessarily many more. And even China tried for years to divide the EU by creating a group with 16 Central and Eastern European countries. The powers around the world don't like the EU because the EU can be a power. The idea of Team Europe is for the Member States and European institutions to work together, as a team. It's a very good idea because, for example, to cooperate with the Global South, you cannot count just on the EU budget, you have to also count on the actions of the Member States and the better that's coordinated, the better for us. In fact, the creation of a Team Europe is the duty of the HR/VP, who is Vice President of the European Commission and chairs the Council, to create common policies shared by the institutions.

Question: And yet, the Council is deeply divided on many aspects of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), as has been shown by the war in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. A problem appears to be the divergence in strategic priorities. What role does the HR/VP play in building a more coherent strategic culture within the EU?
Borrell: This is the key, a common strategic culture: You cannot pretend to have the same foreign policy if you don't have the same vision of the world. And that's why I'm saying that geopolitics starts at home. If you consider that Israel can do whatever it wants because it has the right to defend itself and that its right has no limit, you cannot share the same policy with a Member State who considers that human rights have to be respected everywhere by everyone, including Israel and that Israel is violating humanitarian law and has to be accountable for that. Nobody can act when you look for a binary variable zero or one, then there is nothing in between.

Question: Speaking of different world views, what role do you envision for the EU in the systemic rivalry between the US and China?
Borrell: From the beginning, I've said that the EU has to follow what I call the Sinatra doctrine: do it my way. We don't have to blindly follow what the Americans want us to do. We certainly have been and will always be closer to Washington than to Beijing. We share the same political system, at least until now. But it doesn't mean that we always have the same interests, and, in some cases, we cannot ignore the role of China in order to solve global problems. I think that during the previous administration, Europeans have been following quite automatically the positions of the Biden administration. And I've always tried to make them understand that we have specific interests which are not always coinciding with the interests of the Americans. And when the Americans have an interest, they take care of these interests, and they don't care a lot about the consequences of their actions for us.

Question: Do you believe that the EU shouldn't align with either side right now?
Borrell: We know that for the US, China is the real issue. Obama told us to take care of ourselves, that they have to go to the Indo-Pacific where the new frontline will be. And Trump is saying the same thing, but he's too busy with the war in Ukraine which he wants to finish in order to concentrate on China. But once again I don't think we have to follow blindly the American position with respect to trade with China trying to stop his growth. Because it is impossible to stop the growth of China and if the US do not want to trade with us, we will have to trade with the rest of the world.

Question: Many countries in the Global South are currently prioritizing Russia for security and China for development to alternatives provided by the US and EU like the Global Gateway Initiative. Does it make sense to compete with Russia and China when countries in the Global South don't want to pick a side?
Borrell: This is the new big geopolitical landscape. Many countries around the world don't want to take sides. They will not renounce the advantages of having a good relationship with China for ideological reasons. Instead, they're permanently hedging, and the map of alliances is much more fluid. We have to be as flexible as we can. I think that the view of the world as a confrontation between dictatorships and democracies is too simplistic and doesn't fit our interests. We have to make attractive offers. Russia is not providing that, it became the praetorian guard of African dictators, but their economy is very limited. Russia is a big gas station with an atomic bomb, but it doesn't have the resources that China has, it is not a geopolitical player. We have resources and something which is very important - strong attractiveness. Europe is a kind of magnet, it attracts people and countries; ten countries are still sitting in the waiting room, and many people want to live in Europe. People around the world are seeing our ecosystem, our institutions, our wellbeing, our capacity to develop a better life. That's something that is very attractive. Spain, for example, is very attractive, go to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona and you will see.

Question: One of those countries waiting to join the EU is Ukraine. Since Russia's full-scale invasion, the EU has been more supportive of Ukraine's membership bid and it received candidate status back in June 2022. Commission President von der Leyen reiterated that "our Union is your home." However, the road to membership can take more than a decade and is fraught with technical challenges in adopting the EU acquis (the collection of all rights and obligations constituting the EU's body of law). Are we making the process sound too rosy for Ukraine and the Ukrainians?
Borrell: Von der Leyen has been supporting Ukrainian membership, and she is right to do so. Me too. But the decision belongs to the Member States and is decided by unanimity. Ukraine has chosen to belong to the European family; to our way of life, including democracy, rule of law, social cohesion, economic prosperity and free markets. That is what Russia cannot accept because a democratic Ukraine experiencing socioeconomic development is like holding a mirror to Russian society. That is the real danger for Putin. Now, will Ukraine join the EU anytime soon? It certainly is a merit-based process, and conditions must be fulfilled, but everything has been running at high speed. Of course, nothing can be taken for granted, the decision requires unanimity of all Members and even referenda in some cases. But we cannot appear like someone who doesn't fulfill their promises. I trust the European leaders who, at the European Council, decided to grant candidate status to Ukraine. And not a single one was voicing their opposition to it.

Question: Keeping your word seems particularly important in today's world. Do you believe that the EU can use this golden opportunity provided by American unilateralism and Chinese revisionism to provide more predictability, stability and fair trade?
Borrell: There's a strong demand for more Europe in the world. Sometimes other countries do complain that we're patronizing or presenting ourselves as the model to follow. But it's a fact of life that we have strong potential because of our institutions, and that's the most difficult thing to build. A road is easy to build, a judiciary system much more difficult. The issue is that there's also the temptation of the selfish to close our borders and protect ourselves from the rest of the world, to reject migrants and become all but pure. Some Member States and political parties participate in this view, which means our decline, as we're living in a demographic winter. Talking about my country, Spain, it would stop functioning without migration from Latin America.

Question: Its migration from Latin America for Spain, sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb region for France and the Middle East for Germany. These countries are becoming more diverse and multicultural, while Hungary and Poland are still ethnically homogenous. How is this divergence affecting the cohesion between East and West and the ideas of the European Social Union?
Borrell: I do not think we are going to converge because there are completely different approaches to the demographic problem. Hungary is a little bit the Japan of Europe, they prefer to become old instead of mixing and assimilating foreigners. Others understand that they will have to accept a certain degree of mixticity for their societies to work.

Question: The rise of anti-immigration, far-right movements in countries like France, Germany and Italy is weighing on the minds of people who are considering immigrating to the EU. Does this have an effect on the attractiveness and credibility of the EU?
Borrell: Yes, and many of the deals that we have been doing with our neighbors in the Mediterranean go back to the old paradigm of "they don't care about democracy, they care about stability." What we're asking is to stop migration flows and we close our eyes to anything else. More people make a difference now between the words and the facts. Credibility is a consequence of how others perceive the direction you take; it begins by understanding reality. Credibility doesn't grow on trees.

Question: On the subject of credibility, during your term, the European External Action Service's budget has been slashed to cut costs and focus on countries where the EU sees "its primary interests." This effectively means that the EU is winding down its presence in the Global South. How can this lighter footprint be reconciled with the goal of becoming a geopolitical actor?
Borrell: These are bad times for international cooperation. The worst, most damaging thing that Trump has done is to cut development aid overnight, and a lot of people will be dying as a result. But it's not only Trump, the United Kingdom cut its development aid in half and France and Germany are also cutting. There's a certain tendency to decrease aid. Maybe because the results have not been very successful in some cases, and there might not be the political conditions to continue providing support in other cases. Europeans understand that in some parts of the world, we don't have leverage. What is our leverage in Sudan or Somalia? For a long time, we have given a lot of money to Somalia to pay for the salaries of the African Union troops and certainly ii has helped to prevented Somalia from falling apart. But the war continues. Last time I went to Mogadishu I couldn't go out of the airport. It still exists as a country, but the objectives of stability have not been met. And in the Central African region, the region of the Great Lakes from Sudan to Congo, we provide humanitarian support but our capacity to influence politics is very weak. That's a fact of life. In order to change it, we would need to engage with a level of resources and political commitment that is much, much bigger than what European societies are ready to provide.

Question: There is a disconnect between the EU's desire and ability to become a geopolitical actor. It is, however, an economic powerhouse and has leveraged its interal market for political wins in the past. Should the EU limit its aspirations to areas where geoeconomics and geopolitics overlap?
Borrell: Both things have to be done, you cannot split reality into isolated parts. The EU certainly is not a military power, but not even many Member States are. Military powers are able to play a geopolitical role in the whole world; there are two or three of them. Most of the EU members don't have an effective foreign policy, they only have a regional policy, and some of them don't even have that. Instead, our strength comes from unity, but unity comes from a certain common understanding of the world. We have different approaches to world issues.

Question: The EU now wants to play a bigger role on defense. It's new fiscal rules allow for national escape clauses to boost defense spending, but national exemptions risk entrenching the fragmentation of Europe's defense sector when consolidation is needed. Should the EU have used common borrowing to finance a more integrated defense industrial base instead?
Borrell: If you want to spend more on defense, you either need more revenue or more debt. The funny thing is that Germany, the champions of austerity, have suddenly discovered that it was not the right recipe and that everything they have been preaching has to be set aside. Germany can afford to follow a different path because they are the most powerful country in the EU and have more fiscal room. But the Germans gave a bad answer to the Euro Crisis, a very bad answer from the beginning. It took quite a long time to do the right thing. Let's hope that they will give the right answer to the defense crisis. From my point of view, it should not be a national based answer. Not everybody appreciates it when Germany proclaims that they are going to build Europe's strongest army.

Question: We are studying international relations at a particularly interesting time in history. What should policy schools like SAIS focus on teaching the next generation of policymakers and diplomats to make the world a better place?
Borrell:You can have a bibliographic culture and learn a lot of recipes that are completely overridden by events. The most important asset is skills that make you able to react to unforeseen environments. We will have to deal with black swans more and more. Just look at what happened to Spain, a complete electricity blackout for 24 hours. Nobody was ready for a situation like this. Although the recovery was very fast. So, we need a much better educated population. Education is the key. That makes the difference.

Question: Any last words for us?
Borrell: You are a lucky generation, studying in an excellent school, in a beautiful city, in a civilized country. You are enjoying freedom, in particular freedom of speech, quite a good level of wellbeing, and living in a society which values the health and education of everyone, providing a safety net financed by taxes. We attribute high value to human life. The equality of every human life should be the most important feature of a democracy. I would like it to be a distinctively European characteristic. That is why I regret our position with respect to the massacre that is taking place in Gaza. Nobody will listen to us when we preach about human rights.

Jurek Wille is a MAIR student (B'25'26) at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he worked for the German government. His articles have been published by The National Interest and Atlantic Council.

Antonella Navarro is an MAIR student (B'25 '26) at Johns Hopkins SAIS, specializing in International Finance. She has reported and published with Al Jazeera English, Latin America Bureau, and others.