‘Europe and the Rest’ in Official EU Discourse: Legitimising ‘Geopolitical Europe’ Through the ‘Jungle’ Analogy and Beyond

Abstract

This article critically assesses how the European Union (EU) constructs the identities of ‘EU-Europe’ and ‘the rest of the world’ to legitimise the formation of a ‘geopolitical Europe’. It draws on poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives within the spirit of scholarly allyship, deconstructing texts produced by key EU officials – Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel and Josep Borrell – between 2019 and 2023. The article manifests how civilisational binaries are employed to justify the EU's transition from normative power to power politics. It problematises the ‘EU versus the rest of the world’ framing and, particularly, Borrell's ‘garden–jungle’ analogy, exposing their neocolonial underpinnings. Through an intertextual second reading, it shows how depicting the EU as a peaceful and civilised ‘garden’ and the rest of the world as a conflictual and disorderly ‘jungle’ reinforces civilisational hierarchies. The article argues that these binaries not only legitimise the EU's increasingly securitised foreign policy but also reproduce colonial-era tropes of the mission civilisatrice, perpetuating a Eurocentric worldview.