Abstract
The global world order has been transforming, becoming increasingly less Europe-centred. In this context, the paper critically examines how European Union (EU) foreign policy narratives are structured by the coloniality of power, as conceptualised by Quijano, with a focus on Josep Borrell’s 2022 ‘Garden and Jungle’ speech. The empirical analysis is situated in the post-2022 geopolitical context, in which the EU’s foreign policy narrative has shifted from positioning itself as a ‘soft power’ to adopting the ‘language of power’. The EU’s relative weight in global geopolitics is declining and the EUropean leaders strategically mobilise colonial tropes in political discourses to signal a dominant position over the Other and mark a clear border between the imagined Europe and the ‘Jungle’. Drawing on postcolonial theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this study seeks to empirically reveal how official EU foreign policy narratives reproduce asymmetrical power structures rooted in Western European colonialism, within the post-2022 geopolitical context. Borrell’s framing of EUrope – using colonial tropes of moral and developmental superiority, especially in its relations with Latin America – reinforces the coloniality of power contributing to the EU’s attempt to reassert the global dominance Western Europe lost after the collapse of the colonial empires.