Time.news – It looks like a chestnut. One of those titles that the press periodically brings out, as it is true that the diplomatic function has suffered from changes in form and substance for decades. The advent of new technologies imposing real time to the detriment of time for reflection, the generational difficulty in integrating protocol not as preciousness but as a universally accepted code of communication, the so-called specialist or thematic foreign service entrusted to ad hoc and no longer to career diplomats, and the politicization of the function will, in turn, have struck their blow.
But nothing has been as devastating for the diplomatic function as the latest developments in the European Union and the presidency of Emmanuel Macron. Because what is in the process of disappearing is neither more nor less than the foreign service of the Nation. Sovereign diplomacy has seen itself gradually ousted through treaties and directives from a regional bloc transformed into a Soviet, led by a caste of harmful apparatchiks, using and abusing an abstruse nomenklatura.
Under cover of convergence, it is this Soviet which imposes the roadmap in matters of foreign service. A very undiplomatic foreign service, in which the specific interests of the Member States are diluted. An obese bloc, made up of 27 Member States (28 with Ukraine, between natural son and prodigal son), living in denial of its irreconcilable antagonisms between the historic Western core and the newcomers of the former Warsaw Pact . All nations, much more sensitive to the patronage of the US Secretary of State than the founding states traditionally were.
The Quai d’Orsay has just launched a strike call for June 2. This is the second time in history that this has happened. If the first, in 2003, related to a purely union aspect, a question of indemnity, this one aims at the very survival of its mission. The reform of the senior civil service wanted by Macron is perceived by the six unions which represent it as the “extinction” of the two operative branches of the diplomatic corps, which are the ministers plenipotentiary and the foreign affairs advisers. “The Quai d’Orsay is gradually disappearing”, worry these unions.
These civil servants are called upon to blend into the mass of the civil service. The erudite dimension that has made French diplomacy the world reference, in such a way that French has long been the language in which associated concepts were expressed, untranslatable otherwise, melts and disappears in the magma of globalism. The time is no longer for nuance, for putting into perspective, for the illustrated understanding of the world. There is only one way of thinking and erudition comes to parasitize the fast diplomacy.
The recent expulsion of European diplomats from Moscow, in response to the expulsion of Russian diplomats stationed in European capitals, demonstrated the extent to which governments had lost their way with regard to the fundamentals that regulate bilateral issues, calling it “a hostile acts”, which was a predictable response to disproportionate action. In fact, the prerequisite for the severance of diplomatic relations. And that is precisely what it is all about: breaking with the codes of diplomacy, and at the same time putting an end once and for all to everything that has to do with the representative function. Because who says representative function says difference. Diplomacy is the consideration of differences and occurs between separate governments. But globalism is betting on homogeneity and a single government.
The results are not the same when a politician speaks to a politician, a civil servant to a civil servant and a diplomat to a diplomat. The language of diplomacy is that of the messenger who conveys and receives messages in a whole series of situations, from the most friendly to the most hostile. He literally embodies his country. But to speak you must have free rein. There can be no room for action when the national diplomatic services are under the control of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs of the Union.
If there were a real European policy, based on acceptable common denominators, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. The problem is that the European Foreign Action Service (EEAS) has taken the ultra-Atlanticist turn printed by Ursula von der Leyen, assisted in this by Emmanuel Macron and his imitators. Saying Macron or Von der Leyen is like saying consulting firm McKinsey, whose recommendations range from health to defense, passing, precisely by foreign policy.