A recent article published by EuroNews begins with this statement: “Ursula von der Leyen has called for ‘comprehensive’ security guarantees for Ukraine that can deter future Russian aggression.” This seems rather straightforward and even predictable, given what everyone knows about the woman sometimes referred to as Queen Ursula’s position concerning the war in Ukraine. The only hint that there may be some problematic ambiguity with this statement is the word “comprehensive,” which clearly needs to be defined. Basic logic tells us that in questions of human and political relations nothing can be deemed totally comprehensive, in the sense of including every possibility or eventuality.

So what does Ursula mean? What does she want us to comprehend?

Fortunately, the article offers the evidence to answer this important question.

“The European Union must ‘urgently’ rearm and help Ukraine turn into a ‘steel porcupine’ that proves ‘indigestible for future invaders’ like Russia, Ursula von der Leyen said at the conclusion of a high-stakes summit in London attended by 19 Western leaders.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Steel porcupine:

A new species currently being bred in secret somewhere in Europe by a team of mad scientists led by Ursula von der Leyen and Emmanuel Macron, two real human beings driven mad by the astonishing circumstances that allowed both of them, in defiance of both of the odds and of reason, to achieve the title of president and even be invited to serve a second term.

Contextual note

I’m the first to admit that it’s unfair to treat an intelligent person’s creative metaphor as something other than what that person intended. But metaphors invite interpretation. That is their precise role in poetry. Had this image of a well-defended Ukraine emerged from a dream Ursula was recounting while lying on Sigmund Freud’s couch in Vienna, the famous psychoanalyst would undoubtedly have puzzled over the significance of the lady’s citing an animal whose defense consists of being covered from head to tail by a multitude of pricks. Scientists call them quills, but we all know how ordinary people refer to them.

Ursula wants Ukraine to resemble a porcupine, but with a steel carapace. Unlike the porcupine’s, steel quills would remain permanently erect. Is that how she imagines a country everyone would want to cuddle up to? Does that represent her idea of the nature of an enlightened democracy she wants to welcome into the European community over which she presides? Would she herself want to live in such an environment? And how does she imagine the neighbors of a steel porcupine — Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Poland — might feel about a nation that is on permanent alert to launch a painful barrage of pointed quills at the slightest disturbance near its borders?

For at least the past ten years, political scientist and geopolitical theoretician John Mearsheimer has been claiming that “NATO expansion… is part of a broader strategy that is designed to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border.” Ursula’s steel porcupine appears to confirm the University of Chicago professor’s analysis. If her plans come to fruition, which most observers believe is unlikely, other countries such as Lithuania, Latvia and Finland might, in principle, logically be obliged to follow Ukraine’s example. Given the nature of the threat, they too may be redefined not as sovereign nation states, but as members of a new flank of porcupine states piloted by NATO, a militarized EU or a combination of both.

The EU was created to establish a community in which war would become an unthinkable response to any form of tension among its members. The current crisis provoked by US President Donald Trump’s betrayal of an iron-clad alliance has revealed that without the tutelage and control of the United States, the tensions within Europe will come to the fore, as is already visible. The tension is likely to grow as debate about rearming Europe moves forward.

Turning Europe into a kind of garrisoned superstate may seem like a rational move to some, but the citizens of Europe have not yet had their say on what their respective nations and their community of nations will look like in such a configuration. Recent elections that have revealed a resurgence of the extreme right across Europe. The idea promoted by Ursula and friends of converting social-democratic Europe to a war economy is unlikely to have popular appeal.

Europe is not the US, where the dominant consumer culture has effectively manufactured endless consent by neutering the capacity of angry and indignant citizens to organize politically against policies considered abusive. In Europe, when broad swaths of the population become discontent, revolt becomes an option. The yellow vest movement in France was about gas prices. This time, it’s about war.

The EU today is little more than a largely disordered collection of political entities held together by the grandstanding of a class of largely contested national leaders supported by a cohort of unelected professional bureaucrats and technocrats in Brussels. If porcupine culture becomes the norm, total disorder seems a more likely outcome than mobilizing a unified citizenry to support a bellicose mission.

Historical note

Although it has been astutely observed that “all metaphors are false and all similes are true,” anyone with a smattering of literary culture knows that metaphors provide the meat of all great poetry. They reveal and hide at the same time the delicate truths poets wish to convey. We owe it to ourselves to take them seriously.

Europe today is undergoing a major existential crisis. Having for so long lived under Washington’s nuclear umbrella (a pregnant metaphor if ever there was one) it now finds itself too literally exposed to what Bob Dylan once warned when he predicted “a hard rain that’s gonna fall.”

The idea of Europe is notoriously hard to define and its leaders understand that. That alone may explain why they keep inventing and reinventing interesting poetic tropes to describe it.

Metaphors for Europe change with the season. It wasn’t so long ago that Ursula’s “High Representative” Josep Borrell, the spokesperson for Europe’s foreign policy, famously called Europe a “garden” and the rest of the world a “jungle.” Was the High Representative literally high in October 2022 when at the European Diplomatic Academy he took a moment to explain his vision of Europe?

“Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together. And here, Bruges is maybe a good representation of beautiful things, intellectual life, wellbeing. 

The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”

Borrell’s metaphor is not only easy to understand, it is very traditional. The 17th century English poet Andrew Marvell was fascinated by the metaphor of the garden. In his poem that bears that very title, “The Garden,” his exploration of the multiple dimensions of the metaphor raises questions about man’s place in today’s world. The poet contrasts the toil of conflict and war (“How vainly men themselves amaze/ To win the palm, the oak, or bays”) with the “Fair Quiet” and “Innocence” of the garden. The garden Marvell describes is not opposed to the jungle; they are both different facets of the same mysterious expression of divine creation.

But if Europe is truly a garden, is the rest of the world a jungle? Borrell’s critics in the Global South noted the sinister implications of his metaphor, which did more to evoke associations with Europe’s shameful colonization of Africa than with Marvell’s poem.

A more likely association in the mind of Borrell is Voltaire’s pessimistic conclusion at the end of Candide when he suggests that rather than struggle to find rational solutions to the complex problems of the world, one should “cultivate one’s own garden” and retreat to it. Marvell’s suggestion was similar, praising “delicious solitude.” Voltaire was an enlightenment philosopher, a pillar of “the age of reason.” But he knew that if reason was indeed capable of detecting the light at the end of the tunnel, life itself is a dark tunnel we all pass through and may fail to understand.

So how did we get from Borrell’s garden to Ursula’s prickly beast?  What does it tell us about the psychic state of Europe today?

I write here as one European who sees the train going off the rails. And if it does, we should bear in mind that any porcupine that happens to be strolling by the side of the track when the locomotive derails will simply be crushed by the tons of steel descending upon it.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.