Good morning,
There's a clear hierarchy and vocabulary of moral indignation when it comes to EU diplomacy, I learned this week.
Foreign actions can be "deplored", "condemned", "strongly condemned", or "condemned in the strongest possible terms" in EU summit statements.
The EU merely "deplored" the 18 March Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, which reportedly killed 170 children.
The EU issued a "condemnation in the strongest possible terms" when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and it said it "condemns in the strongest possible terms" when Russia fully invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Having four levels in a diplomatic code is useful when you need to clearly communicate to other states how pissed off the EU is.
But "deplore" is also etymologically linked to crying, which makes it sound more passive than "condemnation", because this connotes inflicting a loss on someone.
And the strict codification aside, EU statements contain subtle poetry that can be quite telling.
This week's EU summit said there was a "breakdown" of the Gaza ceasefire, which "caused" airstrikes.
The passive tense made the "breakdown" sound like an act of God and Israel's unilateral decision to launch the airstrikes sound like a necessary consequence under the laws of physics. On the other side, the EU explicitly named "Hamas" and deplored its action ("refusal" to free hostages).
Meanwhile, reality can get so ugly that even hardened diplomats sometimes dig out their thesaurus for adjectives to embellish their four moral verbs.
The Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 were "brutal and indiscriminate," for instance, and Hamas were guilty of a "particularly deplorable atrocity", the EU said at the time.
Russia's Ukraine invasion was "grossly violating international law," it said in 2022.
- Andrew Rettman, foreign affairs editor
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