Sabine Weyand, who stepped down this week as the European Commission’s leading trade official, has fired a parting warning at her colleagues, urging them to shake off the sense of alarm that dominates their work.
“The thing I’m looking most forward to losing is this permanent sense of urgency,” Weyand said on an in-house podcast called Trade-Off, as she calls time on her 32-year career in the Commission.
She said this “24/7 alertness state” was understandable given the many geopolitical crises Brussels has weathered in recent years, from the the COVID-19 pandemic to the upending of the global trade order under Donald Trump. But she warned the Berlaymont against allowing the just-in-time modus operandi to become entrenched.
“Sometimes I think this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that you do everything in an urgency mode,” she said. “I think that is exhausting, so I’m looking forward to leaving that behind.”
Ursula Von der Leyen, her erstwhile boss, has made an “urgency mindset” a defining mantra of her second term in power. The speed at which her Commission now operates has drawn criticism that some policies are being developed without sufficient scrutiny.
Weyand said she worked seven days a week and was looking forward to “regaining my sanity” as she relocates to Florence for an academic post at the European University Institute, as Euractiv first reported.
“I found it hard to preserve this ability to zoom out and take a distance,” said Weyand, who negotiated trade deals with Mercosur, India and the United States during her seven-year stint at the directorate-general for trade.
A sustainable jungle?
The German also warned the EU shouldn’t give up attempting to improve sustainability and environmental standards worldwide through trade deals.
“When we started there was much more of a focus on sustainability, perhaps sometimes up to a point where we thought we could impose our way of doing things on the rest of the world; we’ve learnt our lesson there,” she said. But “throwing the baby out with the bath water” is not the right solution, she argued.
Weyand warned the European Parliament last month that “law of the jungle” is increasingly defining global affairs, arguing that Europe has little choice but to keep expanding its network of partners as volatility in EU-US ties continues.
As trade moves from an era of multilateral openness to one defined by bilateral relationships, Weyand argued that the EU cannot afford to consider itself only as an economic power. “We also need to invest in the sources of power we are not yet good at,” she said, mentioning defence, foreign policy and diplomacy.
Weyand, who joked her colleagues compare her to fictional cartoon character Edna Mode, from The Incredibles film, is looking forward to reading detective novels and will split her time between Brussels, Berlin and Florence next year.
Sofia Sanchez Manzanaro contributed reporting
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