A good speech has a soul. Did European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s 2021 State of the Union speech have one?
The surprising answer is yes. Von der Leyen gave a pretty darn good speech, overall. And it had a soul, although you had to wait until the end to discover it.
Let’s go through the speech and rate it. I’ll use the categories of delivery, structure, and rhetoric, and assign points to each. I’ll even give bonus points if the number of applause lines is larger than the number of intolerable clichés.
Delivery
On the plus side, Von der Leyen has presence behind a podium. Her words are clipped, articulated, and comprehensible. She flips between English, French and German with a minimum of effort. She has stamina, and can maintain the intensity that a big speech demands. She exudes the seriousness and intelligence that you would expect of a major political figure. When she speaks, your instinct is to listen.
On the down side, Von der Leyen is not the most emotive of speakers. When wanting to make an emphatic point, her go-to move is a two-handed downward karate chop. At her most mechanical, she can look like an angry mother in a Westworld beauty pageant hectoring the judges that her android teenage daughter didn’t stuff anything anywhere during the swimsuit competition.
The audio-visual team tried to complement the speech in real time by adding videos or slides repeating lines that Von der Leyen had just read. The slides felt useful, particularly if I had not caught a number. The videos often were distracting. At one point in the beginning, I found myself watching someone peel potatoes. Why am I watching potato-peeling?
The videos did work, however, when they showed journalists whom Von der Leyen had named as victims of government repression. Then, I knew what I was looking at, and the images reinforced the message.
Score: 7/10.
Structure
Any piece of rhetoric that calls itself a ‘state of the union’ speech is going to face what speechwriters call the Junkyard Challenge. The dilemma is that the speaker has a lot of different programmes – pieces of junk in the junkyard – that you have to mention, complete with terrible acronyms.
Worse still, these programmes tend to be backed up by keen bureaucratic interests that really want you, the speaker, to say exactly what they have often written about their special projects that they treat with the reverence normally given to baby messiahs. How do you string everything together in a way that listeners can understand?
There’s no way to solve this problem. It can, however, be managed. The key is to find some concept or metaphor that binds everything together. Von der Leyen’s concept came from a quote by Robert Schuman: ‘Europe needs a soul, an ideal, and the political will to serve this ideal.’ The concept of Europe’s soul is a powerful one, and as a unifying concept, it partly succeeds.
The speech starts with a perfectly acceptable introduction that celebrates the EU’s role in combating the pandemic while perhaps too-conveniently passing over the Commission’s initial hesitation and difficulties in that regard. Notably, she introduces a second unifying theme here: that of drawing ‘inspiration’ from ‘Europe’s young people.’ ‘Our youth put meaning into empathy and solidarity,’ she says.
I wanted to ask: what youngsters are you talking about, exactly? The ones I see on Spanish beaches or in Belgian parks are putting preening photos of their bulging bits on Instagram.
After a section urging global vaccinations, things start to get a little messy. We jump from celebrating the single market to urging a new ‘European Chips Act’, complete with the stirring invocation, ‘So let’s be bold… with semiconductors.’ (To the fair, the line receive applause.)
It’s the sort of dense, thicket-y stuff that speechwriters hate to deal with, but usually must. It slows the speech down tremendously.
From there, we push forward to sections on climate change and Afghanistan, but the links between them are tenuous at best. One problem is the repeated use of ‘Honourable Members’. Usually such a phrase signals to an audience that the speech is coming to an end, and audience members sigh with gratitude that the torture is almost over. But here, the phrase just means the start of a new section. One wonders if the ‘soul’ concept couldn’t have serve to create more elegant transitions.
The dense language took a toll on the audience’s attention span. Around the 27 minute mark, the camera caught a shot of an MEP surfing on his mobile phone.
Von der Leyen, however, ploughed through these sections with admirable determination.
Score: 6/10.
Rhetoric
In the short-term, a speech has only one judge: the audience and its reaction. The speaker can’t escape from this judgement, even if the speech’s makers often rationalise a poor reception. If the audience claps, laughs, or makes any other positive noises, the speech was probably a good one. If the audience hisses or boos, the speech was likely bad, or perhaps a provocation. If the audience remains quiet, your speech was merely boring – arguably, the harshest verdict.
Yes, in the longer term, critics can recognise a speech like the Gettysburg Address as a masterpiece, even if at the time, the audience’s response was lukewarm at best. But the ‘misunderstood genius’ defence rarely works.
Van der Leyen’s audience was among the more sympathetic, and she can’t receive many points for converting unbelievers. Her theme, overall, was one of self-celebration: hooray for us! And the audience responded as you would think: yes, hooray for us! I counted at least 17 applause lines, not including the sustained applause at the end.
A few lines rang dreadfully hollow. ‘We stand by the Afghan people,’ she solemnly declared. But I doubt that Afghans, standing some 7,000 kilometres away, felt the Commission’s presence.
But more often, signposts earned their applause: ‘human rights are not for sale at any price’, ‘the regime in Minsk has instrumentalised human beings’, ‘women must live without fear’, and ‘when we defend the media, we defend democracy’. Another line about defending the rule of law felt almost brave, given the right-wing Polish and Hungarian deputies in the room. And when she said that ‘under the French Presidency, President Macron and I will convene a Summit on European defence,’ I thought: oh, gosh golly gee! Did we just make news?!
But from this initially high score, we must subtract the clichés that take good speeches and make them dull. ‘Interoperability’ is the third-worst word in the English language (just after, in first place, ‘process’, and in second place, ‘the comprehensive approach’). Why not use words that mean something, like: ‘Help our militaries to work better together’? Anything that doesn’t sound like you’re talking about a robot orgy.
A few other problematic phrases popped here and there. I winced when, near the start, Von der Leyen said regarding the pandemic, ‘There are hearts we can never mend’. Wait, what? Physically or emotionally? The sentence reminded me of the Simpsons gag line, ‘They may say she died of a burst ventricle, but I know she died of a broken heart.’
Also, ‘a pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint.’ Ugh. How many times have transatlantic elites used this phrase to describe intractable problems? Just hearing it once more made me want to die of a broken heart while running up the Avenue de Tervueren in the Brussels 20k. Sorry, I mean of a burst ventricle.
Also, ‘our Union is both beautifully unique and uniquely beautiful.’ That’s a bad pick-up line. I may have heard it in The Wild Geese on a Thursday night, back in the day. Come to think of it, I might have said it.
Finally, a pet peeve. Regarding European defence integration, Von der Leyen said that all we need to do is correct ‘a lack of political will.’
I have never quite understood this phrase. It apparently describes things that member states don’t want to do, but the cliché doesn’t bother to tell the listener why. Member states won’t change their calculus of their own self-interest simply if one says, ‘Please stop not wanting to do something.’ A better approach would identify their concerns, and then propose ways that the Commission could address them.
Score: 7/10.
Applause lines minus clichés: 17 – 5 = 12 bonus points.
Final verdict
The best speeches are about confronting problems and proposing solutions that a community can implement together. So when I saw the Commission’s social media postings about this speech, I was initially fascinated. My early misreading was that Von der Leyen was suggesting that the Union was in danger of losing its soul. What an excellent way, I thought, to frame an urgent call for action.
Unfortunately, that’s not what she was suggesting. ‘I see a strong soul in everything that we do,’ she said. The gist was, nothing is lacking. But a great speech needs a lacking, a space, that it fills with a call to action. The moment was a missed opportunity to confront the lack of courage and vision that, in my view, is the EU’s greatest challenge.
The speech did partially redeem itself by giving us an example of a great soul at the end. I mean, of course, Von der Leyen’s guest, the Italian Paralympic athlete Beatrice Vio (pictured with Von der Leyen above). Her soul was big enough to serve as a stand-in for the speech’s. Such human stories are rhetorically more powerful than all the initiatives, acts, and money-shuffling put together. They give blood to bone.
Maybe in a later speech the Commission President might dare to suggest that the European Union has a soul to lose. She might even reveal a bit of her own soul, as well.
Total score: 7 (delivery) + 6 (structure) + 7 (rhetoric) = 20 out of 30; plus 12 bonus points, for an overall mark of 42. Below punchable Tony Blair, above sober Jean-Claude Juncker.