Leadership Quote by Jacques Santer

“A quota” lands here as both policy tool and political boogeyman: a word that suggests bureaucracy, distortion, and an outside hand on the scale. Jacques Santer’s line works because it smuggles a value judgment into a seemingly neutral observation. Calling quotas “artificial” doesn’t just describe them as constructed; it implies they’re unnatural, a meddling correction that violates how things are “supposed” to function. That single adjective quietly deputizes the market, tradition, or “merit” as the default truth, and casts intervention as temporary triage at best.

The second half - “can only last for a certain period of time” - is where the rhetoric sharpens. It reassures skeptics that even if quotas are adopted, they won’t become permanent entitlements. It’s also a preemptive strike against the common fear that once you engineer outcomes, you never stop engineering them. Santer frames quotas as a transitional device: useful only until the underlying system “fixes itself,” or until political consent runs out. That’s an argument designed to appeal to centrists and institutionalists who want reform without a lasting rearrangement of power.

Context matters: as a European politician and former President of the European Commission, Santer operated in a governance culture that’s constantly balancing harmonization with national sovereignty, technocratic rulemaking with democratic legitimacy. Quotas, in EU life, aren’t abstract; they’re flashpoints (agriculture, immigration, representation). Santer’s sentence doesn’t just critique quotas; it seeks to domesticate them - to make them palatable by insisting they’re temporary, controlled, and ultimately reversible.