Leadership Quote by Anna Lindh

A Swedish foreign minister in the early 2000s, Anna Lindh is speaking in the sober register of consequence: trade policy as moral test, not technocratic housekeeping. The sentence reads like diplomatic boilerplate, but its pressure points are carefully chosen. “Must” is doing the heavy lifting, turning what rich countries often frame as charity into obligation. “Open their markets” isn’t a feel-good pledge of partnership; it’s a demand to dismantle the quiet architecture of protectionism - tariffs, quotas, agricultural subsidies - that lets wealthy states preach globalization while insulating politically sensitive sectors at home.

The pairing of “developed countries and advanced developing countries” widens the target. Lindh is nudging newly powerful economies to stop acting like perpetual underdogs once they’ve gained leverage. It’s a subtle coalition-building move: the “developing world” isn’t a single bloc, and she’s trying to prevent middle powers from reproducing the same gatekeeping they once condemned.

Then comes the second clause, where the subtext turns from access to capability. Market opening alone can be a trap if countries lack ports, standards compliance, financing, customs systems, or negotiating expertise. By naming “export and import capacity,” Lindh is gesturing at the unglamorous plumbing of trade - logistics, institutions, and know-how - and implying that fairness requires investment, not just applause for free markets.

The context is the post-Cold War, WTO-era promise that trade would narrow inequality, colliding with reality: rules written by the strong, with development offered as a future tense. Lindh’s intent is to make that promise binding, measurable, and shared.