Politics & Power Quote by Georgios A. Papandreou

“Europe has a lot of strength” is the kind of reassurance a politician reaches for when the ground is visibly shaking. Papandreou isn’t praising Europe as it is; he’s selling Europe as a solution. The key word is “pool”: strength here isn’t a romantic notion of shared identity, it’s a balance-sheet idea. The subtext is that individual European states, especially smaller or indebted ones, don’t really “have” strength in a global economy unless they can borrow it, leverage it, and insure it through collective institutions.

Papandreou’s era makes the line read less like idealism and more like triage. As Greece’s prime minister during the eurozone crisis, he faced a brutal paradox: the country needed European solidarity, but that solidarity came with conditions that felt like a loss of sovereignty at home. Calling for “a deeper political union” is an attempt to legitimize what was already happening in practice - coordinated fiscal oversight, bailout mechanisms, and the quiet transfer of decision-making power upward - by framing it as a choice rather than an imposition.

The phrase “very much in favour” is also doing work: it telegraphs moderation, voluntarism, and reasonableness, even as the implied alternative is fragmentation and decline. Underneath the consensus language sits a sharper message: monetary union without political union is a fragile bargain. If Europe wants the euro to function like a real currency, it needs the political machinery - shared rules, shared risk, shared accountability - that turns pooled strength into enforceable capacity.