Leadership Quote by Jean-Pierre Raffarin

Raffarin’s line has the tidy, almost childlike geometry of a civics diagram: six founding countries, neatly sorted into “small” and “large.” That simplicity is the point. It compresses the origin story of European integration into a political reassurance: the project wasn’t born as a club of giants, nor as a fragile alliance of minnows, but as a deliberately mixed ecosystem where size had to coexist with shared rules.

The subtext is about power management. By foregrounding a balanced starting lineup, Raffarin implies that today’s EU tensions about dominance, vetoes, budget discipline, and influence aren’t a bug; they’re the founding condition. The “three and three” cadence is doing rhetorical work, turning an uneven reality into a symmetrical founding myth. It suggests legitimacy through equilibrium: the big states were present to confer weight and capacity, the small states to confer restraint and pluralism.

Context matters: Raffarin, a French conservative who served as prime minister in the early 2000s, spoke from a France anxious about enlargement and institutional reform. In that era, the EU was expanding eastward and renegotiating how decisions get made. Invoking the original six (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg) is a way to pull the argument back to first principles and to remind listeners that Europe’s DNA includes both scale and compromise.

It works because it’s anodyne on the surface and quietly prescriptive underneath: Europe functions when the large accept limits and the small accept interdependence.