Leadership Quote by Peter Mandelson

The sly power of Mandelson's "Firstly" is that it’s a tell: this isn’t a reflection, it’s a briefing. He’s signaling sequence, authority, and a coming argument in which the listener is expected to follow the logic like steps on a staircase. That’s pure EU-era political rhetoric, built less for poetry than for persuasion under fluorescent lights.

The key move is the phrase "take for granted". It sounds like praise for European achievement, but it’s really a gentle rebuke aimed at a fatigued public. Mandelson is diagnosing a communications failure: the European Union has done something structurally enormous, and citizens treat it like background infrastructure. The subtext is that the EU’s legitimacy problem isn’t just policy; it’s narrative. If people don’t feel the scale of what’s been built, they’re easier to seduce with simpler stories about sovereignty, borders, and taking back control.

Calling it "the biggest economic space in the world" is deliberate framing. "Space" is technocratic, almost frictionless, a term that turns messy political integration into a neutral fact of geography. It’s also a flex intended to re-center the EU in a global context: not a bureaucratic nuisance but a bloc with weight against the US and China. In the late-1990s/2000s Mandelson world - single market triumphalism, trade negotiations, globalization anxiety - this line functions as a reminder that Europe’s real power often looks boring, which is exactly why it’s politically vulnerable.