Leadership Quote by Anna Lindh

Lindh is making globalisation sound less like an abstract force and more like a moral audit. The clever move is how she shifts responsibility sideways: not upward to distant institutions, but outward across society. Governments don’t get to hide behind sovereignty, companies can’t plead “just business,” and individuals aren’t allowed the comfortable fiction that citizenship ends at the ballot box. In a single breath, she redraws the map of accountability to match the borderless reality of capital, supply chains, and media.

The phrase “makes it clear” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It implies the debate is over; globalisation has already delivered its verdict. That certainty matters because the Millennium Development Goals were, at the time, both ambitious and vulnerable to becoming ceremonial language. By insisting that “all sources must interact,” Lindh is pre-empting the classic failure mode of development rhetoric: siloed action, where governments blame markets, markets blame regulation, and individuals outsource conscience to NGOs.

There’s also an unmistakable political context: early-2000s optimism about global cooperation collided with rising skepticism about globalisation’s winners and losers. Lindh, a Swedish foreign minister associated with internationalism and multilateralism, is defending a particular model of global order: one where legitimacy comes from shared obligations, not just shared trade. The subtext is pointed: in an interconnected world, opting out is itself a choice with consequences, and “responsibility” is the price of participation.