Time & Perspective Quote by Jean-Pierre Raffarin

The line lands with the bluntness of a credential check, but its real work is defensive. Raffarin isn’t offering a dazzling idea; he’s establishing standing. “I was a Member” is a pre-emptive move in a political culture where legitimacy is constantly contested: you can disagree with me, the subtext goes, but you can’t say I don’t know how the machine runs.

The phrasing is tellingly generic. “A lot of European laws and treaties” avoids naming anything concrete, which is precisely the point. It signals proximity to power without inviting scrutiny of specifics. In EU debates, the details are where arguments get lost or exposed; vagueness keeps the speaker on the safe side of expertise while remaining accessible to a general audience that may not track the difference between regulations, directives, and treaties.

Contextually, this kind of statement often appears when politicians are asked to justify a stance on European integration, sovereignty, or “Brussels.” Raffarin, as a French center-right figure shaped by both national politics and the EU project, uses personal experience as a surrogate for evidence. It’s an appeal to ethos over logos: trust my testimony rather than audit the text.

What makes it effective is its quiet insinuation about the EU itself. The sentence casts European governance as something you “see” up close - dense, technocratic, treaty-bound. It reassures skeptics that someone has been inside the labyrinth, while reassuring institutionalists that he’s fluent in the rituals of legitimacy.