"If the constitutional treaty is rejected it will be back to square one, just at a time when we want Europe to be a more effective force for good in the world, when we need to buttress ourselves against the pressures and insecurities of globalization"
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“Back to square one” is the kind of weary, managerial warning that only a veteran of Brussels trench warfare can deliver with a straight face. Mandelson isn’t selling a constitutional treaty on romance or destiny; he’s selling it as insurance against drift. The intent is blunt: reject this deal and you don’t get a cleaner, better version next week - you get paralysis, re-litigation, and a Europe that can’t coordinate even when the world is forcing coordination.
The subtext is where the rhetoric does its real work. By pairing “a more effective force for good” with “buttress ourselves,” Mandelson fuses moral ambition and self-protection, turning a technocratic project into a story about survival and relevance. “Force for good” flatters European self-image - humanitarian, rules-based, post-imperial - while “pressures and insecurities of globalization” quietly names the electorate’s anxieties without itemizing them: jobs moving, borders thinning, identity fraying, security threats mutating. It’s a permission structure for integration: you’re not surrendering sovereignty, you’re pooling it so you don’t get shoved around.
Context matters: this is the early-2000s moment when the EU was enlarging, the euro was still a promise of heft, and the Constitutional Treaty was pitched as the upgrade that would let a bigger Europe act like a single actor. Mandelson’s bet is that fear of irrelevance can do what idealism can’t: discipline fractious nations into ratifying a common architecture. It’s persuasion by foreclosed alternatives - not utopia, just the cost of standing still.
The subtext is where the rhetoric does its real work. By pairing “a more effective force for good” with “buttress ourselves,” Mandelson fuses moral ambition and self-protection, turning a technocratic project into a story about survival and relevance. “Force for good” flatters European self-image - humanitarian, rules-based, post-imperial - while “pressures and insecurities of globalization” quietly names the electorate’s anxieties without itemizing them: jobs moving, borders thinning, identity fraying, security threats mutating. It’s a permission structure for integration: you’re not surrendering sovereignty, you’re pooling it so you don’t get shoved around.
Context matters: this is the early-2000s moment when the EU was enlarging, the euro was still a promise of heft, and the Constitutional Treaty was pitched as the upgrade that would let a bigger Europe act like a single actor. Mandelson’s bet is that fear of irrelevance can do what idealism can’t: discipline fractious nations into ratifying a common architecture. It’s persuasion by foreclosed alternatives - not utopia, just the cost of standing still.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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