Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

There is a quiet rebuke baked into de Vries's tidy bureaucratic sentence: if the threat has gone global, your instincts for sovereignty and secrecy are already obsolete. Calling it an "international phenomenon" sidesteps the drama of naming a specific enemy, which is itself a political move. It widens the target to include terrorism, cybercrime, pandemics, trafficking - any crisis that treats borders like speed bumps - and it flatters policymakers who prefer technocratic language to moral crusades. The real punchline is in "indispensable": this isn't a nice-to-have, it's the price of admission to modern security.

The subtext is an argument against the parochial reflex that still dominates national politics: hoard intelligence, protect sources, avoid accountability, let allies do the messy sharing first. De Vries frames cooperation not as altruism but as self-preservation, an attempt to make the unglamorous work of data exchange sound as urgent as boots on the ground. It's also a subtle nudge at the European project, where the promise of open borders (Schengen) creates a matching demand for shared policing and intelligence. Freedom of movement without information movement becomes a security gap.

Context matters: as a politician shaped by post-9/11 counterterrorism debates and EU coordination, de Vries is speaking into a world where threats scale faster than institutions. The line works because it reduces a fraught political tradeoff - privacy versus security, national control versus collective action - into a practical inevitability. You can keep your border myths, he implies, but reality will invoice you anyway.