Leadership Quote by Jacques Santer

A line like this is the velvet glove over a hard knuckle: Europe’s integration isn’t mainly a romance of shared values, it’s an exercise in managing veto points. When Jacques Santer talks about a “Union of 15,” he’s locating the European project in its mid-1990s reality, when the EU had grown large enough that easy consensus became structurally impossible. The sentence performs bureaucratic modesty while smuggling in a warning: enlargement turns governing into choreography.

The intent is practical and political. Santer, a consensus-oriented Commission president, frames decision-making as sensitivity rather than power. That’s not accidental. “Sensibilities” is a soothing word that recasts national interests, domestic anxieties, and political red lines as feelings to be respected. It flatters member states as partners rather than rivals, while quietly justifying slower, more cautious policymaking. If progress stalls, the implication goes, it’s not incompetence; it’s democratic complexity.

The subtext is also defensive. A Commission head is always negotiating legitimacy: too forceful and he feeds the caricature of Brussels as overreaching; too passive and he looks irrelevant. This phrasing splits the difference, presenting the Commission as mediator, not monarch.

Context matters because “15” is a snapshot before the big eastward expansions and the euro’s growing pains fully hit. Read now, it sounds almost quaint. Yet it nails a lasting EU truth: the more the club grows, the more governance becomes the art of making everyone feel heard even when someone has to lose.