War & Peace Quote by Horst Koehler

Security hawks love a clean story: more surveillance, more agents, more power, fewer threats. Koehler’s line refuses that comfort. The first clause nods to the post-9/11 reflex - strengthen the secret services - then undercuts it with a pivot that’s both moral and strategic. Terrorism isn’t treated as a technical glitch to be patched with intelligence budgets; it’s framed as a social and political problem that feeds on alienation, humiliation, and misrecognition across borders.

The intent is policy-balancing, but the subtext is sharper: state power can’t substitute for legitimacy. “Secret services” carries the necessary chill of the unseen state, a reminder that counterterrorism tends to expand into citizens’ lives and minority communities first. By pairing that apparatus with “dialogue between cultures,” Koehler isn’t doing feel-good multiculturalism; he’s trying to deny extremists their favorite fuel: the claim that the West only understands force. Dialogue becomes a defensive technology, a way to drain the narrative oxygen from “clash of civilizations” politics.

Context matters. As a German statesman in an era of globalized insecurity, Koehler is speaking to a country with deep historical reasons to be wary of unchecked security agencies, and a contemporary reality of immigration, integration debates, and rising suspicion. The sentence is built like a containment strategy: yes to protection, but not at the cost of turning pluralistic society into a fortress. It’s a wager that the long game against terror is fought as much in civic trust and cross-cultural recognition as in classified files.