Politics & Power Quote by Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Rasmussen’s line is diplomacy with a blade hidden in the velvet. By calling the Cold War order an “unhappy and artificial division,” he recasts the Iron Curtain not as a balance of power negotiated by states, but as a moral injury imposed on Europe’s “natural” body. That word “artificial” is doing heavy work: it implies history has a proper shape, and that Soviet influence was an unnatural interruption rather than a competing political project with its own local collaborators and complexities. The framing flatters Western institutions as restorative, not expansionist.

The phrase “dark chapter” is deliberately novelistic. It compresses forty years of varied lived experience into a single narrative unit: a period to be closed, not endlessly debated. That’s strategic. Memory politics in post-Communist Europe is contested terrain; invoking a “chapter” sidesteps messy questions about privatization shocks, nationalist revivals, and the uneven dividends of “returning to Europe.” It’s also an invitation to moral clarity at the moment when policy choices needed consent.

Most revealing is the pivot to “opportunity.” He’s not simply mourning the past; he’s manufacturing urgency. “Now” positions the audience at a hinge point, implying that hesitation risks prolonging the darkness. In the context of NATO and EU enlargement rhetoric, the line reads as a legitimizing script: expansion becomes closure, integration becomes healing, and geopolitics becomes therapy. Rasmussen isn’t just describing history; he’s claiming custody over its ending.