"So that we focus not on competing visions for Europe but on what Europe can do to improve economic growth, to give us a cleaner environment, to create more jobs, to make us more secure"
About this Quote
A tidy list of technocratic virtues - growth, green policy, jobs, security - becomes a way of dodging the messier question of what Europe is for. John Hutton’s sentence is built like a managerial memo: replace “competing visions” with deliverables, swap political argument for performance indicators. The grammar does the political work. “So that we focus not on...” frames disagreement as distraction, a kind of indulgence Europe can’t afford. In one move, ideology is recast as inefficiency.
That’s the subtext: Europe’s legitimacy should be measured by outputs, not identity. It’s a classic late-2000s/early-2010s Euro-argument, shaped by enlargement, the constitutional hangover, and the gathering pressure of economic instability and security anxiety. When publics are fracturing and institutions look remote, leaders and policy advocates often reach for utility: if you can’t sell a shared story, sell services. The promise is pragmatic competence: Europe as tool-kit rather than destiny.
The line also sneaks in a moral hierarchy. “Competing visions” are implicitly parochial or divisive; “cleaner environment” and “more secure” sound like neutral goods, beyond faction. But those goals are not apolitical - every one of them contains trade-offs (regulation versus growth, liberty versus security, national industry versus shared rules). The rhetorical trick is to treat outcomes as consensual and the arguments about how to reach them as optional noise.
As an educator’s cadence, it teaches a lesson: stop debating the syllabus, start grading results. The risk is that democracy becomes customer service, and when the service disappoints, there’s no larger purpose left to defend.
That’s the subtext: Europe’s legitimacy should be measured by outputs, not identity. It’s a classic late-2000s/early-2010s Euro-argument, shaped by enlargement, the constitutional hangover, and the gathering pressure of economic instability and security anxiety. When publics are fracturing and institutions look remote, leaders and policy advocates often reach for utility: if you can’t sell a shared story, sell services. The promise is pragmatic competence: Europe as tool-kit rather than destiny.
The line also sneaks in a moral hierarchy. “Competing visions” are implicitly parochial or divisive; “cleaner environment” and “more secure” sound like neutral goods, beyond faction. But those goals are not apolitical - every one of them contains trade-offs (regulation versus growth, liberty versus security, national industry versus shared rules). The rhetorical trick is to treat outcomes as consensual and the arguments about how to reach them as optional noise.
As an educator’s cadence, it teaches a lesson: stop debating the syllabus, start grading results. The risk is that democracy becomes customer service, and when the service disappoints, there’s no larger purpose left to defend.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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