Leadership Quote by Aleksander Kwasniewski

“Ingredient” is doing quiet political work here. Aleksander Kwasniewski isn’t worshipping technology as destiny; he’s demoting it to something you mix in, measure, and, if necessary, leave out. For a politician who came of age in communist Poland and later led a country sprinting through post-1989 transition and into NATO and the EU, that framing matters. It’s a corrective to two seductive stories Central and Eastern Europe heard in the 1990s and early 2000s: the techno-utopian promise that digitization would automatically modernize society, and the more cynical belief that “modernization” is just a glossy label for inequality.

The double modal “may be and should be” signals a moral conditional. Technology can serve social development, but only if governments and institutions force the alignment. That’s the subtext: left to markets, hype cycles, or foreign vendors, tech becomes ornamental or extractive. As a “tool,” it implies human agency, but also accountability: tools have owners, designs, and intended uses. If outcomes are bad, you don’t blame the hammer; you ask who swung it, and why they built it that way.

Kwasniewski’s intent reads as pragmatic statecraft, aimed at publics both hopeful and wary. It’s a bid to legitimize investment in digital infrastructure and innovation while insisting that social policy has to steer it: education, access, public services, civic participation. The rhetoric is soothing on purpose: progress, yes; surrender to the machine, no.