Daily Inspiration Quote by Jan Peter Balkenende

Balkenende’s line is doing two jobs at once: naming a moral emergency and quietly selling a political architecture to manage it. “Terrorism is an evil” is blunt, almost liturgical language, the kind leaders reach for when they want to collapse complexity into clarity. “Evil” doesn’t argue; it indicts. It also moves the debate away from causes, grievances, and blowback, and toward obligation: if the threat is metaphysical, compromise can look like appeasement.

The phrase “threatens all the countries in Europe” is the key pivot. It frames terrorism as borderless by nature, which makes purely national solutions feel naive or even negligent. That sets up the real policy payload: “vigorous cooperation in the European Union and worldwide.” “Vigorous” is a pressure word. It signals urgency while giving cover for harder measures - intelligence sharing, harmonized surveillance powers, extradition agreements, tighter controls at the edges of Schengen. The subtext is that sovereignty, in this domain, is less a shield than a bottleneck.

Context matters: Balkenende governed in the post-9/11, Madrid, and London-bombings era, when Europe was trying to reconcile open internal borders with heightened security demands, and when Dutch politics were sharpening around integration and social cohesion. The line reassures a jittery public (“we see the danger”) while nudging skeptical audiences toward deeper EU and transatlantic alignment. “Meet this evil head on” is rhetorically muscular, but strategically vague - a promise of resolve without specifying costs, trade-offs, or whose liberties get negotiated along the way.