Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

Korten’s warning lands like a deliberately timed alarm: the EU isn’t just struggling with policy disputes, it’s flirting with a legitimacy crisis modeled on America’s own. The punch of the line comes from its calibrated ambiguity - “perceived or even real” - which is both an accusation and a strategic concession. He acknowledges that trust can collapse even if institutions are technically democratic, because democracy isn’t experienced in constitutions; it’s experienced as responsiveness, voice, and consequence.

As an activist, Korten’s intent isn’t neutral diagnosis. It’s mobilization through comparison. Invoking the US functions as a cultural shorthand for a system many associate with lobby capture, partisan gridlock, and distant elites who speak a different language than ordinary voters. The subtext is that the EU’s “democratic deficit” isn’t a niche concern for political scientists; it’s the kind of structural estrangement that feeds populism, conspiracy thinking, and exit fantasies. “Brussels” is doing rhetorical work here too: it becomes a metonym for technocracy, an administrative city-state imagined as insulated from everyday life.

Context matters. The EU is uniquely vulnerable to this critique because its power is real while its political theater is diffuse: complicated institutions, layered accountability, decisions mediated through councils and commissions that feel harder to “throw out” at election time. Korten presses on that weak seam. He’s less interested in whether the EU meets a formal democratic checklist than whether people feel it’s theirs - and he’s predicting that if the gap widens, procedural legitimacy won’t save it.