Leadership Quote by Jean-Pierre Raffarin

Raffarin’s line is less a civics lesson than a sales pitch for political amnesia. By declaring a “Europe of the 21st century,” he turns a complicated institutional project into a clean generational break: modern, flexible, future-facing. The point isn’t chronology; it’s permission. If this Europe is new, then old objections can be framed as outdated, even irresponsible, relics of a century that Europeans are eager to leave behind.

The subtext is defensive. The 20th century, in European memory, is a double exposure: catastrophic war and the postwar welfare-state settlement, plus the Cold War order that made “Europe” synonymous with peace through interdependence. Raffarin borrows the moral gravity of that history while refusing to be bound by it. He invites listeners to keep the feel-good storyline (integration equals progress) and drop the specifics that trigger anxiety: sovereignty, borders, labor protections, democratic accountability. Saying what Europe is not becomes a way to avoid detailing what it will demand.

Context matters: Raffarin governed in the early 2000s, when EU enlargement, the proposed constitutional treaty, and debates over neoliberal reform were colliding with public skepticism. “21st century” functions as a rhetorical upgrade, like software, implying that integration is inevitable and opposition is a kind of lag. It’s clever politics: he shifts the argument from substance to symbolism, asking citizens to vote not for a policy architecture, but for a self-image - modern Europeans, not haunted 20th-century ones.