War & Peace Quote by Jan Peter Balkenende

Memory is doing the hard work of politics here. Balkenende is pointing at a demographic fact - the wartime generation is dying - but he is really diagnosing a civic vulnerability: when lived experience fades, the story of how Europe became "normal" turns into background noise. Liberty, peace, prosperity start reading like Europe’s natural climate rather than a fragile settlement stitched together from ruin, occupation, collaboration, resistance, and moral compromise.

His phrasing is deliberately paternal without being sentimental. "Disappearing" has a quiet finality to it, a reminder that eyewitness authority can’t be renewed. Then comes the key move: "as a given". That’s not just a description of youthful ignorance; it’s a warning about political complacency. If achievements are treated as default settings, they won’t be defended when they become costly. The subtext is aimed at voters who balk at supranational institutions, collective defense, or the bureaucratic grind of the EU: you may find the maintenance boring, but the alternative is not.

Context matters. Balkenende, a Dutch Christian Democrat, speaks from a tradition that treats European integration as a moral project as much as an economic one - peace through interdependence, prosperity through rules, liberty through shared norms. The quote also carries a quiet critique of postwar consumer confidence: a generation raised inside stability can mistake it for destiny.

It works rhetorically because it turns nostalgia into urgency. He’s not asking for reverence; he’s asking for historical imagination - the ability to see today’s comforts as political achievements that can, under pressure, be reversed.