Justice & Law Quote by Tarja Halonen

"Freedom" is the word politicians love because it sounds like oxygen: necessary, obvious, beyond dispute. Tarja Halonen’s move is to deny it that comfort. By insisting that EU freedom cannot be "the freedom of the strong", she points at the union’s permanent temptation: to market integration and open borders as liberation while quietly tolerating a hierarchy of winners and managed losers.

Halonen, a Finnish social democrat and former president, is speaking from a small-state vantage point inside a bloc where power is unevenly distributed. The subtext is institutional as much as moral. In an EU built on rules, the question is whose rules, enforced on whom, and with what safety net. Her phrase "combined with fraternity and equality" is doing heavy lifting: it drags "freedom" away from its neoliberal default (choice, competition, mobility for those who can afford it) and back toward the French Revolutionary trio that the EU name-checks more often than it operationalizes.

The context matters: the EU’s self-description as a "region of freedom, security and justice" comes from treaty language, a rhetorical blend meant to reassure citizens that integration isn’t just a market, it’s a polity. Halonen tests that claim. Security without solidarity becomes suspicion; justice without equality becomes procedural window-dressing; freedom without fraternity becomes permission for the already powerful - richer member states, employers, majorities - to define the terms of movement, labor, and belonging.

It works because it reframes the EU’s legitimacy problem as an ethical one: the union doesn’t fail only when it’s inefficient, but when it lets "freedom" become a euphemism for advantage.