War & Peace Quote by Jan Peter Balkenende

Balkenende is warning that peace has a half-life. By stacking images of twentieth-century trauma - “horrors,” “chilling winds,” “crushing weight” - he builds a visceral weather report of European history: violence, then dread, then suffocation. The rhetoric is deliberately physical because his real target is something abstract and slippery: complacency.

The pivot comes fast. Those epochal threats are “little more than fading memories,” and that phrase does double duty. It flatters a postwar generation for having escaped catastrophe while quietly accusing it of historical amnesia. The subtext is political: when existential pressure eases, democratic habits stop feeling like choices and start feeling like background noise. “Ideals that once commanded great loyalty” gestures toward the post-1945 settlement - liberal democracy, transatlantic cooperation, European integration - without naming any of it. That vagueness is strategic. Naming institutions invites partisan debate; naming “ideals” lets him claim the moral high ground and recruit a broader audience into a shared anxiety.

Context matters: as a Dutch prime minister in the 2000s, Balkenende was speaking from inside an EU that had grown richer, safer, and more internally skeptical. The Iron Curtain was gone; new fault lines were appearing - populism, terrorism fears, debates over sovereignty and multiculturalism. His line is less nostalgia than a call to re-politicize what success has made invisible. Taken for granted is the danger signal: not that people reject those ideals, but that they forget the costs that purchased them, and therefore stop paying what it takes to keep them.