Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Delors

Delors isn’t reaching for poetry here; he’s laying track. “Therefore” does heavy lifting, implying a prior argument already won: the old vocabulary of belonging is insufficient for what Europe is trying to become. The line reads like a policy memo, but its real target is emotional and political habit. He’s asking Europeans to tolerate a double identity without treating it as a betrayal.

The phrasing “at the same time” is the tell. It’s a preemptive strike against the zero-sum story that integration inevitably dissolves the nation-state. Delors, the economist-architect of the Single Market era, understood that treaties and trade rules don’t travel far unless people can narrate them as legitimate. “Wider European citizenship” isn’t just administrative; it’s an attempt to manufacture consent for shared institutions by giving them a civic wrapper: rights, mobility, protections, a sense of stake.

The subtext is also defensive. In the late 20th-century project of European integration, sovereignty was the sacred cow and the permanent obstacle. Delors offers a compromise: keep the national myth, add a second layer that makes interdependence feel like choice rather than coercion. The word “wider” flatters without threatening; it suggests expansion, not replacement.

Contextually, this is the rhetorical bridge between market integration and democratic legitimacy: if capital and labor can cross borders, citizenship has to follow, or the whole endeavor looks like technocracy dressed up as destiny.