Leadership Quote by Anna Lindh

Lindh’s sentence is a diplomat’s tightrope walk: reassurance up front, alarm bell underneath. “This is not bad” functions like a seatbelt click before impact, acknowledging globalisation’s benefits while refusing the triumphalist story that trade and integration automatically equal progress. The real punch lands in the engineering metaphor that follows. Globalisation isn’t framed as ideology or fate; it’s velocity. Systems have “capacity,” “adjust,” and can be overwhelmed. That language quietly shifts blame away from ordinary people who feel dislocated and toward institutions that were built for a slower, more nationally bounded era.

The subtext is a warning about legitimacy. When integration outpaces governance, politics fills with friction: jobs migrate faster than safety nets, capital moves faster than regulation, pandemics and financial shocks travel faster than any single parliament can respond. Lindh is arguing that backlash isn’t an irrational tantrum against modernity; it’s a predictable response to mismatch. She implies that the crisis is managerial but also moral: interdependence without shared rules produces winners with mobility and losers with borders.

Context matters. Speaking as a Swedish foreign minister in the post-Cold War, pre-2008 optimism, Lindh is reading the early tremors of what would become a defining storyline of the 21st century: global markets with thin global politics. The intent isn’t to slow the world down; it’s to build institutions - European and international - sturdy enough to keep speed from turning into instability.