"We can't put up a protectionist dam on our own against the neo-liberal world market either. However, we can try, together with our European partners, to maintain the social character of Europe as much as possible"
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A “protectionist dam” is an image designed to puncture a comforting fantasy: that a nation can simply wall itself off from the tides of global capitalism and stay morally intact. Huizinga frames the “neo-liberal world market” as something more like weather than an opponent you can outfight. The intent isn’t to celebrate inevitability; it’s to discipline political imagination. He’s telling his audience to stop pretending sovereignty is a magic lever and start thinking in scale.
The subtext is a trade: if you want to preserve a “social character” (welfare protections, labor standards, public goods, a sense that markets answer to society rather than the reverse), you may have to surrender a bit of national bravado. “Together with our European partners” isn’t technocratic boilerplate; it’s the argument’s keystone. Social democracy, in this view, isn’t merely a domestic policy menu. It’s a collective bargaining position. A lone country trying to regulate capital gets punished by capital’s mobility; a bloc can set terms.
Context sharpens the edge. Huizinga, a historian of culture watching Europe’s foundations tremble in the early 20th century, understood how quickly economic pressures can curdle into political extremism. His language anticipates the later European project’s core dilemma: integration as both shield and constraint. The line “as much as possible” is the sober tell. He isn’t promising salvation, only damage control - an appeal to pragmatic solidarity in an era when purity politics, whether nationalist or market-fundamentalist, tends to win applause and lose the future.
The subtext is a trade: if you want to preserve a “social character” (welfare protections, labor standards, public goods, a sense that markets answer to society rather than the reverse), you may have to surrender a bit of national bravado. “Together with our European partners” isn’t technocratic boilerplate; it’s the argument’s keystone. Social democracy, in this view, isn’t merely a domestic policy menu. It’s a collective bargaining position. A lone country trying to regulate capital gets punished by capital’s mobility; a bloc can set terms.
Context sharpens the edge. Huizinga, a historian of culture watching Europe’s foundations tremble in the early 20th century, understood how quickly economic pressures can curdle into political extremism. His language anticipates the later European project’s core dilemma: integration as both shield and constraint. The line “as much as possible” is the sober tell. He isn’t promising salvation, only damage control - an appeal to pragmatic solidarity in an era when purity politics, whether nationalist or market-fundamentalist, tends to win applause and lose the future.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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