Justice & Law Quote by Gijs de Vries

The tell is in the word "integrated": a soothing, managerial adjective doing heavy political work. Gijs de Vries is selling a vision of security where borders are no longer a line on a map but a logic that seeps into the domestic sphere. By pairing "outside" and "within", he collapses foreign threat and internal risk into a single continuum, then treats that continuum as something the state can render legible: a "picture", cleanly composed, presumably actionable. It is rhetoric designed to make an expanded security apparatus feel like basic competence.

The second move is bureaucratic triangulation. Information is "provided" not just to foreign ministers (the traditional custodians of external relations) but to justice and interior ministers, the political stewards of policing, surveillance, and prosecution. The subtext is a transfer of gravity: counterterrorism and national security are not merely diplomatic problems, they're governance problems, warranting legal tools and internal controls. It normalizes the idea that intelligence should travel seamlessly across ministries, and by implication, across the firewall that liberal democracies often claim to maintain between external defense and internal liberties.

Contextually, de Vries is speaking from the post-9/11 European moment, when the EU was building counterterror structures and "security coordination" became a politically saleable shorthand for doing more, faster. The sentence performs reassurance while quietly expanding mandate: if the threat is everywhere, then the response must be everywhere too, and the machinery of the state should run as one.