"We must take care that globalization does not become something people become afraid of"
About this Quote
Globalization is framed here less as an economic fact than as a political mood swing waiting to happen. Schroder’s line is a warning to the governing class: the project can survive spreadsheets and treaties; it can’t survive a public that associates “global” with loss of control. The careful phrasing matters. “We must take care” signals stewardship, not crusade. It’s managerial language for an era when leaders sold integration as inevitability, then discovered inevitability is a terrible campaign message.
The subtext is defensive: globalization, by the early 2000s, was already accumulating enemies. In Germany, Schroder’s Agenda 2010 reforms sharpened anxieties about jobs, wages, and the social state. Across Europe, EU expansion, outsourcing, and migration were turning “openness” into a cultural stress test. So he shifts the debate from whether globalization is good to whether it is frightening. That’s a shrewd pivot. Fear is the emotion that turns policy into identity, economics into resentment, and technocracy into populist fuel.
What makes the quote work rhetorically is its quiet admission that legitimacy is conditional. Globalization isn’t cast as a moral destiny; it’s a fragile consensus that needs cushioning: social protections, retraining, rules that look fair, and leaders who can narrate change without insulting the losers. Schroder isn’t romanticizing a borderless world. He’s protecting a governing order from its own blind spot: treating dislocation as a rounding error until voters make it the headline.
The subtext is defensive: globalization, by the early 2000s, was already accumulating enemies. In Germany, Schroder’s Agenda 2010 reforms sharpened anxieties about jobs, wages, and the social state. Across Europe, EU expansion, outsourcing, and migration were turning “openness” into a cultural stress test. So he shifts the debate from whether globalization is good to whether it is frightening. That’s a shrewd pivot. Fear is the emotion that turns policy into identity, economics into resentment, and technocracy into populist fuel.
What makes the quote work rhetorically is its quiet admission that legitimacy is conditional. Globalization isn’t cast as a moral destiny; it’s a fragile consensus that needs cushioning: social protections, retraining, rules that look fair, and leaders who can narrate change without insulting the losers. Schroder isn’t romanticizing a borderless world. He’s protecting a governing order from its own blind spot: treating dislocation as a rounding error until voters make it the headline.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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