Leadership Quote by Jean-Pierre Raffarin

Raffarin is selling Europe as a cultural insurance policy, not just a currency zone. The move is savvy: instead of arguing for treaties, budgets, or institutional tinkering, he frames the EU as the last serious counterweight to a flattening global default. “We must defend it” turns diversity into something newly fragile, like a habitat under threat. The threat he names - “a single model, the Anglo-American model” - is less about passports than about pipelines: media, language, consumer brands, universities, management culture, even the rhythm of public life.

The subtext is a familiar French and European anxiety dressed up as pluralism. “Cultural diversity” sounds cosmopolitan, but it’s also code for protecting national languages and local cultural industries from being outcompeted by English and American scale. Raffarin implies that without a stronger Europe, individual countries can’t negotiate globalization on their own; they’ll be absorbed into a style of capitalism and culture that prizes speed, deregulation, and standardization.

Context matters: this is post-Cold War Europe, when “Americanization” stopped being an abstract fear and became everyday experience - Hollywood dominance, pop music monoculture, the rise of global tech. In that atmosphere, Europe can present itself as the only plausible third space: modern without being purely market-driven, open without being linguistically homogenized.

Rhetorically, it works by offering a binary: Europe or cultural monoculture. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s effective politics. It turns an institutional project into a civilizational choice, and it casts European integration as defensive solidarity rather than bureaucratic ambition.