Leadership Quote by Jacques Santer

Protectionism always sells itself as tough love: wall off the home team, punish outsiders, watch national industry bloom. Jacques Santer’s line punctures that comforting story with the calm, technocratic bluntness of a European integrationist. “You don’t help your enterprise” is a deliberate narrowing of the frame. He’s not making a moral plea about global solidarity; he’s making an efficiency argument aimed at business-minded skeptics who think tariffs are a shortcut to competitiveness.

The subtext is that “protection” protects more than it produces. Shield a sector from competition and you can end up subsidizing complacency: higher input costs, weaker incentives to innovate, and an industry trained to lobby rather than upgrade. The word “enterprise” matters because it’s both the firm and the larger project. In Santer’s world, enterprise is also Europe itself: the EU as a shared economic venture that lives or dies by frictionless trade.

Context does a lot of work here. Santer rose through Christian-democratic politics in Luxembourg and became President of the European Commission in the mid-1990s, when the Single Market and the new WTO order were reshaping trade rules, and the euro project was gathering momentum. In that era, protectionism wasn’t just bad economics; it was a threat to the EU’s founding logic. The line is rhetorically spare because it’s meant to sound like a practical memo, not a crusade: if you want competitive companies, don’t wrap them in bubble wrap.