Politics & Power Quote by John Charles Polanyi

There is a scientist's quiet persuasion in Polanyi's phrasing: he doesn't argue that global responsibility exists, he treats it as empirically "unmistakable", something you can detect the way you detect a signal rising above background noise. That rhetorical move matters. It shifts "international responsibility" from aspirational slogan to observable trend, inviting the reader to trust the claim as measurement rather than moralizing.

The sentence also performs a careful rebalancing of authority. By pairing the United Nations with "civil society" and "thousands of supra-national NGOs", Polanyi widens the chorus beyond governments, implying that legitimacy is migrating from state power to networked institutions. "Voices" is doing heavy lifting here: it suggests pluralism, debate, even dissent, while still converging on a shared ethic. It's a subtle antidote to the cynic's view of the UN as empty theater, and to the nationalist's suspicion that sovereignty is the only real political currency.

Context is key: Polanyi came of age in the shadow of world war and nuclear anxiety, and later wrote frequently about ethical responsibility in science. Read that way, the quote is less celebratory than diagnostic: global problems (weapons, climate, pandemics) are too large for the old Westphalian script. The subtext is a challenge to the listener: if responsibility is now "shared" and already audible in institutions and NGOs, opting out starts to look less like principled independence and more like willful denial of the evidence.