Time & Perspective Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Lange is slicing apart a feel-good pairing that still flatters itself in policy circles: pacifism as automatically cosmopolitan, internationalism as automatically peaceable. The dash-heavy cadence does two things at once. It concedes the “nowadays” common sense - the modern assumption that rejecting war means embracing cross-border institutions - then swivels to a colder historical reminder. He’s not praising a nobler past. He’s warning that ideas we treat as moral twins are, in practice, convenient roommates.

The intent is diagnostic, almost administrative: don’t build a peace program on sociological trends. “History shows us” is doing diplomatic work; it lets him contradict his own era without sounding like he’s sneering at it. A pacifist “need not think internationally” is a polite way of saying pacifism can be parochial, even selfish: opposition to war because it’s costly, disruptive, or morally troubling at home, not because one recognizes obligations to others abroad. It’s a critique of inward-facing peace politics that can slide into isolationism, leaving international crises to burn as long as the smoke doesn’t drift over the border.

Context matters: Lange was a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1921), writing in a Europe reorganizing itself after World War I, when the League of Nations was the big bet on internationalism as a technology for peace. His line reads like a warning to the League’s supporters: if you want durable peace, you can’t assume the “anti-war” public will also buy the harder sell - shared sovereignty, collective security, and responsibility for conflicts that aren’t “ours.”