Politics & Power Quote by Fredrik Bajer

A peace movement that starts policing its own borders is already losing the war it claims to be fighting. Fredrik Bajer, a 19th-century Danish pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, puts his finger on a failure mode that feels almost modern: the slide from coalition-building into moral gatekeeping. His test for drift is not whether the association still talks about peace, but whether it can still tolerate the messy pluralism required to get there.

The phrasing is quietly surgical. “A sign” frames sectarianism as a symptom, not a principle. “Going adrift” suggests an organization no longer steered by outcomes but by identity, afloat on purity and internal consensus. The sharpest turn is “exclusion of other political parties” paired with the pragmatic jab that collaboration would work “effectively on most of the problems.” Bajer is puncturing the comforting fantasy that peace can be pursued as a standalone virtue, detached from policy fights over budgets, militarism, education, labor, nationalism, and empire. Those are political problems; peace associations that refuse politics end up practicing a politics of refusal.

The subtext is a warning against the seductive coherence of an in-group. Movements love the clarity of enemies and the thrill of being uncompromised. Bajer argues that this clarity is a trap: if your peace organization can’t sit at a table with imperfect allies, it will end up as a club for the already convinced, mistaking exclusion for integrity. In an era of party formation, rising nationalism, and mass politics, he’s insisting that the cause of peace is too big to be treated as a factional brand.