Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

There is a quiet rebuke baked into Lange's phrasing: “earlier ages” didn’t simply build institutions, they “fortified themselves,” as if politics were a permanent siege. The verb turns the sovereign state from a neutral container of citizenship into a defensive architecture - walls, moats, watchtowers. Protectionism and militarism appear not as separate policies but as companion strategies, the economic tariff and the standing army serving the same psychological need: the belief that safety is manufactured by exclusion.

Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate associated with interwar internationalism, is speaking from a Europe that had watched nationalism harden into catastrophe. The line is calibrated to puncture nostalgia. It refuses the comforting story that the old order was stable and therefore wise. Instead, it implies that stability was often the byproduct of coercion and fear, not enlightened governance. “Sovereign state” is doing double duty: it’s a description of the dominant political unit, and a critique of the way sovereignty can become a fetish - treated as an end in itself rather than a tool for human welfare.

The subtext is also strategic: if past societies hid behind barriers, the present should interrogate its own reflexes. Lange frames protectionism and militarism as habits of retreat, not strength. For an audience tempted to re-armor after war and economic shock, he offers a moral diagnosis: the bunker mentality is politically convenient, emotionally seductive, and historically expensive.