Politics & Power Quote by Elihu Root

Globalization, for Root, is not just steamships and telegraphs; it is the slow birth of an audience - and audiences, he implies, become juries. The line “coming to be of interest everywhere” sounds neutral, even inevitable, but it smuggles in a harder claim: once the world is watching, sovereignty stops being a private room. Nations may still act alone, yet they can no longer pretend their actions are nobody else’s business.

Root’s legal mind shows in the framing. He doesn’t invoke armies or destiny; he invokes “judgment,” a word that recasts geopolitics as a courtroom with an expanding gallery. “Thoughtful men and women” is doing heavy work, too. It flatters a transnational class of educated observers - diplomats, journalists, reformers, professors - and quietly narrows whose opinions count as “world opinion.” This isn’t democracy; it’s credentialed moral scrutiny, an early 20th-century faith that rational public judgment can discipline power.

The context is a moment when international law and arbitration were being pitched as modern tools to manage imperial competition and prevent catastrophe. Root, a U.S. statesman-lawyer associated with the Hague movement and institutional diplomacy, is selling a new kind of constraint: reputational and legal pressure, not just force. The subtext is both idealistic and strategic. If conduct is judged everywhere, then legitimacy becomes a weapon - and a shield - especially for rising powers that want rules to matter when raw might is unevenly distributed.