Politics & Power Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Nationalist economic isolationism and militarism show up here as a coupled reflex: when a nation walls off trade and finance, it often reaches for force to keep those walls standing. Lange isn’t describing two separate impulses so much as a political feedback loop. Shut the doors, then post guards. The sentence is engineered to make that pairing feel inevitable, even self-defeating.

The real rhetorical move is in the verbs. Militarism “struggles” to “maintain” sovereignty, while internationalism “marches” forward. Lange casts history as asymmetric motion: the nation-state is static, defensive, and tiring itself out; internationalism is dynamic, collective, and relentless. “Sovereign state” reads less like a celebration than a brittle artifact being propped up. The subtext is a warning that sovereignty, treated as absolute, becomes an anxious performance requiring escalating coercion.

Context sharpens the stakes. Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, wrote in a Europe still digesting World War I and watching the interwar order wobble: protectionist economics, punitive borders, and the normalization of military readiness. He’s arguing against the romance of self-sufficiency and the glamour of armed pride by framing them as rear-guard actions against structural realities: interdependence, cross-border institutions, and shared problems that don’t respect flags.

There’s an implicit critique of nationalism’s story about itself. It promises control, but it delivers permanent emergency. In Lange’s formulation, militarism isn’t strength; it’s the cost of pretending you can stop the future.