Politics & Power Quote by John Boyd Orr

“Inevitable” is doing the heavy lifting here, a word that turns a controversial proposal into a forecast. John Boyd Orr isn’t pitching world government as a utopian hobbyhorse; he’s framing it as the logical endpoint of modernity’s problems outgrowing modernity’s borders. The opening concession - “However difficult it may be to bring it about” - works like political inoculation. He grants the obvious objections (sovereignty, enforcement, competing ideologies) to signal seriousness, then steps over them with a kind of administrative fatalism: resistance may slow the train, but the tracks are already laid.

The subtext is postwar and technocratic. Orr, a politician steeped in the era that birthed the UN and the welfare-state imagination, is speaking from a world where famine, trade, pandemics, and war had demonstrated the limits of purely national solutions. “Agreed international law” and “means of enforcing the law” are the core tell: he’s not romanticizing global brotherhood; he’s insisting that rules without teeth are theater. Enforcement is the taboo word in polite internationalism, because it forces the real question: who holds power, and who gets coerced?

The quote’s intent is both moral and managerial. It’s a warning disguised as reassurance: if humanity keeps building weapons, markets, and crises that ignore borders, governance will either scale up deliberately or arrive violently through domination, blocs, and emergency. Orr tries to make the deliberate version sound not just preferable, but unavoidable.