Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

It lands like a polite Scandinavian sigh, but the blade is real: Bajer is calling out a ritual of internationalism that performs cooperation while quietly sabotaging it. The sentence is built as an “I would have thought…” rather than an accusation, a rhetorical feint that lets him shame organizers without sounding uncivil. That’s the strategy: expose incompetence as a breach of basic decency, not a partisan fight.

The specific intent is procedural and pointed. Large conferences, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were increasingly the stage for peace movements, parliamentary diplomacy, and early attempts at international governance. Bajer, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and committed transnationalist, understood that the new politics depended on mundane logistics: who gets in the room, who can follow the room, who can intervene in real time. Language isn’t a garnish; it’s the power grid.

The subtext is harsher than the syntax. Delegates who “cannot speak” and don’t even “understand” the main languages become decorative representatives, present for legitimacy but absent from decision-making. Bajer’s workaround - a friend “seated beside them” to translate essentials - reads today like an indictment of amateurism, but also of hierarchy: some people get full access; others receive summaries. He’s naming a soft exclusion mechanism that lets elites keep the floor while claiming inclusivity.

Contextually, it’s an early critique of what we’d now call the infrastructure of global civil society. Before simultaneous interpretation and professional translation became standard, language barriers weren’t just inconvenient; they were a way policy outcomes could be prewritten by those fluent enough to steer the conversation. Bajer is demanding that internationalism be competent, not ceremonial.