Politics & Power Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri’s line is the kind of sober, diplomatic realism that can double as a warning and a shield. By casting violence as “heritage” and “traditions of mankind,” he’s not excusing brutality so much as stripping away the comforting fiction that history is a slow march toward civility. The phrasing is deliberately broad: “different nations,” “mankind.” No villains singled out, no righteous exceptions granted. That vagueness is the point. It flattens moral hierarchy and implies that any country claiming innocence is either lying or cherry-picking.

The subtext is aimed at an audience tempted by moral triumphalism - the idea that “we” have outgrown force and “they” haven’t. Holkeri, a Finnish statesman shaped by a small nation’s proximity to great-power pressure, understood how quickly ideals get negotiated down to survival. In the late Cold War and post-Cold War world of peacekeeping and “new world order” rhetoric, leaders were selling international institutions as alternatives to coercion. Holkeri’s sentence punctures that sales pitch without rejecting it outright: institutions matter, but they rest on a species with a long record of settling disputes with fists, armies, and borders redrawn by decree.

What makes the quote work is its uncomfortable normalizing of violence. Calling it “tradition” frames force as culturally transmitted, almost habitual - a learned reflex nations inherit and reproduce. It’s a bleak reminder that peace isn’t humanity’s default setting; it’s a project, constantly outbid by older instincts.