Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Lange’s “internationalism” isn’t pitched as a utopian preference; it’s framed as a matter of social physiology. By grounding his case in “economic, spiritual, and biological facts,” he’s trying to move the argument out of the squishy realm of ideals and into the harder territory of necessity. Economics makes nations interdependent whether they like it or not; “spiritual” hints at the era’s moral vocabulary (and, after World War I, a hunger for meaning that nationalism had conspicuously failed to supply); “biological” borrows the prestige of science to imply that societies, like organisms, either coordinate their parts or suffer breakdown.

The subtext is a rebuke to the sovereign nation-state as the final unit of political reality. “Respect for a healthy development” carries a doctor’s tone: nationalism isn’t just misguided, it’s pathological, a threat to the “health” of society and to “world civilization.” That phrase matters. Lange isn’t only defending cross-border cooperation; he’s defending a civilizational project that he believes can be protected only by institutions that outgrow borders.

Context sharpens the urgency. As a Norwegian politician and early advocate of arbitration and organized peace (in the shadow of industrialized war), Lange is speaking into a Europe where diplomacy had proved too improvisational and pride too combustible. His intent is institutional: “mankind be organized internationally” reads less like poetry than a blueprint - an argument for durable structures (courts, leagues, regimes) that can discipline the forces nations pretend they control. The rhetorical trick is to make international organization feel less like surrender and more like adulthood.