Politics & Power Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Internationalism, in Lange's framing, isn’t a vibe or a slogan; it’s blueprint talk. The sentence is built to discipline a slippery term by pinning it to the language of design: “theory,” “concept,” “organized.” That repetition is doing political work. It insists that cross-border cooperation isn’t an optional moral posture but a program for ordering modern life - the kind of thing you can argue about, codify, and institutionalize.

The subtext is a rebuttal to two temptations of his era: romantic nationalism and utopian borderlessness. Lange splits the difference. He doesn’t deny nations; he treats them as enduring units that must be managed. The key phrase is “mutual relations.” It implies reciprocity, rules, and constraints - not the charity of powerful states toward weaker ones, and not the fantasy that solidarity naturally appears once people “think globally.” Internationalism here reads like a technology for reducing friction: a way to make sovereignty compatible with interdependence.

Context matters because Lange is speaking from the early 20th-century European crisis of governance: industrial economies tangled together, empires wobbling, and war demonstrating what happens when nations treat “relations” as improvisation. As a politician (and, historically, a Nobel Peace Prize-linked figure associated with arbitration and cooperation), he’s nudging the audience toward institutions, not sentiments - toward mechanisms that can survive bad leaders and nationalist mood swings.

It works rhetorically because it shifts the debate from virtue to architecture. If internationalism is an “ought” about organization, then the real argument becomes practical: What structures prevent catastrophe, and who gets to write the rules?