Politics & Power Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Internationalism, in Christian Lous Lange's hands, isn’t the airy idea of “citizen of the world” floating above borders; it’s a sober architecture built from them. The sentence is doing political repair work. Written in an era when nationalism could either be a democratic glue or a fuse to catastrophe, Lange tries to reclaim the nation as a cultural foundation without letting it become a moral cage. The key move is his insistence that “spiritual achievements” don’t drop from some neutral, cosmopolitan sky. They are cultivated in particular soils: language, memory, institutions, habits of education, shared reference points. That’s not a retreat from international cooperation; it’s his argument for why cooperation can’t be sustained by abstraction alone.

The subtext is a rebuke to two opponents at once. To hard nationalists, he implies that the nation’s highest outputs - art, literature, “humanistic sciences” - are evidence of depth, not superiority, and therefore not a license for domination. To a certain strand of elite cosmopolitanism, he warns that stripping culture of national context leaves it thin, bureaucratic, and easily resented. Notice his careful phrasing: “admits” signals realism rather than romance; “roots deep” makes national life sound organic, not militarized.

Contextually, Lange is writing from the early 20th-century peace-and-international-law milieu (he was tied to the Nobel Peace Prize world), when the urgent question was how to build international institutions strong enough to outlast the passions nations reliably produce. His answer: don’t deny those passions; route them into creation, then into dialogue.