Politics & Power Quote by Hjalmar Branting

Branting opens with a shrug that doubles as a scalpel. Calling it a "commonplace" frames disappointment with the League of Nations as not merely widespread, but almost boringly obvious - the kind of fact polite diplomats no longer bother to argue about. That move matters: it lowers the temperature. Instead of defending the League with grand postwar idealism, he normalizes its shortcomings, making room for a more pragmatic conversation about what can still be salvaged.

The dash in "not yet-what" is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. "Not yet" keeps the project alive; it’s a refusal to declare the League a failure, even as he admits the gap between aspiration and reality. It’s statesmanly triage: acknowledge the wound without pronouncing the patient dead. He also places responsibility carefully. The League isn’t condemned for being corrupt or malicious; it simply isn’t what "its most enthusiastic protagonists intended". That phrase subtly sidelines the maximalists - the true believers who sold the public a moral machine that would make war obsolete. Branting suggests the problem may lie as much in the sales pitch as in the institution.

Context sharpens the restraint. In the early 1920s, the League’s promise was colliding with missing enforcement power, great-power self-interest, and the conspicuous absence (or half-presence) of key states. Branting, a social democrat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is speaking from a small-state perspective: nations like Sweden needed rules-based order, but couldn’t afford naive faith in it. The line is calibrated to defend internationalism while immunizing it against utopian hype.