Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

A “decisive battle” is a deliberately martial phrase aimed at disarming militarism on its own turf. Christian Lous Lange, writing from the wreckage of early 20th-century Europe, frames internationalism not as a utopian hobby but as an urgent counter-force to a specific enemy: the sovereign state imagined as a self-sufficient fortress. The target isn’t sovereignty in the abstract; it’s sovereignty hardened into ideology, where protectionism becomes a moral posture and militarism a default instrument of policy.

The subtext is that isolation is never neutral. A state “isolated” by tariffs and armaments doesn’t merely defend itself; it manufactures suspicion, then calls that suspicion realism. Lange pairs protectionism and militarism because the two often travel together: economic walls normalize political walls, and political walls justify armies. He’s describing a feedback loop where domestic fear, economic grievance, and security theater fuse into a national identity.

Context matters: Lange was a Norwegian politician and a leading voice in the interwar peace movement, closely tied to the League of Nations moment when people still believed diplomacy could be institutionalized before the next catastrophe. His rhetoric carries the anxiety of that window closing. Internationalism “must now engage” signals impatience with incrementalism; the crisis is already in motion.

What makes the line work is its tactical reversal. If the sovereign-state myth sells itself as strength, Lange reframes it as a brittle isolationism that invites conflict. Internationalism becomes the hard-headed alternative: not sentiment, but strategy for survival in an economy and security landscape that no border can actually seal.