Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Lange is pointing at a historical lag: the world is changing its hardware faster than its governing software. The “territorial state” is the 19th-century assumption that politics maps neatly onto borders, that sovereignty is a fenced-in asset, and that economies can be managed as if they were mostly domestic. His phrasing is coolly forensic - “characteristic” carries a faint indictment - suggesting that the very moment people finally recognize the mismatch is when institutions double down on the old model.

The key move is the pairing of “technically and economically.” Lange isn’t making a dreamy moral plea for cosmopolitanism; he’s arguing from infrastructure and incentives. Technology compresses distance, speeds communication, and links production. Economics follows with trade, finance, supply chains, migration. Once those systems spill across borders, the territorial state becomes an anachronism: still powerful in law and symbolism, increasingly clumsy in practice.

Subtext: the crises of his era - and he wrote in the shadow of World War I and the League of Nations experiment - weren’t just failures of diplomacy or character. They were collisions between interdependence and a political order built for separateness. “All who think about the matter” is a polite elitism, but also a provocation: if the facts are obvious to anyone serious, then the persistence of border-locked politics is willful, even self-serving.

As a politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lange is quietly advocating for international governance that matches the scale of modern life. He’s diagnosing why nationalism keeps winning arguments it can no longer operationalize.