Politics & Power Quote by Hjalmar Branting

Branting’s sentence performs a neat rhetorical pivot: it pulls the listener “back” to the League of Nations as if the debate has drifted into abstractions, then lands on a bracing admission of how ugly the real work will be. The phrase “Let us return, however” isn’t polite throat-clearing; it’s agenda control. It signals a statesman trying to discipline a room full of wishful thinkers into confronting mechanics, not ideals.

The core move is his refusal to romanticize peace. He defines the world not as a family of nations awaiting harmony, but as a battlefield of “conflicting interests and egotistic wills.” That wording quietly undercuts the League’s early sales pitch: peace won’t arrive because everyone suddenly becomes reasonable; it must be engineered in spite of everyone’s incentives to defect. “Protect peace” is also telling. Peace is treated as something fragile, needing active defense, not a default condition that naturally reasserts itself once treaties are signed.

Calling the task “frighteningly difficult” reads like candor, but it’s also strategic. Branting, a Scandinavian social democrat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is preparing his audience for compromise, enforcement mechanisms, and inevitable failure points. In the early post-World War I moment, the League was both a moral project and a political gamble. His subtext: if you build an institution that assumes virtue, you’ll get paralysis; if you acknowledge ego and interest, you might design something that survives contact with reality.