War & Peace Quote by Christian Lous Lange

The chill in Lange's line is how calmly it treats war as a design feature, not a moral failure. His target is the "territorial state" as a political technology: sovereignty fenced in by borders, secured by armies, legitimized by the idea that a people and a patch of land should map neatly onto each other. If that arrangement remains "the last word" - the final stage of social organization - then conflict isn't an aberration. It's the predictable audit of competing claims.

The word "continue" does heavy lifting. Lange isn't imagining a brand-new danger; he's diagnosing a pattern already visible in early 20th-century Europe, where nationalist ambition, imperial hangovers, and alliance systems turned territorial disputes into continental catastrophe. Writing as a politician and peace advocate in the interwar period, he is speaking into a moment when the League of Nations represented both fragile hope and institutional inadequacy. The sentence reads like a warning to those who believe you can keep the old machinery and simply pledge better intentions.

Subtext: the nation-state trains citizens to treat borders as sacred, resources as zero-sum, and security as something achieved against outsiders. That worldview makes "inevitable" feel less like fatalism and more like a provocation: if we accept inevitability, we are choosing it. Lange's intent is to smuggle a radical premise into a seemingly sober forecast - that peace requires political evolution beyond hard sovereignty, toward supranational rules strong enough to outrank the map.