Politics & Power Quote by Hjalmar Branting

The line flatters national pride only to corner it. Branting starts with the bait of “so great” and then flips greatness into a liability: real power, he implies, is not the freedom to stand apart but the responsibility to stay entangled. The phrase “in the long run” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not a moral scold, it’s a forecast. Opting out might feel like sovereignty today, but history compounds the bill.

Branting’s subtext is aimed at the classic holdouts: the empires and the self-styled exceptional nations convinced they can out-muscle diplomacy. “Afford” turns foreign policy into a cost-benefit argument, stripping isolationism of romance. This isn’t idealism about world brotherhood; it’s a pragmatic claim that modern conflict and commerce are too networked for any state to remain a clean, independent variable. “Increasingly universal” adds a quiet threat: the club is expanding, and outside status will look less like principled independence and more like self-exile.

Context matters. Branting was a Swedish Social Democrat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate speaking in the shadow of World War I, when the League of Nations was pitched as a machine to prevent another catastrophe. Small states like Sweden had learned that “neutral” doesn’t mean “untouched.” His argument is also domestic: it sells internationalism to skeptical voters by reframing it as insurance. Join not because you trust everyone, but because you don’t trust what happens when no one is bound to anyone.