Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Militarism isn’t a policy failure here; it’s the subscription fee of sovereignty. Christian Lous Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate shaped by Europe’s pre- and post-World War I convulsions, is making a deliberately chilling claim: the modern state can’t promise ultimate security without also reserving the right to organized violence. Strip away the flags and speeches, and “sovereign” quietly means “able to compel.” Armies aren’t an aberration tacked onto politics; they are the enforcement mechanism that makes borders, laws, and treaties more than polite suggestions.

The quote’s intent is to puncture the comforting liberal fiction that militarism lives only in “bad” regimes. Lange refuses the easy moral geography of peaceful nations versus aggressive ones. His formulation “merely differences of degree” is both diagnostic and accusatory: even states that market themselves as benign still rely on coercive capacity, and often on the credible threat of force, to sustain their autonomy. Neutrality, in this view, is less a moral status than a strategic posture backed by preparedness.

The subtext is a warning to internationalists who think peace can be engineered solely through good will or legal architecture. If militarism is baked into sovereignty, then peace requires more than disarmament slogans; it demands institutions that can dampen the security dilemma, where one state’s “defense” reads as another’s provocation. Lange is not excusing militarism. He’s explaining why it keeps coming back, especially in a world where the state remains the highest court of appeal.