Politics & Power Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Internationalism gets caricatured as a kind of border-erasing utopianism; Lange’s line is a neat, corrective rebuke. The first two words, “On the contrary,” aren’t just argumentative throat-clearing. They signal a refusal to accept the bad-faith framing that cooperation equals surrender. By pointing to “its very name,” Lange performs a little linguistic trapdoor: internationalism is literally built out of “nation.” You can’t accuse it of denying national existence without sounding like you haven’t read the label on the tin.

The subtext is political triage. Writing in a Europe where nationalism had proved explosively “one-sided” and then catastrophically lethal, Lange isn’t asking nations to disappear; he’s asking them to stop pretending they are morally self-sufficient. “Limits their scope” is the key phrase. It’s a restrained, bureaucratic verb that smuggles in a radical claim: sovereignty should have borders too. The point isn’t to humiliate national identity but to hem in its most dangerous impulses - the idea that a nation’s interests automatically outrank shared rules, minority rights, or peace.

Context matters: Lange’s era watched treaties, alliances, and new international institutions struggle to replace raw power politics with norms. His intent is to make internationalism sound like realism, not romance: nations remain the actors, but the stage gains guardrails. In that framing, nationalism isn’t love of country; it’s the insistence that the country gets to play without referees.