"On the contrary. Internationalism also recognizes, by its very name, that nations do exist. It simply limits their scope more than one-sided nationalism does"
About this Quote
Christian Lous Lange, a Norwegian historian and Nobel Peace laureate, wrote as a champion of the League of Nations after the trauma of World War I. He faced a common accusation: that internationalism seeks to erase nations. His reply is crisp. Internationalism, by its very name, is about relations among nations. It takes the nation seriously but refuses to let it become absolute. Where one-sided nationalism elevates the nation into a final court of appeal, internationalism draws boundaries around what the nation should control and what must be shared, negotiated, or governed together.
Limiting scope is not the same as denying identity. Nations can nurture language, culture, and democratic self-rule while accepting common rules on matters that spill across borders: war and peace, trade and tariffs, refugees, rivers and seas, pandemics, the climate. The point is not to dissolve loyalties but to tame them, so that devotion to a homeland does not harden into hostility toward others. International law, arbitration, and collective security are the tools of that discipline. They do not abolish sovereignty; they redefine it as responsibility within a wider web of mutual obligations.
Lange calls nationalism one-sided because it sees only the inward face of political life. It privileges cohesion at home and power abroad, and is tempted to treat international limits as insults. Internationalism insists on the outward face: interdependence, reciprocity, and the ethical insight that justice does not stop at the border. It rests on the practical observation that some problems are unsolvable by any single nation, and on the moral conviction that human dignity should not depend entirely on nationality.
The line is not between national pride and rootless cosmopolitanism. It runs between absolutism and restraint. Internationalism asks nations to be strong enough to accept limits, wise enough to share authority, and confident enough to see that a smaller sphere of unchecked power can yield a larger sphere of peace.
Limiting scope is not the same as denying identity. Nations can nurture language, culture, and democratic self-rule while accepting common rules on matters that spill across borders: war and peace, trade and tariffs, refugees, rivers and seas, pandemics, the climate. The point is not to dissolve loyalties but to tame them, so that devotion to a homeland does not harden into hostility toward others. International law, arbitration, and collective security are the tools of that discipline. They do not abolish sovereignty; they redefine it as responsibility within a wider web of mutual obligations.
Lange calls nationalism one-sided because it sees only the inward face of political life. It privileges cohesion at home and power abroad, and is tempted to treat international limits as insults. Internationalism insists on the outward face: interdependence, reciprocity, and the ethical insight that justice does not stop at the border. It rests on the practical observation that some problems are unsolvable by any single nation, and on the moral conviction that human dignity should not depend entirely on nationality.
The line is not between national pride and rootless cosmopolitanism. It runs between absolutism and restraint. Internationalism asks nations to be strong enough to accept limits, wise enough to share authority, and confident enough to see that a smaller sphere of unchecked power can yield a larger sphere of peace.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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