Politics & Power Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Nation-states don’t look timeless in Christian Lous Lange’s framing; they look engineered, late, and geographically parochial. By pinning “deliberate national feeling” to “only recently,” “the nineteenth century,” and “only in Europe,” he punctures the comforting myth that political borders naturally mirror ancient peoples. The sentence is built like a legal brief: stacked qualifiers narrow the claim until it becomes hard to romanticize. That tightness is the point. Lange is demoting nationalism from destiny to design choice.

The subtext is quietly political. If the state is a modern artifact produced by cultivated sentiment, then it can be unmade, reformed, or superseded. Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate associated with internationalist thinking, is signaling skepticism toward the era’s rising national absolutism. He’s also describing a technology of governance: nationalism as a binding agent that allows centralized institutions to command loyalty beyond dynasty, church, or local ties.

The context matters: Europe’s nineteenth century is the workshop of mass politics - universal conscription, compulsory schooling, standardized languages, railways, newspapers. “Deliberate” hints at elite orchestration: bureaucracies and intellectuals manufacturing a shared “we,” then translating it into administrative power. Read this way, the line doubles as warning label. When political legitimacy depends on feeling, leaders have incentives to curate emotions - pride, grievance, fear - because sentiment scales faster than constitutional nuance.

It’s a coolly destabilizing thought: the modern state isn’t the expression of a nation; the nation may be the state’s most successful invention.