"Peace congresses often start by dealing with some of the less important questions in excessive detail, so at the end there is no time to discuss the most important problems"
About this Quote
Diplomacy, Bajer suggests, has a knack for mistaking motion for progress. His line skewers the ritualistic choreography of “peace congresses” that bury themselves in procedural trivia, negotiating commas while the guns keep their relevance. The barb lands because it’s not anti-peace; it’s anti-performative peace. He’s pointing at a familiar institutional pathology: when a room is full of delegates who must report “results” back home, the safest results are the smallest ones. Low-stakes items offer quick consensus, flattering the process while sidestepping the landmines that could fracture the coalition or expose moral cowardice.
The subtext is about power and incentives. The “less important questions” aren’t accidentally over-discussed; they’re chosen precisely because they let everyone look busy without paying a price. Exhaustive detail becomes a refuge, even a weapon: delay as diplomacy, paperwork as politics. Bajer also implies a ticking clock, the way agendas are engineered so urgency arrives only when it’s too late. By the time the “most important problems” surface, everyone is fatigued, press deadlines loom, and the conference can declare itself “productive” while leaving core conflicts intact.
Context matters: Bajer was a Swedish peace advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1908), writing in an era of proliferating international conferences and hopeful legalism before World War I shattered the fantasy that procedure alone could restrain force. The quote reads like a warning from inside the movement: peace isn’t just the absence of fighting; it’s the willingness to confront the central questions early, when they can still be answered.
The subtext is about power and incentives. The “less important questions” aren’t accidentally over-discussed; they’re chosen precisely because they let everyone look busy without paying a price. Exhaustive detail becomes a refuge, even a weapon: delay as diplomacy, paperwork as politics. Bajer also implies a ticking clock, the way agendas are engineered so urgency arrives only when it’s too late. By the time the “most important problems” surface, everyone is fatigued, press deadlines loom, and the conference can declare itself “productive” while leaving core conflicts intact.
Context matters: Bajer was a Swedish peace advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1908), writing in an era of proliferating international conferences and hopeful legalism before World War I shattered the fantasy that procedure alone could restrain force. The quote reads like a warning from inside the movement: peace isn’t just the absence of fighting; it’s the willingness to confront the central questions early, when they can still be answered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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