Politics & Power Quote by Alva Myrdal

Harmonious understanding, Myrdal implies, is the kind of diplomatic wallpaper that looks good until you notice the cracks are structural. Her line is a refusal of the sentimental fantasy that wars can be talked out of existence if only people sit in the right room with the right vocabulary. The key word is “pretend”: not “fail” or “struggle,” but pretend, a moral indictment aimed at institutions that sell peace as interpersonal reconciliation while leaving the machinery of conflict untouched.

As a diplomat, Myrdal isn’t dismissing dialogue; she’s narrowing the target to what actually drives violence. “Economic and political roots” shifts attention from the convenient story of ancient hatreds to the less flattering realities of resource competition, security guarantees, ideological blocs, and the distribution of power. The subtext is almost technocratic: peace is not a mood, it’s an arrangement. Without structural change, “harmonious understanding” becomes theater, useful for press releases and summit photos, harmful because it delays harder decisions.

The context is the mid-20th century, when faith in international bodies and “understanding between peoples” was pitched as an antidote to catastrophe, even as the Cold War made conflict a system rather than an accident. Myrdal, deeply involved in disarmament debates, writes from that double bind: diplomacy must keep talking, but it must stop flattering itself. The sentence works because it punctures optimism with a plain, almost austere realism: if the roots are strong, then the work isn’t persuading hearts; it’s renegotiating interests, redesigning incentives, and accepting that peace requires leverage, not just empathy.