Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

Technocratic language is doing diplomatic heavy lifting here. Bajer’s sentence reads like minutes from a committee meeting, but that’s precisely the point: it smuggles a radical ambition - permanent international coordination - into the blandest possible packaging. “Has in the meantime expressed its opinion” performs restraint, implying consensus without naming dissent, and keeping the speaker safely behind the mask of procedure. No demands, no drama, just an “opinion” that happens to advance institutional change.

The key move is the contrast between “a body should be established” and “more effectively than has hitherto proved possible.” Bajer isn’t merely proposing another panel; he’s quietly indicting the Hague system as insufficient. The phrase “hitherto proved possible” is a polite confession of failure: the conferences, for all their moral aspiration, lacked continuity, expertise, and administrative muscle. What’s being proposed is the machinery that conferences conspicuously don’t have - a standing apparatus to do the unglamorous work between grand gatherings.

Context matters. The Hague Peace Conferences (1899, 1907) were early experiments in codifying laws of war and arbitration, celebrated as milestones yet hamstrung by great-power rivalry and the episodic nature of diplomacy. Bajer, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate associated with organized peace activism, is speaking from that frustrating middle ground: ideals are on record, but implementation keeps slipping away. The subtext is activist realism: if peace is going to be more than rhetoric, it needs bureaucracy. The sentence is a blueprint for how reformers learned to talk to states - not in the language of moral urgency, but in the language of “preparation” and “effective work,” where political resistance sounds like mere inefficiency.