"The present level of armaments could be taken as the starting point. It could be stipulated in an international treaty that these armaments should be simultaneously and uniformly reduced by a certain proportion in all countries"
About this Quote
Quidde is doing something quietly radical here: stripping disarmament of its usual moral theater and reframing it as an engineering problem with a baseline and a ratio. “The present level of armaments” is deliberately unromantic language. It concedes, almost coldly, that the world is already armed to the teeth; the proposal doesn’t depend on purity or trust, only on arithmetic and simultaneity. That’s the subtext: if you wait for virtue, you get an arms race. If you start from what exists, you might get a treaty.
The key rhetorical move is “simultaneously and uniformly.” Quidde is anticipating the classic spoiler of any peace plan: the fear of being the sucker. In an era when European powers treated military buildup as both insurance and prestige, unilateral reduction was politically suicidal. Uniform cuts promise symmetry; simultaneity promises security. He’s addressing not only generals but parliaments and publics conditioned to equate restraint with weakness.
Context matters. Quidde, a German liberal critic and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was shaped by the militarism of the Kaiserreich and the catastrophe it helped unleash. His language reads like an early draft of the logic that would animate interwar disarmament efforts: make reduction procedural, verifiable, and collective. There’s an implicit rebuke to nationalist exceptionalism, too. No country gets to claim it needs “just a bit more” because it’s uniquely threatened or uniquely virtuous.
The intent isn’t naive pacifism; it’s a pragmatic attempt to break the feedback loop where everyone re-arms because everyone else is re-arming. In that sense, the quote is less plea than blueprint.
The key rhetorical move is “simultaneously and uniformly.” Quidde is anticipating the classic spoiler of any peace plan: the fear of being the sucker. In an era when European powers treated military buildup as both insurance and prestige, unilateral reduction was politically suicidal. Uniform cuts promise symmetry; simultaneity promises security. He’s addressing not only generals but parliaments and publics conditioned to equate restraint with weakness.
Context matters. Quidde, a German liberal critic and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was shaped by the militarism of the Kaiserreich and the catastrophe it helped unleash. His language reads like an early draft of the logic that would animate interwar disarmament efforts: make reduction procedural, verifiable, and collective. There’s an implicit rebuke to nationalist exceptionalism, too. No country gets to claim it needs “just a bit more” because it’s uniquely threatened or uniquely virtuous.
The intent isn’t naive pacifism; it’s a pragmatic attempt to break the feedback loop where everyone re-arms because everyone else is re-arming. In that sense, the quote is less plea than blueprint.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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