Politics & Power Quote by Hjalmar Branting

Branting’s sentence reads like diplomatic wallpaper, and that’s precisely its genius. In the early League of Nations era, “neutrality” wasn’t a moral pose so much as a survival strategy for smaller states trying to avoid being crushed between emerging power clusters. By calling them “so-called neutrals,” he punctures the comforting fiction that any country could stand entirely outside the new circuitry of alliances, debt, trade, and security guarantees. Neutrality, in practice, was already relational.

The intent is transactional and preventive: he’s arguing that the League shouldn’t demand total ideological alignment or full-blown bloc membership as the price of cooperation. Agreeing “on particular points” is a deliberately modest standard, designed to make collaboration feel safe, reversible, and non-threatening. It’s a pitch for issue-by-issue multilateralism before the term existed: cooperate where interests overlap, even if your broader strategic posture diverges.

The subtext is a warning about how international institutions fail. If the League becomes an exclusive club where only like-minded powers coordinate, it will incentivize hard bloc formation outside the institution, accelerating exactly the polarization it was meant to defuse. Branting is also signaling to bigger players: stop treating neutrals as freeloaders or moral ornaments; they can be useful partners, and their buy-in lends legitimacy.

Context matters: post-World War I Europe was improvising a new order while old empires collapsed and new states appeared. Branting, a Swedish social democrat and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, is trying to keep the League flexible enough to function in a world already sliding toward camps. His bureaucratic tone isn’t blandness; it’s a bid to make compromise sound like common sense.