Politics & Power Quote by Christian Lous Lange

A bridge is a conveniently hopeful metaphor, but Lange deploys it with a diplomat's quiet warning: you can get stuck midspan. Writing out of the early 20th century - when telegraphs, shipping lanes, finance, and industrial supply chains were knitting continents together faster than parliaments could adapt - he names a mismatch that still defines modern politics. The territorial state remains the unit of legitimacy, taxation, and coercion; the real forces shaping daily life increasingly ignore borders. That tension is the engine of his sentence.

The intent is reformist, not utopian. "World community" doesn't read like a sentimental plea for togetherness; it reads like a governance problem. He frames global interdependence as a fact already accomplished "economically and technically", stripping it of ideology. The subtext is that clinging to purely territorial politics isn't just old-fashioned, it's structurally destabilizing. If markets, communications, and technology operate at world scale while political accountability stays national, crises will arrive transnationally and be managed provincially. The result is predictable: blame games, tariff spirals, arms races, and institutions that are always playing catch-up.

His rhetoric is doing two things at once. It flatters modernity ("worldwide communications") while exposing its democratic deficit. And it subtly shifts agency: we're not choosing globalization; we're choosing whether to govern it. For a politician in an era bookended by world war and the first serious experiments in international organization, the "bridge" is a call to build institutions before events force them into being.