Christian Lous Lange Quotes
Concord, solidarity, and mutual help are the most important means of enabling animal species to survive.
Hand in hand with nationalist economic isolationism, militarism struggles to maintain the sovereign state against the forward march of internationalism.
It is against this concept of the sovereign state, a state isolated by protectionism and militarism, that internationalism must now engage in decisive battle.
Within each such social group, a feeling of solidarity prevails, a compelling need to work together and a joy in doing so that represent a high moral value.
The main concept is that of an international solidarity expressed in practice through worldwide division of labor: free trade is the principal point in the program of internationalism.
Earlier ages fortified themselves behind the sovereign state, behind protectionism and militarism.
The simultaneous reactions elicited all over the world by the reading of newspaper dispatches about the same events create, as it were, a common mental pulse beat for the whole of civilized mankind.
It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.
No state is free from militarism, which is inherent in the very concept of the sovereign state. There are merely differences of degree in the militarism of states.
But teleological considerations can lead no further than to a belief and a hope. They do not give certainty.
Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.
The free trade movement in the middle of the last century represents the first conscious recognition of these new circumstances and of the necessity to adapt to them.
Only recently, during the nineteenth century, and then only in Europe, do we meet forms of the state which have been created by a deliberate national feeling.
A pacifist will often - at least nowadays - be an internationalist and vice versa. But history shows us that a pacifist need not think internationally.
History shows us that other highly developed forms of civilization have collapsed. Who knows whether the same fate does not await our own?
The sovereign state has in our times become a lethal danger to human civilization because technical developments enable it to employ an infinite number and variety of means of destruction.
Moreover, if the territorial state is to continue as the last word in the development of society, then war is inevitable.