Words matter. These are the best Hjalmar Branting Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Fraternity among nations, however, touches the deepest desire of human nature.
The equality among all members of the League, which is provided in the statutes giving each state only one vote, cannot of course abolish the actual material inequality of the powers concerned.
At Geneva, the neutral states were often in agreement concerning the preliminaries for Genoa, and Genoa itself was marked by a quite natural mutual exchange of ideas.
And the annual meetings of the League’s Assembly are in effect official peace congresses binding on the participating states to an extent that most statesmen a quarter of a century ago would have regarded as utopian.
But it is possible that, in the days ahead, these years we have lived through may eventually be thought of simply as a period of disturbance and regression.
I do not overlook the fact that the appearance of these new, free nations in the European political community not only celebrates the return of the prodigal son but also creates new sources of friction here and there.
Before the war there were many who were more or less ignorant of the international labor movement but who nevertheless turned to it for salvation when the threat of war arose. They hoped that the workers would never permit a war.
There is no reason why agreement on particular points should not be both possible and advantageous to the so-called neutrals and to one or more of the blocs, either existing or in the process of formation, within the League of Nations.
We must remember that the people for whom this change represents a first taste of freedom and a new and brighter future did not allow their resolution to falter, no matter how great the suffering by which they bought this independence.
All in all, the League of Nations is not inevitably bound, as some maintain from time to time, to degenerate into an impotent appendage of first one, then another of the competing great powers.
As long as the problem of world reconstruction remains the center of interest for all nations, blocs having similar attitudes will form and operate even within the League itself.
Let us return, however, to the League of Nations. To create an organization which is in a position to protect peace in this world of conflicting interests and egotistic wills is a frighteningly difficult task.
The kind of support encouraged by such modes of expression has always arisen basically from confusing the fatherland itself with the social conditions which happened to prevail in it.
It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be.
A formally recognized equality does, however, accord the smaller nations a position which they should be able to use increasingly in the interest of humanity as a whole and in the service of the ideal.