Hjalmar Branting
Hjalmar Branting
Karl Hjalmar Branting was a Swedish politician. He was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and Prime Minister during three separate periods. When Branting came to power in 1920, he was the first Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden. When he took office for a second term after the general election of 1921, he became the first socialist politician in Europe to do so following elections with universal suffrage. In 1921, Sweden's Prime Minister Hjalmar Branting shared the Peace...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth23 November 1860
CityStockholm, Sweden
CountrySweden
Hjalmar Branting quotes about
The League of Nations is not the only organization, albeit the most official, which has inscribed the maintenance of peace through law on its banner.
The whole collective force of the League is to be turned against the aggressor, with more or less pressure according to the need.
I have already mentioned that recent years have brought with them much disillusionment concerning what has so far been achieved by humanity.
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.
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.
We here in the North have for many years had a natural tendency to feel that when our representatives come together at an international meeting, we embark on the quest of mutual understanding and support
No nation is so great as to be able to afford, in the long run, to remain outside an increasingly universal League of Nations
Last year, the Assembly of the League, as a result of the initiative taken by the Scandinavian nations, further limited and clarified all the provisions of the clause prescribing the duty of states to participate in sanctions
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
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
As a result of the World War and of a peace whose imperfections and risks are no longer denied by anyone, are we not even further away from the great aspirations and hopes for peace and fraternity than we were one or two decades ago?
Fraternity among nations, however, touches the deepest desire of human nature
The World War broke out with such elemental violence, and with such resort to all means for leading or misleading public opinion, that no time was available for reflection and consideration
It is a commonplace that the League of Nations is not yet-what its most enthusiastic protagonists intended it to be