Hjalmar Branting Quotes
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.
Branting, Hjalmar. "Fraternity Among Nations." Nobel Lectures, Peace 1901-1925, edited by Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, 1972, pp. 325-333.
Son of John Jay. Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor. International organizations have been notoriously inept at protecting countries from aggression or minorities from persecution and ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Armenian genocide by the Turks was the exemplar at the time, but the UN peacekeepers refused to fight to prevent the Serbs from murdering 7,000 Bosnian Muslims. When they were protecting the Israeli-Palestinian borders, they did nothing to stop Arab Armies from attacking Israel right through the UN Troops. They did nothing to help prevent the Ruanda genocide. UN “troops” are rarely willing to risk their lives for the victimized people or the International Organization itself.
He used the “united nations” as a general description as the UN had not been created or named yet, However, as this quotation demonstrates, the President was already thinking about a UN idea, but as a realist, he explained that the great powers had to come to some agreement of interests. Actually China and France, at the time, would go along with whatever the United States and Britain wanted to do and had a great common interest, and there was already a strong association of interests between Britain and America. Russia was to be the problem and a complete common interest was never to be, but there was enough to get the United Nations started.
Karl Hjalmar Branting was a Swedish politician who was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (1907–1925) and Prime Minister during three separate periods (1920, 1921–1923 and 1924–1925). When Branting came to power in 1920, he was the first Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden. When taking 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, Branting shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Norwegian secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Christian Lous Lange.
