The UN's unique legitimacy flows from a universal perception that it pursues a larger purpose than the interests of one country or a small group of countries.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The reality is that international institutions like the UN can only be as effective as its members allow it to be.
The United Nations is the preeminent institution of multilateralism. It provides a forum where sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems, and seize common opportunities. The U.N. helps establish the norms that many countries - including the United States - would like everyone to live by.
The United Nations has a critical role to play in promoting stability, security, democracy, human rights, and economic development. The UN is as relevant today as at any time in its history, but it needs reform.
In a case like Iraq the UN has again shown what important role it plays as the guarantor for protecting international peace and stability in the global political structure.
What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.
Like Canada, we very much wanted the United Nations to be a relevant and effective body. But once those efforts failed, we no longer saw things from a multilateral perspective. For us, now, it is much more basic than that. It is about family.
A new sense of shared international responsibility is unmistakable in the voices of the United Nations and its agencies, and in the civil society of thousands of supra-national NGOs.
The United Nations is designed to make possible lasting freedom and independence for all its members.
More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations.
The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small.