The UN isn't just a debating club to the faithful, it is a "moralizer".
I don't question that the UN moralizes. It sets its standard for how countries should treat each other and how they treat their people, thus we get moralizing on human rights abuses or incursions into foreign countries. The UN does for countries what Miss Manners does for polite interaction. Is Miss Manners a paragon? I don't know. We really don't know anything about her. For a long time they didn't publish her real name. Perhaps she practices what she preaches, perhaps not. When she opines, she doesn't personalize it. She doesn't tell us what she does in similar circumstances and urge us to follow her example. Neither does the UN. They have set themselves up as arbiters of certain behaviors, not as paragons of those virtues. There's a difference between "do what I say, not what I do" and "follow my example." Both moralize but only one presumes paragon status.
But drape that self-same Coalition in blue, and suddenly it gains "legitimacy".
Legitimacy is always gained by adhering to accepted practices. Executives and parents and even countries look around them to see how others are handling a certain matter. It is normal human behavior to benchmark and vet. Their comfort level is high when they are in step with the crowd and low when they are out of step. Part of that comfort comes from the realization that being in step with the crowd conveys legitimacy and also cover should things turn out badly. If your kid gets in trouble for some late night activity, you are advantaged if your kid's curfew was the same as the rest of the community, disadvantaged if you were more lenient. Any sensible person or country has reservations about following a path that is out of step. That doesn't mean that that path cannot be chosen, only that doing so requires a much more rigorous testing to achieve comfort.
For countries, the UN is where you go for ultimate legitimacy because the UN includes all countries and because it has a formal process for expressing it's judgments, which, as a result, take on an air of legitimacy. That doesn't make UN a paragon any more than a business association for handymen is a paragon. They are venues for benchmarking and vetting standards of behavior. |
