The UN: mask of law, mirror of power

Let us begin with this tasty definition of the UN’s activities, as found on Wikipedia: “The organisation’s primary objectives are the maintenance of international peace and security. To achieve them, it promotes human rights, provides humanitarian aid, sustainable development and the enforcement of international law, and it possesses specific powers such as imposing international sanctions and authorising military intervention.” A solemn, balanced text, almost inspiring.

But if we scrape off the diplomatic varnish, could we offer a slightly more lucid version? For example: the UN’s primary purpose is to organise the sharing of global influence among the Security Council’s members – something they bargain over with remarkable consistency. It is also there to make sure they do not tear each other apart every time their interests clash, by giving them a big table, comfortable chairs, and above all a precious saving in bullets and bombs.

And what about the other countries?

The UN offers them polite, sometimes forceful supervision in the name of “peacekeeping”. It is a bit as though five hefty bandits had agreed not to kill one another while reserving the right, together, to decide who is bad or respectable in the rest of the neighbourhood. That naturally implies an immense privilege – the privilege of judging others while never being judged themselves.

We then see them point at some “troublemaker”, demand his neutralisation, or on the contrary cheer him on loudly – all depending on the strategic return of the operation. And if, by bad luck, resistance appears against one of their allies, it is usually that resistance which gets labelled a threat. Just scan the headlines to be convinced: the whole staging feels theatrical. Business, nothing else. A transaction: give me that contract and I will assist you. Support my resolution and I will divert the spotlights.

Meanwhile, the permanent members of the Security Council remain out of reach. Untouchable. Impossible to sue, question or subject to any real accountability. And yet, if an independent, incorruptible, truly universal international court ever saw the light of day, who would be the first summoned? We may at least ask. It is entirely possible it would be the very people who currently hold the reins.

Of course, some will say that in spite of everything, the UN is still useful – a bulwark against chaos, a voice of collective reason. Fine. But that depends on the point of view. Is it the view of the powerful, or of the peoples? Everyone knows, even States, that in a just system power cannot be both judge and party. So who is fooling whom?

But let us be more serious!

The United Nations fascinates by its aura. In the popular imagination, it is the impartial referee of conflicts, the voice of the voiceless, the moral tribunal of a brutal world. It embodies the ultimate utopia: an international order based on law, peace and human dignity. That very fascination should raise an alarm, for what the UN represents may be exactly what it prevents: the naked awareness of a world delivered to the anarchy of the powerful.

The UN’s genius is not legal but symbolic. It does not guarantee world order: it mimics its forms, simulates its values, and dissolves injustices in words. Look closely and the UN is not the cure for disorder. It is the disguise. The scenery.

The Security Council: a five-voice political theocracy

Everything starts with a technical detail, a single article of the Charter. Five nations – the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom – hold a veto that blocks any binding decision. By a lone objection they cancel votes backed by the vast majority of member States, and by their agreement they impose their will as universal law.

This is no anomaly, no bug, but a core feature of the system. The Security Council is a five-headed nuclear monarchy. Far from being a democratic forum, it enshrines a geopolitical theocracy: five sanctified powers, unassailable, irremovable, holders of world law not because they are just but because they won a war eighty years ago.

This veto turns international law into an asymmetric fiction: a rule for the weak, an option for the strong. And the UN, far from revolting against that founding inequality, is its zealous guardian. Here begins the shift: when law ceases to be a principle and becomes a protected privilege.

The General Assembly: moral theatre without consequence

Opposite that oligarchy of victors, the General Assembly looks like an agora. Each nation holds one vote. Resolutions pass by crushing majorities. Yet this power is entirely void of binding force. Resolutions are mere symbolic gestures, ethical postures, rhetorical echoes.

Thus, a resolution adopted by 180 States against 2 changes nothing on the ground. It may denounce an occupation, condemn a war, demand a fundamental right – nothing will happen. Majority indignation is ritualised, domesticated, converted into diplomatic prose. The Assembly is a theatre without weapons: a place where one speaks instead of acting.

That impotence is precisely what gives it symbolic strength. By seeming to speak for humanity, the Assembly spares humanity from acting. It offers a moral outlet that neutralises rage and a lofty tribune that lulls responsibility. Paradoxically, its uselessness is what makes it effective: it anaesthetises without transforming.

Global justice as a pacifying myth

The UN does not produce justice: it manufactures the appearance of justice. It fulfils an anthropological role more than a legal one. What the world fears more than injustice is the absence of authority – sheer chaos. The UN fills that void not with the force of law but with the illusion of law’s existence.

Reports, missions, inquiries, commissions, conferences : everything conspires to craft a narrative of an ordered world. Even when everything burns. Even when war is blatant, when the aggressor is identified, when victims scream. The UN writes. It formulates. It frames.

This global rhetoric has a precise effect: it siphons off the sense of radical despair. It renders the intolerable tolerable by translating it into documents. It transforms violence into discourse. And that transformation is not a simple failure. It is an implicit strategy.

The UN as a worldwide moral anaesthetic

We must see the UN not as an impartial arbiter but as a machine for moral softening, an immense factory of euphemisms. By turning crimes into debates, violations into reports, emergencies into procedures, it converts human anger into intellectual acceptance.

This mechanism soothes elites, reassures media, calms publics. Even victims end up hoping for a mention in a communiqué rather than for real change. The UN hands out verbal medals to suffering. It offers recognition in place of reparation.

But at what price? The price of paralysis. The price of surrender. By relieving peoples of their indignation, it strips them of their only weapon: revolt. It is hard to scream when someone speaks on your behalf. That is what the UN does: it speaks so that no one screams.

An engineering of global consent

The UN’s fundamental function is therefore not to act but to prevent. Prevent what? The emergence of a real counter-power, of structured anger, of a worldwide jolt. The UN neutralises the very possibility of an international revolutionary movement.

It achieves this through a simple technique: promise. Justice is on its way, we are told. It advances, slowly, surely. One must wait. Sign. Negotiate. Rephrase. Meanwhile, the balance of power stays intact. The dominant dominate. The humiliated keep hoping.

Here lies the paradox. The UN sustains a worldwide faith in justice to come, precisely to guarantee the everlastingness of present injustice. It renews the status quo by promising its reform. This is not a contradiction; it is a strategy of endless delay.

The UN’s historical responsibility

People often believe the UN is powerless. That is false. It is powerful in the art of making powerlessness acceptable. It is skilful at transforming disaster into normality. Since its birth it has covered illegal wars, prolonged occupations, massive massacres – not by denying them, but by wrapping them in language.

And it does so with full legitimacy, for its Charter enshrines the untouchability of the five victors of 1945. The world order rests on that founding inequality. Everything is skewed from the outset. Yet this very structure speaks in humanity’s name.

The real question is therefore not “Why does the UN do nothing?” but “Why does it pretend it can do everything?” That illusion, maintained on a planetary scale, is the true lock on change. It blocks not only action but even the thought of alternatives.

The UN as a lock on global clarity

We must state the matter with scandal-worthy precision:
The UN is not a failure, it is a mask. It is not a dashed hope, but a functional decoy. It is not an arbiter that falters, but a scenography that succeeds. Its role is not to impose law but to make people believe law exists. That collective belief, carefully maintained, defuses humanity’s moral revolt.

The UN’s gravity therefore lies not in what it fails to do but in what it prevents. It prevents us from seeing the naked architecture of global injustice. It prevents us from imagining another order. It prevents us from hearing the screams.

That is why this text exists. Not to denounce a malfunction but to break a spell. To lift the veil. To let us hear, beneath the diplomats’ soothing words, the chilling silence of those who have no one left to defend them.

The UN talks too much. And that overflow of discourse stops us, collectively, from thinking about what should precede any system: radical lucidity about what is. Law without force is not a promise. It is a performance. And the world deserves more than a stage set.

Perhaps the only form of justice left begins by tearing down the curtains. For the UN is the main obstacle to the emergence of genuine global justice. The UN is the greatest victory of the brigands. Without firing a shot, they achieve what would otherwise require wars. Yes, the UN avoids wars – let us grant it that – but what kind of entities enjoy the immunity it provides? The answer is: the worst of all.

Let us read that definition again:

“The organisation’s primary objectives are the maintenance of international peace and security. To achieve them, it promotes human rights, provides humanitarian aid, sustainable development and the enforcement of international law, and it possesses specific powers such as imposing international sanctions and authorising military intervention.” Hilarious, is it not? They have no shame…