Politics & Power Quote by Dag Hammarskjold

Hammarskjold points to a crisis of perception and ownership. The United Nations can seem like a distant, baffling construct, a collage of committees and acronyms that ordinary people watch from afar. By invoking a Picasso abstraction, he names the feeling that global governance is avant-garde art: clever perhaps, but alien, hard to read, not made for you. He counters with a homely image, a drawing you made yourself. The work might be rough, but it carries your hand, your care, your responsibility. Only when people feel that kind of authorship toward the UN, he argues, will things begin to set right.

The line comes from a leader who fought to give the UN a practical, human face. As Secretary-General during the Suez Crisis and the Congo turmoil, Hammarskjold helped invent modern peacekeeping, turning principles into boots on the ground. He insisted on an independent international civil service and on the notion that the UN is not a stage for national posturing but a tool for common action. He also knew how easily it could be caricatured as bureaucracy or utopia. His answer was not to simplify the world but to draw citizens into it, to link legitimacy to participation.

The contrast between a museum piece and a personal sketch also reframes expectations. A museum piece must be perfect and complete; a personal sketch is iterative, smudged, and alive. The UN, seen as a drawing we make, becomes a process rather than a monument, a daily practice of compromise and protection rather than a temple of lofty declarations. That shift demands more than sympathy; it requires citizens to fund it, defend it, critique it, and model its cooperative spirit in their own politics. The condition embedded in his promise is clear: global institutions work only when people recognize themselves in them and accept the work such recognition entails.