Politics & Power Quote by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi

Calling the UN "the best instrument" is a deliberately modest boast: not a victory lap for multilateralism, but a defense brief. Ciampi, a centrist Italian statesman formed by postwar reconstruction and European integration, is speaking from a continent that learned fragility the hard way, then tried to engineer it out of politics through institutions. The key word is "instrument" - technocratic, almost bankerly. It frames the UN not as a moral cathedral or a world government, but as a tool kit: imperfect, necessary, and judged by whether it reduces systemic risk.

"Still" does the real argumentative work. It anticipates the obvious objections - Security Council paralysis, bureaucracy, selective enforcement, great-power hypocrisy - and concedes them without surrendering the premise. The subtext is a warning against the seductive alternative: that sovereignty alone, or ad hoc coalitions, can manage transnational threats. Ciampi is betting that even a compromised forum is better than a vacuum, because fragility is what happens when rules become optional and communication becomes a luxury.

"Less fragile" is also carefully chosen. He avoids the utopian language of peace or justice and instead speaks in the vocabulary of resilience. It's a claim calibrated for an era of diffuse instability: civil wars spilling across borders, uneven development, refugee flows, terrorism, and the early recognition that markets and climates ignore passports. Ciampi isn't insisting the UN can fix the world; he's insisting it can keep the world from cracking as easily. In that lowered expectation sits the persuasion: pragmatism as an ethical stance.