Michael Ignatieff Quotes

International institutions are composed of governments. Governments control their own military forces and police.

No self-respecting country - especially one with our clout and proud history - should sign up to a proposal that surrenders the power to veto our foreign and trade policy to another entity.

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

Admitting, however, for the sake of argument, that I am prime and sole minister in this country, am I, therefore, prime and sole minister of all Europe? Am I answerable for the conduct of other countries as well as for that of my own?

The problem with the United Nations is that while democracy within nations is the best available form of government, democracy among nations can be a moral disaster - especially if some nations are not democracies.

The purpose of the United Nations should be to protect the essential sovereignty of nations, large and small.

As the highest ranking American official in the United Nations organization, I came to understand thoroughly that the national constitutional processes of the member states define the status of territories under their sovereignty.

The nations must be organized internationally and induced to enter into partnership, subordinating in some measure national sovereignty to worldwide institutions and obligations.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

The international body must have the institutions and powers it needs to do what it is created to do; in other words it must be boldly and openly set up as a super-state on a level above the national sovereignties, and that, in turn, means that the Member States must have accepted in advance as much limitation and subordination of their particular sovereignties as this superior sovereign power requires.

If governments do not want to work with the U.N. and the international organizations, there is a limit to what you can do. And there is also a limit to patience.

I wouldn't say the nation-state is dead, but the Sovereignty has been greatly circumscribed ... even for a country as large as the U. S.

Governments can expect to act multilaterally or unilaterally—but not have it both ways at the same time.

The American nation cannot reach across the planet and pick the leadership of other countries.

Foreign policy is too important to be left up to foreign service officers.

American foreign policy must be fashioned by the United States, not the United Nations.

World government is a premature concept at this stage. We are moving more and more into supernational arrangements, but it is too early still.

You cannot have individual foreign policy. You cannot have celebrity foreign policy.

The United States does not feel any need to consult with anybody … except when it suits them.

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

When America rejected the League, she had deliberately chosen to rest solely upon treaties with the sanction of public opinion alone…

International institutions like the UN can only be as effective as its members allow it to be.

Under the George W. Bush Administration…, the United States was generally seen as having the capacity and resolve, to pursue its own agenda in complete disregard of other states’ preferences.

Sovereignty is not just at the national level; that's the mistake of Brexit that other people make.

When the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.