Comment by dgellow
17 hours ago
The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.
> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter
> The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
The UN's explicit purpose is to try and prevent conflict. One of the requirements to join is to renounce the right to use force in international relations except in self-defense.
They do that in a number of ways. One of those is to have these types of symbolic votes. The hope is that by having where everyone stands out in the open, whether on silly things or serious things, it will reduce conflict. Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Obviously world peace hasn't been achieved. It probably never will be. Nonetheless, that is the goal of the UN. They want to try to fix conflicts.
It aims at peace yes, but importantly it is an inter-national organisation, meaning it lives beside nations and doesn't have any formal power over them. In some cases the individual treaties negotiated at the UN result in the UN having some formal influence over member nations, but even then the concrete commitments are usually very limited. For examy the Paris agreement basically just says you have to make a few reports, with peer pressure being most of the enforcement.
In contrast the EU is (partially) a supernational organisation: in some fields the EU holds formal power over what happens in the member nations (because the member nations changed their national law to give EU that power).
>The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.
Trump didn't unilaterally decide what the rest of the world calls two bodies of water, only the US
He doesn't even have the power to unilaterally declare what the US calls it. Names of geographic features are established by popular usage, not governments.
>established by popular usage, not governments.
This is straight up wrong.