How Europeans are raised to love the United Nations
Americans are often puzzled by the veneration of the United Nations in Europe. The US has been UN-skeptic from the very start. Preisdent Wilson took the initiative to its failed predecessor the League of Nations, but had to see the US Congress refuse the country to join it. And even though the US played a large part in the birth of the UN, there has been a large body of skeptics in the country from the start.
Europeans on the other hand may have been cynical about the disastrous failure of the League, but people living on the war-ravaged European continent were more than willing to give League 2.0 a chance. Remember, half the continent had been Nazi occupied, the other half had been on the losing side (some, like Italy, had combined the two). There are obviously good historical reasons why Europeans were positive to the UN, and since it has been part of an international framework keeping the continent out of major wars for a historically astonishing 60 years, Europeans have grown to rely on it and are reluctant to admit that some of its institutions, especially the Security Council, is something of a relic in a post-cold war environment.
I grew up in Norway, and was actually raised in a combination of cultural impulses from both extreme US UN-skepticism and Norway's open, unopposed veneration of the world organisation. Part of the US UN-skepticism was actually religious and apocalyptic, arguing that the UN (and, earlier, the League) was one of the apocalyptic beasts in the Book of Revalation (similar ideas exist about the EU among fundamentalists in Europe). I grew up in the particular American sect the Jehovah's Witness, and thus learned that the UN was an atrocity: the image of the beast in Revelation. This is probably a reason why I even noticed the virtually unopposed veneration of the United Nations in Norway.
 Norway's social-democratic state has even instituted the UN day (October 24) as a unique sort of public holiday for the schools. Instead of being a day off as is typical of such days, it is a day where schools have a special programme where children learn how great the UN is, and learn to sing its praise (sometimes literally). Schools and even kindergartens make this a day of special projects for the children; teaching them about international solidarity and human rights. The same is the case in Sweden, and as near as I can find out, in many other European countries.
 The picture or the right is from a Swedish school celebrating the UN day in 2003. The picture on the left is from the webpage of a Norwegian school, a drawing by a child in celebration of the UN's child convention, exhibited to celebrate the UN day.
We can surely argue that children can learn far worse things in this world than international solidarity and the value of of the United Nations. Be that as it may, this goes a long way towards explaining why many Europeans reacts very negatively when members of the Bush administration disparages the United Nations. Probably, hearing a US president dismiss the UN sounds the same as a European dismissing God does to an average midwestern American.
Seeing the UN as the major hope for international peace and security is implicit in European thinking, the kind of ideas people have socialised into their minds from childhood and are unlikely to reject later in life without giving the matter serious thought. It would take a major rethinking to even admit the idea that the United Nations is incapable of handling many international emergencies, not to mention realising that it has major flaws.
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