The United Nations remains the only bastion of peace, justice and development in the world.

If home prices crash in the US, the bastion of capitalism, could it destroy confidence and end the boom in other countries? If so, could a worldwide recession follow?

We were deeply involved in the process of the Court's creation, through its historic establishment as the international bastion safeguarding the victims of crimes that shock the conscience of mankind.

Not surprisingly, Pakistan has reacted angrily to such statements they are also alarmed. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan s army chief, cautioned the US against intervening in the terrorist bastion of North Waziristan.

In Europe, antipathy to immigrants, or Islam, can quickly switch to hostility toward the European Union, which is seen as yet another bastion of entrenched elites. This is what Wilders and Grillo have in common.

But, with the overthrow of Mengistu Haile Mariam s Marxist Leninist dictatorship in 1991, Ethiopia began to transform itself. Today, it ranks among the five fastest growing economies in the world, and is a bastion of regional stability.

The seventeenth century united this spiritual mission with imperial expansion, which eventually encompassed a landmass spanning 11 times zones. In the early twentieth century, the imperial and spiritual mission became one, as Russia became the bastion of world communism.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel could not penetrate the bastion around Rice, and his dissent on policy toward Syria, which he often took directly to Obama, was not appreciated. After the midterm elections, Hagel Obama s third defense secretary in six years became the floundering administration s sacrificial lamb.

After the Labor leaders Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ehud Barak embraced the two state concept, there came the first tentative movements in that direction from Likud members Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert, and Ariel Sharon. Now, from the very bastion of the right, came Benjamin Netanyahu.

One component is the jihadists, some of them foreign and some local, with direct ties to al Qaeda or, at least, sympathy with its worldview. The jihadists appear to want a Taliban style Iraq that could serve as a bastion for the wider global Islamist insurgency.

The Muslim Brotherhood considers itself the bastion of modern political Islam, and believes that it should assume a leadership role for all Islamist groups and states. For his part, Khamenei describes himself as the leader of the Islamic world, and calls Iran its mother city (Umm al Qora).

Following the AKP s parliamentary election victory in July, and now with the election of Gül, many observers predicted military intervention. Although there is no doubt that the military, as the bastion of the secular establishment, does not like these results, a coup is virtually out of the question.

But instead of bashing or seeking to undermine Al Jazeera, politicians should encourage this bastion of free expression, recognizing that Arabs will need to endure a messy process on the way to democracy. Along that tortuous route, the world's major powers are bound to be offended, probably quite regularly.

In many countries, people on the right of the political spectrum provide a bastion of support for the central bank. In northern Europe, for example, the European Central Bank s independence is seen as essential for price stability and politicians on the right typically attach a higher priority to this goal.

The fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were Saudis crystallized a long held view of the kingdom as a bastion of authoritarianism and intolerance. In some respects, this perception is accurate, but it cannot be applied to the broad Saudi public.

Indeed, former President George W. Bush welcomed Rebiya Kadeer, a leader of the exiled Uighur independence movement, to the White House, embittering many Chinese. And given that the Uighur bastion of Xinjiang is close to China s borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US was unwise to raise Chinese hackles in this way.

In a heartbeat, Cameron (who himself studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford, having previously attended that bastion of classical education, Eton) has signed away Britain s global influence. Having lost its empire, Britain retains outsized global influence simply because of the power of its civilization and the education absorbed by its decision makers.

For these voters, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi are merely historical figures, and are a distant memory even for many voters born before 1975. It is not surprising that Rahul Gandhi proved unable to bring the Congress a victory in a recent election in a constituency that historically had been a bastion of support for his family.

Today, with spirit renewed, and faced with the challenges that threaten the very existence of humankind, we are working together with the same conviction and motivation as in San Francisco, seeking to invigorate our Organization, which has become the bastion of our principles, for without those principles, we would stand no chance in the globalized world.

Meanwhile, the Senate, the French parliament s upper house, a conservative bastion between the two world wars and ever since, swung to a Socialist majority for the first time in history at the end of 2011. The Socialists also control 20 of France s 22 regional governments, a majority of the presidencies of the Departments, and most cities with more than 30,000 inhabitants.