Sorry Secretary-General Guterres, Multilateralism Is A Pipe Dream

With the backing and participation of the Rector of the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica, I initiated dialogues during the Covid pandemic on whether the UN General Assembly could be transformed into an effective body of global governance.

Those inquiries came to mind this week after reading about Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ “Pact for the Future,” which was adopted without a vote and touted a “step-change towards more effective, inclusive, networked multilateralism.”

Guterres rightly says: “International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them. We see out-of-control geopolitical divisions and runaway conflicts – not least in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and beyond. Runaway climate change. Runaway inequalities and debt. Runaway development of new technologies like artificial intelligence – without guidance or guardrails. And our institutions simply can’t keep up.”

However, the Pact for the Future is purported to be “the most progressive and concrete commitment to Security Council reform since the 1960s, with plans to improve the effectiveness and representativeness of the council.” As such it discordantly echoes the tragedy of the commons (the Earth itself), and is stillborn precisely because of its focus on the obsolete Security Council.

The premises of our UPeace dialogues were: 

1. The post-World War II international order is collapsing, and cannot be transformed; therefore a new paradigm reflecting the global reality is urgently necessary. 

2. The UN is an international institution, not a global one, and that distinction must be clear.

3. A psychological revolution is vital, in order to effectively end the primary identification with particular groups (tribalism and its modern forms of ethnicism and nationalism). 

4. A new, authentically global, non-power-holding consultative body urgently needs to be created to work independently in conjunction with the UN General Assembly, bypassing the moribund Security Council.

UPeace is an important seedbed of insights and ideas for the UN, and Rector Francisco Rojas is an influential liaison. So perhaps our dialogues had some effect, since “Guterres advocated for a Summit for the Future more than two years ago as an attempt to persuade world leaders in the wake of the global Covid outbreak that cooperation and multilateralism had to be revived.” Sadly though, it cannot.

The United Nations was the dream of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. To their credit, they acknowledged the failure of President Wilson’s League of Nations, looked beyond the carnage of World War II, and founded the United Nations.

The UN is based on FDR’s “Four Freedoms”: the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. The first is often suppressed or marginalised, even in the United States. Islamophobia makes a mockery of the second. And the third and fourth freedoms sound positively utopian these days.

During the talks with UPeace I visited Muir Woods, an isolated grove of awe-inspiring Giant Redwoods across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco in Marin County, where the UN charter was signed on the 26th of June 1945. Roosevelt had just died, and did not see his dream come to fruition in New York. But he and Eleanor would be appalled at the paralysed talk shop that the UN has become in the throes of the Security Council.

Indeed, many people are pointedly asking: “As diplomats from nearly 200 member states gather in New York this week for the United Nations general assembly against the backdrop of a massive Israeli bombing campaign in southern Lebanon, a nagging question to be addressed is whether the UN is too broken to be fixed.”

Clearly, if the United Nations continues the way it is going, it will soon go the way of the League of Nations.

Can internationalism/multilateralism be revived? Can there be basic global cooperation when 200 separate, “sovereign” nation-states remain the cornerstone of the world order? Can there be a revolution in consciousness that overthrows man’s ancient tribalism and its modern forms of ethnicism and nationalism?

Clearly, the answer to the first two questions is no, while the prospects for psychological revolution appear to be as dim as Guterres’ multilateralism.

Unfortunately, throughout human history, a defunct and corrupt world order has only ended with war or economic collapse.

Until the 20th century, world orders such as Pax Romana were regional. But after World War II Pax Americana attempted to be global. It failed, though many American elites still believe “there is no substitute for US power, just as many UN people believe there is no substitute for the UN. However, “there is no substitute” is an admission of a failure of insight and imagination.

As others have noted, the UN “remains one of the most important humanitarian organizations on Earth, overseeing relief efforts for refugees, natural disaster victims and others in dire need.”

Politically however, the UN and US are practically useless. The Biden Administration and the Security Council appear utterly incapable of stopping Netanyahu’s Israel from leveling Lebanon as he has Gaza, or ending the microcosm of World War I in Ukraine, or halting the hellishness in Sudan.

President Biden, in his address to the UN, had the temerity to speak of despair after failing for a year to use the enormous leverage the United States has over Israel to stop the slaughter in Gaza. “I know many look at the world today and react with despair,” he outrageously said.

The “polycrisis” is not only horizontal, at the political and economic levels, but also vertical, at the human psychological and spiritual levels. It encompasses all that humans are and have been, all of history and prehistory, all people and humankind as a whole.

The international order is dead, and the ideal of multilateralism is a pipe dream. The old institutions like the UN can still serve humanity, but only if they are superseded by enough human beings who have ended tribalism/nationalism within themselves.

© Scoop Media