By GILBERTO MARINGONI*
The new reality does not fit into the structures imposed by the hegemonic power for eight decades
The world is moving towards multilateralism, but multilateral organizations are in crisis. Far from being a play on words, this is the essential observation that can be made based on the loss of effectiveness of the UN Security Council, the lack of practical consequences of G-20 decisions, and impasses arising in meetings of organizations focused on the environment, international trade and human rights, amid the intensification of the West-East dispute.
At the same time, there is growing political dispute within specific interest blocs, such as the G-7, NATO, BRICS and the Arab League, among others. If we focus only on BRICS, of the four initial members present at its founding in 2009 – Brazil, India, Russia and China – 19 more had joined by the Kazan summit last October. NATO comprises 32 countries, led by the US, the Arab League 22 and the G-7 continues to be the main forum for the richest countries in the West, to which Japan is added. This is not about comparing the activities of the UN system with other international arrangements, but about realizing that multilateralism faces serious tensions and shortcomings in the post-2008 crisis world.
Lack of leaders
Two of the greatest expressions of turbulence faced by multilateral institutions occurred in the second half of 2023. The 78th UN General Assembly was notable for the absence of the leaders of four of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Xi Jinping of China, Emmanuel Macron of France, and Rishi Sunak of England claimed scheduling problems. Vladimir Putin, in turn, had an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court.
Although he is not a member of the Organization's highest authority, India's Narendra Modi did not show up either. With the exception of Joe Biden, everyone sent representatives. Two months later, at the 18th G-20 Summit in New Delhi, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Lopez Obrador were absent, replaced by aides. In 2024, the presidents of China and Russia again did not attend the General Assembly.
The non-participation of leaders in important events does not affect the functioning of the UN, although it does show some discredit to the institution. Much more serious has been the repeated failure to comply with resolutions approved by its bodies. Let us take an example, the genocide in the Gaza Strip, starting on October 7, 2023. Since then, the Security Council has approved four resolutions demanding a humanitarian pause, truce or ceasefire. Tel Aviv has not complied with any of them and its representatives have accused the Organization of being “anti-Semitic”, called for its closure and declared Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “persona non grata in Israel”.
The difficult global concertation
The constellation of multilateral organizations that bring together all independent countries is a recent phenomenon in history. The first attempt to bring different interests together around a table took place in 1919, at the end of the First World War, with the League of Nations, which eventually brought together 58 members. It was basically a proposal from the United States, led by Woodrow Wilson, who failed to convince his country's Senate of the importance of the initiative. With the rising power outside, the bloc had limited action until its dissolution in 1946.
The next attempt to organize and discipline the interstate system also had the USA as its main formulator and sponsor. It was designed based on the three summit conferences held by Franklin D. Roosevelt (USA), Winston Churchill (Great Britain) and Joseph Stalin (USSR) between 1943-45, when the Allied victory over Nazi-fascism in the Second World War was already in sight. Franklin D. Roosevelt had internally restructured the role of the State in the economy after the 1929 crisis, through the new deal, and was preparing to outline his country's imperial action on the external plane.
British scholar Peter Gowan wrote that the Democratic administration had two tasks to accomplish in creating the UN: “One would be to address mass popular politics, both within the United States and internationally. It would be an inspiring ethical face, offering the promise of a better world. Simultaneously, the internal face of the organization could be shaped (…) as a framework for the power politics” of the hegemonic power.
The State Department had to resolve an intricate issue that had made the League of Nations unviable: how to group together under the same rules great powers and peripheral states with little influence in the global arena? In other words, how to update the rules of hierarchy between countries and the balance of powers, the basis of the world system defined after the creation of the interstate system in 1648, in the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia, which sealed the end of the Thirty Years' War?
UN under US control
To be legitimate, the UN project had to combine, at the same time, the complex political architectures of equality and hierarchy. The solution was to establish a general assembly, in which each state would have one vote, regardless of its relative importance, and a sort of restricted directory, composed of five members who had made up the allied forces in the recently ended conflict.
The agreement on the basic structure was reached at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in the second half of 1944, outside Washington, between representatives of the USSR, China, Great Britain, France and the USA, who would become permanent members of the body known as the Security Council. As a method of ensuring compliance with the decisions, all votes had to be unanimous. Thus, one vote against would be enough to veto any resolution.
The United States never thought of the UN as a world government, but as an organization under its total control. The US's prominence in the new entity represented the other side of the results of the Bretton Woods conference – which had validated the new architecture of the international financial system weeks earlier. There, the dollar was imposed as the global currency, in the same way that the Security Council was created through force. Although established as a multipolar mechanism, the UN was designed to exercise American unipolarity. From then on, when this was put in check, the organization faced crises.
The UN Charter was signed by 49 independent countries on June 26, 1945, amid pomp and celebration. Almost all of Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East were colonies, protectorates or mandates of European countries. Despite its imperfections and imbalances, it represented a notable advance in civilization. Throughout the Cold War (1947-91), the United Nations represented obstacles to countless imperial actions by the United States and other powers around the world.
Powers disrespect rules
The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949 represented the first concrete manifestation of the limitations of the UN for Washington. The empire created an alliance that openly denied its multipolar preaching in the name of fighting a common enemy. Six years later, the USSR would articulate the Warsaw Pact. Violations of the rules of the Charter occurred repeatedly. In this regard, the British historian Perry Anderson wrote: “The Israeli occupation of the West Bank lasted half a century without the Security Council lifting a finger. When the US and its allies failed to secure a resolution authorizing them to attack Yugoslavia in 1998-99, they turned to NATO instead, in blatant violation of the UN Charter. (…) Four years later, the United States and Great Britain launched their attack on Iraq, bypassing the Security Council.”
After the Cold War and with the absence of any global competitor, Washington's unilateralism undermined the post-war multilateral arrangement. The sovereignty of states not aligned with Washington became a work of fiction and so-called international law was subordinated to the law of the strongest.
In May 2020, dissatisfied with the direction the World Health Organization was taking in combating the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump announced his country's withdrawal from the organization to which it was the largest contributor. The International Court of Justice, created in 1945 to settle disputes between countries, does not have the participation of the United States, China, Russia or Israel.
The fragile world order
In May 2024, hundreds of organizations issued a public letter calling on member states to regularize their contributions to the UN, which has led to a reduction in the activities of several organizations, especially those focused on defending vulnerable populations in conflict regions. At the time, almost half of the member countries were behind on their payments. In December, the organization made public the need for an additional contribution of US$40 billion to meet humanitarian demands in several countries.
For José Luís Fiori, professor of international political economy at UFRJ, the post-World War II world order began to collapse in the early 1970s, “when the US abandoned the peace agreements Bretton Woods and unilaterally disengaged from the parity between the dollar and gold, which they themselves defined in 1944”. In his words, a second stage of this order (1992-2008) was sustained by the unipolar power of the United States. After the victory in the Cold War and the Gulf War (1991-92), “the United States reserved from the beginning the unilateral right to wage ‘humanitarian wars’ and to declare and attack ‘terrorism’ anywhere in the world, according to its exclusive discretion, and without any concern for the United Nations and its Security Council, which were literally scrapped in 1999”, he writes. In the economic and financial sphere, this is the neoliberal order, enshrined in the Washington Consensus (1989) and imposed by force and blackmail on the periphery.
A third phase began with the 2008 crisis, which radicalized the application of deregulation measures, privatizations and eternal fiscal adjustments as the new Western consensus. It coincided with the years of China's vigorous entry as a global competitor to the United States, the recovery of the Russian economy, the unprecedented weight acquired by India and the spread, in more recent years, of localized wars with global repercussions.
These are times of accelerated loss of political influence in Europe, widespread advance of far-right and neo-fascist movements and strong population displacements. The environmental crisis has become a decisive factor in relations between countries, as has the accelerated deindustrialization of Latin America, the discarding of national projects in important peripheral countries and the worsening of income and wealth disparities.
Frozen structure
The possibilities of the UN system are outdated in this brave new world. Its dozens of bodies, commissions, dispute chambers, financial institutions, etc., still have their most important instance of power frozen in a design from eight decades ago.
President Lula has emphasized, in international forums, the need to renegotiate “global governance” by reviewing the Charter, considering that only 51 of the current 193 members of the United Nations participated in its founding.
Current tensions show that the world order is banging on the back burner, as the saying goes on the streets, but there is no way forward. So-called international law, as always, is defined by the old adage that he who has the most power wins. Unfortunately, a new global agreement will not come about through good conversation alone.
*Gilberto Maringoni is a journalist and professor of International Relations at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC).
Expanded version of article published in year-end issue 1343 of the magazine Capital letter.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
