We need support from many regional and subregional organizations. We need support from business communities, we need support from religious communities and local communities and even philanthropic organizations, first of all, to solidify our political will. Second, to mobilize our resources, which are used as tools—if we do not have effective tools, how can we do it?
—Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the UN
The UN was created in a war-torn world in 1945. Soon it found itself operating in a very different kind of conflict, the Cold War, which saw many nations align themselves with one of the two major powers, the United States or the Soviet Union. Along the way, massive transformations altered nations, cultures, and worldviews. European colonies were besieged by anticolonial movements, leading to the creation of more than a hundred new nations since the 1950s. Additional global changes came with the unraveling of the Soviet bloc starting in 1989, and more than two decades later we are experiencing the fallout, as the formerly bipolar world becomes tripolar. China’s rising wealth and assertiveness, alongside a Russian Federation eager to retain its great-power status and a United States that is still regarded as the world’s dominant economic, political, and military power, has greatly complicated, and some would say impeded, the functioning of the UN Security Council, an issue we will explore later. Next to the top-tier powers is an array of second-tier powers, including Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Certain nations in Asia (e.g., South Korea, India), Africa (South Africa), and Latin America (Mexico, Brazil) with growing weight and visibility have also made the global political landscape more diverse and less concentrated. Regional or common-interest organizations like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) have given voice to the agendas and aspirations of nations in the emerging political and economic landscape. An observer of the UN in 1945, time-warped to today, would find a truly transformed world.
The emphasis on multiple actors has attracted notice among experts and policymakers, who have noted the proliferation of “centers” around the world. The Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, also known as the G20, is a group of finance ministers and central bank governors from nineteen countries with large economies plus the European Union. Representatives of the G20 have held summits regularly since 2008 and speak for the countries with most of the world’s economic output and trade and two-thirds of its population. Stewart Patrick of the US Council on Foreign Relations argues that the G20 has “given a little bit of competition to the United Nations framework.” He doubts that it will ever replace the Security Council, “but there are concerns within the United Nations broader general membership that the G20 over time may become some sort of global director that will infringe upon the Security Council’s prerogative.” That seems unlikely, Patrick thinks, “because of course the same differences that apply within the Security Council would apply even more so given the diversity of the G20.”
Other, newer factors have come into play, such as the digital revolution and its associated information explosion and the rise of social media. Joseph S. Nye Jr., described by Madeleine Albright as “America’s foremost expert” on power, sees the information revolution as transforming global politics by providing political access to everyone, including both well-intentioned mainstream individuals and groups and those with dissenting or even destructive agendas. “The problem for all states in today’s global information age,” he writes, “is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful states.” Nye has commented on the rise of alternative centers of policy and action. “One of the dilemmas of multilateral diplomacy is how to get everyone into the act and still get action. The answer is likely to lie in what the Europeans have dubbed ‘variable geometry.’ There will be many multilateralisms that will vary with the distribution of power resources in different issues.”
These alternative “minilateral” frameworks of cooperation express multilateral relations on a limited scale and don’t necessarily require or even invite UN participation. Patrick includes among them the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (a Eurasian political, economic, and military association), as well as the G7 (a conference of the finance ministers of the seven largest developed nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the G8 (the G7+Russia), and the many security summits and ad hoc groups that form to address specific problems. “You’re also getting greater reliance on regional organizations, and they’re increasingly giving the UN a run for the money,” he remarks.
In traditional multilateral relations, explains Esther Brimmer of George Washington University, “particularly in a global body, you focus on member states as a whole trying to work toward an issue. Now the minilateral approach in effect says you try to take a small core of states to work on an issue, to hammer out the terms of the issue, bringing together maybe stakeholders who are relevant for the issue or who are credible voices in other regions, and you build out from that, having come up with a deal, with a frame, with a smaller group. Or it says you have a group that participates in something voluntarily and creates a framework and agreement, and then others opt into it and it builds out by other states self-selecting to be part of the group.”
Minilateral relations are happening like this in international trade, she says, but also in other areas, such as counterterrorism. “The idea is you have maybe thirty-odd countries that self-select to work on greater cooperation among their counterterrorism experts. Then they launch and link it to the UN, and then you have other countries that self-select to be part of it and want to build up from there.” She calls it a “vanguard approach” that “builds out to the others.” Her question, though, is “Will these minilateral mechanisms contribute to global norms because, as the vanguard, they are able to work out the tough issues and then bring them to others, or do they constitute an alternative?” If an alternative, it would seem that they might circumvent the UN.
The question may be on the mind of Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson when he says, “I would want to see these regional or common-interest groups relate their programs, their plans, their objectives to the global reality. In today’s world I can see that like-minded countries come together, but if they do so in contrast to global cooperation, then I think we will have a negative development.” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged the UN to think more collaboratively, not just to accomplish its goals more effectively but to ensure its place in the global discussion. “That is a very important lesson which I learned, and that is why I have been appealing and reaching out to Member States: please, let us work together.”
Whether the member states are listening is another matter. Eliasson worries that habits of mind and action are preventing the UN from responding quickly enough. “The agenda for international organizations was mainly composed during the 1960s to the 90s and the beginning of this century,” he notes, but a lot has changed since then. He asks rhetorically, “To what degree do we have serious discussions in the United Nations on the new global trends?” Not enough, he concludes, not nearly enough. “I don’t think we have drawn the conclusions for [creating] a good international system to deal with this new global landscape.”
Some insiders see an opportunity for the UN in this new landscape. According to Mark Malloch-Brown, who was deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan, the influence of leading nations like the United States and Russia is diminished, but the importance of the United Nations is actually enhanced “because where else can you seek answers in the situation of power dispersal?”
But the same forces that make the UN more essential may also circumscribe its work by pushing it to act cooperatively or in liaison with other actors, whether they are national governments, regional organizations, global institutions like the World Bank, or grassroots organizations representing specific ethnic or religious groups. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made it clear that in the new global landscape the UN must partner more with other organizations, recognizing that “nobody—no organization, no country, however powerful, however resourceful one may be—can do this alone.”