The UN system continues to show just how poorly it is structured, how lacking in the courage of its convictions, how inadequate and incapable it is to serve as a central authority in global governance.
Global governance is meaningless if laws are applied or respected selectively. The best the UN can do, it seems, is “manage” crises, and send thoughts and prayers to families affected by recurrent crises.
When the last era of globalisation reached its peak with the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995, there was great exuberance about global governance. The excitement was quickly curbed when the East Asian crisis of 1997 shook the foundations of market-led capitalism and the “architecture of global finance”. Global governance was revealed to be a “nebuleuse”, a cloud of “ideological influences that have fostered the realignment of elite thinking to the needs of the world market”.
In 1999, in great haste, the UN published a “landmark” set of papers on global public goods and how to better manage international co-operation and globalisation. These issues have been discussed, or alluded to, in this space previously. Through “the lens” of global public goods the UN, and global public policymakers, would address a range of problems in the world: market crises, conflict, cultural heritage and global disease.
Then came the dot-com crisis (2000); the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington (2001); the invasion of Afghanistan (2001); the invasion of Iraq (2003); the global economic crisis of 2008; the invasion of Libya (2011); the war in Syria (2011); the Ebola crisis in West Africa (2014); the Brexit poll (2016); the Covid-19 pandemic (2020); the war in Ukraine (2021); a global rise in ethno-nationalism, and the latest hot phase of the conflict over Palestine.
The problem for the UN is actually that, like its interwar predecessor, the League of Nations, it is incapable of preventing transnational conflict and can only “manage” it — as if there are no structural and historical injustices and iniquities in the international system.
A bigger problem is the UN system’s ineffectual jurisdictional reach, especially within the Security Council, and more importantly with the International Criminal Court (ICC). Put another way, the UN has been helpless to prevent any of the worst of what has gone wrong in the world over the past two decades.
As we stand today, our faces turned to the Israel-Gaza conflict and war in Ukraine, it is easy to identify parallels between the UN today, and the League of Nations in the interwar years. While the idea of the league may have been noble, its glaring flaws were its liberal idealist underpinnings (liberalism always has winners and losers), and its inability to curtail rogue states, notably those that refused to accept the jurisdiction of multilateral institutions such as the ICC.
In 1921 Arthur Sweetser, a member of the information section of the League of Nations, stated the organisation’s prime desideratum: “No nation shall go to war without having first had the recourse to arbitration or conciliation... This single agreement fulfils hopes cherished [that] if peace may be preserved by blanket agreement not to go to war... [peace may] be preserved by removing the causes of war”.
We have to believe the League of Nations tried. However, when Russia attacked a port in Persia in 1920 the league would not intervene. When Benito Mussolini invaded Greece in 1923, he simply ignored the league.
The league was involved in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which sought to outlaw war, yet it was incapable of enforcing the pact when Japan invaded Mongolia in 1931. And, of course, the League of Nations administered Gdańsk (Danzig), but was unable to prevent it falling into the hands of the Nazis in 1939. The league collapsed with the return to conflict during World War 2.
Let’s ignore, here, some of the possible causes of war; that it’s in our DNA, that it is caused by religion, nationalism, greed, gluttony, searches for more land (more taxes), or imposing one set of beliefs about freedom, democracy or human rights on others, boosting military industries, or confusing security with militarism. For what it’s worth, I cannot get to the point where I believe we can eliminate war. To paraphrase Eli Wiesel, we may never have peace, but that does not mean we should stop working for it.
Based on a firm belief in a global common good, notwithstanding vast differences among 7-billion to 8-billion people, better governance should help provide senses of security and safety, promote prosperity and overall wellbeing, and protect common pool resources that extend beyond national boundaries. Within this frame, states — I usually avoid the term “nations” — would have to accept that they are not exceptional, not unique, that they do not have sanctified manifest destiny, and nor can they claim closer proximity to their creator than any other group.
Most states are legal-political entities, and should necessarily be held to a higher standard than “non-state” actors without surrendering entirely their “right to exist”. They may, nonetheless, have to ask at what cost to others do they exist.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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