The United Nations General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders in New York has been overshadowed by war, notably the risk of escalation in the Middle East after Israel’s weekend air strikes on Lebanon. That conflict and the enduring wars in Ukraine and Sudan have brought into focus the inadequacy of today’s system of global governance and its failure to fulfil the UN’s founding mission of bringing nations together to achieve peace.
Underfunded, sometimes poorly managed and prone to scandal, the UN and its agencies still play an indispensable role, particularly in the world’s poorer places. It is the only global body with the authority and capacity to co-ordinate action on issues like climate and pandemics that affect the entire world and in humanitarian emergencies. But the structures established in 1945 are in need of a major overhaul to address today’s challenges and to give fairer representation to countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
UN secretary general António Guterres convened the Summit for the Future last week to chart a path towards reform. The summit adopted a Pact for the Future including 56 broad actions to improve the UN’s decision-making mechanisms and address issues like unsustainable debt and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). The pact, which was opposed by Russia, North Korea and a handful of other countries, is a step in the right direction but implementing it will require a change of outlook, particularly among the western powers.
President Michael D Higgins’s clumsy response to questions about his congratulatory message to Iran’s new president distracted attention from his speech to the summit, which was an eloquent call for a return to the UN’s first principles. He called for the UN, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to be remodelled to give more agency to Asia, Africa and Latin America and an end to what he called the abuse of the veto on the Security Council.
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The world needs agreed, enforceable rules to resolve conflicts and to protect the weak from the strong. But the United States-led “rules-based international order” is seen as lacking legitimacy, not only by rival powers such as China and Russia but across much of the Global South.
The US is perceived not only to have written the rules but to pick and choose when to follow them . Washington’s refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court and agreements like the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea undermine its credibility as keeper of the global rulebook.
The global system needs better rules with a broader base of legitimacy and enforcement mechanisms that work. The Pact for the Future is a welcome step towards a reinvigorated multilateral system but the hardest work lies ahead.