One of the biggest international political events of recent years opens in New York on Sunday, with more than 130 presidents and prime ministers and representatives from about 7,000 non-governmental organisations expected to attend. Ireland is sending an unusually high-level representation led by President Michael D Higgins and including Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Micheál Martin.
For United Nations secretary general António Guterres, the Summit of the Future is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul the way the world manages common problems and challenges.
“Our institutions cannot keep up, because they are designed for another era and another world,” he said this week.
“The Security Council is stuck in a time warp; international financial architecture is outdated and ineffective; and we are simply not equipped to take on a wide range of emerging issues.”
Despite the urgency of Guterres’s call to action, which comes against the background of wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, the summit has received little attention in the international media. And none of the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, China, Russia, France and Britain — are likely to be there.
Guterres proposed the summit in a 2021 report called Our Common Agenda, which was in part a reflection on the weaknesses of the global system exposed by the coronavirus pandemic. Although the health crisis was a global one, governments prioritised the protection of their citizens to the point of fierce competition for life-saving treatments, vaccines and protective clothing.
He saw the failure of international co-operation during that crisis as evidence that multilateral institutions were stuck in the past with no framework for managing new challenges like those posed by technologies such as artificial intelligence. The institutions had also failed to adapt to the shift in the centre of economic and geopolitical gravity from western Europe and the United States to Asia and the Global South.
“We can’t build a future for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents,” he said.
Although some of today’s international bodies are more than a century old — the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was founded in 1919 and the Universal Postal Union dates back to 1874 — most were established after the end of the second World War. The UN was formed in 1945 as an international intergovernmental organisation to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.
The UN General Assembly operates on the principle of one state one vote with each of the 193 UN member states having an equal voice. But the 15-member Security Council reflects the outcome of the war, with five of its winners holding permanent seats on the council, each with the power to veto any decision there.
The UN grew as more countries became independent after decolonisation and it took on an ever greater number of specialised agencies, funds and programmes. These include agencies such as the World Health Organisation and United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation, funds like the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund and entities such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
When the victors in the second World War fell out and the United States and the Soviet Union formed rival blocs, making decisions in the Security Council became more difficult. But the two blocs, along with a large and active Non-Aligned Movement that formed in the wake of decolonisation in Asia and Africa, achieved collective action at the UN despite the cold war.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union heralded a new era of international co-operation, with relations between Washington, Moscow and Beijing on a relatively good footing. Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s 1992 report An Agenda for Peace outlined a vision of an activist, interventionist UN with a greater focus on preventive diplomacy, peace enforcement and post-conflict peacebuilding.
The post-cold war interlude of modest co-operation among the great powers took its first big hit in 1999 when Nato bombed Yugoslavia without the authorisation of the Security Council. The United States and its allies failed to secure a Security Council mandate to invade Iraq in 2003 but went ahead anyway, ignoring reports from UN weapons inspectors that there was no “plausible indication” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Flouting the UN Charter has become routine for other permanent members of the Security Council too, notably Vladimir Putin’s Russia with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia and China can veto any attempt in the council to sanction Moscow while the US has consistently blocked action against Israel over its actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
The year 2023 marked the highest number of state-based conflicts in the world since 1945 and the past three years have seen more conflict-related deaths than any time in the last three decades, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo. But in a meeting last week to draft the Pact for the Future to be adopted by consensus at the end of next week’s summit, diplomats argued over whether it could include the word “aggression”.
A year before the UN was founded, 43 countries agreed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to establish the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). They aimed to help rebuild the shattered postwar economy and to promote international economic co-operation and trade by harmonising monetary policies, helping countries through periods of financial instability and offering loans for reconstruction and development.
Like the UN Security Council, the IMF and the World Bank (which became known as the Bretton Woods institutions) had a governance structure that reflected the distribution of power at the end of the second World War. The US and Europe continue to enjoy voting rights in the two institutions disproportionate to their share of the world’s population, at the expense of countries in the Global South.
More than a third of the UN’s member states are suffering under unsustainable debt and one in four spend more each year on servicing the interest on their debt than on health or education. These countries and others in the Global South want commitments from next week’s summit to address issues of debt and development but the US and its allies want to leave such discussions to the Bretton Woods institutions, where they enjoy a blocking minority.
Expectations are modest in advance of the summit and there is little chance, for example, of any meaningful proposal for reforming the Security Council or reducing nuclear arsenals. And diplomats have been struggling to agree on the UN’s role in regulating the application of artificial intelligence, which is already reshaping the battlefield as well as much of the economy.
The Pact for the Future, the Declaration on Future Generations and the Global Digital Compact which the summit is expected to adopt will not fix the global system. But Guterres hopes that a successful summit will create a path towards finding new strategies to make the system more effective, including through what he calls networked multilateralism, working with regional organisations like the African Union.
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