The international community always looks to regulate its own relationship and dynamics through schemes and/or architectures, which have variously existed for centuries and initially emerged from the assemblies that led to the Peace of Westphalia, which was then followed by the Congress of Vienna, the Holy Alliance, the Quadruple Alliance, the Quintuple Alliance, the Peace of Paris (after the Crimean War), the Berlin Congresses (two), the International Union of American Republics, the League of Nations and finally, the United Nations.
The aspiration to regulate activities has grown with the development of the complexity of international dynamics and has extended, sometime in a very stringent manner, to issues that are not essentially political, but important, such as public health, with the proliferation of the so-called “international bureaux,” which since the end of the 19th century have contributed to establishing a praiseworthy network of regulations and systems.
It is a matter of fact that after 1945, aside from the establishment of the United Nations, there has been a proliferation of organizations, be they international, regional, sub-regional, which regulate (or attempt to do so), every aspect of collective life (and in some areas, even individual life, considering how the decisions of the EU Commission impact many aspects of the life of individual citizens of the European Union).
Since 1945, however, this development has been accompanied by the emergence of the East-West confrontation, and many entities were developed with such a system (an example of this divergence was “Intervision” which transmitted via satellite the programmes of the televisions of the nations close to the USSR, in contrast to “Eurovision,” which is organised around the EBU [European Broadcasting Union]). But as far as possible, these entities existed together in the oscillations of the Cold War, and the UN itself had a role that was not particularly relevant in international affairs, blocked as they were by the system of crossed vetoes of the P5 (USA, France, UK, USSR, PRC) of the Security Council; and this confrontation was reflected in the increasing number of AFPs (Agencies, Funds and Programmes) progressively established, limiting the impact of these entities.
Other than the institutionalized entities, multilateralism saw the establishment of de facto groups, like the G7, that bring together the most developed economic powers of the world. This group, which developed progressively both in membership and articulations, as informal meeting of ministers of finance in 1973, reached a very complex architectural level, while maintaining the formula of rotational presidency/troika without setting up a permanent secretariat and getting a more profiled role, starting with the case of the war in Kosovo, where the G7, without any legal legitimacy, but with a real power, issued a strong communiqué against Belgrade in 1999, just before the beginning of the NATO-led campaign.
A New (or Old) Season
The last decade of the 20th century and the end of the USSR, which became Russia, freed the international system from the bonds that bound it for half a century. In fact, the role and weight of the UN system and regional organizations exploded, such as the impressive strengthening of the EU and the transformation of the OAU (Organization of African Unity) into AU (African Union) just to name a few. This explosion was accompanied by the growth of the influence of the economic and security system led and guided by USA allies and partners and which relies on a plethora of organizations of various types and natures. However, this influence is now seen and experienced with ever greater annoyance by a growing number of nations which witnessed these organizations as the long arm of a system of power that leaves them on the margins.
But multilateralism has its own strength, reflecting an irrepressible need for dialogue, regulation of ever emerging new aspects and updating those aspects already regulating collective life and the international community.
This has also seen distortions and particular situations, such as states joining organizations with which, in theory, they have little in common, such as the membership of the Commonwealth, heir to the British Empire, of states that have never been part of it, but which believe it is useful to join for their priorities (Cameroon and Mozambique in1995, Rwanda in 2009, Gabon and Togo in 2022), or the OAS (Organization of American States), albeit in a weakened form with observer status. As of today, the OAS comprises 75 permanent observer countries, including the European countries with territory or territories in the Western hemisphere—Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and UK, as well as the EU Commission, all the EU and European countries (including the Holy See), India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Vanuatu, Bangladesh, Philippines, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Angola, Benin, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria, Togo, Israel, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen; in March 2022, the OAS voted to suspend Russia as a permanent observer due to the 2022 war against Ukraine); especially the presence of European countries for an entity which was born with the aim of keeping alive the Monroe Doctrine (and its Theodore Roosevelt addendum) demonstrate the need of multilateralism and need of ties.
But multilateralism, as a political phenomenon, is not, and cannot be, immune from the leadership dreams or hegemonic aspirations of states and their mutations and evolutions. As mentioned above, the intolerance of a growing number of states towards existing architectures in which they were unable to play the desired role and have the influence they believed they could have, has progressively opened the way to the creation of a network of new architectures, whether with global, regional or even sub-regional aspirations; and examples of this, even with different aims, but similar in membership, are the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), a forum which today includes 120 countries that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc (even if, especially during the chairmanships of socialist countries, the group was blamed for lining with the USSR).
The Non-Aligned Movement was founded with the view to advancing interests of developing countries in the context of Cold War confrontation. Originally conceived to work within UN framework, the Group of 77 (G77) at the UN is a coalition of developing countries, designed to promote its members’ collective economic interests and create an enhanced joint negotiating capacity in the UN (the group was founded on 15 June 1964, by 77 non-aligned nations in the “Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries” issued at the UN Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD). The group consists of diverse states with a common South-South ideology. There were 77 founding members of the organization headquartered in Geneva, but it has since expanded to 134 member countries (after the UN, it is the largest grouping of states worldwide; Uganda holds its chairmanship for 2024, succeeding Cuba); as of 2023, the group comprises all of the UN member states (plus Palestine), excluding the following countries: members of the Council of Europe; members of the Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Area (except for Tajikistan); members of the OECD, except for all its (four) Latin American members; Palau and Tuvalu.
This coincides, partly, with the aspirations of reconstituting old areas of influence, such as Russia. Moscow, after years of weakness and internal chaos, following the dissolution of USSR, attempted to recompact, in one form or another, the network of multilateral and/or bilateral alliances established by the USSR and which had characterized international relations from the 1950s onwards, in primis, the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. The simple re-proposition of this model appear problematic, given the substantial differences; now the Central and Eastern Europe states are solidly woven into the EU and NATO (with Hungary rebellious, for now), and the only potential partner of Moscow in the region remain, Serbia (which is however tempted by the enlargement project of EU known as “Western Balkans,” a concept which also includes Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo); among the former Soviet republics in the West remain only Belarus, given the war with Ukraine and the ongoing process of accession to EU by Moldova; the Caucasus is in a prolonged interstates/intrastate crisis (the Armenia/Azerbaijan war; internal instability in Georgia and Armenia; complicated ties with Türkiye and Iran); in the republics of Central Asia the bitter rivalry with China is more and more difficult for Russia to contain Beijing’s pressure. Gradually, Russia created a series of organizations, which were supposed to overcome the virtual, in the sense that it never existed in reality, CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, which included, Armenia (but the membership is questionable), Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova (active participation in CIS ceased in November 2022; plans to fully withdraw by the end of 2024, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan), starting with the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization, formed in 2002 with Russia, Armenia (which plans to leave it), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan) and more recently EEU (EuroAsian Economic Union, founded in 2015 with Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia [Yerevan, due to the lack of support of Moscow for the dispute with Azerbaijan, plans to leave it]). However, these organizations remain at a very low level of activities and relevance.
Alongside this project of reconstructing a lost past, there are new actors who, despite significant internal fragilities, have the ambition of being countries of reference in the international community and acting as a pole of attraction and imitating what especially the USA and the EU have done since WWII onwards.
But this is not the prerogative of certain states and of a recent initiative. An example of this dynamic was the Alliance for Progress, initiated by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. This architecture sought to establish economic cooperation between the US and Latin America and avert an expansion of communist influence in the region. As well, the Alliance of Democracies (AoD), till now a non-profit organisation (with ambition to become a fully-fledged international organization), was dedicated to the advancement of democracy and free markets across the globe. It was established in December 2017 by former NATO Secretary General and former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen with the ambition to gather together all the democratic countries against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc. Instead of excluding some states, the need of an increased coordination in the economic field at the global level, led the G7 in 1999 to promote the establishment of a “less democratic” entity, the G20 (in reality the membership is larger than 20 participating states) where the democratic governance framework is not “fully” required, like in the G7.
Putting together new and old ambitions, a new alternative system of international organization appears to be under construction, with all the difficulties and contradictions that emerge in global landscape such as the present one.
The most visible sign(s) of it are two organizations, BRICS (in 2006, Brazil, Russia, India and China created the BRIC. South Africa joined in 2010, making it BRICS) and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in 1996 by China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan). Both have the usual pronouncements of all international organizations: the aim of built a better world, fairer, just, peaceful, inclusive and balanced. In reality it is the concretization of hegemonic aspiration (or way to escape from a secondary role in the world stage, for the weakest members) of new and old powers, corroborated by an impressive economic growth (that it shows in the case of China with more evident fissures) and never missed ambitions.
Both are perceived as the tool of the expansionist policies of Moscow and Beijing. The reality is more complex, given the different magnitude on the international scene of the two, and it is more obvious that Russia is now like another Belarus, this time vis-à-vis China.
A rapid view on the recent dynamics of BRICS brings some light on this organization, considered a paradigm of the new multilateralism under construction. The BRICS alliance invited six new countries to join the bloc in 2024. Out of the six, four joined: the UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Ethiopia. The bloc has been mixed on thoughts to further expand in 2024. However, with the next summit scheduled for October 2024 in Russia, the BRICS bloc has made a major announcement on the future expansion of the alliance. Indeed, Russia and China have confirmed that BRICS is open to allowing many more countries to join the bloc. Russian President Putin hinted that another new round of expansion could be initiated in the upcoming 16th BRICS summit in Kazan city.
China also wants BRICS expansion in 2024 to make the group financially stronger and take on the US and other Western allies. When asked about expansion, Putin stressed, “Of course, we will consider the degree to which many other countries, about 30 of them, are prepared to join the BRICS multi-dimensional agenda in one form or another. To this end, we will start working on the modalities of a new category of BRICS partner country.” (On the side lines of the visit of Putin in Azerbaijan, Baku started to prepare the accession process). The number of countries expected to join in the future is very variable. According to media sources, not officially confirmed, around 47 countries have currently expressed their interest in joining the BRICS alliance before the next summit and almost all are also interested in adopting the future BRICS currency and ditching the US Dollar. While other members have remained silent on the idea of mass expansion, the original founders have continued to build support for the bloc with interested nations. For example, Brazil shared its support for Bangladesh joining the bloc this past April. Additionally, the South American member has done so with other countries recently. India is insistent on holding off expansion to strengthen the bloc and its current countries further.
BRICS is now a 10-member group and further expansion would receive a big financial boost. Furthermore, trade between new BRICS countries could be reshaped and experience a paradigm shift in transactions. The BRICS’ main aim is to end reliance on the US dollar (and in perspective the Euro, yen and pound) and settle trade in local currencies. Indeed, the more countries that join the bloc, the stronger the project would be. Correspondingly, the US dollar would be in a more precarious position. But this will not happen tomorrow that another currency (which one is a major question, given the problems of China, the resistance of having to share this burden from India, UAE and the financial non-existence of the others) will replace the dollar.
The incertitude about it adds other identitarian questions on the future and nature of BRICS. But the problem of BRICS (and the SCO) are the not divergent, but the not fully coherent policies of their more important members. Aside from the obliged choice of Russia aligning with China, there are other dystonic elements in this field, like the presence of India represents an element of uncertainty due to the agenda of New Delhi, which plays a very complex game with China and Russia, but at the same time, with prudence and exceptions, is part of the “Quad” (a pact which put together India, USA, Japan, Australia) and is a member of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a planned economic corridor that aims to bolster economic development by fostering connectivity and economic integration between Asia, the Persian Gulf and Europe (the corridor is a proposed a trade route, logistic and industrial development poles from India to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Greece). Both initiatives, the “Quad” and IMEC, are clearly against Chinese pressure (or attempts to take the exclusive leadership of BRICS and SCO) and consider each other a strategic competitor, and undermine the cyclopic plan of the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative). This situation shows how multilateralism cannot be separated by a positive grid of a bilateral dimension, which should constitute the background network of an effective multilateral scheme; and again, the contradictory relations between New Delhi and Beijing demonstrate that the fact that both are member of the same architectures, both have important trade, and this reinforces their military paraphernalia on the disputed border of the LAC (Line of Actual Control) and, as said, they consider each other a dangerous and systemic competitor.
Also, bilateral relations with Moscow is peculiar; the Indian armed forces are largely equipped with systems of Russian origin. But for years New Delhi increased the purchase of US military weapons and this forces India to have a prudent outlook. At a more inferior level, the divergent priorities on the management of the Blue Nile waters with the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) represents a looming crisis between Ethiopia and Egypt, two countries on the permanent edge of collapsing, but recently awarded membership in BRICS on the occasion of the Summit in South Africa in 2023 (together with UAE, Iran, which are btw in unfriendly relationship).
BRICS appears to face, despite the setting up of an articulated architecture with financial arm, an international bank with ambition to be a new IMF/World Bank without the dollar, an ensemble of weakness, united only by hostility against US and EU (even though they have lucrative business initiatives with both), which is still an unclear view of building future.
The Sick Old Man
As above mentioned, multilateralism saw its most visible symbol around the UN and its “system.” Like in many other fields, the war in Ukraine brought clearly to the surface the old problems, and persistent fractures affecting these architectures emerged in the votes at the General Assembly and at the High Commission of Human Rights, where the support for Russia was not as marginal as the West hoped.
As mentioned, the attempt to instrumentalize multilateral institutions to national priorities, ignoring the mandate that established them, affect the entire international system and allow the unscrupulous behaviour of many actors. A large responsibility of this situation is in the hand of the P5 at the UNSC (USA, UK, France, China, Russia) and their veto policy management and the weakness of the international bureaucracies for their subservience (it should be said that all the member states contributed to a joint US-USSR initiative in the 1990s who put an end to the permanent service scheme for the staff of the UN secretariat, a model that is now overwhelming present in the majority of the international and regional organizations, undermining the independence of the staff and weakening their resistance to the pressures of the member states and making the organization a mere tool of the member states). Given that, and current attempts to establishes alternate architectures which want to compete with the UN, it is not clear how the same UN could regain its usefulness, its profile and its reputation.
The UN’s Summit of the Future will be held on 22-23 September 2024. Ahead of the Summit, at the High-Level Political Forum in New York of the General Assembly, many countries have committed to accelerating delivery of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and as yet not announced, open a discussion over the future of the organization by the member states. The most realistic outcome will be a façade unity, postponing the existing divisions, masked behind rhetorical declarations.
Apart from authorizing the UN Secretary-General (never heard from, held in little regard, especially for his contradictory and weak positions on Ukraine and Gaza) to take a few minor organizational initiatives, nearly all the “actions”—like so many previous resolutions over the decades—will fall short. The continuing pursuit of perfection in an organization that is still pretending to adhere to an 80-year-old Charter, originally developed by and for the prevailing postwar Western interests, is useless, reproposing, in a different framework, what Macron and Trump have said about NATO.
The latest draft of the Pact for the Future, a kind of global EU “Green Deal” with some elements of the EU “Strategic Compass” has 17 actions on peace and security. Most of them will depend on the UNSC to carry out, but the P5 powers will continue to veto any decisions that impinge on their national interests. Action 24 will pursue a “future free from terrorism,” but in the UN Secretariat the responsibility falls on a department headed by a Russian diplomat, while his country is blamed of terrorist action by the head of the same organization which appointed him. This, while the US has urged the UNSC to call for a ceasefire, while also giving Israel weapons for massive attacks in Gaza. China has ignored and vehemently opposed discussions on the findings of a UN report on crimes against humanity in Xinjiang/East Turkestan.
From the beginning, the path toward the Agenda 2030 was poorly managed, and the blueprint was far too complex and ambiguous. A visible sign of the failure of the UN in achieving its own targets, defined after a long bitter negotiation process with the member states which asked to reduce their impact, is Action 1, which foresees to reach a slim 15 percent of the results for 2030.
As for climate change and the environment, Actions 9 and 10 will (in reality would) enhance the ambition to address climate change and accelerate efforts to protect, conserve and sustainably use the environment. After decades of trying, it is not obvious that solutions will be found through the UN. Quite the contrary; all this while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has played a role in raising the alarm, the UN has relied on the Conference of the Parties (COP) process to achieve results and is a sign of the subservience to specific interest. The offer to host the next Panel was given, with an overwhelming majority by the member states, to another large producer of hydrocarbons (like the UAE), Azerbaijan, with the aim to reduce the hydrocarbon-originated pollution. One goal, SDG 16, stands out as a precondition for development but is one of the least likely to be met, ignoring that stability, rights and strong multilateralism are pivotal elements for the achievement of SDG targets.
But the COPs have been singularly ineffective for several reasons. The main one is the UN Secretariat’s weakness, allowing voluntary national targets to reduce carbon emissions. As mentioned above, the permission for petro-states to host COP meetings, is like having a fox securing a chicken coop, with the UAE last year and Azerbaijan this year; and it has failed to counter the advocacy by oil and gas interests, reducing the magnitude, expectation, and extending the time of the goals to be reached.
The weakness of the current multilateralism is visible in another key aspect of international life—trade (Action 5 of SDG). The WTO (which has replaced UN Trade and Development, or UNCTAD, in this function) has rules that are blatant. The US refuses to allow the appointment of judges for the dispute mechanism; the world’s largest exporter, China, continues to claim to be a developing-country (regardless that it is the second world economic power) and hides information on its trade policies.
Global trade negotiations began in 2001 in Doha and died in 2015. There have been several calls for WTO reform but there is no consensus on this, similarly for the UNSC. Trade, like before WWI, is being weaponized through targeted tariffs, and countries are pursuing industrial policies that subsidize domestic production, limiting it and reducing number and impact of free trade agreements. As of now, trade relations are rapidly developing bilaterally and regionally. The present situation, with a weak governance in peace and security, the SDGs, climate change and trade would suggest that global multilateralism is now failing, prompting questions about the future of the phenomena, reducing the chances that the priorities and needs of small states can be raised, listened to and negotiated fairly. As for restoring the UN to its full functions, ethic and profile there is little hope that that can occur with the current leadership of the organization (and the UN system itself).
Conclusion
As of now there are about 55 active conflicts in the world; multilateralism appears as a necessary tool for their governance, but also the global economic and financial situation, not to mention the condition of economic, social and political rights, individual and collectives. The problem is how to articulate and manage these needs, subjected as they are to very strong pressures, by states and economic powers. This necessity should come even before reasoning about the architectures and powers to assign to them. The agendas of political and economic powers, behind their ethical and ideological reasons, seek to exploit multilateralism and bend it to their own interests and use it for their own ends.
There needs to be a common perception that multilateralism can be a useful tool for stability, a method for mediation, synthesis and development, instead of appearing as a limit to the omnipotence of political and economic actors, and as a method to bring together competitors and adversaries.
