The birth of the United Nations in 1945, and its multiple agencies thereafter, gave rise to the post-World War II notion of “world order” and the concept of “multilateralism”. This meant multiple countries around the world engaging with each other under the aegis of global institutions, underpinned by consensus on global norms and the values underpinning those norms. The existence of an ordered world was intended to provide the space to identify threats, foster cooperation, and as far as possible, to prevent conflict and help contain it if it occurred. As Dag Hammarskjöld once put it, “The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” That it can broadly be said to have done for many decades. After all, we have not had a Third World War.
However, today’s world is one of polycrisis, where the very basic assumptions of this structure have been challenged. Neither have conflicts been averted before they become critical nor has cooperation been properly fostered, with global institutions unable to transcend the disagreements among key member states. And the system itself has not evolved in step with the emergence of newer forces on the global scene.
Humanity is precariously close to the hell that Hammarskjöld wanted the UN to prevent. Geopolitics is bedevilled by major conflicts of global resonance, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the brutal conflict in Gaza both impacting countries around the world.
There is also a crisis of values. When Francis Fukuyama wrote of The End of History and the world celebrated the rise of liberal democracy and capitalism as the time-affirmed ideal form of social, political and economic organisation, few anticipated a destructive backlash to the very globalisation that was seen as the harbinger of world prosperity. From the rise of Trump in America, Netanyahu in Israel and Erdogan in Turkey, to the gains made by the right in Germany, Greece and France, we are seeing an uptick in the popularity of populism, predicated on a resentment of globalisation, topped off by the cultural grammar of hyper-nationalism. The existence of groups like QAnon in America or the neo-Nazi Third Path in Germany would have been unthinkable even as recently as the end of the Cold War.
Meanwhile, the world has changed in ways that the UN has not kept up with. The “decline of the West” is still debatable but the “rise of the rest” is not. The so-called Middle Powers have found considerable diplomatic leeway since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China. From climate financing to digital infrastructure and global public goods, the developing world has found the space (and in many cases, the capability) to make its voice heard.
The Voice of the Global South summit under India’s G20 presidency signified the growing space for the developing world to express itself, unencumbered by the need to placate one global hegemon or another. The Global South’s increasing prowess in innovation, sustainability and entrepreneurship, combined with its significant demographic advantage, gives these countries the leverage to be what Foreign Minister S Jaishankar called “non-West” without being anti-West.
The rise of the Global South points to both the weaknesses of the current world order and shows that countries that earlier lacked the wherewithal to contribute to the global system are now expressing themselves at the table, rather than just being on the menu. But the question of institutional reform remains contested, and consensus is unlikely to emerge anytime soon. If the UN is looking out of date, and the question of reform is likely to be fraught for a long time to come, can the G20 offer a pathway to global governance outside the established paradigm?
After all, the G20 also reflects a major transition in how diplomacy is conducted and global outcomes are shaped. There is a visible shift to issue-based ‘plurilateralism’. The conscious choice of countries to engage in dialogue on global issues in “mini-laterals” like BRICS, SCO, the Quad and others exhibits the comfort inherent in dealing with countries on their own terms, outside the structure of global governance created in 1945.
While the essence of multilateralism as we know it has eroded, countries have not stopped, nor have they any incentive to stop, cooperating. The consensus on a G20 joint communiqué, undoubtedly a diplomatic triumph for India, showed that even in a fragmenting world there is scope to find common ground. Globalisation is challenged but technology has integrated the world in a way that most links are irreversible; countries are unlikely to succeed at “de-globalising” in any meaningful way. In this increasingly networked world, countries are working through multiple networks, which will sometimes overlap with each other with common memberships and sometimes be distinct.
Paradoxically, the eroding credibility of conventional multilateral engagement is accompanied by the emergence of persistent issues too broad to be amenable to a unilateral solution: terrorism, migration, climate change, cyber-security and the rise of artificial intelligence. We are yet to evolve globally acceptable norms on many of these issues, and policymakers are wondering how to deal with technology that has already evolved beyond what they can regulate, by the time they pass legislation to codify any regulation.
Here, there is a need to create, innovate and apply new solutions, which can’t fructify without the ability to meet, debate and cooperate. That was what the UN offered, but it is unable to give a seat at the high table to those countries who are instead finding space at and through the G20, unencumbered by permanent members’ privileges or the restrictive prescriptions of a formal, largely un-amendable, Charter. Through the G20 and mini-laterals, these countries can pursue multilateralism ‘à la carte’, rather than be confined to the UN system ‘à la Chârte’.
A world of polycrisis thus marks not an end to global governance, but a new beginning. The emerging global system heralds a new kind of global governance, where diplomacy is reorienting itself to a fragmented world. In international affairs, policymakers who aren’t propelled by passion are often propelled by necessity, and the necessity today is to urgently evolve a style of global governance that can weather volatility and spur cooperation on shared interests.
Redesigning the UN system may seem to be a lost cause, but redesigning priorities in a way that global interests can be championed within mini-lateral or plurilateral groupings is not a far-fetched possibility. We can’t wait for UN reform anymore, but in this process of transition, global governance itself is being redefined.
Shashi Tharoor
Third-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Sahitya-Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life
Armaan Mathur
A final year student pursuing political science honours at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi.