To Salvage The UN, We Need To Think Outside The International Box

During the pandemic I initiated a series of dialogues with the rector and others through the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica. UPeace is the only UN-mandated University in the world, formed by the General Assembly in 1980.

The thematic question of our dialogues was: “Psychological Revolution and the Emergence of an Effective Global Polity?”

Rector Francisco Rojas and I agreed on some basic premises. The first was that the foundation for a true global order has to be poured before the complete collapse of the post-World War II inter-national order.

We rejected the notion that “To save the United Nations from the irrelevance in which it now wallows will require the concerted backing of the few powers that govern the defunct security council.”

Remaining within the crumbling box of the UN and the defunct post-World War II international order because “where else can the hard conversations about war technology happen“ is a monumental failure of imagination.

The fact is that everyone on Earth now lives in a very disordered and increasingly dangerous global society. “Coexistence“ was always a fragile veneer; chaotic convergence is what we’re confronted with and must deal with as human beings.

The climate crisis and the precipitous loss of biodiversity lead the list of intensifying global crises that urgently require a psychological revolution that puts humanity as a whole over national interest. And if we wait until complete collapse from this foundation, it won’t be possible to build a true global order for the foreseeable future, if at all.

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We also agreed that a tangible form has to be given to the “sovereignty of humanity” over the competing sovereignties of nearly 200 nation-states, especially since two of the “great powers” are dangerous shadows of their former selves.

Even the most ardent social justice activist is not so naïvely idealistic to believe that “power can be evenly distributed.” At the dawn of planetary AI, the issue is coercive power itself, rather than some ridiculously realpolitik trifecta of corrupt, crumbling and communistic superpowers – – the United States, Russia in China.

The idea that “this moment calls for a rededication of power checked by reasonable deliberation, negotiation, and diplomacy — a core principle that inspired the charter of the United Nations,” is “idealism to a fault.“

The UN has fulfilled a crucial purpose in preventing the Cold War from erupting into another world war, but it is no longer fit for political purpose. In short, the UN cannot, as an inter-national institution having national sovereignty as its cornerstone, be reformed into an effective body of global governance. At least not without the emergence of a non-power-holding global body of world citizens, and the dissolution of the security council.

“Imagining a renewed UN that is a problem solver rather than a bystander, the prime instrument for collective action (which can only happen if the great powers want it to),” is a prescription for allowing the law of the jungle to continue unchecked. Such a mindset reflects a total failure of imagination to look beyond the expired international system.

The United States of America, the former beacon of democracy, teeters on the edge of autocracy, and no midterm “blue wave” by the Democrats is going to restore what formerly passed for democracy here.

America’s chickens have come home to roost. By invading Iraq in 2003, the USA made a mess of the Middle East and a mockery of the rule of law. The idea that of America of “the leader of the free world” has become risible.

History may well record that the United States lost its chance to genuinely lead the international order during the Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton threw away that chance, and perhaps delivered a fatal blow to the UN itself, when he blocked Security Council intervention during the Rwandan genocide, at a time when America was widely admired as “the sole remaining superpower.”

Disingenuously, Clinton has since given a revisionist rationalization for expanding NATO to the Russian border, after his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, promised Gorbachev NATO wouldn’t go beyond the reunified German border. “I think we did the right thing at the right time. And if we hadn’t had done it, this crisis might have occurred even sooner,” he disingenuously said.

Clinton added, “I offered Russia not only a special partnership with NATO, but the prospect of eventual membership in NATO, arguing that our biggest security problems in the future were going to come from non-state actors.”

That’s incredibly obtuse, and it lays bare Clinton’s wasted presidency. At the time, offering Russia the supposed carrot of “eventual membership” in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was perceived by Russia as a slap in the face. And given a new war in Europe 40 years after he was inaugurated, and the real and growing danger of nuclear war, Clinton is incredibly out of touch talking about “non-state actors ad the biggest security problem.”

As the former president of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, said, “Our international rules-based order through which the world’s nations pursue global peace and development is crashing into the limits of its founding vision.”

Just as it didn’t occur to America’s elites to question whether the United States is “the indispensable nation,” so too it doesn’t occur to them to question whether “the architecture of our global [sic] order” can be reformed.

The international order cannot be reformed. We cannot fit the square, splintering pegs of the old order, based on the separate supremacy of nearly 200 nation-states, into the round hole of a global society. The premise of the sovereignty of nation-states now has as much meaning and relevance in our interconnected world as the sovereignty of queens and kings.

The inter-national order is history, and as long as politicians and ‘thought leaders’ insist on conflating it with a global order, there will be increasing disorder and insecurity.

Will it take another world war to move beyond quixotic attempts to preserve the an obsolete international order? Or can there be a genuine, multilevel response to its internally chaotic, but (momentarily) outwardly confined collapse?

In a much more violent and more planetary way, the current collapse reprises the cave in of the USSR and the US in the early 90s (only now being belatedly recognized where the USA is concerned).

People are no longer listening to the same old hidebound political functionaries that refuse to acknowledge the reality of the present collapse, and derisively dismiss thinking outside their blasted boxes by calling it “some mystical process to create a new world.”

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