Multilateralism: A global view

The State of Multilateralism Roundtable.

The multilateral systems that (re)emerged after the Second World War, and which evolved in a functionally divided yet interlocked global governance matrix to tackle everything from peace and conflict resolution, human rights and global health, via biodiversity, climate change and trade, to the standardisation and collection of data in an endless array of fields, is in crisis.

This is both due to longstanding developments and systemic imbalances, and due to new, disruptive tensions in the international system. This means that the United Nations, along with several other longstanding international organizations, is under unprecedented pressure, due to deep-seated conflicts among its member states, increasing budget constrains, and a receding investment in the procedures, policies and rules of multilateral cooperation and global governance among key actors. For the United Nations as such, the problem seems to be moving from disagreement with policy priorities within the organization, to disengagement with the UN as an organization.

This is emphatically not true, however, if we have a global contemporary and historically more nuanced view of what the UN was and where it stands now. The UN has always been an arena for cross-ideological and political contestations and cooperation and never solely an ‘instrument’ for a purely western or liberal “rules-based order”. Measuring the UN against such a yardstick, would therefore miss the point. In a global perspective, the UN has been an arena to leverage the influence of what some term “the Global South”. Despite deep disappointments and the institutional imbalance of the UN (particularly prevalent in the UN Security Council), therefore, many member states - spanning the east, west, north and south - are urgently concerned with institutional reforms and strengthening. Moreover, the decentred, diverse and deeply-institutionalized nature of the UN’s multilateralism, developed over the last century (including the League of Nations), increases its resilience in times of crisis.

This new series of Roundtables, entitled The State of Multilateralism, seeks to bring together the deep desire in academia, in civil society and within the UN itself, to seize this moment to create a dialogue that is deeper than before. There is a need to mobilize the vast repositories of critical knowledge that are available among scholars, to listen to the experiences and institutional know-how of officials from international organizations, and to engage with civil society and other stakeholders in a global manner to (a) understand the historical roots and trajectories of multilateralism; (b) take stock of the current challenges and opportunities of multilateralism; and (c) to boldly and creatively discuss future avenues of multilateral collaboration.

With this in mind, the first The State of Multilateralism roundtable, provisionally entitled “Multilateralism: A global view”, seeks to to start this necessary conversation by placing the United Nations within the broader infrastructure of multilateralisms – temporally, geographically and functionally.

Attendance

Attendance by invitation only. Please contact Haakon A. Ikonomou on ikonomou@hu.ku.dk if you would like to attend.