Faults of the West

The adherence to the concept of nation-states, which is an enduring legacy of Treaty of Westphalia, of 1648, which was cemented by the United Nation’s Charter, of 1945, continues to inform a narrow and crude form of nationalism which is undermining humanity’s efforts to address the planetary polycrisis. In particular, the institutions that we established to promote peace and security, specifically the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), are now dysfunctional to the point of now being a clear and present danger to the well-being of humanity particularly given increasing threat of a preemptive nuclear weapons strike in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or in the Korean peninsula. The dysfunctionality of the institutions that we have designed to maintain humanity’s collective security was illustrated by Russia’s presidency of the UN Security Council, on the 24th February 2022, when it was  invading.

A significant number of Western countries were among the founding members of the multilateral system that was designed and operationalized as the UN system, in San Francisco in June 1945. However, the actions of some Western countries on the global stage such as historically the US bombing of Serbia in 1999, US and UK’s illegitimate invasion of Iraq in 2003, NATO’s bombing of Syria in 2011, and the recent US and UK retaliations against the Houthis, without the authority of international institutions, is creating an environment that encourages copy-cat mimicry in the form of regional wars. Self-help militarism is on the increase creating a much more unstable geopolitical landscape, including Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in Gaza; Pakistan against Iran, the Saudi Arabian assaults in Yemen; rising tensions between Serbia and the Kosovo; Venezuela’s threat to use force against Guyana; and in Africa the civil war in Sudan; the border tensions between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda, which endured a genocide in 1994.

The dysfunctionality of the UN Security Council is now evident in the full-blown systematic collapse of any semblance of an international system of collective security. It is this institutional failure that has created the context in which countries who have lost faith in the UNSC to resort to their own self-help agendas.

The West through some of its actions is moving away from the principles that it was involved in establishing at the beginning and launch of the United Nations system. An emerging policy priority in the rest of the world is to try to revitalize the use of international law, as evidenced by South Africa’s application to the International Criminal Court (ICJ), on 29^th December 2023, despite criticism and pressure from Washington, London, Brussels and Ottawa, which ordered Israel to take measures within its power to halt all genocidal acts, as defined by the Genocide Convention.

Increasingly in situations in which the West has a particular interest, such Israel’s war with Hamas, it sanctions or dismisses the actions of countries from other regions as being “counterproductive”, or more precisely counterproductive to the interests of the Western bloc. Paradoxically, as noted above when the West is determined to utilize military action it does so without the legitimacy of international law. When countries in the rest of the world raise their concerns about the violations of the corpus of international law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law, they are castigated by the West, when it has a specific interest in a particular case. The selective use of international law and the increasing self-help based on calculated self-interest will only increases the perception from the rest of the world, of the hypocrisy and double-standards inherent in the international system.

Despite the Wests’ geopolitical, geoeconomic and military power, this current state of global affairs is not in its short or medium-term interests. The absence of a functioning multilateral system, that can address and resolve disputes in a non-violent manner, increases instability in the rest of the world and has a negative impact on Europe and the US, in the form of migratory flows and the increase in transnational organized crime evident in the increase in the illegal trade of weapons, narcotics and human beings.

This crisis of multilateralism requires us to recognize that we are now in a “San Francisco Moment” and a major global inflection point. This historical moment demands bold action from global policymakers, based on the convening of action-oriented geopolitical dialogues, that involve the West and the rest of the world, with a deliberate focus on redesigning and reconfiguring of the institutions to govern and address the global challenges.

The transformation of the multilateral system is necessary in order to more effectively manage, negotiate and address global challenges and to protect the planet from, for example, further environmental damage due to climate change as well as the effects of increasing wars which are undermining societies across the world.

The failed efforts to “reform” the UN over the last 30 years, which have been ongoing, since 1992, with the advent of the end of the Cold War, through perestroika and glasnost, only had the effect of moving the deck chairs around the Titanic as the planetary ship continues to slowly sink underneath the weight of the multiple global crises. It is necessary for governments in the General Assembly, to invoke Article 109 of the UN Charter which calls for a General Conference to Review the organization, which was supposed to have been convened in 1955, ten years after the establishment of the UN based on the deliberations that took place in San Francisco.

If humanity is to empower itself to address the challenges that it faced with the “false dichotomy” between the West and the “rest” has to be gradually dismantled through the creation of institutions that can increase the opportunities for collective action. There is only one planet and it requires us to create institutions that are capable of responding effectively to the challenges that threaten to undermine the ability of humans to live on planet Earth.