Who Will Save UN?

On the occasion of the Summit of the Future promoted by UN Secretary General Guterres, there has been a multiplication of comments in the media about the inconclusiveness of the results of the long debates held in the General Assembly and about the current state of the UN, very often defined as no longer irrelevant because of its inability to contribute effectively to the resolution of international crises, which are multiplying.

However, all the proposed solutions were far from decisive, as they did not address the important problem at the heart of the crisis: the lack of common commitment within the UN of all the major power factors of the international system in agreeing and imposing an adequate solution to emerging crises.

A collective security organization can only be truly effective and efficient if it succeeds in involving all the determinants of the international system in its decision-making and implementation. Today, the UN is unable to accomplish this because of a double disadvantage:

(1) unlike the situation at the time of its creation, the Security Council, i.e., the decision-making body on the use of force, does not include what are now all the major power factors of the system;

(2) even the permanent members of the organism, included at the time as determinants of the system’s power factors, no longer share a common conception of legitimacy.

The five permanent members of the council are actually spread across two different factions. Three of them (the USA, UK, and France) are members of the nominally regional NATO alliance and meet regularly in the G7 format, which goes well beyond the Atlantic dimension. Meanwhile, Russia and China are the founding members of BRICS, a format that brings together an ever-increasing portion of what is very effectively defined as The Rest. The acronym BRICS, which, as the recent summit in Kazan revealed, continues to bring together countries of growing economic, demographic, and military weight, committed to strengthening mutual ties through intensive programs of political, economic, and financial cooperation.

From all this clearly follows the need to adapt the composition of the UN Security Council, to reserve permanent seats for the states that are now becoming the real determinants of power in the international system.

The members of the newly formed council should commit themselves to clearly defining the rules on which the international order they are to govern will be based, indicating the significance of repeated references to a rules-based order in the declarations of the G7, the European Union, etc. There is now widespread misunderstanding of the concept of international liberalism, which Westerners cite as a criterion for action and which The Rest, in fact, sharply criticize.

This is ambiguous because after World War II, the victors of the conflict established a liberal international order and created the UN as its guarantor. An order that the Soviet Union ignored with its allies during the Cold War, but which it accepted again, first with its endorsement of the 1975 Helsinki Act, and specifically with Gorbachev and his agreements with George H.W. Bush in Helsinki in September 1990.

It was then that the West, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, distanced itself from adherence to the liberal order through the democratic expansion policies of Clinton and his successor George Bush, which led to the adoption of military measures without the approval of the UN Security Council, beginning with the war against Yugoslavia and the implementation of the policy of “regime change”, initiatives against countries whose political orientation they did not like. Not to mention that the origin of the Ukrainian crisis was the refusal of the Kiev government to recognize the autonomy of the Russian-speaking minorities of Donbas, widely supported by Western democracies.

These developments mean that the United States and its allies, while continuing to see themselves as supporters of the liberal order, have shaped a different order, more properly defined as neoliberal. This deviation from the original order was authoritatively branded by then-President of the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York, Richard Haass, in a prominent 2017 article in Foreign Affairs.

If the rejection of liberalism opposed by credible members of The Rest refers to the modified formula that has been implemented by the West in recent times, original liberalism remains a viable solution, of which Helsinki’s 10 points remain the most authentic.

A close examination of the positions of BRICS and its most authoritative representatives, such as Russia, China, and India, on the international order shows that it is possible to achieve full compatibility of their positions with the Helsinki points. Even the West could not object to a system based on the core values it itself allegedly refers to. In this way, a global dispute will emerge that can finally create a common concept of legitimacy by promoting full consensus in the governing body of the organization (the Security Council), where the permanent presence of all major power factors, as well as recognizing its veto power, precisely because, as stated in the introduction, the participation of all major power factors must underlie the effectiveness of the global body to protect the collective security of the system in its decision-making and its commitment to their implementation.

A way to achieve this result would be to convene a new Helsinki Conference, and not on European but global security. Thus, it would no longer be the CSCE, but the Conference on Security and Global Cooperation (CSCG).