Despite the manifold challenges to multilateralism, state AMITAV ACHARYA and DAN PLESCH, there are grounds of hope for the future of the United Nations.
First, the demand for multilateralism has varied, the authors write in ‘The United Nations: Managing and Reshaping a Changing World Order’, published in the journal Global Governance.
In the United States, both the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations retreated from multilateralism, although to a lesser extent than Donald Trump. Domestic politics can be a double-edged sword insofar as support for the UN is concerned. “Here is a striking example: despite Trump’s rhetoric against multilateralism, the US Congress has kept funding for the UN stable,” ACHARYA and PLESCH state.
Second, the demand for multilateralism is driven by a combination of strategic, normative, and functional logics. If the idea of multilateralism as good and desirable for its own sake is discarded, then the strategic and functional reasons for it might persist or even increase to compensate for it. Rising powers such as China and India, along with traditional powers, see multilateralism as important to their status and influence.
Transnational challenges defy national boundaries, which no single nation or bloc can solve on its own. “This reality does not itself sustain multilateralism since not all agree on its importance. But this also means that the need and demand for multilateralism is not just a moral imperative, but also a practical necessity.”
Third, the demand for multilateralism varies across issues, according to the authors. A study published in 2016 showed that while demand for global governance might be strengthening in the need to address climate change, human rights, global security governance, and mass atrocities, it is weakening in health, trade, and even possibly finance (where it may be static after having risen in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial turmoil).
Also, in some areas such as trade and finance, the demand for global governance is crisis driven. “Understanding these variations across issue areas and time is important in generalizing and devising ways of addressing challenges to the UN and its role in global governance.”
Fourth, while the decentering and fragmentation of multilateralism can create confusion, increase transaction costs, and possibly lead to reduced effectiveness of existing UN-based global governance institutions and mechanisms, it is also clear that fragmentation is driven by the demonstrated weaknesses and failures of existing mechanisms and their lack of normative and performance legitimacy.
In this context, the emergence of new actors and frameworks of multilateralism due to the proliferation of new actors is not necessarily at the expense of the UN. “This is not a zero-sum game, but a positive-sum one, one that offers considerable scope for divisions of labor,” ACHARYA and PLESCH state.
For example, human rights laws today are enforced not only in international courts, but also through criminal prosecutions in domestic courts of former state officials, where both international law and domestic criminal law are used.
The International Criminal Court has been joined by more than two dozen international enforcement courts in the world enforcing human rights law. This promotes human rights around the world.
Some bilateral and plurilateral arrangements create stricter standards for intellectual property protection and tougher enforcement penalties for intellectual property infringement than existing Trade-Related Aspects on Intellectual Property measures. Hence, they support the goals of global trade governance, if not its primary multilateral institution.
In finance, a key development is the emergence of ‘cooperative decentralization’ as a form of fragmentation, resulting from the 2008–2009 financial crisis. These regional and plurilateral financial arrangements worked with the International Monetary Fund. Opinion is divided on the benefits and costs of this form, with critics skeptical of their ability effectively contain crises while others see them as durable and positive forces in global financial regulation.
In climate change, the authors state, the proliferation of initiatives does not replace or weaken the UN’s role. At the same time, as academic literature has pointed out, institutions are sticky—it’s easier to modify them than to create new ones.
Hence, as existing multilateral institutions come under pressure, they will not be displaced, but new arrangements may emerge with respect to aspects of environmental degradation such as industrial pollution and deforestation. Fragmentation can be creative, leading to innovation in problem solving.
Fifth, despite the current pessimism about global governance, the demand for multilateral action is wider than ever before—a key factor supporting the future of the UN. A good deal of recent literature on agency is concerned with the proliferation of actors, especially looking beyond the state-centric focus of the early literature to capture the role of transnational civil society and the private sector, and so forth.
But the issue of agency goes well beyond bringing the nonstate actors in. Equally important is that the US role in creating and maintaining the global governance architecture has been more limited and less positive while the contribution of others including Europeans and the developing countries (and the weaker actors more generally) is less appreciated but more substantial and extensive than is usually captured in the academic literature and policy debate.
This is clear in the area of human rights, Responsibility to Protect, climate change, and internet governance, the last being an understudied area where the US role has come under intense criticism after the revelations by intelligence analyst David Snowden in 2013 of massive and systematic US surveillance of the internet.
“However, these factors are not enough to keep the UN going in the long term,” ACHARYA and PLESCH write. “Critically, leaders must pay more attention to selling the benefits of multilateralism and the UN to domestic audiences. To this end, a comprehensive and nonpartisan assessment audit of the benefits of multilateralism for countries is necessary to reduce political partisanship and bias in the debate over the necessity and importance of the UN.”
Acharya, A., & Plesch, D. (2020). The United Nations, Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 26(2), 221-235. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-02602001
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