By Hassan Damluji
In Mark Carney’s Davos speech we now have a G7 leader saying publicly what may have been being said privately for months: the US can no longer be seen as a positive force, and a new order must be built where middle powers can find protection in solidarity against their bullies. Where does this leave the United Nations? Carney’s sentiments might seem to signal yet another club, yet another case of fragmentation. But if they are smart, middle powers will not only team up, they will also enshrine and champion the United Nations as a pillar of their international agenda.
Life expectancy
Ten days ago, I gave a speech at a major event celebrating the 80th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly. The event was held in the same, hallowed spot where its founding fifty-one members first met in January 1946 – Central Hall in London. With the UN Secretary-General, the President of the General Assembly, a number of grandees and two thousand people in attendance, it was a moving and energising moment. But my speech laid bare the data our think tank has collected (available here), which shows that the public’s faith in the international community is sliding, driven by a generation of young people that is less open to the world than its elders.
As we met to mark the UN’s 80 years, the US was announcing its departure from dozens more international bodies. And Donald Trump was threatening war while preparing to launch his “Board of Peace”, which has morphed from an attempt to manage post-conflict Gaza into a rival to the UN itself. Doom-mongers wondered if we had gathered at a birthday party or a funeral. Some noted that 80 years is about as long as most people can expect to live.
But I believe that this moment of crisis truly is a golden opportunity for the United Nations, if only middle powers can seize it. Lessons from the European Union, the African Union and NATO might be instructive.
Ever since Trump’s second inauguration, Global Nation has been arguing incessantly for a new “middle power alliance”, bringing together countries from the Global North and the Global South that are individually powerless, but collectively unstoppable as a bulwark against economic and security threats from the three marauding giants: the US, Russia and China (noting that China might reasonably claim to have done far less marauding of late than the other two). When we first made the case, we were a lone voice, thought by many to be overly dramatic and unrealistic – Europe, India, Canada would never have the need, nor the guts, to pull away from US hegemony. But gradually over the last year our radicalism has come to be seen as pragmatism, even obvious fact.
Would a new club of middle powers strengthen or destroy the United Nations?
Institutions in crisis
Let’s take some historical examples. Brexit rocked the European Union and many predicted that Britain would be the first domino to initiate a general collapse. But the shock of Britain’s departure brought the union much closer together. Eurosceptic parties in France and Italy were forced to change their tune, because their voters insisted on it. Further crises – the pandemic and Ukraine – have led to massive EU-wide economic and military schemes being launched. Each of these is binding Europe closer together by showing how its members can benefit from the club. Even those with antipathy towards Brussels do not want to lose the stimulus cheques or the access to joint defense.
The African Union experienced a similar moment with the pandemic. The deep inequalities in vaccine development and manufacturing capabilities, leading to their place at the back of the queue, exposed the weakness of African countries’ hub-and-spoke relations with “donor countries” who prioritized themselves when the crisis came. African leaders instead decided to strengthen their ties, especially through the empowerment of the African Union, so that they could show up as a united force on the international stage and demand better terms in future negotiations. The rapid decline in donor funding for Africa in the intervening years has only strengthened many countries’ resolve to look after their own continent, not just on a country-by-country basis, but also through multilateral institutions like the AU.
Finally, consider NATO. It is going through its own moment of reckoning, with its most powerful member threatening to invade other members, and questioning the value of the alliance. Will this lead to the other NATO members spinning off in different directions? While it is too soon to say for sure, the wise money is on Canada and European NATO allies pulling together at this time of crisis. It is clear to them that if the US is to leave them in the lurch, they will need each other more than ever. Europe’s unwavering response on Greenland and Mark Carney’s speech – not to mention its rapturous reception – made that clear.
All these examples show that, in recent times, bullying and abandonment by major powers tend to bring international institutions together, rather than split them apart. This is because they bring into focus the risks that these institutions were designed to prevent. For too long, these risks seemed too distant. Many were happy to play fast and loose with a safety net they had forgotten they needed. Much of the public did not understand or care much about the international order. They do now.
Three ways the UN can underpin a middle power alliance
So what of the UN? Middle powers, from Canada to Germany, Brazil, India and Australia, if they are now to come together to ward off the bullies – which they must – should make it a shibboleth. Why? Because the United Nations is the ultimate symbol of legitimacy for countries who want to reject bullying. It is the only organization capable of bringing all middle powers together, whilst also including an off-ramp for the bullies so that they too can come back to the fold. And, contrary to popular belief, it can be fundamentally changed to make it better fitted to the modern world.
First, legitimacy. Nothing about a world of power politics reduces the importance of having a story to tell. Donald Trump may not care what many people think, but he knows he needs to frame his approach as somehow legitimate to his voters even if that boils down to the claim that America is special and gets to do whatever it wants. Vladimir Putin needs to show Russians, and his “useful idiots” abroad, that Ukraine rightfully belongs to him and mother Russia. China’s narrative campaign to asset it legitimate right to Taiwan is almost as complex and costly as its military preparations to take the island. These are all wannabe hegemons who mostly concern themselves with convincing their own populations. But a middle power alliance has no such luxury. It needs to hold up a standard of legitimacy that can appeal to the hearts and minds of the citizens of all of its members. National self-defense is helpful but not enough to bind 50 countries together in effective cooperation. EU law or NATO’s charter certainly wouldn’t cut it. Only the United Nations and the body of international law that underpins it can provide a common ground for the legitimacy claim of every possible member of a middle power alliance.
Next, inclusion. It is obvious that the United Nations is an organization that can bring together all members of a middle power alliance. But why not create their own separate grouping, like a bigger version of NATO? Smaller groupings of military or economic alliances already exist and might grow or evolve in a new order of middle powers. But the United Nations remains crucial because it is the only body that already includes every middle power and also the bullies. To avoid another world war, it is not enough only that middle powers come together to provide another rival bloc. They must work to persuade the marauding giants that their interests are better protected by returning to a system of global rules. While progress at the UN will always be difficult while the giants remain untamed, UN structures need to remain in place, doing what they can (like great humanitarian work, for example), and waiting for the moment at which the US, China and Russia see sense and return to the fold. This has happened before. The UN Security Council was deadlocked for much of the Cold War, but from 1990 there was a long period in which it was more functional than it had ever been.
Finally, to those who say that the UN is impossibly compromised by a design principle that gave too much power to the victors of World War Two, you should consider that the UN is not fixed in its current format. Many people know that efforts by Security Council members to reform the Council itself have been blocked by China and Russia and therefore have gone nowhere for decades. But fewer people realise that there is another way, a more fundamental and legitimate way, for the UN to reform itself.
Article 109 of the UN Charter provides for a conference to be held, if agreed by a majority of countries and any seven Security Council members, with no veto, to review and update the founding document of the United Nations. As Heba Aly, the director of the Article 109 Coalition, an organization dedicated to making that happen, argues in this year’s Global Solidarity Report, activating it could create unstoppable momentum towards a fairer, more effective UN.
All this means that the world should think of the UN in the context of a truculent US, just as the EU thought of its union in the light of Brexit. Let the bully withdraw its money and support if it must – the rest of us should pull together and insist that until international law, enshrined by the UN, is respected, we will team up as middle powers to impose costs on those who break it.