-Analysis-
PARIS — The annual General Assembly of the United Nations opens today in New York, and it all leaves me feeling bewildered… The world is currently in the middle of two major wars, in Ukraine and the Middle East — and faces several other dramatic conflicts, such as in Sudan, and others still looming, such as in the China Sea.
And the United Nations, whose primary mission it is to prevent conflict, is more powerless than ever.
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We all know the reason, of course: it’s the paralysis of the Security Council, the organization’s supreme body, in which five countries — China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Russia — have a veto right that they granted themselves as life insurance in 1945.
If the Europeans don’t abuse it, the three great powers use it to protect their “friends”, or, in Russia’s case, to cover up its own crimes in Ukraine. So forget the Security Council for as long as the two wars that concern them directly or indirectly last.
Hallway diplomacy
The General Assembly is another story. It’s the forum of universal democracy, one country, one vote, big and small, from nuclear powers to the tiny island nation of Fiji.
The General Assembly talks, but nobody listens.
This is where everything should happen, except there’s a catch! The problem is that no one really cares what happens at the General Assembly since its resolutions are not binding. The General Assembly talks, but nobody listens.
There was a time when heads of state would still flock to the annual General Assembly in September, not so much to find out what it was going to vote on, but to listen to the main statements, to meet behind the scenes. Even this dimension of backroom diplomacy has lost some of its interest in a period of confrontation.
So what’s to be done? Should we resign ourselves to seeing the United Nations die, just as in the 1930s we witnessed the slow decline of its predecessor, the League of Nations, with the risk of generalized war? If we look back at the history of the last century, the League of Nations was founded after World War I, to prevent another massive war.
It failed, as we know. Then came World War II, and after it ended, the United Nations, with its increased powers to impose sanctions and send peacekeepers.
New world order
We have to admit that it doesn’t work, that the system imagined in 1945, without the colonized countries, without the losers of the war, and by protecting the most powerful with the right of veto, has only led to a new and dangerous impasse.
The first two attempts at global governance, the League of Nations and the United Nations, were the product of world wars. What is at stake in today’s conflicts is once again the establishment of a global balance of power, between a West on the defensive, authoritarian powers in action, and an emerging world to the south, demanding its place at the table.
A new world order will emerge from this direct and indirect confrontation. The question is, in what state will the world be afterwards, the one that succeeds the UN-managed planet of today, and the wars that no one, least of all the UN, is in a position to prevent? It’s a question that should haunt us and drive us, but which, alas, is too far removed from the our daily political debates.
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