Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1996 under the headline “Global Leadership. The UN after the Cold War”, was recently republished[1]. 30 years on, It still makes an interesting read. However, the current global situation demands a different response today than what the former UN secretary-general outlined as he left office.
First, we need a global reflection of what the UN is and what it stands for. It is, when one reads the UN Charter carefully a club of 193 nation states, which joined the club voluntary. These members committed to end the scourge of war once and for all, and they committed for that purpose to the principles of the UN Charter. Even when members are not fully conversant with the Charter, in their actions they still have to abide by it. The club has an executive board, i.e. the Security Council, and a general membership assembly, the General Assembly. The Secretary-General is the club manager, he manages the club’s staff and he is to advise the members when conflicts between members occur, which threaten or actually violate the UN Charter. His or her role is thus quite clear, and article 99 of the Charter gives any Secretary-General the mandate to advice the Council of impeding threats and/or violations. Tackling the conflict is not within the authority of the Secretary-General and UN staff. It lies not even with the Security Council nor the General Assembly. Their authority only extends to the right, some would say the obligation, to convoke the conflict parties to explain their respective case to the Security Council, who will give the parties a road map how to settle their conflict peacefully through negotiations. (Chapter VI of the Charter). if a veto power is party to a conflict, then article 27.3 demands that this member abstains in a voting on the road map. Contrary to the interpretation of successive US administrations, irrespective whether they were led by a Democrat or a Republican President, the US government maintains that decisions under Chapter VI are not binding. That, however, is not what the Charter says. Article 25 makes no such distinction. If conflict parties do not abide by the decision of the Council, then collective measures can be taken under Chapter VII, e.g. sanctions, which then are binding for all member states. In extreme cases of non-compliance, a collective military action can be launched as a last resort.
Hence peace-making, keeping, maintenance is not a task of the UN organisation and their staff, but it is the task of member states. During the Cold War members took an understandable, but wrong turn, when they relied, in some cases exclusively, on the secretary-general and UN staff to operate peace missions. These missions can be mounted to support members’ efforts, but they cannot replace them. Boutros Boutros-Ghali fails to mark this point clearly. The former Secretary-General rightly considers globalisation and fragmentation as the determinants of the global situation. That has not changed since 1996, if anything, it has continued without an overarching framework. Kofi Annan attempted to give a global blueprint with the Millennium Declaration of 2000, which was adopted by 149 heads of state and government in September 2000, but members considered it non-binding, and the tools which were put into place to monitor the implementation, namely the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), shifted the attention to development cooperation rather than to global development. This was corrected in 2015 with the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were to be implemented by all member states, but they have never developed much traction, and so we see that 3 years before the deadline, an overwhelming number of goals and targets will not be met. Quite different from the MDGs, which actually did succeed to a great extent.
While globalisation is primarily an economic phenomenon of an increasing interconnectivity of market economies, fragmentation is a political phenomenon. While the UN can keep a watchful eye over the international economic situation, it is not within their purview to act. The IMF, the WTO and development banks are here the agents and custodians of the global order. Political fragmentation, by contrast, however, is very much within the ambit of the UN.
Today in a lot of speeches multipolarity is stated as the defining structure of the global political landscape. However, most speakers do not go much beyond criticizing the US for their hegemonial behaviour since 1989/90. But rarely is this US behaviour constructively challenged. And while it is only reasonable to assume that basic foreign policy concepts of any US administration will remain unchanged, it is equally reasonable to assume that US governments will adjust to a newly emerging world order, if it were to be constructed without threats to international peace and security. The Achilles heel of US foreign policy, especially in the UN bodies, is not that they do not wish to address threats and violations, it is their unilateralism which at times puts US diplomats out on a limb.[1] And while Russia has responded to this US unilateralism with its restorative wars, of which the aggression against Ukraine is only the last one in a long series since 1990, China rhetorically promotes a multilateral approach, but in reality also acts primarily to challenge US global dominance.
Hence, in order to escape the power struggles of these 3 powers, the other 190 members have to go back to basics, i.e. recall chapter VIII of the Charter and the importance and relevance of regional institutions, both in managing globalisation, but also in overcoming the fragmentation. While we have a plethora of multilateral groupings, e.g. G7, G20, BRICS+, SCO to name only a few, and more recently a group of middle powers, such as Canada and Australia, EU and others, to strengthen multilateralism, peace and international law, what all of them have in common is that they are strong on statements, and weak on collective action.
Boutros-Ghali summaries the work of the UN as having responded both to global concerns and to national needs of member states and their people. This is a fair summary. But since the mid-1990s we have seen, that global concerns are addressed on the basis of scientific knowledge, which is not always uncontested, many of these concerns, in spite of the fact that they affect all member states remain unmanageable, and hence uncontrolled. Climate change and pandemics are just two examples. Whether one agrees or not that climate change is human-made or the result of naturaly changing planetary conditions, it is occurring, and hence adaptation and mitigation need to be put in place by all countries. Yet, the Paris Agreement of 2015 which set out such a global scenario, is almost forgotten or neglected by most governments. Pandemics, caused by viruses or other pathogens can only be contained, if strict public health measures are swiftly implemented nationally and internationally. Health ministers have worked after the Covid-19 pandemic in WHO, to strengthen such a global public health preparedness and response system, but so far, no binding agreement has been reached. We are thus at a stage, where we need to define international political processes, which produce effective responses to global challenges, and in particular international peace. In the spirit of the UN Charter such responses should preferably be found by voluntary alliances. But, considering that so much of the UN and what it stands for is being undermined today, the question must be raised, does voluntarism suffice?
Boutros-Ghali says that the UN has been tasked with a multitude of responsibility without, as he puts it, the necessary “political, military, material and financial resources”. But is that what is missing? To give the UN more resources might not necessarily solve any of the above problems better. The way forward appears that member states discuss, agree and decide to refit the organisation, by giving its staff the needed authority to bring any wayward country back to the straight and narrow. If voluntarism does not get us there, then the time has come to find ways and means to strengthen multilateralism by binding collective decisions by a clearly defined majority of member states which represent more than 50% of the world’s population.
Today only the Security Council can take binding decisions. But even when a decision is taken, little is said or done to enforce the decision. Partly, as was pointed out earlier, because the Council cannot solve conflicts, partly because the decisions are not truly geared to get conflict parties to enter into negotiations. Throwing more resources at the UN and its staff will thus hardly be the way forward. Instead we need a political process, where, when the Council cannot reach an agreement, then the General Assembly has to be able to step in, and take a decision which is binding. So far, a veto cast in the Council has nowadays to be explained to the General Assembly. In future, the GA should be empowered to pass a binding resolution by a qualified majority. And any such resolution should always outline the steps to be taken to implement the decision.
In order for such a decision by either the Security Council or the General Assembly to possess the necessary heft, UN staff should be advising member states of the dimensions of the conflict, its roots, the actual and potential stumbling blocks and the needed political changes to overcome the enmity which led to the conflict. UN staff may advice member states on the direction, in which a potential solution might lie, but whether such advice is accepted squarely rests with the conflict parties themselves. All conflicts have deep historical roots going back sometimes for several centuries. Overcoming this historical legacy often requires a political paradigm shift. Promoting economic development can help, but political paradigm shifts need more than economic growth. They need leaving behind age-old divides and avoid replacing them with new ones. Such fundamental shifts might be facilitated by mediators, from the UN or other institutions. What is needed for such mediation to work is that mediators have access to a vast body of knowledge. The UN secretariat should be networked with research institutes globally and thus be more a think tank, than a public sector bureaucracy, and it should contain a body of well-versed mediators.
To manage such a shift, many international consultations will have to occur. Refitting the UN and the UN system can’t be done quickly. But it is not by starving the organisation that we shall get there, but by member states organising such consultations with clear outcomes. The Charter foresees, according to article 109, that for this purpose a general conference should be convened. Whoever is going to be the next Secretary-General will be well advised, to start preparations for such a general conference with regional consultations and a clear vision of what the role and function of the UN in this century should be, and which sequence of steps might result in the needed repositioning and revitalisation of the UN organisation.
Boutros-Ghali understandably spoke of preventive diplomacy and disarmament. But at this point in time it would be more important for the new Secretary-General and the new leadership team to focus on getting the ongoing conflicts on a peaceful conflict resolution path according to the provisions of the Charter. Success will breed success, and open the doors to preventive diplomacy in later arising conflict situations and a more general acceptance that armed force is not the way to resolve political conflicts. Talking, listening, seeking unconventional solutions with patience and endurance is a much better way to proceed. So, for now, we need a diplomacy which can result in changing current patterns of nationalism and unilateral actions into collective thinking and actions, and restore trust and confidence that an impartial UN, not only their staff, but also their bodies, first and foremost the Security Council, are our best guarantee for international peace and security. It goes without saying that collective action does not replace responsible national action within a country. For a long time to come, nation states will be the backrock of the international political order, but national interests need to be calibrated with the interests of the global community. Non-state actors from civil society, the business and scientific communities can help strike the right balance for state actors to agree on such balanced policies.
Once, inroads have been made into untangling the contradictions in the current political fragmentation, the issues of providing for the organisation a robust financial basis which gives sufficient independence from any national interests will be much easier to attain. For now, member states should pay what they owe on time and in full.
Rome was not built in a day. Nor will the UN be revitalized in a year or two. But if we start to take the Charter as the rule book for international and national politics, start on a path of renewal with a strategically chosen sequence of steps, we shall begin to live in a much more peaceful, socially just and ecologically sustainable world.
[1] See Falk/von Sponeck: Liberating the UN. Realism with Hope, Stanford University Press, 2024
[1] Foreign Affairs, The Backstory, 27 September 2026
