Speaking at Harvard in late September,
2024, Noeleen Heyzer, a former undersecretary of the UN, related the need for
multilateral governance internationally to the need for the UN to evolve. The
UN Charter created a system in which both large and small nations would be held
accountable to international law: a rule-based order. This would protect
the weak from the strong. Yet the Security Council has been unable to end wars.
The UN is, according to Heyzer, “severely weakened,” so “(t)he strong do what they
can and the weak suffer what they must.” Peaceful coexistence that rectifies
power imbalances was at the time sorely lacking in Ukraine and Gaza. National vetoes in the Security Council were inflicting
much damage on the UN's ability to respond. The implications for the UN, she
admitted to me after her talk, are not at all good even concerning whether the international
organization can reform itself sufficiently to rise out of abject failure.
Four global problems demonstrate the weakness of the United Nations as a multilateral institution by which countries can be held accountable. The UN’s response to the Covid virus pandemic was slow, and entirely in effective in getting China to share vital information with the world as the disease spread. China’s national interest—and the “face-saving” cultural reflex—was a threat to the interests of the global commons—the public health of the species, which should outweigh national interests even if not every national government is convinced. The climate crisis has demonstrated that binding multilateral governance has become necessary in part because of the growing power of MNCs, which are oriented to short-term profit and pushing costs to society (i.e., externalities.[1] Cybersecurity against hackers from abroad also demonstrates that the rule of law is needed internationally. Lastly, international security, which was severely compromised by the 55 conflicts going on in 2024, demonstrates just how damaging the national vetoes in the Security Council can be to international peace. The US invasion of Iraq, Russia of Ukraine, and Israel in Gaza leave us with the unhappy conclusion that no enforcement mechanism for international law exists. Impunity has been blatant, such that international law itself risks being utterly discredited. Ignoring international law and the use of national vetoes by allies of belligerent countries preempt international law, resulting in a heightened sense of unfairness globally.
Put in place in 1945, “(t)he current international system is out of date," she said. "We face a breakdown or breakthrough. Collective rethinking to make anther historical pivot is needed," she added. Diffusion of power has occurred since the UN’s founding. Fifty-one countries were initially in the UN. By 2024, the figure had reached 193 countries as members of the international organization. “The UN needs to evolve to reflect the shift in global power from the unipolar world of the US to a multipolar world,” she said. Global stakeholders include non-state actors; they should be included, she advocated streneously. “Solidarity is an act of enlightened self-interest,” she said.
She reported that the UN was fundamentally rethinking how it could evolve to fit the reality of the twenty-first century. A shift from a state-centric approach to one that engages diverse actors outside of the UN was needed, she argued, to protect our global commons. Economic inequality and social injustice undercut global stability, and thus should be emphasized more in the UN, she argued, as it evolves in the future. She emphasized throughout her talk that the UN should assume more of a role in rectifying economic inequality and patriarchy in countries that are members of the UN.
Thus far, I have briefly sketched Heyzer’s argument. I turn now to critiquing it. Although addressing economic inequality was a leitmotif in her talk, she said nothing of the impact of the UN’s humanitarian work around the world in alleviating economic inequality. To be sure, that humanitarian work has been a benefit to the species, especially in terms of food and disease, and the organization’s ideals too are of value, but I contend that neither saves the organization from the verdict, which I share with Heyzer, that the UN has failed overall.
Most significantly, a vague reference to the General Assembly working on how the UN could evolve does not reflect the severity of the impotence of the Security Council and the General Assembly in regard to restraining national interests that compromise or even eviscerate collective action on the four major problems discussed above. The countries having vetoes in the Security Council cannot be expected to willingly give up their respective vetoes. Political realism says as much. So, it is difficult to see how the major problem in the UN could be solved short of the non-veto members forming a new international organization—a substitute for the UN sans vetoes.
Even such a solution leaves the impotence in enforcement untouched. Putin in Russia and Netanyahu in Israel beginning in 2023 highlight the need for international law to “have teeth” (i.e., have credible enforcement mechanisms). By this I mean something more than mere embargoes, as those of the E.U. and U.S. against Russia in 2024 demonstrate just how difficult it is for embargoes to have sufficient economic impact to result in political/militaristic change in the embargoed country. I submit that vesting UN troops with more authority in using force to stop countries like Israel and Russia within their respective sovereignties geographically would be necessary for international law to be able to live up to the name of law. Theoretically, if international law is indeed law, then political realism should include the strategic interests not just of countries, but also whatever international organization(s) promulgate and presumably enforce international law.
After her talk, I spoke with Heyzer to present my critique, which I said I would publish. She agreed with me that the veto powers on the Security Council would not agree to unilaterally give up their respective vetoes, so the non-veto countries of the UN would have to form another international organization sans vetoes, which the veto-holding countries of the UN could join. By implication, the discussions then underway in the General Assembly to reform the UN can be viewed as superficial rather than as serious attempts to reform the UN out of its paralysis in promulgating international law. She also agreed with me that without going further to address the impotence in enforcing the UN resolutions on the UN’s willful countries that violate UN resolutions doubtless with a sense of impunity, even a non-veto substitute organization would not be a viable solution unless viable enforcement mechanisms “with teeth” could be formulated and implemented. I suggested to Heyzer that in addition to not permitting the most powerful countries to wield veto-power in the Security Council, which would not improve enforcement, the UN troops would need additional authority to literally push back or arrest countries that violate UN resolutions or verdicts of the UN’s court by invading other members other than in self-defense. She did not reply to my suggestion itself, which likely means that she did not agree with it. Instead, she said, “creative thinking is needed.” I agreed wholeheartedly, and pointed out that even though our species has developed technology and economically both in terms of fiscal and monetary policy, having learned lessons from the Great Depression so another would not occur in the financial crisis of 2008, there has not been much in the way of political development since the Enlightenment. Heyzer agreed with me on this point, and that a burst of thinking was needed in 2024 due to the four emergent threats to our collective interests internationally discussed above. As I have already stated, she said the following crucial sentence during her talk: “Collective rethinking to make another historical pivot is needed.” I submit that such a pivot would go beyond, though be related to, merely voiding the vetoes and creating a mechanism of enforcement at the extant UN. Deep political principles are reexamined and shifted around for there to be a fundamental change sufficient to constitute a historical pivot.
Climate change alone demonstrates that continuing with the principle of absolutist national sovereignty at the expense of multilateral international governance is nothing short of foolish. Continuing to rely on the UN to address the four pressing and dire problems impinging on international relations even though the consensus is surely that the UN itself has failed in its principal missions reflects very badly on humanity in its cognitive functioning. The lack of any significant public discourse on the need for a replacement for the UN is itself a red flag, or indication that our species is akin to race horses wearing blinders. Unlike the horses, we can take ours off. I don’t believe the problem is that we have hit the ceiling of the human brain’s ability to think; rather, too many people, even among the political and economic elites, have been giving things exogenous to thinking, such as ideology, stubbornness, and sheer complacency, too much weight in being able to distort or even displace reason.
I submit that it is telling that a former undersecretary of the UN admitted that a substitute organization would be necessary—that a former high-ranking UN official has come to the unhappy conclusion that the UN is not able to adequately reform itself, given the hegemony of the veto-wielding member-countries (which are not member-states, as some reporters erroneously claim, since the UN is an international organization rather than a federal government). The implications are indeed dire for the UN.
Simply put, unless or until another international organization or government is established for multilateral international relations funneled by an institutional structure and procedures, the international arena will continue to instantiate the state of nature. Ultimately, the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty must give way for multilateral international relations to rise from the barbaric state of nature. Although the UN’s ideals were still of value as late as 2024, it can be argued that the UN itself had dropped to the status of a dead corps still twitching, as evinced by the sheer dismissive impunity of Russia and Israel as they both ravaged exogenous territories not permitted by the UN, which also had no ability to constrain countries violating the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions. If the UN had become impotent in preventing or stopping war and in literally saving the species from possible extinction (not to mention saving coastal cities around the world), is this not a stark indication that the international organization had failed and thus that a substitute or alternative was already warranted?
That an organization that was so clearly failing would continue nonetheless to function as if it were viable and be treated as such by national leaders points to a basic flaw in the human brain. To act as if and not even cognitively recognize that the route is futile goes beyond cognitive dissidence as a mental error. The lack of any public discourse on replacing the UN after Putin and Netanyahu had so easily dismissed strictures set by the UN is itself problematic. If someone tells people not to cross a line in the sand and yet they do anyway, and with impunity, to treat the teller as at all credible is nothing short of pathological.
1. In
the case of democracies, governments have an electoral interest in increasing
GNP even by refusing to constrain fossil fuel extraction, refining, and
consumption. Autocracies have a cash-flow interest in maximizing exports, which
may include oil and conventional vehicles. During its invasion of Ukraine, Russia
sent its embargoed oil through Saudi Arabia and India, which were then able to
sell the oil to the West without disclosing the source.
