Globalistan’s Challenges
By Mark Eyskens, former Prime Minister of Belgium
The earth is still round and hard, but the world — that of the people — has become flat and fluid.
The world has changed, and is still changing. A whirlwind of scientific and technological revolutions has swept through our planet, taking us at warp speed from a world defined by Gutenberg’s printing press to one epitomised by Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Increasing prosperity and modern medicine — which has significantly extended the average human life span — mean that at the end of the 21st century the world population will have grown to nine billion. In this world of growing interdependence, the survival of humanity will depend even more on cooperation and good global governance.
The international political, diplomatic, and economic agenda is enormously overloaded: the UN Security Council looks increasingly hamstrung by power politics and out of touch with today’s reality; state fragility, violent religious extremism, and the rise of nationalism are challenging international security and solidarity; and the global market economy is dominated by a small cartel of large corporations.
Comprehensive reform of the UN Security Council — today dominated by five powers wielding veto powers will be essential to future management of global affairs.
The Security Council is no longer representative of the “state of the world” today, and increasingly under fire for no longer being fit for purpose. At the core of these reforms should be efforts to ensure a wider range of countries are included as permanent members, not least Brazil, South Africa and India, which are flexing their demographic and economic might.
The decision-making system of the Security Council needs serious review: including, for example the introduction of qualified majority voting.
Reviving a modified form of the Trusteeship Council of the UN (chapter XIII) should be considered as part of any UN revitalisation program. This would not mean the resurrection of compulsory mandates in a neo-colonial manner, but a new type of trusteeship aimed at multilateral coaching of those states that show signs of fragility and are at risk of becoming “failed states”.
Another project to reform the institution could include an examination of how countries can adapt democracy and good governance to local, traditional and historically specific circumstances without reducing the importance of the universal declaration of human rights. Finally, thought should go into how the federal state model could help to eliminate internal conflicts and tensions in many countries.
These tensions are palpable across the globe today, exacerbated by or channelled into the rise of nationalism and an insistence on sovereignty. These doctrines are fundamentally incompatible with the way the world works today, and the current and future need for international cooperation. These tendencies within and among many states fuel isolationism and undermine international solidarity as promoted by multilateral institutions such as the UN and the European Union. Too often nationalists behave like troglodytes who descend into their cave, remove the ladder and think that this makes them safe. But the opposite is in fact true: cooperation is an absolute necessity in a world that is now, economically and otherwise, highly interdependent.
Sensible voters should support not independence but “more dependence”: governments are often too small for the big issues and too big for the small matters.
Our global market economy is effectively an oligopoly, with many sectors dominated by very large multinational corporations.
T o produce prosperity, a market economy should not be given free rein, but instead should be regulated in order to avoid imbalances, excesses, and Darwinian fights-to-the-death. The global financial crisis of 2008–2011 made this abundantly clear. Another dramatic downturn, or large economic collapse — for example in China — would inevitably have negative implications for global political stability: safeguarding the global economy while at the same time ensuring it works for all (through, for example, free trade and investment agreements) is essential. And again cooperation, this time in the form of multilateral surveillance and monitoring — by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, particularly in cases of mergers or close collaboration between large corporations — is of vital importance.
Such international cooperation is sorely needed not just for a sustainable global economy, but for global security as well. The interconnected nature of violent extremism and terrorism belies approaches that are confined to state borders. What is needed is concerted action across states and boundaries to address what is a truly transnational threat. The ignominious failure of the Arab Spring and the spread of horrendous religious and civil wars across the Middle East requires the international community to step up and assume its responsibility. We are seized of priorities like defeating the Islamic State and establishing a level of democracy in Syria.
We are also familiar with the tools, for instance the imposition of a strict arms export embargo and the blocking of the financial flows of the warring groups. But the requisite international cohesion and political will is lacking: any international approach would involve the U.S. and Russia as the inevitable protagonists, thus risking perceptions of international action as in fact a purely Western intervention, a modern version of the Crusades.
Yet pragmatic cooperation — including between blocs not easily reconciled, such as Russia and the West, and on deeply contentious issues such as Ukraine — remains essential to the solution of so many of today’s conflicts, as well as those of tomorrow.
Alongside international cooperation to prevent insecurity, we need cooperation to deal with the effects of environmental or man-made disasters and conflict. Today, refugees are streaming toward Europe from war zones in Africa and the Middle East; thousands are dying while states bicker over how best to deal with the influx.
Efficient and humane management of the refugee crisis is needed, as well as public advocacy in Europe about how these refugees could be integrated to revitalise aging populations.
I t is not just within Europe that cooperation and solidarity is essential, but also with the Middle East, not least rich Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who should make a much greater effort to accommodate refugees.
Changes in all domains have never been so profound, rapid and global as they are today. The essential question is not whether this ubiquitous change is happening; it is how to transform all of these changes into real human progress, how to improve the human condition. This task — promoting prosperity and well-being, justice and fairness, efficiency and accountability — is not just ethical, it is essential for the future of humanity if we want to avoid the spread of global barbarism.
This article represents the view of the individual writer, not that of International Crisis Group or of its Board.
