The U.N. Can Still Be Made to Work
A League of Democracies can pressure reform from the outside, and shifting work to the General Assembly can make it happen on the inside.
There are countless global challenges, ranging from nuclear proliferation to human trafficking, genocide to climate change. Yet, with no means of compelling collective action among states, it is left to the most globally minded states to cobble together solutions. Unfortunately, the solutions are seldom adequate because they rarely get buy in from other states, and they are plagued with free riders. If you want the benefits of a functioning world order without doing your part to sustain it, all you need to do is leave the hard work to others. This raises what is arguably the most crucial question of the twenty first century.
How can we achieve collective action in a world in which most of our major challenges are global?
Somehow, leading states concerned with a functioning rules based order must compel other states to comply with their agreements around, say, climate change or nuclear proliferation, while possessing none of the enforcement mechanisms typically available within states. After all, it is not as if they can throw noncompliant states in prison.
Few states consistently support a rules based order, and some of the most powerful states, like Russia and the United States, commonly block action at the level of the UN Security Council, where it would be most effective. Hence, theorists of international relations like Hedley Bull often describe international society as anarchical in the sense that there is no means of compelling states to abide by the rules.
People confronted with the challenge commonly turn to the idea of a world government, but political philosophers going at least as far back as Immanuel Kant remind us that a world government might turn out to be the most oppressive force in history. Its size would render popular participation largely meaningless, and if ever it were to attack its subjects, they would have nowhere to turn to.
Is it possible to imagine a form of global governance that is meaningfully representative of humanity, capable of redressing the great global challenges of the twenty-first century, and yet sufficiently constrained as to prevent its ever becoming a threat to human freedom? The question challenges us to consider how close might get to world government without creating an oppressive Leviathan.
Most would agree that the UN is a largely ineffective organization.
The historian Paul Kennedy concluded at the end of his epic history of the association that it has probably been most effective as a forum through which world leaders worked out their differences. But as he points out, that’s no small achievement. In his history of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gambling with Armageddon, Martin Sherwin points out that without the United Nations, there would have been nowhere for America and Russia to work out their differences. Yet, if the UN was a necessary counterpart to solving the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was probably essential to saving humanity—and that is only one of countless crises that were talked out in the global body instead of being fought out on the field of battle.
The UN can be credited with stopping a multitude of wars through its peacekeeping missions of which there have been dozens. It can be credited with preventing countless millions of deaths through its humanitarian missions. And it can be credited with saving millions of lives through its vaccinations, and its women’s and children’s rights campaigns. In this way, the UN may not have had much of an impact on great power politics, and it may not have brokered a climate deal, but it has improved the lives of perhaps hundreds of millions of people—in addition to quite possibly having helped save humanity in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But if that’s the case, and if local wars often become regional, and the chaos of failed states tends to cross borders, there is no telling what the world would look like without the UN.
Meanwhile, anyone reviewing the history of the UN cannot help but notice that its policies and pronouncements are often dramatically more progressive than those of its member states. In fact, the dialogue among nations that has been unleashed at the UN has been integral to an emergent global consciousness, which has taken on a range of issues that concern only the world’s most progressive states, from the rights of women and children, to human trafficking and famine relief. In this way, the UN is more than the sum of its national parts, and that probably has a lot to do with the dialogues it has initiated.
Jurgen Habermas highlights a deeper process that is commonly at work in functioning legislatures. Public debate compels advocates to make their case to a neutral audience of onlookers if they are to win adherents to their causes. This means that the moral arguments they make need to be framed in universal enough terms to appeal to the wide range of people they are trying to win over. In the process of participating in public forums, advocates will therefore tend to adopt more universal principles and speak a more universal moral language over time, for in so doing they are more likely to win their debates and enact their platforms.
This is how a body like the UN, which is comprised of so many conservative states, can generate so many progressive policies. If you are going to win a debate at the UN, you need to win the support of a diversity of states, and this requires you to adopt moral arguments universal enough to appeal to them all. Yet, Habermas observed something else that happens when people engage in public debate: their own moral positions are transformed as well. In this way, normative principles tend to emerge in conjunction with moral arguments, while moral arguments provide the basis of legal architectures.
Hence, it is possible to get global agreement without requiring global compliance. So, maybe we don’t need to enforce global rules, after all?
The legal theorist Thomas Franck observes that while there is little compulsion in international law, there is in actuality significant compliance. While there are always outliers, most states remain bound by international treaties banning land mines, chemical weapons, the spread of nukes, and human trafficking, for instance. And it is much the same with most domestic laws: people obey laws not just out of fear of being punished but also because they believe it is the right thing to do, and doing the right thing is bound up with the idea of themselves as members of a society and the legitimacy of its laws. The argument builds on the English School of International Relations, which emphasizes how an international society has been established by heads of state, foreign ministers, and diplomats.
International society matters because it generates compliance among otherwise self interested states.
Perhaps it is for these reasons that Hassan Damluji is able to suggest that we are actually quite close to global government already. A few reforms of the UN might allow us to compel compliance with the kinds of agreements that a more representative global body might achieve. A more representative UN—with a weakened and more inclusive Security Council and a stronger and more democratic General Assembly— might take on more of the functions of a global government while still protecting state sovereignty and human freedom. Meanwhile, a revenue stream in the form of a global wealth tax—or, say, a carbon tax or resource use taxes—might provide the UN with the resources needed to carry out more effective compliance with treaties while making peacekeeping missions more effective.
Stranger things have been known to occur on the international stage, after all—not least the establishment of the UN itself.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can make such talk appear utopian. However, there is another approach to achieving significant global governance: establish a “League of Democracies” as originally outlined by Immanuel Kant. The league would be a voluntary federation of republics, which at this stage in history might account for almost half the nations of the world and about half of world trade. It might build on the principles and institutions fundamental to the European Union, the military alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the economic institutions of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Together, these organizations constitute what Anne Marie Slaughter has referred to as global governance, as opposed to global government. Yet, a League of Democracies would be more inclusive, more comprehensive, and more democratic. The incentives for joining it might be immense, for it could open up access to trade, military security, technological access, educational opportunities, and the free movement of peoples for its member nations. The organization could create association agreements with partial democracies premised on their improved rule of law and respect for human rights. And it would be big enough to challenge the UN Security Council to do better or risk irrelevance.
~ Theo Horesh, author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind