Category Archives: Multilateralism

Constructing an Inclusive Order: Avoiding Fragmentation and Worse – Disorder

Posted on by
Reply

Two summits completed and another off in the distance, but impacted by these just completed summits. A crowded summit schedule has begun.

The statements were voiced and the Leaders’ Communique issued by the G7 at Schloss Elmau to be followed by more speeches and statements and the issuing of the “Strategic Concept”  a once ever ten year statement by NATO at Madrid.

What have we learned from this G7 and the NATO gatherings? Let me first focus on the G7 Summit. Well, first it is relevant that we take into account the position expressed by one of the longstanding observers of the summit process, Sheffield’s Hugo Dobson. As he concluded, along with his colleague Greg Stiles in Global Policy , reflecting their review of the German G7 and in particular the Leaders’ Communique:

In summary, and despite what we have tried to do here, beware reading too much either positively or negatively into a single summit document. Rather, this communiqué should be placed in the context of a network of summits – most immediately the NATO Summit in Madrid later this week and looking further ahead to the Indonesian-hosted G20 Summit later this year.

And it is a summary and caution well worth heeding. Nevertheless, the tone is worth further comment. The G7 took the time and the Communique to underscore their self characterization as a democratic forum. In their Communique opening the G7 declared:

 As open democracies adhering to the rule of law, we are driven by shared values and bound by our commitment to the rules-based multilateral order and to universal human rights. As outlined in our Statement on support for Ukraine, standing in unity to support the government and people of Ukraine in their fight for a peaceful, prosperous and democratic future, we will continue to impose severe and immediate economic costs on President Putin’s regime for its unjustifiable war of aggression against Ukraine, while stepping up our efforts to counter its adverse and harmful regional and global impacts, including with a view to helping secure global energy and food security as well as stabilising the economic recovery. 

 

Continue reading →

Struggling to Keep UN Multilateral Institutions Relevant

Posted on by
Reply

She sought to put her best foot forward in her first appearance following her controversial visit to China. In the opening moment of her statement Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reflected the positive aspects of her trip:

Let me start by thanking the Government of China for its invitation. For the first time in 17 years, a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been able to travel to China and speak directly with the most senior Government officials in the country, and other interlocutors on key human rights issues, in China and globally I appreciate the Government’s efforts in making this visit happen, particularly the arrangements for my virtual meeting with President Xi Jinping.

She has received dramatic criticism from the human rights community. As identified in the NYT, the comments from Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch dismissed the Commissioner’s efforts: “That mandate requires a credible investigation in the face of mountains of evidence of atrocity crimes, not another toothless dialogue.”  A second comment by Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch underscored the harsh negative view expressed by the human rights community (NYT, June 13, 2022) : “There was no condemnation from Madame Bachelet even remotely commensurate with the severity of the atrocities being committed in Xinjiang, … She gave up her most powerful weapon for a back room dialogue which will be meaningless.”

Continue reading →

The Missing Mechanisms – Examining the Current Summitry Cycle: Rome G20 and Glasgow COP26

Posted on by
Reply

So many summits recently: from the Rome G20 Summit, to the Glasgow COP26 Summit, to APEC, and finally the East Asia Summit. It is the crescendo of the annual summitry cycle. And, this year, 2021, was particularly noteworthy. In this summit cycle we had in person leaders gatherings at the Rome G20 Summit, immediately followed by the 5-year COP ‘check-in’ with many G20 leaders flying off directly to the Glasgow Summit following the Rome G20 Summit. It is not a surprise given the importance of these summits that colleagues have been attracted to assessing the advances, or the limitations of these gatherings and then more generally to examine the overall effectiveness they present of multilateral leadership.  One of the key assessments, not surprisingly, is to determine whether these summits, and therefore the multilateralism underpinning them can meet the rising global governance challenges facing the international system. Prime Minister Draghi who chaired the recently concluded G20 Rome Summit had this to say about multilateralism, and inferentially the G20:

“Multilateralism is the best answer to the problems we face today. In many ways it is the only possible answer,”  he said in his opening comments on Saturday. 

 

From the pandemic, to climate change, to fair and equitable taxation, going it all alone is simply not an option. We must do all we can to overcome our differences”.

Yet the judgements from the experts have generally been measured, even rather downbeat, over the current G20 and COP26 and other summitry efforts. Broadly there is recognition of some material advances in the global governance agenda, especially concerning climate change efforts but the fundamental – and many would argue the urgent and necessary collective actions – seem to elude global summitry policy making. And, most agree that more global order needs are just out of reach. Here, my colleague Yves Tiberghien in East Asia Forum (EAF)  had this to say about the G20 and the critical multilateral efforts:

The G20 is currently unable to function as the incubator for the reform of global governance institutions that the world needs to manage global markets and pressing systemic risks. It is proving unable to manage the great frictions between established and emerging powers.

Continue reading →

Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 2

Posted on by
Reply

The growing geopolitical tensions in the international system, in particular  between the United States and China and also with Russia, have led to a chorus of voices urging on middle powers to greater efforts in maintaining  and even strengthening a rules-based order. Roland Paris in a major Chatham House Brief titled: “Can Middle Powers Save the Liberal World Order?” pointed at various urgent calls from international experts:

Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist, has proposed a ‘middle-powers alliance’ to ‘preserve a world based around rules and rights, rather than power and force’. Two eminent American foreign-policy experts, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, have also called on US allies to ‘leverage their collective economic and military might to save the liberal world order’.

The urgency and calls for middle power action rose perceptively, of course, with ‘America First’  from the Trump Presidency and from the failure of the leading powers – the United States and China – to organize global governance efforts to tackle the global pandemic. Indeed the global pandemic has seemingly ‘lit a fire’ under experts and officials issuing a rising chorus of calls for greater middle power action in the face of leading power failure. An  evident instance is a recent article from  Foreign Affairs from our colleague Bruce Jones from Brookings titled:“Can middle powers lead the world out of the pandemic? Because the United States and China have shown that they can’t”.

In Part 1 of this Post series we attempted to identify which states experts were referring to when they issued the call for middle power action. We ended up with a variety of categories. There were the traditional states, Canada, Australia and maybe South Korea and Singapore. There were states that fell within the top 20 economic powers  – way too many states but lots of familiar powers. And then there were all those states , identified by Jeffrey Robertson in his insightful article: “Middle-power definitions: confusion reigns supreme” in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (2017. 71(4): 355-370, with an interest in and “capacity (material resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.)resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.) to work proactively in concert with similar states to contribute to the development and strengthening of institutions for the governance of the global commons.” And in fact there seemed to be a bit of a marriage between middle powers and multilateralism in the newly created “Alliance for Multilateralism” created by the foreign ministers of France and Germany that umbrellaed at its creation some 40 states.

Continue reading →

Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 1

Posted on by
Reply

I had a debate very recently with my China-West Dialogue (CWD) colleague, Colin Bradford. In a memo we were working on for CWD, he described the two major trade agreements, CPTPP and RCEP. He then added:

 

These two trade agreements show that middle powers are able to take multilateral actions on their own that make an impact.(*)  

But which countries do we see achieving that? And behind that, why have analysts and policy makers become significantly more interested these middle powers in the Trump era recently past?

Counting the Middle Powers

The debate begins with the ‘Who’. Though Colin and I were generally agreed on the content of the article, we went around in circles over which countries we could, and should, identify as middle powers. Now, I was more than ready to forgive Colin his vague characterization of middle powers and then broad inclusion of the same – after all he is an economist – but soon thereafter I stumbled over a rather recent article by Bruce Jones, also of Brookings. and a well known international relations analyst. The article found in FA and titled, “Can Middle Powers Lead the World Out of the Pandemic? Because the United States and China Have Shown They Can’t” tackled the question of the current middle power membership. Given the subject matter of the article, Bruce was called upon to identify in some manner, the states that captured the current set of middle powers:

The concept of “middle powers” is imprecise and somewhat inchoate, but it generally refers to countries that are among the top 20 or so economies in the world, lack large-scale military power (or choose not to play a leading role in defense), and are energetic in diplomatic or multilateral affairs. These countries were seeking to fill part of the international leadership void even before the crisis, particularly when it came to buttressing the rickety multilateral system.

So, there we were. I had no difficulty acknowledging that the term was “imprecise and inchoate” but as for the rest of the features identified by Bruce, well, not so sure. Increasingly, I came to suspect that this was likely to be one of those classic international relations definitions – unclear and contested.

Continue reading →

Exploring the Many Recent International Arrangements – Multilateralism, Plurilateralism, Alliances, Bipolarity and More

Posted on by
3

Multilateralism, plurilateralism,  bipolarity, multipolarity, alliances and alignments have all become subjects of serious inquiry in policy and political communities. The discussion and questioning of various international governing arrangements has grown ever louder with the final year, as it turns out, of the Trump Presidency. And, now, also, with the successor to Trump, President-elect, Joe Biden.

The outgoing President scorned long standing alliances and alignments and trumpeted (no pun intended) ‘America First’ attacking these traditional relationships. He fawned over authoritarian leaders and spurned allied ones. Rather than multilateral trade action, he targeted Chinese trade practices imposing broad-based tariffs that brought costs to American producers and consumers. All these many actions seemed determined to undermine the rules-based order.

Meanwhile, Biden, in marked contrast to Trump, announced soon after his election, the return of US global order leadership. This seemed to reflect what colleague Thomas Wright (2020) described in The Atlantic as a ‘restorationist approach’ to American foreign policy.  President-elect Biden presenting his national security team on November 24th declared (2020):

And it’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again, sit at the head of the table.

What arrangements do Biden and his team envisage – what relationships do they target? Will they seek to: revitalize alliances, encourage multilateralism, avoid rising bipolar tensions between the United States and China and tackle the many global governance challenges. Is the Biden foreign policy willing to relax relations and lower tensions with China and broadly take the steps that reestablish American leadership and to refocus on a multilateral rules-based order? 

Over the next few posts I hope to delve and deliver, with friends, the many forms of global order relations – multilateralism, plurilateralism, multipolarity, alliances, alignments and more. The hope is to reflect on the diversity of these arrangements, determine their individual and collective effectiveness and to examine these arrangements in the context of a new US Administration and its goals. And we hope to uncover those structures and arrangements most likely to stabilize the international system and further global governance efforts.

Continue reading →

The Link Between Domestic Politics and Global Governance

Posted on by
Reply

Colin Bradford is the Guest Blogger for this Post. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Brookings in Washington. He is a also a Principal of the Vision20 and a Co-Chair of the China-West Dialogue all with Yves Tiberghien, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia and Alan S Alexandroff Director the Global Summitry Project of Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto and the Blog Master here at RisingBRICSAM

The underlying political driver of the current tensions in the global order is the actual or potential failure of economies to deliver social outcomes that are politically sustainable.  This is not just a phenomenon that brought about Brexit and Boris Johnson in the UK or Trump in the US – now apparently unelected.  This has been, and is, the drama of developing economies for decades. The failure to deliver social outcomes that are politically sustainable is  the source of social unrest now in Eastern Europe, the fear of the Communist Party of China, and the discontent of Europeans with the strictures of the EU.  It is global and deep seated; sweeping and systemic.

Populist nationalism is on the rise and authoritarianism is increasing as a result. The easy road for politicians to take today is to appeal to national strength and rally their publics around the flag.  The hard road to take is seize on this moment of hyper-interconnectivity revealed by the COVID 19 crisis and realize that strong multilateral cooperation and coordination is essential for global health and economic recovery in the short run and systemic transformation in the medium and long run.

The urgent necessity is for governments, societies and firms to realize that there is no going back to normal, that systemic crises require systemic change and that social priorities and people-centered policies are vital to restoring confidence in markets and governance.

But to systemically transform the social order reinforcement, resonance and support from the global system of international institutions is the new global governance priority.  Multilateralism needs to be revived to create innovative responses to these new domestic social priorities.  Strengthening the WHO, the ILO, the OECD and the multilateral regional development banks is necessary so that they can become the drivers of the international system as front-line innovators, taking on the dominant norm setting roles that the IMF, World Bank and WTO assumed during the Bretton Woods era.

The fact that social priorities are primordial domestic priorities does not mean the international institutions have no role to play.  To the contrary, key roles of international institutions are essential now through peer reviews, sharing best practice, and widening the array of policy options for national governments to engage in selective borrowing for internal application based on national criteria, culture and practice.   The funding international institutions provide provokes dialogues with governments and societies about priorities and challenges which enable countries to take advantage of global knowledge frontiers embodied in the experience of international institutions. Returning to knowledge-based policy making in national practice, which is sorely needed now, can be facilitated by these interactions between global institutions and national governments.

New forms of multilateralism and a new global order need to support transformation in the social order. This force field also operates in reverse.  Social transformation would strengthen societies as a whole such that the new social order would support the global order by: reducing ‘my-country-first’ nationalism, unilateralism, and dampen geopolitical tensions. The social order and the global order would be in constructive symbiosis instead, as currently, in rather destructive dynamics of a bipolar competitive era.

The new nexus between economics, society and the global order would create positive synergies toward better futures and greater systemic sustainability.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

Did the Osaka G20 Bring Global Governance Progress – Part Two

Posted on by
Reply

So, the Vision 20 principals, Colin Bradford, Brookings, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia and myself, at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy thought it would be valuable to take a second gaze at the G20 Osaka Summit. This look, of course, occurring following the conclusion of the Summit.

There is little question that the G20 was dominated by the Donald Trump’s ‘reality TV show’ – the meeting and joking with Putin, the dramatic meeting over tariffs with Xi Jinping. And, finally, but certainly not least, the dramatic ‘handshake summit’ with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un at the DMZ. In the end, there was little bandwidth left for any coverage of the collective meetings of the G20, or examination of the Leaders’ Declaration. The Oska G20 reflects the shape – read that as the fragmenting – of the Global Order. But the V20 principals thought to try and draw some conclusions where we could on the state of the order in this chaotic ‘Age of Trump’.

Continue reading →

The Consistent ‘Dismantling’ Strategy of President Trump

Posted on by
Reply

The above has become the iconic image of Trump with other allied leaders. For some time, now, the ‘Experts’ have been trying fully to capture the core, and the operating mechanics of Trump foreign policy.

This started before Trump’s surprise election. It has continued on since that time.  Understanding Trump’s foreign policy and his various initiatives have become rather more critical as time goes on. We see Trump and his close colleagues trying to advance Trump policy at the regular summits, most evidently the G7 (the picture above); at summits of his own making most notably the Singapore Summit with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, and a soon to be convened NATO Summit to followed by Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia in Helsinki.   

So where are we? And where is Trump leading? Describing Trump foreign policy means an effort to capture what Trump means by his ‘America First’ strategy.  It seemed early on that America First was built on a foundation of some form of U.S. unilateralism and strong skepticism over the multilateral institutions in trade and political alliances that served as the heart of the liberal international order. Most of us saw the irony of this: after all the United States had been the chief promoter and ‘construction boss’ for building the liberal international order. As our colleague John Ikenberry declared in FA in his article, “The Plot Against American Foreign Policy”, there is yet another irony: 

A hostile revisionist power has indeed arrived on the scene, but it sits in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world. Across ancient and modern eras, orders built by great powers have come and gone—but they have usually ended in murder, not suicide.

There was some degree contention by analysts to assess what degree of aggressiveness – how forward or uninvolved – Trump foreign policy would be. This assessment was not so much against America’s rivals but with America’s allies.  As time has passed though, it seems there is a growing sense that Trump is mounting a serious, even concerted effort to dismember the liberal order.  Continue reading →

A Threat to the Entire Order – A ‘First Glance’

Posted on by
Reply

Philip Stephens, opinion writer at the FT concluded his examination of the current state of the liberal international order by saying:

I am sometimes asked what I consider to represent the biggest threat to global peace and stability. A nuclear North Korea looks dangerous, but containable. Mr Kim is not a madman. So the temptation is to reply that the risk is found in China’s rise or in Russian revanchism. The real answer is Mr Trump’s retreat.

Having just completed a podcast with my colleague Bruce Jones, the Vice President and Director – Foreign Policy, Brookings (the podcast at Oxford’s Global Summitry should be up next week)  I decided to find a small hole to crawl into it. 

All right so that comment is a bit exaggerated. But the point is:  ‘America First’ is not just about Trump skepticism over the global economy and the continuing attack on the value of the multilateral trade regime.  No, it is also a mighty scepticism over the value of the multilateral security arrangements.  Let’s just contemplate for a moment the likely Trump bullying over the upcoming NATO Summit. 

But meanwhile his eagerness to question the deployment of U.S. forces in Korea and to accept apparently without consultation the suspension of ‘war games’ with his Korean allies leads to  a general expert view, that of course may be wrong – that a big winner on the Peninsula  after the Singapore Summit is a non-attendee – China. A Stephens suggests: 

Absent from the Singapore summit, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, was nonetheless a big winner. In Mr Trump’s world of everyone for themselves, China will replace the US as the pre-eminent power in east Asia. Japan, Taiwan and, in time, South Korea itself, may choose to take a tip from Mr Kim. If you want to be safe, build a bomb. 

What an unhealthy result that would be. 

Image Credit: cnn.com