The world lacks good international governance, and an important part of the problem is due to the great paradox of the 21st century, since the architecture of world organizations is in the hands of institutions that correspond to another historical era. Indeed, we live in the era known as globalization, while most of the organisms that govern the planet were created at the end of the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War.
Even more, those of a financial order created in more recent dates, do not alter and on the contrary confirm what has been said, since they operate either within institutions created at that time or that function with that logic of power.
This not only happens with almost all the thematic institutions such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO in culture or FAO in agriculture and food, but also with the territorial organizations of the United Nations system such as ECLAC.
The foregoing takes place in a world in constant transformation, and also a constant lack of adaptation to these modifications, as reflected in the annual rites of the UN General Assembly, despite the fact that its composition has varied enormously, since in In 1946 there were few independent African countries and today there are 54.
This situation of lack of adaptation to the real world, in form and substance, is not only manifested within the UN, but also outside it, in those groupings that link countries by affinity or by region. This is the case of the Organization of American States (OAS), the African Union, the Arab League, or the current European Union, which simply do not have an international weight corresponding to the economic, historical and cultural weight of the countries that comprise them.
Within the UN, power is concentrated in the Security Council, which has the anachronism that those powers with the right to a permanent veto represent the winners of the Second World War, which explains why neither Germany nor Japan are part of it. That very power of veto leads powers like the United States or Russia to bypass it frequently, as well as former colonial powers such as France or the United Kingdom when they intervene in former African colonies.
The UN system has not only a political component but also an economic one, since the origin of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund dates back to July 1944 and the Bretton Woods Conference.
Both emerged as institutions to which countries turned through governments, but they have lost relevance in a world in which capital moves quickly pressing the key of devices such as computers or personal telephones. Evidence that reflects another era is found in statutes that still allow situations in which former colonial powers such as Belgium maintain shareholding rights that do not pale in comparison to countries that stand out in their economic power.
The result is generally irrelevance and much criticism of an excessive, costly, and generally inefficient bureaucracy. It is also a system that today is characterized by biases, even when it should be lacking due to the nature of its activity, as is the case at UNESCO, and, above all, in the area of Human Rights, which is obsessively focused on in Israel and not in systematic violators of those universal rights as shown by the case of countries that have integrated its Council such as Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Cuba or Venezuela.
The very bureaucracy of these institutions, which was marginal and contained during the cold war, has become an alternative power that is not always accountable to its constituents (the member States) and that has sometimes sought to impose agendas with the values through which he believes the world should be governed. Moreover, more than once through minor resolutions, agreements, programs, using the “soft law” as a shortcut to International Law, and bypassing the mechanism of the Treaties themselves, it has pressured the Member States in various ways, sometimes using punctual rulings of international courts, to achieve their purposes.
In short, starting with the United Nations itself, the architecture of international organizations is not the most appropriate or advisable for the world of the 21st century. It is an inefficient and obsolete system, which is why a new structure and institutionality is needed that reflects, economically and politically, the current diversity and multipolarity.
Can be done? Yes, it can, to which it should be added that it fundamentally depends on the USA. But why the United States?
Not only because it is still the first power, still the number one superpower, but also it is still the main financier of those institutions. It is also his story, since the two great attempts of the 20th century were his work, both the extinct League of Nations in the first half of the century and the United Nations in the second half.
There is no other or another. It does not seem that China or Russia have the interest to do so, nor do two countries like France and the United Kingdom move away from the first places, in terms of power.
The USA also needs the challenge, since it would allow it to have something that it lacks today, in the form of a unified, bipartisan foreign policy, as it would also order its foreign policy, with the automatism and clarity that its great rival for the scepter of the main superpower is China.
Outside of China, there is no other country that can aspire to compete with the USA for first place on a global level, with the addition that it has increasingly growing economic resources. There is no other rivalry that has the capacity to define the geopolitics of the 21st century, in addition to everything indicating that area by area, sector by sector, China seems to be moving just like the United States in the 20th century when it proposed to take the scepter from the British Empire.
Today, the USA can do it, we do not know if in a few years it will be able or will. Today, not only can it, but it is also still influential in all indicators of power, from military to cultural, from hard power to soft power.
It would also give the United States a sense of mission as well as a bipartisan foreign policy, a state policy that it currently lacks. Today, it has the opposite, since in basic areas what predominates is the divided house that Lincoln spoke of.
The current polarization of the USA is such that we not only find it very divided, but also with conflicting visions regarding its past and its future, a country where its elites seem to have lost not only their unity but also their sense of mission around to the superiority of its economic and political systems, unlike in the Chinese elite where that supposed superiority seems to abound, from business leaders to Communist Party activists.
Above all, it is the verification that the current structure and its architecture of international organizations has already fulfilled its historical function, and today, it seems to create as many problems as it solves, with the addition that the current system provides less and less certainty and respect for the rules of the game, that is, as the invasion of Ukraine has shown, the international system does not guarantee stability.
And if history teaches anything, it is that, both economically and politically, in a scenario like the one described, there are inevitably forces that push towards conflict.
No other country could have the interest of the United States to seek a reform of this magnitude of the international system. Nor does anyone have their history, and still, the power, although we do not know if they have the will to exercise it.
The big question is that, does the USA still have the will to continue occupying the first place, and if so, for how long?
If it does, I believe that the first step to face a situation where China’s economic power makes it as or more complicated than the cold war, is to have a strategy whose first step comes to mind is a new international architecture, more in line with the historical era that we have had to live, and that today harms the United States.
And perhaps there will be a Nobel Peace Prize as a reward for whoever heads the initiative.
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