“The world is on fire, literally and figuratively.” This – the opening line from a recent Independent Expert Group report for the G20 – casts the state of the world in no uncertain terms. We live in a time defined by crises of global proportion and intricate complexity, characterized by increasing warfare and conflict, and underlined by rising frustration and cynicism over the inability of the current international system to deliver – either on what the world needs or what the system itself has promised. 

Who can put out these kinds of fires in this kind of world? 

The UN Security Council seems paralyszed in the face of growing number of increasing wars, conflicts and deep-seated internal divisions. The UN General Assembly is struggling to achieve its sustainable development mission, with targets far off track and poverty and inequality worsening. The Paris Agreement’s near-universal pledges to contain global warming have yet to reduce carbon emissions, challenge fossil fuel subsidies and prevent temperatures from rising to new heights. The aims of signature multilateral financial institutions – the World Bank’s mission “to reduce poverty by lending” to poorer countries and the International Monetary Fund’s mission “to achieve growth and prosperity” by supporting financial stability and monetary cooperation – seem lost, in search of seemingly elusive answers. Indeed, roughly one-third of the world’s people now live in countries that pay more to service debt than for education or health. One need only recall the stark inequities in the availability of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic to see the how the geopolitical status quo can be profoundly inhumane.

The head of the UN Environment Programme, Inger Andersson, has argued that there are some silver linings among these dark clouds. Over the last couple of years existing multilateral environmental agreements and processes have delivered progress in global governance and protection of biodiversity (the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework), the ocean (the emerging “Global Plastic Pollution Treaty” and High Seas Treaty). However, implementation is patchy at best, contributing to frustration and cynicism at a time when international cooperation is essential; as the International Energy Agency has brusquely observed, there is “no low international co-operation route” to contain global temperature rise. 

High-stakes transition 

“A transition is under way to a new global order”, UN Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged in issuing “A New Agenda for Peace”, which sets out steps to help stitch back together a world fractured and imperilled by growing “geostrategic competition and geoeconomic fragmentation”.  

“What is at stake is not the future of the United Nations, but of our nations and humanity,” he wrote. “The possibility of global devastation, whether from nuclear weapons, climate change, diseases or war, or even technology run amok, is tangible and increasing. Member States will need to find new ways of working together despite the increasing mistrust that has permeated international relations.” 

What will that new global compact be?  

Nearly 80 years have passed since post-World War II period that gave rise to many of the prevailing multilateral institutions. Change since then has utterly remade the world, no matter what the yardstick: countries’ population, GDP, or actions that demonstrate desire to wield greater economic and political power in the world’s arenas. At the time the United Nations was created, 80 countries that are now independent member states were colonies. Concerns of the 21st century would have read largely as science fiction in the 1940s,  when climate change was not on the agenda, and the everyday technologies of modern life (computers, mobile phones, Internet access) had yet to emerge or create new threats (cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, social media disinformation campaigns, the ability to wage war with drones).Could they have envisioned the world we have created with such storied innovation and such levels of wealth and such profound chasms of inequalities and so many still waiting for access to electricity and so many more still seeking relief from poverty? Would they have imagined how steep growth trajectories and the engine of globalism would improve the life of billions, in the process remaking both the world economy and the relationships between countries?  

Calls for change 

Embers that stoked the 21st century geopolitical fire have smouldered for decades by countries and people who feel powerless and left out. Calls for change reflect frustration and anger of populations and countries that believe, as one analysis put it, “the rich and powerful are running roughshod over the poor, marginalized and vulnerable for their own outsized benefits, and are doing so with impunity.”  

Calls to remake the multilateral financial architecture are growing louder. Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley has underlined that the Bridgetown Initiative call to rethink the global financial architecture is a movement in search of “transformation, not reform”. At present, poor countries face a triple burden – heavy debt, inadequate public finance and almost absent private investment – at the same time they are dealing with the costs imposed by climate change itself. As a Washington Post article jointly written by the unlikely duo of Bono, the U2 singer, and Lawrence Summers, an economist at Harvard University, notes, “Long lectures from richer to poorer countries followed by little investment just isn’t working.” 

Challenges to the status quo of global governance and finance systems are emerging – as demonstrated by the decision of the BRICS bloc of developing nations (Brazil, China, India, Russia, and South Africa) to invite additional members (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates). The move has been interpreted as a wake-up call, reflecting “not only the appeal of China’s values-neutral globalization but also the failure of Western countries to build a more inclusive international order”. 

Change is reverberating in other channels. China is strategically funnelling development finance to expand its economic and political influence. More than 30 countries declined to endorse a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a geopolitical “revenge of the Global South”. Decarbonization itself is poised to further rewrite the geopolitical script by changing the value of some resources (fossil fuels) compared to others (rare earths).  

What can fix what ails the world? Can any multilateral process or institution bring about what is really needed? Is greater isolation or fragmentation or polarization ahead? Or do these crises lead to changes that can inspire trust and confidence – and work?  

The world has changed, but the mission is as resonant now as in 1944. As Henry Morgenthau Jr. observed in opening the Bretton Woods conference, “The transcendent fact of contemporary life is this: … the world is a community.”