I cannot hide it (because it is already obvious to the reader of the blog): I am a supporter of bold (though not necessarily radical) changes in the functioning of international institutions, especially global ones, which, like the UN, cannot keep up with changes in the world. And I am aware that there are no perfect ideas and no solutions that guarantee success. But I cannot somehow come to terms with the fact that the authors of all the reform reports I mentioned earlier, from the very beginning, put up walls for their own imagination, are afraid to take up complicated and controversial issues, and do not want to introduce bold and difficult-to-implement ideas into the discussion. They safely follow a trivial route. Must the status of “sage” necessarily involve timidity?
No one has a monopoly on good ideas. But I know from experience that they are often born under the influence of heated discussions and disputes. And if we at the outset exclude difficult and controversial issues from the discussion, nothing great will come of the debate.
The direction of changes in international organizations can be intuitively imagined. One of the landmarks far on the horizon is the liberation of international institutions from the monopolistic power of governments, using them to build a network of joint action of all actors of international politics, especially ordinary citizens, and promoting global identity.
Report “A Breakthrough for People and Planet…” prepared in 2023 in the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future was based on the correct assumption that multilateralism should go beyond the circle of states and cover a wide range of international actors (a trace of Prof. Slaughter’s hand?). However, in the area of recommendations, the report avoided bold, unconventional, but also controversial solutions. It didn’t even serve as an opportunity to ask questions. Therefore, the report contains only a proposal to strengthen the voice of civil society by allowing representatives of NGOs to stay in the corridors of the conference part of the UN headquarters, suggesting that they use Internet channels to communicate with UN bodies. The authors rightly wanted to strengthen the role of women and youth, give special status to cities and regions, and introduce representatives of the private sector to the work of the UN. But these solutions are rather symbolic, or even misleading. They lag far behind the expectations of global civic movements. Members of the Panel did not directly comment on the proposals submitted by these movements, for example regarding the creation of a parliamentary body or a civil society body in the UN system. It is known that these ideas will not pass now because some big countries will not allow it, but why not raise the standing of these ideas by describing them in the report?
In the light of Russian aggression against Ukraine, the UN role as an instrument of collective security has become crucial for its credibility. And originally, this was supposed to be its constitutive mission. In the Panel’s report, the problem of “effective collective security” was included in a separate block, but it was placed fifth (penultimate) in the structure of the report and recommendations. At the very beginning of the chapter, the authors proposed extending the definition of collective security to clearly include the so-called triple planetary crisis (climate and environment), cross-border crimes and socio-economic inequalities. I understand that the authors silently assumed that the definition of security already includes violations of human rights, the rule of law and democracy. While writing this, I place between the lines the so-called wink. Because they certainly didn’t assume it.
UN officials often condemn military coups, such as the recent one in Niger (Gabon, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad), but UN bodies do not always treat them as a threat to security. The Security Council responded to the 2023 coup in Niger, but only through a statement by the President. Practical actions (sanctions) were not considered. The same applies to the UNSC’s reaction to mass violations of human rights and democratic standards. Dictatorships and autocracies do well in the UN and do not feel any discomfort.
The authors of the Report considered the reform of the Security Council to be crucial for effective collective security. Here’s another digression. I started professionally dealing with the reform of the Security Council in 1996, almost at the beginning of the discussion. I follow its fate to this day. The discussion has been going on for 30 years and there are no visible results. The Panel’s proposals followed the usual path: increasing the size of the Council, limiting the veto power, considering seats for regions, extending the term of office of non-permanent members, convening the UNGA meeting when the Security Council is incapable of acting.
My opinion is clear: the Security Council should be scrapped altogether (suspended, hibernated, etc., following the example of the Trusteeship Council), and its powers should be transferred to the UN General Assembly. The Security Council was a product of the post-war era. It was intended to consolidate the special responsibility of the victorious powers for world peace. It was intended to guarantee their material contribution to extinguishing conflict fires. It was intended to ensure quick action. It’s not even about the fact that the world looks different today than it did 75 years ago, when the Council was created. But most of these expectations were unfortunately not met. The Security Council should therefore be dissolved. A new algorithm of action and decision-making (with an appropriately high qualified majority) of the General Assembly should be built on the basis of the UN resolution “Uniting for Peace”, in particular regarding the introduction of sanctions and taking coercive actions (including the use of force).
Is it a provocation on my part to suggest that? Yes, yes. I wouldn’t be myself. And I know, I know: the international community is not yet ready for this. But really, no “sage”, no “high-level personality” employed to sign these reform reports has the courage to support such a solution? Hey, my dear political celebrities, it’s time to finally have the courage to take off the ground.
And the result of this driving with the brake on by all these eminent personalities is that citizens have long ceased to be interested in the fate of the UN and many other institutions.
It is no wonder that even holding by Poland of the OSCE chairmanship in 2022 did not generate any interest in our country. Maybe that is a good thing, because it was a chairmanship without vision and ambition. The only thing that can be remembered is blocking Lavrov’s participation in the OSCE ministerial meeting in Łódź and putting Łódź on the map of ministerial diplomacy.
What’s next for the OSCE? In February 2022, the Polish Chairmanship took the initiative to revive the OSCE as a dialogue platform through the so-called Renewed European Security Dialogue (RESD). Reading the speeches delivered as part of this dialogue leaves no doubt: the Himalayas of wishful thinking were reached there. And that’s all that remains of this dialogue as of today.
Firstly, all parties must be interested in dialogue, and Russia was not. Secondly, it must be conducted at an important level, and the absence of several Western foreign ministers (including the US Secretary of State) and Lavrov himself (rightly banned), even at the Łódź meeting, did not increase the standing of the OSCE as a forum for dialogue. Because it was not the time for dialogue. And it cannot be decreed administratively.
The OSCE has been experiencing an existential crisis since the late 1990s. Under Putin, Russia no longer concealed its intentions to destroy the organization. In January 2005, Putin said this directly to Kwaśniewski. Because Russia was bothered by ODIHR’s opinions on the elections, the activities of the OSCE field missions, its interference in “internal” affairs in the so-called post-Soviet area. And even earlier, if Russia wanted to talk about European security, it was not in the format of over 50 countries, but in the format of a “concert of powers.” And Russia made such proposals two decades ago. It was not really interested in pan-European dialogue.
In the meantime, the United States clearly reduced the scale of its political involvement in the OSCE, especially after September 11, 2001, and decided to use the OSCE for auxiliary purposes (engagement in Asia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, etc.).
European Union invested primarily in its own political instruments (and rightly so), i.e. in the common foreign policy, the Eastern Partnership, the Berlin process regarding the Western Balkans and other.
Marginalization of the political role of the OSCE was compensated by numerous operational programs that duplicated the activities of the Council of Europe, UNDP, the EU and the World Bank. And in terms of dialogue, discussions at the OSCE forum turned into a “shouting match” between the West and Russia and Belarus, full of trivialized propaganda comparable with the debates at the UNGA.
I suggested a decade ago that the European Union should initiate (at least now within the so-called European Political Community) a serious debate on the future of the OSCE. That didn’t happen. Pity.
For over two years, Western politicians and experts have been afraid to ask directly whether the OSCE with Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus makes sense at all. Because if it doesn’t, appropriate consequences should be drawn. I, God forbid, do not propose extinguishing the OSCE or disbanding it. But I expect at least a sober look at its possibilities.
The CSCE was able to reach mass public consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s (and the “Helsinki committees” still function today). Today, the OSCE does not reach the consciousness of ordinary citizens at all. Even in Central Asia and Mongolia.
Enlarged Europe as a geopolitical construct still makes sense. But only after the democratization of Russia and Belarus. Then it will be necessary to build new foundations for a wider Europe. With the active participation of the new Russia.
This would also create an opportunity to introduce a civic dimension to the new institution.
You may be tired of this “citizen” dimension that I bring into considerations about the reform of international institutions. I will repeat my belief that it is the citizen who is for me the most solid agent of the moral factor in international relations. And without this moral factor, we won’t get very far in repairing the world.
In my lectures “Citizen and World Politics” (downloadable file on my blog), I described that the problem for international relations has always been that intra-tribal (intra-national) morality and inter-tribal (international) morality were guided by two different moral philosophies. Moral codes have evolved. But, as researchers rightly claim, international ethics has lagged centuries behind ethics within states, behind human ethics. Can international ethics ever be based on the canons of human ethics? The lack of a universal moral code emerges as an insurmountable obstacle. There is also an additional complication resulting from the fact that collective ethics will always differ from individual ethics. So there is only a roundabout way, i.e. developing international law. For many experts, international law is undoubtedly a form of moral code, because its application is largely unsupported by sanctions, and law without sanctions is more like a moral norm than law in the strict sense.
Treating international institutions as a platform for intergovernmental dialogue only is therefore a highly minimalist approach today.
The European Union is the only organization that wants to show that it values the citizen’s voice and even wants to give it causative power. Of course, the European Union has a political interest in this, because, as I wrote in the previous entry, it has learned the hard way that without civic consent, or at least understanding, it cannot develop further. But even in the case of the EU, the mechanisms of connecting with citizens are still quite occasional and shallow. And the citizen doesn’t really have the habit to conduct a regular dialogue. Therefore the so-called activist movements fill the void and sometimes even take advantage of civic passivity and impersonate the voice of citizens. Because a citizen will always act reactively when he/she senses a threat from political institutions in the air. In welfare societies, as Habermas once described it, the natural instinct of the human individual is to protect the space of private life (“lifeworld”), i.e. family, personal life, consumer choices, from the visible and invisible hand of the state and the market. This allows autocrats (in Russia or China) to take advantage and propose devil’s pacts of inviolability of private and family space in exchange for the individual’s resignation from activity in the political and social agora.
However, I will repeat again and again that the only hope for finding good answers to the challenges of the modern world is not the collective wisdom of states or international institutions, but the collective wisdom of citizens.
