Multilateralism or antagonism?

An alliance of democratic countries against an alliance of authoritarian states, the current global political trend, does not serve the cause of international cooperation

The crisis provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the largest and most significant events to hit the world since World War II, with repercussions across multiple areas of people’s lives, from health to economics, security to human rights. The virus has had the paradoxical effect both of highlighting the importance of international cooperation and of amplifying the trends in today’s world that are making cooperation more difficult. In that sense, it appears as a critical moment for multilateralism, as for so many other areas of life.

The crisis of multilateralism

The multilateral system was already under great strain before the coronavirus arrived. As Richard Gowan and I wrote last year for ECFR, we can identify three interrelated crises of multilateralism. There is a crisis of power: the United States is no longer willing or able to underpin the multilateral system, and China increasingly seeks to shape institutions around its own values and objectives. There is a crisis of relevance: institutions are based on rules and procedures designed for yesterday’s concerns, and in many areas, they do not accurately reflect the most significant demands of today’s world. And finally, there is a crisis of legitimacy: many countries see institutions as not reflecting their interests and concerns, while many people even in established democracies believe multilateralism mainly serves elites rather than the collective interest.

Another way of expressing the fundamental challenge to multilateralism is that the EU and its allies are seeking to preserve a liberal rules-based system in a pluralist world, where liberal powers no longer enjoy the primacy they did after 1989. Unlike the Cold War period, the contemporary world is sufficiently interconnected that there are strong reasons to preserve global and universal institutions: financial and trade flows, migration, climate change and infectious diseases need to be addressed globally, and the prevention of human suffering and armed conflict also seems to call for as universal a reach as possible. Yet, unlike the post-Cold War period, the democratic world is unable to set the terms under which international institutions function. It cannot be assumed that all parties to international organisations share a desire to make them work and a common vision of their underlying purpose. Instead, in some cases, states see multilateral organisations as a forum to pursue geopolitical advantage.

Covid and the WHO

The pandemic has shone a spotlight on the way that all these trends are affecting global institutions. The World Health Organisation (WHO), which should have been the forum for international cooperation in response to Covid-19, has instead become a political battleground. Under President Trump, the United States has announced that it is quitting the WHO, which it accuses of being overly deferential to China. The US accusation is partly true, but it reflects a structural weakness of the WHO secretariat in relation to all its member states, not only China. The WHO has little power compel transparency and timely reporting from countries that do not have a robust commitment to those values. The US move does not represent a constructive attempt to reform the organisation, but rather to instrumentalise it as a way of extending its confrontation with China into another sphere.

Similar trends are visible in the next urgent question on the global health agenda: how to ensure the fairest and most effective global distribution of vaccines against Covid-19 as they are developed. The race to develop a vaccine has been compared to the space race during the Cold War – as exemplified by the fact that Russia has named the vaccine that is now undergoing trials “Sputnik”. The World Health Organisation along with other non-governmental organisations has launched the Covax initiative for global distribution of any vaccines that prove successful, but the programme is struggling to attract support; instead rich and powerful countries appeared to be focused on keeping any vaccines they can obtain for their own population, or using their distribution for geopolitical purposes. It is understandable that countries should prioritise the needs of their own populations, but a far-sighted approach would also take account of the global picture, given the difficulty of preventing the virus from spreading across borders.

The international cooperation

In other areas, too, the pandemic has revealed a lack of international cooperation. The Security Council took months to pass a resolution on the crisis, paralysed by in-fighting between the United States and China. The G20 group of leading economies has made slow progress in mobilising international financial assistance for the developing world, which stands to suffer severely from the impact of the disease. Covid-19’s constraining effect on global trade has been worsened by pre-existing trade wars, and comes at a time when the World Trade Organisation’s dispute settlement mechanism is paralysed by the US refusal to appoint new members to the organisation’s appellate body, and when there is a widespread sense that China has exploited the global trading system because of the unfair advantage conferred by its state capitalism model.

Can the multilateral system be repaired after Covid-19? The European Union has made the preservation of a rules-based order into one of the priorities of its foreign policy, and France and Germany are leading an “Alliance for Multilateralism” designed to mobilise support for the system. Some plausible suggestions for reform of specific institutions have been made – ranging from measures to bring greater transparency and a revised dispute settlement procedure to the World Trade Organisation, to give the World Health Organisation more teeth over member states, and to establish standards for cyberspace and renew arms control. In all these cases, the problem is not to find technical measures that would make the system work better – rather, the question is whether the leading powers of the world, and their populations, continue to believe that global cooperation can really promote the common interest.

Different approaches to multilateralism

It is likely that we will increasingly see a two-track approach to multilateralism in the aftermath of Covid-19. In some areas, there will be a splitting of the world into rival blocs, based around opposing political and economic systems. Some people in the United States have begun calling for a “free world” strategy, in which the United States draws a stronger distinction between democratic allies and authoritarian rivals. There are signs that Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, is drawn to this approach. British prime minister Boris Johnson has also called for a D10 grouping of democratic states (incorporating the existing G7 plus India, South Korea and Australia) to coordinate rules for cyberspace. While this idea neglects the continuing divisions between such countries (for instance, over taxation of digital companies), it responds to a significant trend in global politics. The contours of such a division are indeed already emerging in the technology sphere, because of the security implications of internet control, as witnessed in the disputes over the role of the Chinese firm Huawei in building 5G networks in Europe.

Yet the attempt to build multilateral institutions among like-minded democratic states cannot alone meet the most pressing questions confronting international policy. For one thing, Western economies are far more interconnected with Chinese and other undemocratic countries than they were during the Cold War. While some separation in security-linked technology and medical sectors is inevitable, the economic consequences of a complete split would be too severe to make it feasible. We still need to find a way to continue trading with China, while accepting that its economic model is unlikely to evolve away from state capitalism in the near future. Many of the greatest risks to our countries involve threats that cannot effectively be addressed only by democracies acting together, but require a modus vivendi between countries of very different political regimes. Pandemics, climate change, international development and the attempt to limit violent conflict all fall into this category. While like-minded democratic countries will unquestionably coordinate more closely, they cannot give up on the effort to find some way of coexistence with states whose fundamental values they strongly oppose.

This article is also published in the September/October issue of eastwest.

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Anthony Dworkin [LONDON] Senior Policy Fellow at European Council on Foreign Relations.