Empowering People at a Time of Global Emergency
Unfolding Global Emergency
The unfolding Ukraine War that began in February of last year produced an increased global awareness that the political forces dominating the history of our times are dangerously out of touch. They are not in tune with a set of circumstances threatening the future wellbeing of humanity and the natural habitat of planet earth upon which the survival of the human species depends.
Many persons all over the world are becoming increasingly troubled by the sense that political leaders and economic elites almost everywhere are acting recklessly as custodians of the future. They are operating according to an anachronistic logic of world order that aggravates the frustrations and alienation of many societies by favoring ultra-nationalist withdrawals from already weak structures and processes of internationalism. These withdrawals are magnified in their effects by wild conspiracy theorists disseminated through social media that cast blame for menacing conditions on vulnerable racial minorities, religions, and migrants and put their misinformed trust in demagogic forms of leadership.
Reflecting these patterns of belief and behavior, most governments, while giving lip service to an array of serious world order challenges, react so ineffectually to salient dangers, including climate change, biodiversity, nuclear war, aggression, predatory neoliberalism, pandemics, displacement and forced migration.
There has also been a dispiriting slowing of progress with respect to such perennial societal torments as mass poverty, disease, hunger, and malnutrition despite the material sufficiency of food production, medical supplies, and abundant knowledge. These are some of the grim consequences of extreme inequality that has been accentuated by being coupled with a virtual absence of transnational empathy accompanying the rise of right-wing populism that exhibits rage against any show of hospitality toward migrants and even opposes social protection for the less fortunate among its own citizens, often portrayed as ‘the losers’ according to widely accepted verdicts rendered by the marketplace.
The evolving structures and processes of global governance, including the allocation of public revenues, have continued to be shaped by the priorities of an outmoded past. They continue to feature preparations for war and war itself, internal and transnational trade and investment patterns, refusals to engage creatively and constructively in multilateral approaches to such issues as global warming, food security, energy development, humane patterns of refugee and migration resettlement, and transnational arrangements to establish ecological stability.
Three Illustrative Policy Domains: the UN, Legal Accountability, Nuclear Weapons
In such an atmosphere the UN System has been severely hampered in pursuing the goals set forth in the UN Charter, restricted by limited funding, geopolitical meddling, ambition, and impunity, privileging of national over global interests, and the detrimental effects of the extreme weakness of world community sentiments and behavior among its most influential members.
The UN operates in a state-centric manner as modified by the special status given to the P-5 in the form of permanent membership on the Security Council and an unrestricted right of veto. This seemingly perverse way of carrying out the original UN imperative of ‘saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ was regarded back in 1945 by the founders as the only way to ensure a truly global organization. Such a judgment took into account the influential view that the League of Nations failed because it tried to exclude geopolitical considerations, thereby depriving itself in different ways of the participation of such sovereignty-oriented states as the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Germany.
In this sense, the inclusion of geopolitics, although crippling the effectiveness of the UN in key strategic crises, managed to keep all actors engaged as dues-paying members. There is current talk, stimulated by the Russian attack upon Ukraine, and subsequent warfare, of downgrading, if not eliminating, these prerogatives of the P-5. Such moves should not come about as an outcome of partisan geopolitics. If a reformed UN takes sides in high profile conflicts between its major members, it runs a serious risk of repeating the League experience. There is little evidence to support the view that Russia, China, or the U.S. are ready to alter their security policies in deference to adverse UN decisions. Such decisions would be castigated as policy tools of the West, or more specifically of NATO or even more narrowly, of the United States.
A parallel difficulty weakens the role of international law in relation to the regulation of global security, especially in the face of wartime conditions. The prosecution of German and Japanese political leaders and military commanders for war crimes at Nuremberg and Tokyo, were notable for their exemption of the crimes of the victors, which included the use of atomic bombs against two Japanese cities and the indiscriminate intense bombing of many cities, maximizing civilian loss of life in both countries. How can a legal process gain respect if equals are not treated equally?
This dichotomy has persisted in relation to the functioning of the International Criminal Court, expressed by the failure of the geopolitical actors to become parties to the governing framework set forth in the Rome Statute, and crying ‘foul play’ if the ICC dares even to undertake a mere investigation of war crimes allegations involving these states or their close allies. International law in the domain of global security resembles more closely an oligarchic power structure rather than a normative order in which authoritative rules and principles are applied in a neutral manner to the strong and weak alike.
Another crucial dimension of the global security environment involves nuclear weaponry. Here, too, despite the apparent balance struck in the NPT between states possessing nuclear weapons and those that have not acquired such capabilities, the hegemonic character of word order is revealed.
After 50 years it is clear that the balancing formula between the obligation to forgo a nuclear weapons option and the equivalent obligation of the nuclear weapons states to seek in good faith nuclear disarmament has been abandoned by the latter, although presiding over a regime that threatens non-nuclear states, such as Iran, with coercive diplomacy if not war, in the event that they are perceived as crossing the nuclear military threshold. In other words, the NPT is reinforced by a geopolitically contrived and discriminatory enforcement regime that has no basis in law and appears to violate the sovereign right of a country to control its own security policy. A healthy symbolic reaction to this form of nuclear hegemony has been the negotiation and entry into force of Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) (2021). Yet Northern opposition to such a constructive approach led by the Global South was derisively expressed by a NATO statement expressing its refusal to depart from its reliance on deterrence and nonproliferation, reaffirmed as components of a superior global security posture.
A Concluding Observation
In this essay, three important deficiencies of global security have been depicted, each of which is highlighted by the behavior of all major actors in the Ukraine Crisis. If there is a silver lining, it is the strong incentive to perceive these deficiencies from the perspective of global interests, and to consider the most practical ways of strengthening global governance with respect to the UN, international law, and nuclear weaponry.
A starting point would be the acknowledgement that few governments, even among the non-nuclear states, seem to have a present willingness to break ranks by investing their security future in deference to global interests, which might at times clash with the pursuit of national interests.
This political vacuum for the reform and transformation of global security governance suggests that civil society has the responsibility to act and an opportunity to make a difference. It is in this spirit of engagement that our campaign for ‘Saving Humanity and Planet Earth’ was born, and draws its inspiration. We are hoping that this progressive initiative will become a benevolent force encouraging fresh thinking and action with an intent to transform global security in nonviolent and ecologically friendly directions.
