The Crisis of Multilateralism

Something has snapped in workings of our multilateral institutions. And there seem to be too many problems in too many places for this to be entirely coincidental. If the late 20th century was an age of coming together, the early 21st century looks like being an age of drifting apart. Some countries won’t mind that. China, for example, has always instinctively favoured bilateral negotiation over many competing voices of the multilateral roundtable. ASEAN’s problems over how to handle territorial disputes in the South China Sea have been well publicized: the association is now effectively split into pro- and anti-China camps. Less widely covered was last week’s move by Uzbekistan to suspend its membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. (Trefor Moss – The Diplomat – 26/07/2012)

While ASEAN and the CSTO are quite different groups that aim to do quite different things, essentially have the same problem: their members have conflicting visions of how their region’s strategic landscape ought to develop. And when members of a club can’t agree on basic issues, the club ceases to work. Other institutions face similarly uncertain futures. EU, once model for the likes of ASEAN, is in turmoil. NATO, for so long bedrock of Western security, will limp away from Afghanistan without much sense of its future direction. The organization is now centred, from U.S.’s perspective, on wrong ocean; Washington has become more interested in its dynamic Asian partners than in its declining European ones. Another example is UN Security Council: it is yet another type of multilateral grouping, but it resembles many of those already mentioned if only in its diminishing ability to function, as demonstrated by tht enervating deadlock over Syria. These groupings of nations operate by consensus. But consensus is becoming ever more elusive. The ASEAN members, which have never balked at publishing some pretty bland assertions of like-mindedness in the past, were unable to profess solidarity in even the most superficial terms last week, failing to issue a joint communiqué for the first time in their 45-year history. How can we explain this phenomenon of increased polarity in international politics? In some cases it could simply be that the structure of the institution has outlived its usefulness, most would probably agree with this where UN Security Council is concerned, with exception of the five permanent members. The countries that first came together to form these various institutions are not the same places they were then: nations that once had similar priorities and visions may now have drifted apart politically and economically. The structure of international politics has also been transformed beyond all recognition. Countries have risen and fallen as political and economic powers, while institutions that serve these countries have struggled to keep pace, reforming too slowly, too timidly. The power of these groups to help their members to navigate the geopolitical challenges that they face has waned as a result. The world has many multilateral institutions, but too few work well. They need to update their visions of regionalism and multilateralism for the 21st century. This quest will end, for some, in the realization in new geopolitical order there is no longer a common thread that ties their members together.