Multilateralism, after the UN

(The article was originally published in Indian Express on November 01, 2025 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)

The United Nations Organisation (UNO) celebrated its 80^th anniversary this week. The spurt of articles seeking to project the organisation as the only panacea for the mankind betrayed a sense of anxiety about its future. Ban Ki-Moon, former Secretary General, reminisced how the organisation saved the lives of his family during the Korean War of 1950-53 and grimly reminded that while celebrating its accomplishments, “we must also ensure it is fit for purpose in the 21st century”. Reform of the multilateral system is urgent and overdue, he cautioned.

This anxiety is justified. Ban Ki-Moon talked about how the newly formed multilateral body successfully navigated through the Korean War. But, this week, 29 October to be precise, marked another important event in UN’s history. As the organisation turned 11 years old in 1956 came the Suez Canal crisis, when two permanent members – UK and France – together with Israel, unilaterally attacked Egypt, throwing first challenge to the global body. From Suez seven decades ago to Gaza and Ukraine today, journey of the UN has been anything but glorious. Apologists may argue that had the UN not been there, millions would have perished of hunger and disease in Africa and elsewhere. But they don’t talk about those millions who perished in horrible wars in Sudan, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Iraq and Gaza, sometimes in the very presence of the UN Security Forces (UNSF). The UN was created primarily to end wars and maintain peace and security of the nations, not to feed the hungry while turning the other way as conflicts ravaged nations.

There were limited successes during the unipolar years of 1990s when the world became free from the Cold War tensions. During 1992-95, in war ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina, a former Yugoslav republic, , UN Peacekeepers were deployed, and food and medicine supplies were organised in the conflict areas. The UN also constituted International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1993 and prosecuted those involved in the ethnic conflict, including former Bosnian president Slobodan Milosevic. Three years later, when ethnic Albanians and Serbs got into a conflict in 1998-99, the UN deployed Peacekeepers again and secured a final settlement in the form of recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation. Another important, although short-lived, success during that period was to bring the North Korean leadership to agree to freezing of nuclear proliferation activity in November 1994.

The downward slide of the UN in the new century began with the unilateral invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies in 2003. As the organisation continued to slide, demands for its reform grew louder on one hand, while more and more leaders of important countries began showing less and less interest in its affairs on the other. Only 43 heads of government attended this year’s session while most others sent either heads of state or other leaders. Xi Jinping, unreservedly the most important global leader after the US leadership, and Vladimir Putin attended UNGA only once in last ten years. Alarmed by the situation, Secretary General Antony Guterres warned the world leaders at a special session held in September 2023 that “it’s reform or rupture”.

Tragically, those calling for a reform, including Guterres, have no clue about what reform is possible. The UN was created on a fundamentally flawed foundation. On the one hand are 193 nations enjoying democratic equality of ‘One nation – One Vote’. At the same time, an undemocratic veto system was also created by which five nations became “more equal” than others. Both fed on each other and rendered the body ineffective.

Some consider expansion of permanent membership from five to ten or more as an important reform while others argue that the veto system should go. Both seem untenable. Firstly, the veto system became necessary precisely because all 193 member countries got equal voting rights. Tragedy is that a good number of those countries are autocracies and dictatorships which do not give such voting rights to their own citizens. Anticipating the possibility of a few countries ganging up against others to pass unreasonable resolutions using brute majority, five big countries were made the conscience-keepers through a veto. Although undemocratic, it helped prevent the UN from being misused through brute majority. Countries like India and Israel would have faced humiliating situations on issues like Kashmir and Palestine in the absence of the veto. Given this dilemma, if veto has to be done away with, the entire voting structure of the UN itself needs to change.

Frankly speaking, the UN is beyond reform. Its structure is such that countries that do not accord human rights to their citizens sit on human rights committees and those that oppress women in their countries occupy women’s rights committees. Russia used veto 161 times while the US used it 95 times. On the other hand, the interest groups in UN forced at least 8 emergency sessions on Palestine but not even one on Sudan or Cambodia or Bosnia or Rwanda.

The League of Nations, predecessor of the UN, faced similar situation during the 1930s. Japan and Germany quit the body and UK and France went ahead with their unilateral politics. The US, which created the body, never joined it. Its annual meetings ceased to take place after 1939. As the UN was formally created in June 1945 after the Second World War, the League leadership met one last time in Geneva in April 1946. “The League is dead. Long live United Nations”, exclaimed Viscount Robert Cecil, key architect of the League and a British statesman.

It is time now to think on similar lines about the UN. When the League became dysfunctional, two statesmen – Frederick Roosevelt and Winston Churchill – came forward with the Atlantic Charter in 1941 to address the new global reality, leading to the creation of the UN four years later. As the world entered the phase of multipolarity, we need such statesmen to build a new multilateralism, not just the daydreamers about ‘UN reform’        .