Above photo: US President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023. White House/Wikimedia Commons.
The foundations of the UN charter and international law developed since WWII are being usurped by a murky ‘rules-based order’.
In 1945, humanity came together to create the Charter international system based on the United Nations. It expressed the hope that after the most catastrophic war the world had yet seen, a comprehensive set of normative principles and institutional practices would prevent another conflict of that magnitude from ever occurring again. By coming together on a set of shared principles, the hope was that a better system of international relations would emerge. The result was the UN and its foundational Charter, reinforced subsequently by numerous declarations, protocols and conventions. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, as well as the Genocide Convention.
The UN remains the centre of multilateral diplomacy and provides the normative framework for international politics. It is far from a world government, but its norms and statutes establish the framework for what is considered legitimate and legal, and what is not.
The system worked and delivered many public goods, above all through the system’s two dozen specialized agencies. The creation of a Security Council with five permanent members sought to remedy the failings of the Versailles system and the League of Nations, created in 1919, but providing a stronger steering committee for international politics. The system remains in place today, but is facing unprecedented challenges.
From the beginning, the practices of international politics were incommensurate with Charter aspirations. The creation of competing blocs during rhe Cold War prevented consensus on fundamental matters. When the Soviet bloc disintegrated in 1989-91 the Charter system faced a new challenge—the striving for global hegemony of the remaining bloc, the political West led by the US. This bloc claimed certain tutelary privileges, formulated initially in terms of a ‘liberal international order’ and later in the form of the ‘rules-based order.’ The part effectively tried to substitute for the whole, the particular for the universal. This generated conflicts and even wars, and as a result the ‘new Cold War’ today is more challenging and dangerous than the first.
The UN seeks to balance the interests of the great powers (through the Security Council, comprising what at the time of its founding were the five leading powers) with the sovereignty of the community of nations. The UN Charter provides the foundations for a system that repudiates the logic of war and provides a mechanism for the peaceful resolution of conflict. The UN is also at the heart of a dense network of international organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as well as UNESCO, dealing with culture.
In Palestine, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNWRA) since 1947 has provided essential support for displaced and immiserated populations. In Gaza it provided logistical and physical support for a large proportion of the strip’s 2.3 million citizens. Its closure by Israel on the unproven grounds that perhaps up to a dozen UNWRA operatives may have participated in the October 7 atrocity represents not only yet another physical blow to humanitarian work on the ground, but also an ideological attack on the UN system itself. This is compounded by the subsequent suspension of support for UNWRA work in Gaza by some leading states, including Germany, Italy and Canada.
The end of the Cold War provided an opportunity for the practices of international politics and the norms of the Charter system to come into closer alignment. The intense ideological divisions of the earlier period were no longer relevant, and the world appeared to be converging on a set of common standards and norms. The negative peace of the Cold War, in which conflict was managed rather than transcended, would give way to a positive peace, in which cooperative endeavour would allow human and social development, infrastructure investment as swords were turned into ploughshares, and greater security for all. This was also the era of globalization, in which economic imperatives of global trade and investment were assumed to generate a more pacific set of behaviours. Competition would shift from military confrontation to economic rivalry. The course of history proved to be very different.
In structural terms, without the constraining influence of bipolarity one of the blocs created during the Cold War now claimed certain tutelary rights over the system as a whole. The US had always been wary of subordinating its foreign policy autonomy to an external agency. This was the reason the Senate refused to ratify US membership of the League of Nations in 1919. By contrast, after 1945 the US was a founder member of the Charter system and invested in its development, in the belief that the legitimacy of US actions would be enhanced when sanctioned by an international authority. However, the US always reserved the right to act independently, and it did so in the majority of Cold War-era conflicts.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and its alliance system, the unipolar era was marked by a great substitution. Liberal hegemony acted as the substitute for Charter norms, and for the pluralism that they represented. The Charter system is based on sovereign internationalism, the equality of the more than 200 states that populate international politics combined with a commitment to the multilateralism represented by the Charter system. It was on this basis that the Soviet Union, China and some other great powers were founding members of the UN. It was on this legacy that Mikhail Gorbachev drew when ending the Cold War in 1989. However, after 1991 the political West began to usurp the rights and norms of the Charter system. Democratic rather than sovereign internationalism became the operative norm.
Democratic internationalism, with its emphasis on human rights and liberal constitutionalism is outwardly attractive, but it is based on the ideology of democratism—the instrumental application of democratic norms in the service not of the democratic preferences of an actually existing demos but an idealized representation of those preferences. Anything else is condemned as populism and thereby delegitimated. Democratism is to democracy what Marxism-Leninism is to socialism.
The practices of international politics, driven by the ambitions of the US-led political West, increasingly diverge from Charter norms. The notion of a ‘liberal international order’ makes sense in terms of power politics and the development of a globalized economic order, but by definition it presumes a distance from the international system in which it is ostensibly embedded. During the Cold War the parallel systems more or less coexisted peacefully, since excess ambitions were constrained by the existence of a powerful military and ideological alternative. This rival order, indeed, prompted the political West to implement reforms drawn from the adversary to maintain its own viability. The creation of welfare states in Western Europe and Canada had deep internal roots, but rivalry meant that domestic constituencies had to be satisfied to avoid alienation and sympathy for the enemy. Even the US was affected by this dynamic, although tempered by the prosperity generated by the permanent war economy and an all-encompassing informational ecosystem.
With the constraints removed, the political West went into overdrive. The language of unipolarity, exceptionalism and of ‘the indispensable nation’ signalled the universalistic aspirations of liberal hegemony. In the economic sphere, the imperatives of globalization ostensibly compressed time and space and rendered sovereign internationalism redundant. The liberal international order now rebranded itself as the rules-based order, based on the presumption that it was something separate and distinct from the Charter system.
The UN was marginalized in the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and looked on helplessly as the crisis in European security intensified. While NATO enlargement in technical terms may have appeared as rational, in substantive terms it represented the repudiation of the idea of indivisible security embedded in all the fundamental agreements regulating the European security order, from the Helsinki Final Act of August 1975, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe in November 1990, through to the Istanbul Declaration of 1999 and the Astana Declaration of 2010. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the culmination of a long period in the degradation of the conduct of international politics. The UN has become an arena for the airing of divisions rather than a forum for their resolution.
The divergence between Charter norms and the practices of international politics is complete. The Charter international system is threatened as never before. Globalization is fragmenting into at least two potential streams, accompanied by the general degradation of diplomacy and the culture of international politics. Sanctions have become not an alternative to war but a way of conducting hostilities. Given the deadlock in the UN Security Council, the only universally legitimate source of sanctions and other global managerial and deterrence policies, nations have turned to the creation of alternative blocs and alignments. The war in Ukraine from 2022 and the Israel-Hamas war from 2023 signal the breakdown of the aspirations for an enduring post-Cold War peace.
Despite the crisis of the Charter international system, there is no alternative waiting in the wings. Reforms, above all to the permanent composition of the Security Council, are necessary, and possibly in the relationship between the General Assembly and the Security Council. However, in the main, the principles and norms underlying the system remain the only realistic foundations for a viable international system. The Charter international system will remain the foundation of international affairs for the foreseeable future.
What is required to resolve the crisis is not a new international system but a new pattern in international politics. For that to occur leadership at the national and international level is required, accompanied by pressure from political associations and popular movements. This is the real revolution of our time.