“It's really irritating when they talk, but they don't do.”
HM Queen Elizabeth II
Last week's headline that Xi Jinping is expected to snub the forthcoming UK summit on the climate crisis drives home the need for a major step forward in global co-ordination. The most acute driver is global warming, which will damage China every bit as hard as most other countries: but there is an increasing number of issues on which humanity must learn to set global, rather than national, parameters.
The United Nations is over 70 years old: it was designed as a talking shop for a time when nations resorted to violence rather than dialogue. The Queen’s reign has spanned virtually its entire existence, and she is right to recognise that now is the time to move to the next stage - global action.
So in this commentary we look at the key international bodies and some of the big issues which would benefit so greatly from United Nations Mark 2.
The United Nations now includes 193 sovereign states, a huge (and almost complete) increase from the initial 51. Its mission is to maintain international peace and security, to develop friendly relations among nations and to achieve international cooperation, being a centre for harmonising the actions of nations. By and large, it has succeeded in the first of these objectives with some notable exceptions, including Vietnam and the Middle East.
However, a tighter group of the most influential nations has proved necessary; and the G7 was formed in 1975, followed by the G20 in 1999. The major focus of these is on economic and financial cooperation.
Humanity is moving at a much faster pace than these international bodies. Migration is mixing us together at a rate which will make it hard to distinguish between nationalities within the next two generations. Business moves across borders as if they hardly exist and, whatever journalists write about globalisation being reversed by the pandemic, we know that is not the case.
The pandemic itself has demonstrated that viruses paid no heed to national restrictions, much to the chagrin of Australia and New Zealand. Technology spans the world, bringing its unique version of global anarchy to challenge authoritarian regimes.
The UN, G7 and G20 find it hard to keep up with all these, and now we have the spectre of climate change with its truly global challenge.
The Queen’s contrast between talking and doing is right on target. It's because the UN couldn't get beyond talking that the G7 was formed, albeit with the limited purpose of acting on economic challenges. But now we need a much broader consensus for action, and that challenge will be as clear as daylight in a fortnight's time, at the climate conference in Glasgow.
Above all, we need to define what are the key ‘global action’ issues. All three international bodies then need to agree them. These issues should best be filtered from those significant areas of global convergence noted above: climate change, technology, pandemics, business and the treatment of migrating peoples. Of course, the maintenance of peace between nations and economic progress will also remain critical objectives.
Others will no doubt set out detailed parameters in each of these areas: for myself, the search for a more egalitarian form of capitalism requires a convergent platform for regulation and administration (as noted in our commentary on 6 September), a globally accepted presumption in favour of disintermediation, and an agreed focus on empowering young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As noted often in these commentaries, the tech revolution brings great opportunities to address these issues with concepts such as ‘Shares for Data’, and I was delighted to read of Prince William echoing our criticism of excursions into space taking precedence over the myriad of challenges that we face here on Earth.
So, let’s move global co-ordination up a large step; so that, in the key areas identified above, humanity agrees to act as one.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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