The Role of the United Nations in Times of Geopolitical Change

“Where has the community spirit gone,” asked VCDNP Senior Fellow Angela Kane during a webinar on the role of the UN in times of geopolitical change, as well as on opportunities for and challenges to multilateral cooperation to solve global problems. The webinar, held on March 1, 2021, was organized collectively by the Bonn International Center for Conversion, the German Development Institute, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the United Nations Association of Germany.

In 2020, the UN celebrated its 75^th anniversary. Ms. Kane, also the former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, noted key developments in this respect. She argued that the optimism in international affairs that prevailed at the end of the Cold War, with a focus on cooperation and multilateralism, is now gone. This has been particularly evident, she observed, in the past four years in the United States, as well as by increasingly aggressive Chinese foreign policy and continued human rights violations by China. Democratic countries today are in a small minority and new technologies such as artificial intelligence pose serious challenges to the privacy of people.

To meet the needs of a world that has gone through fundamental geopolitical changes, Ms. Kane called for UN reform, drawing particular attention to the privileges afforded to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and the role of geopolitical interest in acting to resolve conflict situations. She observed that since the creation of the United Nations, the world’s population has increased from just above two million to almost eight million, of which 42 percent are under the age of 25. Surveys show that the young generation supports the UN and want to see it play a more active role in global affairs.

In conclusion, Ms. Kane called on the UN to actively facilitate the participation of civil society and young people in multilateral diplomacy. She called for the readiness of reform both in the UN Secretariat and among its Member States and observed that neither pandemics nor environmental changes respect borders.