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Lecture by the President at the University of Bosphorus in Istanbul

Istanbul, 21.5.2009  |  speech

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Lecture given by the President of the Republic of Slovenia Dr. Danilo Türk at the University of Bosphorus entitled "Multilateralism in an Era of Uncertainty: The Role of the Institutions in the System of the United Nations"
Istanbul, 21 May 2009


President Türk gave a lecture at Boğaziçi University entitled "Multilateralism in an Era of Uncertainty: The Role of the Institutions in the System of the United Nations" (FA BOBO)Introduction

Thank you very much Mr Rector for your kind words and for this very nice introduction. Thank you, students and professors for your presence here. I'm very glad and honoured that you show interest in what I might say by way of introduction, I'm sure that you will also have questions because questions and answers is something that makes the academic discussion the most interesting and something where people from the academia should feel no restrictions. Obviously, as President of Slovenia I often feel restrictions of different kinds, but this is only one more reason to be happy to come to the academic environment wherever I travel and to talk about issues that are of interest to me and to people who come to these meetings and then engage in a discussion. So what I propose to do today is to speak about multilateralism in an era of uncertainty and the role of the United Nations institutions, institutions of the UN system. I'm sure that this is something that you have been giving a great deal of thought, perhaps more about the era of uncertainty than the international institutions, but as you will see these two aspects go very closely hand in hand.

I should say by way of the opening hypothesis that very often when people talk about international problems they first define challenges and then in the course of a discussion they try to define solutions and when they come to the solutions stage they normally talk about institutions that either have to be strengthened or changed or established anew. What they then discover is that this seeming conclusion is only a beginning of a new phase of problems because institutions in themselves are the problem, because they are never there to solve everything. They are both part of the solution and part of the problem. Therefore I think one has to talk about the era of uncertainty in the globalised world with a clear understanding that institutions are necessary but also with an understanding that institutions in themselves will not solve everything, that the institutions also have to be shaped properly and that a great deal of attention has to be given to the question of how do institutions operate, what needs to be done to make sure that they operate in the optimal way and with an aim to really contribute to solutions.

President Türk gave a lecture at Boğaziçi University entitled "Multilateralism in an Era of Uncertainty: The Role of the Institutions in the System of the United Nations" (FA BOBO)An Era of Uncertainty

We live in a world and at a time, which is special in many ways. Every era I guess is special in some way. Our era is special in a way that we still live in the aftermath of the ending of the Cold War, which was a system that lasted for several decades and defined much of the reality of international community. That era is over, we are now more aware of the processes of globalisation, processes which obviously have not started recently. These are very old processes which have shaped the human history for several centuries, most actively since the industrial revolution in the beginning of the 19th century. Now they have come to a new level and it is fair to say that nowadays the current phase of globalisation has created a situation where more people around the world feel the effects of changes more quickly than in any other era before. So what happens in the Far East or in the Americas is more felt elsewhere more quickly than before and that is probably one of the main features of contemporary phase of globalisation.

Our era is also special because we at this point find ourselves in a period of financial and economic crisis, which was in a way intellectually expected, but not really imaginable until very recently. The collapse of Lehman Brothers last September has created a shock and the degree of panic. Intellectually one could say this was expected, that at least something like that was expected. But it is one thing to intellectually expect a problem and it's another thing to experience the problem. Now we are experiencing a problem and we are not yet certain whether the way out has been really found. We have read various pieces of literature recently about "stress tests", which were applied to asses the curent state of the banking sector, about the ending of the era of panic, about what the United States Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner described as reassuring effects of the stress tests, but we don't really know weather the worst is over. This we hope will be the case, and there are good news about stabilisation of the banking world and the financial sector, but we don't know whether this is a real beginning of an end of the crisis or is it just a phase which will lead to further phases and the crisis will go on for a very long time. So we live in an era of uncertainty, which has compounded the uncertainties created by the end of Cold War structures and the globalisation, trands of globalisation.

An emerging political World order

Obviously, in a situation like this we ask ourselves what kind of world we are living in and what kind of world we can expect. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War we were used to hear that this new world is a unipolar world, that it is a world in which there is one and sole remaining superpower, that everybody else is revolving around that superpower and that that is a pattern which will shape the political relations of the world for the decades to come. I always thought that this concept was simplistic. I worked in the United Nations I saw how the dynamic between great powers developed in the Security Council in the first part of 1990s. I have seen that United States can play a leading role and it did play a leading role but in every situation there was a need for partners. There was always a need for a proper combination of actors and that the "sole superpower theory" was in fact a gross simplification. American diplomats were most aware and most sincere about that. They knew that if one wanted to deal with situations like Somalia, to which United States paid a great deal of attention in early 1990s, or to Georgia, one needed really much more than the power of the sole remaining superpower. The idea of unipolarity had it's limits.

We now hear a great deal about the emergence of a multipolar world and again I think we have to be sceptical about this. We have to ask ourselves what is meant by multipolarity of our era. We are probably not in a situation similar to that of the 19th century when a number of great powers of comparable strength competed, created balances and then created a doomsday machine that ended in World War I. We don't have that kind of multipolarity now and this is very good. We have emerging big powers, big economic powers like China, India and others and they compete. They are on the world stage, they are in the mood of competition and they are relatively peaceful. I think we should be appreciative, we should be happy with the fact that competition of today is much more peaceful than competition that characterised the emergence of great powers in the previous historic period. So this is good news.

But how does the world organize for that competition? That remains open and that of course has to do with the way diplomacy is conducted and with the way international institutions are developed. We know that the emergence of answers to this question is not something that comes quickly. It's not something that comes as a result of academic thinking. It comes as a result of political, economic, diplomatic struggle and we can be happy to see that in the recent meeting of the group of G 20 in London we have seen a pattern which is at the same time competitive but also cooperative. This is again a good news. I would not like to suggest that G 20 as expressed in London was a definitive answer to the problems of our time, but it is certainly a much better framework than anything else that we had in the past. There are emerging powers and other powers, the existing powers, that came together and are able to agree on a platform which promises a way forward. This platform is very far from being perfect or final. It has important open questions, including the question of how far and with what thoroughness the international financial system should be reformed in the future, so there are many important questions to be addressed in the future, but still it is a good beginning and one can encouraged by that.

Rebalancing: a basic requirement for the future

Now, one would have to understand that the situation as it is now and as can be expected in the future will need a certain degree of rebalance. There are new powers, they are on stage. The world is in an era of more cooperative type of work and in an era where we have a certain multipolarity. I wouldn't call it multipularity, I prefer the word "polycentricity", which means that there is one really paramount power, that is the United States, which is active in every field, in every region of the world, and there is a number of other powers who have more limited agendas who may not be equally involved everywhere, but who are more regionally defined. So polycentricity, I think, is closer to the reality of our time than a full-fledged multipolarity. And most importantly, we see the fact that multilateralism is a real thing nowadays, that multilateral frameworks do operate, not all in the formal sense, but they are there.

In this context, obviously, the questions of how is the rebalancing going to look is an important question. I think one has to realistically accept the dominant importance of the United States for now and for the forseeable future. I think that it is fair to say that global economic recovery cannot take place without economic recovery off the United States. There can be different speeds, there can be different paces, but without the United States things will not work. I think for us in the European Union this is something we have to pay a great deal of attention to. You will remember that at the beginning of this current crisis there was an illusion that this is crisis that has affected mostly the United States but the European Union will be able to manage somehow. We have seen in the most recent data that the European Union has experienced much steeper decline than expected initially. There is no place for "schadenfreude" in our globalized world. We are there together and we have to work together.

For a country like Slovenia, which is a small economy, which is an export oriented economy - we export about 70 % of our GDP and we export much to places like Germany - this is again a very important matter. If German GDP goes down, the import markets shrink, this affects us and we feel the effects of the crisis very seriously. We do understand better than before how much the German export economy was dependent on the American market and that without improvement there, without rebalancing in that regard things will not improve globally. The situation is even more dramatic if one compares the situation between China and the United States. China will have to invest much more in domestic spending, in development of domestic market and in the domestic economy in general, which is not and easy matter, but it is an inevitable task. America will probably have to save more and adjust its spending patterns to the actual income, which is again likely to be a difficult task. But a certain rebalancing of the two economic power acters of the world is indispensable.

So we will have to see this global rebalancing before a real solution to economic crisis emerges. We obviously today cannot say that the basic factors of such global economic rebalancing are in place. They can't be expected automatically, but I'm among those who believe that the patterns of competition which we have seen so far have had enough cooperative spirit to expect a relatively peaceful future. I do not believe that the current competition leads inevitably to large scale political conflicts and possibly wars. Wars of different kinds can not be excluded, but certainly they are not inevitable. China at an earlier stage, when it was less pragmatic, had a theory of inevitability of wars. But luckily that area is long over and has been replaced by much more pragmatic, much more practical outlook of the world. This gives us reason to hope that the future competition, future rebalancing will be peaceful. We don't know exactly how that rebalancing will take place but we do know that it will effect the international institutions. I would like to say a few words about how I see the situation of some of the key institutions today.

International Institutions - examples of the need for change

One of them is the International Monetary Fund. I'm sure that many of you have studied or are studying the working of the IMF. One could see in the last years that there was a period of time when the international debate almost avoided any reference to International Monetary Fund. It was felt that the main decision-making has to take place outside and that in fact much of the international debate was conducted outside the IMF. But prior to London and at London Summit of G 20 we have seen a reemergence of the international reliance on the IMF. There have been additional resources provided, the talk about issuance of new special drawing rights has become stronger than before and of course the talk about revision of the quota system and other institutional changes have already started with a new vigour. I guess that this is good and also necessary because IMF remains a valuable institution. It only has to be reformed properly. It has to be reformed in terms of different balances, new balances of decision making, it has to be improved in that sense also with the understanding that for the process within the IMF consensus-building will have to remain a major culture of the institution.

Also, I believe that one has to think - and here I would like to invite your thinking - to improve the integration of the IMF within the United Nations system more generally. As you know, both the IMF and the World Bank are financial institution and they are quite jealous to preserve their independence from political institutions. That's understandable and in the UN we have always - I say we, because I worked for UN for a number of years - understood the sensitivity. But now I think the IMF should understand that the financial decisions have to serve development purposes in ways which would allow the discussion on the purpose of loans much more closely connected with the rest of the UN system then was the case before. This discussion was in place before as well. There was never a total disconnect between the two institutions. But I remember very well that the IMF was never really willing to engage in a discussion which would have binding conclusions for the Fund. It was always exploratory, it was always "ad referendum". The decisions in the Fund were completely autonomous if discussed in the context of the UN. So, the meetings that the UN had with IMF were largely consultative in nature but without binding force. I think that one has to look at that practice critically and see what needs to change. The IMF also has to realise that the kind of conditionality which was prevailing in the lending policies in the past are no longer the right ones and that there is a need for a new discussion on the policies of lending that IMF will conduct in the future. I don't have answers to the questions of how those policies should look. I'm not sure whether anyone else has answers to this particular question. But a debate is clearly needed. The conditionality of the past should go into "the dustbin of history". The conditionality of the future is yet to be determined and I hope that you and others in the academia will have ideas in that context.

Let me move quickly to the United Nations as an organization and the system. Since we are meeting in Istanbul I should say that here everybody should be proud of Kemal Derviş, the former United Nations Development Programme administrator, who has done a great deal to energize the UNDP and who has also helped in strengthening what we called in the UN "the coherence of the system". I think the UN has an important task to accomplish and that is to make sure that everywhere it exists at the level of "country team" of agencies - and there are many countries in which the UN agencies exist together - that they work in a coherent way and that their presence is developed to a maximum. Of course the needs of different countries are different. In a country in a post-conflict area the work of UN agencies implies certain tasks, let us think about Liberia for example. On the other hand work a country with a very different political and economic outlook like Yemen is another example calling for a different combination of elements of the UN system to be put in place in support of that country. But in both cases, one has to make sure that the UN works coherently, that agencies supplement, complement each other and that the effect for the benefit of the people in the country is maximized. So that is as far as the UN country teams are concerned.

Another major reform, which is needed, is the reform of the United Nation's Security Council. This is the subject, which has been on the agenda for a long time. It has been actively discussed since early 1990s without much success, but that shouldn't discourage anybody because these are the kind of things which effect the long term position of major powers of the world, so therefore one has to be very patient. There are many ideas about what needs to be done. There are countries who believe that there should be additional permanent members added. There are those who believe that such new permanent members should not have the right to veto. There are other countries that believe that by no means there should be any additional permanent members, with or without the veto. So there is a division of opinion in that regard and I'm sure that you have followed that discussion, you have your own views. I would be interested to hear if you have any thoughts or any questions on the matter. I have thoughts myself because I have worked in the Security Council for a number of years. Obviously, there needs to be a formula, which will do justice to the emerging polycentric or new multipolar world and it will have to be expressed finally in the Security Council.
There is sometimes a tendency to underestimate the importance of the Security Council for global security management, because not everything that the Council does is very visible. But I would like to invite you to think very critically about that, because you will see, that the Council is covering by far the largest part of the international security landscape and is dealing with many issues which are not perhaps the most visible, but they are certainly among the most important issues of the international security agenda of today.

Finally, and with this I will conclude, there is a need to think about the United Nations Human Rights Council. I don't know how many of you have looked at the work of the Human Rights Council of the UN. It's a body, which is often criticised quite brutally in the international press and normally the brutality of criticism is related to the amount of ignorance of the author. The more the author is ignorant, the more brutal his criticism. But that's how things generally are in life. What is often neglected is the fact that the UN and most other institutions are creatures of states, sovereign states, which still are a major, very fundamental feature of international reality. So, states have limitations when it comes to human rights. One has to be careful about what to expect from states in their dealing with human rights in their advocacy of human rights or in their protection of their practices with regard to human rights. States are eminently political creatures. All states are like that. And of course, they are not natural allies of human rights. Some among them are indirect allies of human rights. Their human rights policies are filtered through political filters and of course these filters are different. Therefore intergovernmental institutions in the field of human rights are a problem by definition.

If one looks at the evolution of the Human Rights Council since its inception in 2005, one can say that the Council has made some progress in determining the practice of what is called "universal periodic review". This is a review of practices by states of their human rights performance. When I was working for the UN, we, the UN officials who helped the Secretary General at the time, agreed that there should be two key political principles which would help the Human Rights Council to establish better practices than were the case with its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission.

One was that reviewers have to be reviewed first - and frequently. In other words, every country who comes to the Council to become a member of the Human Rights Council has to be reviewed in its human rights practices immediately. That should be done more than once. This is important because very often in the past countries became members of the Human Rights Commission with the view to criticising others or to protecting themselves and there was never any real discussion about their own situations. These issues are obviously extremely sensitive. Just imagine, United States did not wish to become a member of the Human Rights Council initially, but now it has decided to join. So, human rights performance of the United States will have to be discussed and it will have to be discussing in all dimensions, some of which are extremely good and some of which are not so good. Let's see what comes as a result of that. So, the idea of reviewers being reviewed first is critical and has to be persued vigorously. Council hasn't been too good at that, but there is still time to develop proper practices.

Secondly, there should be no immediate reelection of Human Right Council members. This is more difficult to achieve, but I firmly believe that that's a principle we should be following, because in the past countries which entered the Human Rights Commission stayed there for a very long time. They were reelected and they developed a habit, a culture of criticising others. As a result of that countries which were criticised also wanted to be on the Human Rights Commission in order to protect themselves. As a result of that we got two blocks in the system, one criticising the other and the other defending itself against criticism. This of course is unhealthy and it could be improved. It could be changed to some extent by insisting that there should be no immediate reelection, so that rotation is more diverse and that countries who come know that they will not be there to criticise others forever or that they will not be exposed to criticisms by others forever.

And finally, thirdly, I think that that the Council should be much more careful with special sessions. The Council has developed a habit of discussing the issue of Palestine very frequently and that's probably necessary, but it has avoided some other situations like, for example, the situation in Darfur. This creates a sense of selectivity, which is harmful and shouldn't happen.

Conclusion

I have spoken now for a little more than 20 minutes and I think I should stop. In my talk I tried to give a few insights into the changing global landscape with questions which are very large and which of course have to be developed into much more detailed questions in your academic work. I'm sure that you are thinking about them. At the same time I tried to suggest a few hypothetical definitions of problems as I see them. These reflections included a thought on the world of international institutions of the UN system. I also wished to suggest a few ideas about where the path towards the future should be. Nothing of this is final, this is only a starting point for a discussion. I hope we can have a few questions and a discussion. I'm sure that all the questions relate to the kind of things that you will be studying very thoroughly and then have a very good knowledge about them. Thank you very much.

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