Chapter 20

Taking In the International Stage

In This Chapter

Establishing the United Nations

Monitoring financial groups – the G8 and G20

Forming trading blocs

Partnering with the World Trade Organisation

Noting the rise of China

Joining NATO for military support

You live in a rapidly changing, globalising world. What goes on in neighbouring nations and faraway countries has an impact, both big and small, on your life and the prospects for the UK as a whole. In this chapter, I cast the net far and wide to outline the big international organisations whose actions are helping to shape the world in the 21st century. If you want to know more about the wider world, this is the chapter for you!

Starting at the Top: The United Nations

The United Nations, or UN, as it’s most commonly known, is the closest thing the planet has ever had to a world government. No fewer than 193 nations are members of the UN, accounting for some 99 per cent of the population of the globe. Each member state sends its own ambassador and team of diplomats to the UN so that they can meet other diplomats, talk about the shared problems of humankind, and resolve and prevent conflicts – or that’s the theory. The great British prime minister Winston Churchill once said that ‘to jaw-jaw is better than to war-war’ and the UN is the ultimate exercise in ‘jaw-jaw’.

The UN was formed at the end of the Second World War – a war that claimed the lives of more than 50 million people. Leaders of the countries involved in the conflict decided that, after such a cataclysm, having an international body where nations could air and debate their views was necessary, and to this end established the United Nations in 1945.

In essence, the UN is supposed to be a force for good in the world, doing its best to prevent war and aid those who are economically disadvantaged, starving or at risk of catching infectious disease.

The UN is an immensely powerful organisation because it expresses the collective will of 193 nations. The moral weight the UN carries gives it a lot of legitimacy. Governments that ignore it or act against its wishes may not survive for long. A government that flies in the face of UN resolutions can find that other nations refuse to trade with it – a process called sanctions – or be subject to military action from an international force under the banner of the UN (I talk more about the UN and its military muscle in the upcoming ‘The Security Council’).

The UN has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. All documents are printed in each of these languages. However, ambassadors from member states can use their own language to make speeches because literally hundreds of interpreters work at the UN, translating what each member says.

Among diplomats and politicians you often hear the phrase ‘the will of the international community’. More often than not, this phrase refers to the opinions of the UN as expressed through its resolutions. It’s a bad idea for governments to go against ‘the will of the international community’ as this could lead to trade sanctions and even in extreme cases military action.

The UN’s headquarters are in New York City, in the United States. Since the end of the Second World War the US has been widely recognised as the most powerful nation in the world, so it’s probably appropriate for this international organisation to be based there.

The small plot of land around the HQ of the UN, although located in New York, is actually international territory, which means that the US government and local police force have no rights there. The UN headquarters is, in effect, its own state.

Delving into how the UN works

The UN isn’t just a talking shop. It has its own civil service, called the UN Secretariat, and a host of satellite organisations through which it works to achieve its aim of facilitating peace and development around the globe. The UN even has its own court – the International Court of Justice – which oversees the trials of people who’ve committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. The next sections cover the five principal parts of the UN and the role of each in how the organisation works.

The UN has its own constitution called the UN Charter, which sets out the jobs of each of the five parts, as well as the role of the UN secretary-general. In addition, the charter sets out certain rights that individuals can expect in relation to how their government treats them, such as the fairly fundamental ‘right to life’.

The General Assembly

The General Assembly is where all 193 member states meet to discuss world affairs, such as admission or suspension of new member states, whether or not UN members should send food or economic aid to a state, or where one country’s border should stop and another one start. Basically, the UN General Assembly can discuss anything that occurs in international politics.

The General Assembly may make recommendations for a course of action after taking a vote and member states are expected to abide by these recommendations. In effect, the General Assembly can tell countries what to do.

Each member state has one vote in the General Assembly, so voting rights aren’t weighted in terms of population or economic power. China, with over a billion people and a massive economy, has one vote, and the Cook Islands, with a tiny population and an even smaller economy, has the same.

Usually, the General Assembly needs a two-thirds majority to pass a recommendation, but on some minor matters, a majority of nations voting in favour is enough.

However, the General Assembly doesn’t have the right to make recommendations relating to peace and security – when countries are at war or close to war. This is the preserve of the UN Security Council, which I cover in the next section.

The Security Council

The Security Council is the body providing the UN’s muscle. It’s made up of the biggest military and economic powers – as they were in around 1945 – as well as a host of nations voted into their seats by all General Assembly members for a two-year term. The Security Council is important for two reasons:

• It deals with matters of international security and peace. Resolving and preventing conflict was, after all, the main reason for setting up the UN in the first place.
• Whereas the General Assembly can recommend that nations follow a course of action, the Security Council can resolve that they do. The difference lies in the fact that member states can follow a resolution from the Security Council with action. Ignoring a resolution can lead to sanctions and even military action from other member states. In addition, only the Security Council can authorise the deployment of peacekeepers to the world’s trouble spots.

The UK is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – along with France, the US, China and Russia. This gives the UK extra-special powers (no, not the ability to scale tall buildings in one bound or see through walls), including the permanent right to sit on the UN Security Council and to veto resolutions. Only the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have the right of veto, which means they can stop any resolution under discussion.

The power of some of the permanent members – such as France, the UK and, to a lesser extent, Russia – has dwindled since 1945. Some argue that new powerhouse nations, such as India, Brazil, Japan or Germany, should replace the less powerful permanent members. However, none of the ‘big five’ wants to make way just yet!

A UN resolution is a very big deal. Since 1945, fewer than 2,000 resolutions have been passed and countries are expected to follow them.

The United Nations Charter gives it the power to keep international peace through military intervention if necessary. Now the UN doesn’t deploy peacekeepers to every conflict zone; the Security Council normally requires some sort of ceasefire or peace process to already be in place. The role of the troops on the ground is to try to stop war breaking out again and to create the right atmosphere for a lasting peace.

Member states of the UN don’t just support it with money and the provision of ambassadors and diplomats; they also supply troops for UN peacekeeping duty when asked. For peacekeeping duties, troops are usually drawn from a host of nations – sometimes as many as two dozen – and the troops obey the orders of a single force commander appointed from the senior military of one of the nations supplying troops. Meanwhile, a representative of the secretary-general, normally a senior world statesperson, takes care of the diplomatic side of the peacekeeping operation.

People often refer to UN peacekeepers as blue helmets or blue berets after their distinctive headwear.

The UN can’t be everywhere and sometimes it asks a regional military organisation such as NATO (see the section ‘Providing the Military Might: NATO’, later in this chapter) to do the peacekeeping for it. Although UN peacekeepers generally aren’t expected to fight, NATO has traditionally taken a more robust role. In the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, NATO actually went on the offensive against Serbia and its allies in order to ensure eventual peace.

The UN Secretariat

The UN Secretariat is effectively the UN’s civil service. Its jobs include carrying out studies, providing information and executing administrative tasks for the Security Council and other UN bodies. The Secretariat is expressly charged with meeting the needs of UN bodies and not UN member states. So, for example, a British person working for the UN Secretariat takes his or her instructions from the appropriate UN body rather than the British government.

The UN secretary-general heads up the Secretariat. This post is usually held by an eminent politician from one of the General Assembly’s member states. The secretary-general picks Secretariat staff; generally, they’re noted civil servants from member governments around the globe.

The UN secretary-general is one of the most important roles in world politics. Not only is the secretary-general in charge of the UN Secretariat and the figurehead of the UN, speaking for the collective will of the General Assembly and Security Council, but he or she’s allowed, under the UN charter, to bring matters to the attention of the Security Council for its consideration. The current holder of the post is the former South Korean prime minister Ban Ki-moon.

The Economic and Social Council (ESC)

The Economic and Social Council is a group of member states charged with promoting economic and social co-operation and development around the globe. In particular, the ESC’s main objectives are as follows:

• Promoting higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development
• Helping to solve international economic, social and global health-care problems
• Encouraging international cultural and educational co-operation as well as respect for human rights

Yes, I know, even just one of the objectives of the ESC is massive. So how does it try to achieve what looks almost impossible? The ESC looks to co-ordinate the work of the main UN agencies (more about these in the upcoming section ‘Taking in UN agencies’), governments and even non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as big international charities, around the globe. The theory is that solutions to really huge problems – such as the spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world – can only come from nations, charities and UN agencies all working together in a co-ordinated fashion so as to target aid and education. The ESC provides a forum for all these governments, different NGOs and the UN’s own agencies to gather and formulate action plans.

The ESC has 54 member states. All the large, powerful nations, such as the US, China, India and Japan, are represented, as are France and the UK. The ESC holds several meetings throughout the year, preparing for a four-week session in July each year. The really big discussions about and decisions on the problems of the world occur at this session.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ)

As the name suggests, the International Court of Justice is the legal arm of the United Nations. It’s where politicians and military leaders who commit war crimes or crimes against humanity stand trial. The ICJ is located in The Hague in the Netherlands, rather than in New York (where the rest of the UN is headquartered).

The ICJ (or international criminal court as it’s also known) doesn’t sit that often but exists for when wrongdoers are arrested. In part, it’s supposed to act as a deterrent, to stop government leaders committing barbarous acts. The most prominent ex-leader recently tried at the ICJ is the Bosnian Serb Radovan Karadžic´, accused of committing war crimes in the former Yugoslavia at the end of the 20th century. The case, which began in 2008, is now finally reaching the end, with the defence resting in March 2014.

The ICJ exists to try leaders who’ve committed terrible acts against their own people or those of other nations. The idea is that any leader thinking of perpetrating such crimes can expect to be brought to justice eventually – if not by his or her own people then by the UN through its court of justice.

Taking in UN agencies

Much of the work of the UN isn’t done in New York at the General Assembly or by the Secretariat, but instead by UN agencies. The 17 UN agencies range from low-profile ones dealing with global postal services; to those bringing aid to the world’s starving, and promoting better health and education in the developing world; then through to the very big and important World Bank.

Some countries really rely on these UN agencies; in fact, without them it’s fair to say that some already troubled nations would slip into absolute chaos. Hunger, illness and acute poverty would present even greater problems than they do already.

The following list contains some of the big UN agencies, many or all of which you may have already heard of in the media:

• United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO): UNESCO is meant to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, human rights and fundamental freedoms. To bring extra publicity to its work, UNESCO employs a series of celebrity ambassadors, including actress Angelina Jolie and tennis ace Roger Federer.
• World Food Programme (WFP): As the name suggests, the WFP is about feeding people who are starving. It’s the biggest of the UN’s humanitarian organisations. The WFP is based in Rome and has offices in more than 80 countries. The main job of the WFP is distributing food to people who are suffering from drought or famine. It saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of people each year, and in some years, millions.
• World Health Organisation (WHO): The WHO’s objective is to combat disease, especially infectious disease – new threats such as H1N1 (swine flu) and SARS, as well as established ones such as malaria – and to promote the general health of the people of the world. As part of its work, WHO organises mass vaccination programmes.
• World Bank (WB): This body acts like, well, a bank, making loans to countries for development programmes whose stated goal is to reduce poverty.
• International Monetary Fund (IMF): The IMF oversees the global financial system and the economic policies pursued by individual countries. It tries to ensure that governments follow sensible policies – not borrowing money that they can’t afford to pay back, for example – and looks to create a global financial system whereby all countries can enjoy growth.

Many argue that the United States is too powerful within the IMF and World Bank as a result of its government providing much of the finance for the loans and aid distributed by the two organisations.

Bringing Out the Big Guns: The Role of the G8 and the G20

The UN isn’t the only big international organisation. Consider also the G8, or Group of Eight, which started as the Group of Six in 1975 and expanded to its current size in 1997. The G8 encompasses the seven largest world economies of the time, plus Russia.

But times have changed, and in 1999 the G20, or Group of Twenty, was formed. Composed of finance ministers from the 19 countries with the largest economies, plus the European Union, the G20 seeks to find ways to stabilise the world economy.

The G8 and G20 are, of course, really big deals, but they aren’t the only game in town. The World Economic Forum, held in Davos, Switzerland each winter, brings together the shining lights of world business – tycoons, lobbyists, intellectuals, big-name politicians and the small matter of a few thousand journalists. They talk about trends in the world economy, technological development and the environment.

Starting small with the G8

The G8 is made up of seven of the world’s biggest economies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US. The eighth member (by invitation rather than size of economy) is Russia, but at the time of writing this county is suspended following its annexation of the Crimea in 2014.

The G8 was originally formed to increase economic co-operation and promote growth among member economies, but its role has expanded to include international development (in particular among the world’s poorest countries), environmental concerns, international law enforcement and even world health issues.

Unlike the UN, the G8 itself isn’t a powerful body – for example, it can’t deploy peacekeepers. Instead, it gains its clout from the fact that the member states are the most economically powerful in the world, and the G8 countries agreeing to do something and carrying it through can have a huge influence on global events.

The leaders of the G8 nations – the presidents and prime ministers – take it in turn to be the president of the organisation and to host the annual summer summit. At the summit they discuss a wide variety of topics and formulate common policies that members should pursue, such as cutting global carbon dioxide emissions or forgiving the debts of poorer countries. These summits are a very big deal, with literally thousands of diplomats gathering as well as representatives from other nations, the European Union, and the United Nations and its agencies, such as the World Bank.

In recent years, the three days of the G8 summit have drawn protests from anarchists and anti-capitalist and environmental groups. Sometimes these protests have become violent; at other times, such as the 2005 summit in Gleneagles in the UK, not so much. Gleneagles saw 225,000 people taking to the streets of the nearby city of Edinburgh to urge the G8 leaders to do more to alleviate poverty in Africa.

The G8 isn’t just about presidents and prime ministers getting together and having a chinwag every year. Throughout the year the finance and environment ministers of the G8 meet to maintain co-operation between summits.

The G8 is a wealthy club. The eight member states represent some 14 per cent of the world’s population but nearly 60 per cent of its wealth. In addition, the G8 nations have military might; £7 out of every £10 spent globally on defence comes from the G8 countries. The G8 is also exclusive. Many commentators question the relevance of the G8, because the giant populations and economies of China, India and Brazil aren’t in the club, having to make do with membership of the G20 instead.

Changing times: G8 morphing into G20

The world’s altering fast, particularly with the rise of China and India, and all major international organisations are racing to catch up. The G8 may have seven of the largest economies in the world as members but it doesn’t have the seven largest economies in the world. China, by some measures, has a bigger economy than Japan, and India is racing into the list of the top ten largest economies. Meanwhile, some of the established G8 nations are slipping down the pecking order, with Mexico recently overtaking Italy in terms of economic size.

To deal with these economic shifts, in 1999 the G8 group of nations decided that, instead of the finance ministers of the G8 meeting regularly to decide world economic policy, the finance ministers of the 20 biggest economies in the world should meet. Thus, the G20 was born. Suddenly, countries like Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and, of course, India, Brazil and China got a seat at the top table and a say on some of the big issues affecting the world economy. The world financial crisis of late 2008 emphasised the shift of economic power away from the West to the East and the developing world.

The G20 nations account for a staggering two-thirds of the world’s population (thanks in no small part to China’s inclusion), as well as 85 per cent of the world’s wealth.

The G20 concerns itself primarily with economic co-operation and ensuring stability and growth in the world economy; its brief is therefore a lot less wide-ranging than that of the G8.

Looking at the Regional Trading Blocs

Nations that are near each other geographically often do most of their trading with each other. For example, the UK’s biggest trading partner isn’t the United States or China: it’s Germany, which is only a short flight away.

As a result of shared trading interests, the world is divided into trading organisations that look to promote co-operation and free trade in their own parts of the globe. These organisations don’t stop at just negotiating trade deals between member states and outside countries; they also often delve into other areas of politics such as shared diplomatic objectives or addressing environmental concerns. In many respects these trading blocs have developed into power blocs; although short of being federal states, they still look to carry members in a similar direction.

The idea’s a simple one, if you think about it: in a globalising world, relatively small nations, like the UK, have a better chance of exerting influence on world events through membership of a bloc of countries. Some of the major trading or power blocs are:

• European Union (EU): This is the bloc the UK belongs to. Its 28 member states account for 500 million people, with a combined wealth even greater than that of the United States. (See Chapter 21 for the full lowdown on the EU.)
• North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): This contains Canada, Mexico and the US, and looks to encourage the free movement of goods and people within the three member states.
• Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC): This is the bloc for countries fronting the Pacific Ocean, as the name suggests. A total of 21 member states comprise APEC, including China, Russia and the United States.
• Cairns Group: This bloc contains some of the world’s leading food producers and exporters rather than nations sharing borders or even an ocean. Argentina, Australia, Brazil and Canada are leading members.

The Chinese government recently stated that it wants to establish a new trade bloc with its relatively near neighbours in Asia, such as Korea and Indonesia.

Factoring in the World Trade Organisation

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) promotes the free movement of goods and services around the globe. It encourages member states (all 151 of them) to abolish or reduce tariffs placed on imports and to stop paying subsidies to their own industries. Negotiations are often mired in controversy, however, and can take a long time; the present round of world trade talks, called the Doha round, for example, has been going on since 2001!

The WTO is the only international agency overseeing world trade and ensuring that every nation sticks to the agreements it’s signed up to. When nations are involved in trade disputes – for example, the US is always trying to get the EU to let in more of its beef exports – the WTO judges who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong. However, the WTO prefers to let nations discuss compromise solutions, which can take years to agree upon.

The WTO can impose trade sanctions on countries that it thinks are breaking the rules and imposing unfair tariffs on imports or subsidising their own industries to give them an unfair advantage. However, sanctions are rare as they tend to damage everyone concerned.

Playing the Power Game: China Taking Over from the United States

According to political scientists, the 20th century was the American century but the 21st century will belong to the Chinese – and it’s certainly looking that way!

In the last two decades, the Chinese economy has gone from being mostly agriculturally based to being technologically advanced and producing stunning growth. Some of the statistics emerging from China are amazing: a new power station is built each week; nine cities in the country are more populated than London; 260 million people are under the age of 14 (that’s four times the entire population of the UK); and more people now use the Internet there than in the US. China isn’t just an arriving world power; it’s arrived. It used to be said that ‘all roads lead to Rome’; a truer phrase nowadays would be ‘all roads lead to China’.

Yet China still has a long way to go to catch up with the old 20th-century superpower, the United States, in terms of wealth and military might. The US spends roughly ten times as much as the Chinese on its military, and car ownership in the US is seven times greater than in China. What’s more, the average American enjoys wealth and a standard of living that the average Chinese person can barely dream of. Life expectancy in China is still five years less than in the US. China, though, is undoubtedly flexing its political as well as its economic muscles – and, many believe, at the expense of the West and the US.

Some of the key ways China is trumping the US in the global power politics game include

• Looking to form trading and political blocs with near neighbours and other emerging economies.
• Securing natural resources from African and Arab nations through bilateral trade and aid agreements, sometimes negotiating with regimes that many in the West view as having poor human rights records.
• Stockpiling large amounts of money made through having a substantial trade surplus and using it to buy US government debt. This situation is worrying for some because if China was to sell this debt in a hurry, US government finances could collapse.

China is the world’s biggest exporter, particularly of manufactured goods, whereas the US is the world’s biggest importer. In fact, China enjoys a massive trade surplus with the US – which means that it sells many more goods to the US than it imports from the US.

Providing the Military Might: NATO

The West still has a few cards up its sleeve regardless of the seemingly unstoppable march of China (refer to the preceding section). Led by the United States, the West has by far the strongest and best-equipped military machine in the world, embodied in NATO. The 28 member states in NATO include Canada, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the US.

Simply put, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) is a military alliance set up after the Second World War in response to a widely perceived threat from the Soviet Union. This alliance is based on the simple statement that an attack on one NATO state is an attack on all. Three of the member states – France, the UK and the US – can back up this statement with nuclear weapons.

The immediate reason for NATO’s existence – the threat from the Soviet Union – disappeared along with the Berlin Wall after 1989 and many questioned whether or not the organisation still had a purpose. However, civil wars in the Balkans in the 1990s highlighted the need for its existence, because it was NATO that eventually imposed peace on the troubled region.

Rather than reducing its membership since the end of the Soviet threat, NATO has in fact increased in size. Many nations that were previously members of the Warsaw Pact – and thus allied to the Soviet Union – are now members of NATO.

More recently, NATO got involved in conflicts outside of Europe and the North Atlantic, most notably in Afghanistan against the Taliban, a group closely allied to the extremists who carried out the 11 September terrorist attacks on the US in 2001.

The UK has been one of the two leading countries in NATO – in terms of military spending – since its inception, but it’s the US that supplies most of the troops and money underpinning it.

France has had a difficult relationship with NATO. Former French president Charles de Gaulle actually withdrew the nation’s troops from NATO command in 1959, arguing that the US and UK were too powerful. Gradually, though, after de Gaulle’s death, the French re-integrated into NATO and their troops now take part in exercises and combat operations when required.