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From the European Union to the Commonwealth

OVER THE YEARS I’VE ENCOUNTERED MANY PARTS OF THE “INternational system”: the United Nations and its family of organizations, the World Trade Organization, NATO, all kinds of NGOs and think tanks, charities and foundations, and regional blocs including the European Union, CARICOM in the Caribbean, MERCOSUR in Latin America, and ASEAN in East Asia. These organizations represent humanity’s current efforts to guide and strengthen the international community and further the goals of shared progress, shared responsibility, equal opportunity, peace, and prosperity for all.

For historical reasons there is still a significant structural and ideological bias in the international system toward what is loosely (and confusingly) called the West or sometimes the North, but as we gradually drift toward a more multipolar world, this bias appears to be diminishing. This process, at least in the immediate term, tends to create more confusion and the potential for more conflict rather than greater clarity and inclusiveness, but humanity is a complex organism and cannot readjust without turbulence. The fundamental paradox of narrow interests versus collective interests will never go away as long as there are humans on the earth, and it will never stop producing turbulence. The question is how well and how wisely we manage that turbulence.

So, what of humanity’s various attempts so far to collectivize our efforts and really make the world work? The European Union stands as the first, and so far the only, moment in history when a large number of sovereign states have found the maturity and wisdom to cede a tiny part of their precious sovereignty for the common good.

Of course the EU is far from perfect—it’s organized by human beings, after all—but as a first shot at truly widescale cooperation and collaboration it’s a pretty good start. However, I should add here that I don’t see the European Union as a step toward some kind of one-world government; that has always seemed to me like a very bad idea. In my experience, government is effective in direct proportion to its closeness to the governed, so the idea of an authority in Brussels or New York or anywhere else wielding jurisdiction over people living on the other side of the planet sounds like a recipe for chaos and discontent at best, and tyranny at worst.

In my view, government should be even more local than it currently is in our world of nation-states, not less so: when I observe an administration in, say, Mexico City, attempting to govern a nation of 120 million people, even via a federal system, it stretches the boundaries of what can properly be called government. I’ve seen government work best and most efficiently, effectively, and responsively in populations of less than two or three million. The European Union is a union of states and cities and regions, not a superstate, and should remain so.

Today, the EU is challenged by a distinctly twenty-first-century problem: it has a problem of identity. Many European citizens, according to the EU’s own research, feel distant from its institutions and feel no strong loyalty to the concept, and without the support of its populations, of course, the EU cannot survive. The EU itself often puts this problem down to its own inability to communicate its benefits adequately to its own citizens, but I don’t really buy this idea—and what’s more, I don’t like the idea of Brussels spending European taxpayers’ money on selling itself to them more effectively, were that even possible. That sounds suspiciously like propaganda.

No, the EU’s problem is not that it doesn’t brag enough about its successes. The problem is that it is no longer quite sure what it’s for, and that uncertainty is contagious. The EU is suffering from a loss of a core defining purpose because it has been so successful at fulfilling its original one: to spread and perpetuate peace and prosperity in Europe. And yet the irony is that in the age of grand challenges, finding a suitable replacement “mission” should be easy; Europe has many options. It just doesn’t seem to realize that unless it identifies and crystallizes and rallies around a clear purpose, it might well continue to be a useful bureaucratic machine, but it will never touch people’s hearts.

The identity issue is a knotty one. For decades, the governments of EU member states have blamed Brussels every time they themselves mess up and have taken the credit for everything good that the EU has delivered. You don’t need to look further than this for at least one of the explanations for Brexit. When David Cameron announced after forty years of this message from governments of all persuasions, that the EU was a fine institution and everybody in the UK should vote to stay part of it, it’s not surprising that so many people reacted with angry incredulity.

Incidentally, globalization has a rather similar problem, which derives from a similar basic vulnerability: it’s just too easy for leaders to blame globalization for everything that voters complain about and to take credit for everything good that globalization brings. Of course, globalization is far from blameless; indeed, it is directly and indirectly responsible for much of the trouble in the world today, but the principle is quite similar.

There could have been, theoretically at least, a version of Brexit which was actually good for the UK, for the EU, and for the wider world. Things would have been very different if Britain had left because of a sincere conviction that the EU was too parochial, too inward-looking—for its own purposes as well as for Britain’s—and that, in leaving, Britain could forge a stronger, more outward-looking, more flexible, more modern, more global coalition of states, cities, regions, and other international actors. The present British government and its foreign service repeat the slogan “global Britain” in all their public utterances around the world, implying that it’s all about moving beyond the European Union rather than away from it, but at present it’s as hollow a piece of branding as you could wish for. There’s no doubt that, purely in terms of trade, Britain would love to be a bigger global player, but being a member of the European Union hardly prevents this. Being a truly principled, outward- and forward-looking, reforming global actor is, alas, about as far from the present intentions and vision of the UK as you can imagine, and virtually the opposite reason for the majority of Brexiteers opting to leave in the first place.

One of the clear front-runners for the EU’s new mission is certainly migration, and it wouldn’t be difficult for the EU to take the lead on this fundamentally moral, and certainly epoch-making, topic. Whenever we get distracted from the moral issue, we run the risk of making the wrong decisions on migration. At its best, the European Union has been quite deft at handling the huge challenge of retaining a sense of moral principle alongside practical considerations and politics, without appearing to preach morality or impose values.

And a moral issue it certainly is. At heart, the decision whether to accept migrants of various kinds surely boils down to a simple question of comparing your discomfort with theirs: indeed, it’s a basic human obligation for us always to measure our own comfort against that of other people. If we can reduce somebody else’s severe discomfort by undergoing some mild discomfort ourselves, then we have a clear duty to do so. At present, many of us in the “developed” world are getting the equation seriously wrong: we are refusing to undergo even very mild and temporary discomfort in exchange not merely for the comfort but for the actual survival of many thousands of others.

Some of us aren’t even refusing to undergo actual discomfort: we’re refusing to contemplate a rather vague notion of possible social change (“I don’t like the idea that my local shops might become different”). We shouldn’t overcomplicate this: it’s a moral failure, pure and simple, and we in Europe are put to shame by countries like Jordan and Turkey, which take in hundreds if not thousands of times more refugees than we do in the West.

Fear of change is understandable but not excusable. It’s important to remember that migration was already producing a crisis situation, not unlike a world war, before the pandemic (the trickle of migrants to Europe we’ve experienced in recent years is the merest aperitif for the hundreds of millions that climate change is about to unleash). In such situations, we have no choice but to reevaluate that equation of discomfort. Luckily, our sacrifice diminishes in proportion to the number of us that are making it. If ten people suffer discomfort for the benefit of one refugee, their discomfort will be very mild indeed. In Europe at the moment, we outnumber the refugees and migrants by seven hundred to one: so, if everyone plays a part, our actual sacrifice will be negligible, but its effect will be profound.

The United Nations

Over the last twenty years I’ve also worked alongside and sometimes closely with a number of members of the UN “family.” As with any bureaucracy, the inertia, the apparently unnecessary complexity, the tedious addiction to process, are enough to drive you mad when you’re actually trying to offer help to a country that urgently needs it. On the other hand, in no other organization have I come across such an amazingly high proportion of devoted, well-meaning, competent, thoroughly good people. The UN attracts the best, and it’s a tragedy that the size and complexity of the system compels them to wade through so much wasteful muddle.

In 2018, I was asked to address the biannual meeting of the United Nations’ Chief Executives Board for Coordination. Chaired by the UN secretary-general, this body consists of the thirty-one executive heads of the United Nations, its specialized agencies including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, its related organizations—the World Trade Organization, the United Nations Office for Project Services, and the International Atomic Energy Agency—and the twelve funds and programs created by the UN General Assembly. In other words, it’s all the senior decision makers of the international system, and its purpose is “to provide broad guidance, coordination and strategic direction for the UN system as a whole.” That’s not a bad proxy for the people who run the world (as distinct from the people who run its nations, cities, regions, corporations, and religions). The request was quite an honor, since outside speakers are rarely invited, and it was the special seventieth anniversary meeting of the board, which took place in the United Nations Ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in London, where the very first CEB had been held in 1948.

I gave my talk, but in the two hours of discussion that followed, my enthusiasm at being part of this impressive gathering soon dissipated. I was puzzled that instead of grappling with the big issues on the agenda, many of the interventions from the attendees were just promotions for their own agencies’ activities and successes. Often completely ignoring the topic on the table, each agency head would launch into a detailed account of what they had achieved during the previous period, their plans for the future, quite often pitching their upcoming events or programs, apparently overlooking the fact that the heads of other UN agencies were rather unlikely to attend. The impression I got wasn’t so much of a smoothly running system of interlocking organizations sharing a common set of goals, but more of a ragtag group of competing companies pushing their own agendas, and not very subtly at that.

If competition between agencies lay at the heart of the culture of the United Nations system itself, there seemed little chance it could inspire the countries of the world to set aside some of their own competitive habits in favor of a little more collaboration.

In many other summits and international meetings I’d attended, it was transparently obvious that the sole reason why most delegates spoke at all was to make sure it was noted in the official record that they had made a contribution. It hardly mattered what the contribution was, so long as their bosses back “in capital” saw that they were doing their job and ensuring that their country’s voice was heard on the international stage. Yet in this case, since it was the boss who was making the contribution, I couldn’t understand who they were doing it for. Some of them were clearly trying to impress the secretary-general, António Guterres, who seemed impatient with their reluctance to have a proper discussion or add anything useful to the topics on the agenda, one or two of which he clearly cared about.

But the basic challenge for the UN is that its power to influence the behavior of nations is limited, perhaps quite rightly so. If the gathering I saw in London were a world government, armed with real executive power over the nations of the earth, then heaven help us all. (It’s worth adding that the UN’s power over its member states is uneven, too: it wields more influence over the weaker and poorer than the stronger and richer members.) But on the whole, the UN has little supra-sovereign authority and mainly functions as a discussion forum for the international community. Its power is granted to it by its member states, which of course are reluctant to grant it enough power to restrict their freedom of action in any serious way (their voters would never forgive them if they did). The UN has, over the years, evolved many ways of influencing, cajoling, and nudging member states, and the Security Council does in theory carry a moderate-sized stick, but it’s a muddle and a compromise at the best of times.

And we are not living in the best of times. Being fully representative and all-inclusive, like the UN, is fine for periods of stability and for the purposes of maintaining a functioning world order; but it becomes inadequate for periods like our own, when change becomes imperative. Perhaps this is the fate of all bureaucracies: it’s no accident that the UN resembles many national civil services, with a fundamental purpose of preventing change. The moment you’ve made sure you’ve represented all possible conflicting interests, you effectively consolidate the status quo.

I and others better qualified than me have spent—I’m tempted to say wasted—many hours discussing reforms of the multilateral system, and sketching out marvelously inventive systems and structures for updating or replacing the United Nations. And with good reason: the systems that we have today were originally designed in an age very different from our own and there’s little doubt that if one were to redesign them from scratch today, they would look very different. For a start, they wouldn’t simply represent the leaders of nation-states; they would include the other power brokers who are so important in the modern age: cities, regions, religions, corporations, high-profile individuals, nongovernmental organizations, and so forth. But what’s often forgotten in these discussions is the simple fact that nobody has the power to implement these marvelous new systems, so designing them is a pointless activity. At this level, above the level of the sovereign power of nations, nothing and nobody has the power to impose anything.

I am far from despising the United Nations, even though its flaws are painfully obvious. I have no doubt that the world would be much worse off without it. As an aid agency, it’s indispensable. But it has reached the limits of its power to get us out of the mess we’re in now and it badly needs help.

A friend of mine who served as a diplomat at the United Nations once described to me how hard it was to get treaties agreed at the General Assembly. It was always the same 30 countries whose delegates sat up all night trying to hammer out an acceptable treaty, he told me, while the other 160-odd countries would go out to dinner and go to bed, come back in the next morning and veto everything that had been created for them in their absence.

A team can’t get anywhere unless everybody on that team understands how to be a proper team player. Life on earth is obviously a team sport: It simply can’t work if nations treat it as a sprint to the finish, where the winner takes all. What my friend’s anecdote confirmed was that only a small minority of the players on the team have any conception of this, or any desire to recognize it. The rest want to please the crowd, but they aren’t prepared to do anything substantial to earn its praise.

Who has the power to change this? The United Nations is the referee, not the captain or the trainer. The role of captain, in the past, has usually fallen to the strongest and most assertive of the players, and that’s neither fair nor wise. But these sporting metaphors are only useful up to a point, because the human race is a team which must learn to organize itself without a captain. It must self-organize or fail.

And this is the problem with the regional trade blocs too: they are, basically, self-interest groups. They may be bigger than nations because they include several nations, but they are still fundamentally inward looking, selfish in their intentions, and competitive in their nature.

Here again, the European Union is ahead of the rest, and it demonstrates every day that such a bloc can cooperate, collaborate, and compete with countries and regions beyond its own borders, and benefit from the approach.

Other groupings seem to lack this essential perspective, the crucial notion that they are themselves the building blocks of a better world and that they must look far beyond simple enlargement, toward proper integration with the global system.

The Commonwealth

Some years previously I’d been asked to give the opening keynote at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malta. The CHOGM is a biennial summit attended by Queen Elizabeth II, as head of the Commonwealth, and the heads of state or heads of government of the fifty-three member states. Most of these are former territories of the British Empire, although declared “free and equal” by the Commonwealth since 1949. This big group of nations has a surprisingly low profile considering that it accounts for nearly a third of the world’s population and occupies 20 percent of the world’s territory on all six inhabited continents. The member states have no legal obligations to one another but share at least in principle a set of common values: democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

Normally the opening ceremony of the CHOGM is a song-and-dance routine designed to showcase the history, culture, and achievements of the host nation—rather like the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games—before the delegates get down to the serious business of discussing human rights, climate change, trade, or development. But for the 2015 summit, coming as it did just before the critical UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, the Maltese government decided that it would make use of the opening ceremony, the only part of the agenda over which it had full discretion, to send out a message to the Commonwealth and the wider world. Since the hosts supported my views on this matter, my keynote was integrated into the song-and-dance routine—I was smuggled onto the stage among the dancers, following a performance by Malta’s superstar operatic tenor Joseph Calleja (a very tough act to follow).

It was an interesting challenge speaking to a very large audience in the auditorium in front of me, with the queen and most of the British royal family sitting on a raised dais on the stage behind me, along with the presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs of fifty-two other countries, while I wandered between a large group of children brightly dressed as sea monsters, traditional Maltese fishermen, and a very large butterfly, doing their best to stand stock still without giggling. And at the back of my mind was a vague feeling that turning one’s back on the monarch might still be a capital offense.

My message was simply that the Commonwealth could become a gigantic force for progress in the world, instead of the world’s biggest self-interest group; that it should look outward as well as inward; and that this duty was also an opportunity that it couldn’t and shouldn’t ignore.

Although I didn’t have time to talk about it in the opening ceremony, a message which I stressed to the Commonwealth in other meetings was about the importance of patience in advancing those core values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law among member states and beyond.

Too often in Commonwealth gatherings and other forums where “developed” and “developing” countries get together, I had seen tense and unproductive exchanges caused by the representatives of “developed” nations urging their “developing” nation colleagues to increase the rate at which they modernized their societies, clamping down for example on traditional practices which were incompatible with broadly agreed-upon principles of human rights.

But patience is required, even in the face of human suffering, because human societies have a speed limit when it comes to major cultural change. Like the poor frog that dies in boiling water because the temperature has risen too gradually for it to notice, societies can deal with radical change as long as it’s not too quick. Thus, for example, the “West” can learn to contemplate (if not fully accept) a potentially explosive concept like equality of the sexes, as long as the speed is right: my mother calmly accepted that my daughter would have a role in society which would have seemed both inconceivable and undesirable to my grandmother.

But one of the side effects of globalization is that it confronts societies—even those which may not even have started such processes—with the consequences of these slow changes almost literally overnight. A phenomenon created by evolution is visited upon other societies as revolution. We live, whether we like it or not, in a multispeed world, and we ignore that fact at our peril.

Giving my talk in Malta in the twenty-first century with several monarchs in the audience felt in some ways like a peculiar if picturesque anachronism, but I’ve encountered one or two aspects of monarchy during my career which seem far from irrelevant to the challenges we are facing today.

Royal families are an international network of sometimes charismatic, widely respected, uniquely experienced, generally well-intentioned, often wise, and always highly educated leaders who are often not allowed to interfere in domestic politics. That creates an interesting tension, and a frustrated vocation. Royals also have extraordinary access to powerful people around the world—royalty has retained much of its glamour and fascination, perhaps especially among the citizens of republics—and this is an asset which should not be wasted. They tend to have a highly elevated sense of public service too, since this is how most of them are brought up. It’s part of the reason why they devote themselves to “good works” (in addition to the obvious point that they need to try to look socially useful just in case the population one day decides that they are useless).

The interesting thing about good monarchs—allowing that inherited power isn’t exactly a fair idea—is their ability to take an impartial view of the good of the nation, precisely because they aren’t distracted by the need for constant reelection. So why not expand their remit to the good of all nations? If monarchy wants to survive as more than a mere tourist attraction, I believe it must be allowed to do wide-scale as well as long-term thinking, and perhaps it’s worth us nonroyals giving it our permission to try.

The international system needs all the help it can get, so it’s possible that the true value and vocation of this remarkable resource would be to bolster the creaky multilateral institutions by focusing on the wise, patient, courageous management of global issues.

Maybe Monarchy 2.0 is nothing more than a useful global think tank, an even more elevated version of The Elders; maybe it’s a nonnational diplomatic resource with an exceptional ability to engage productively with and intercede between recalcitrant politicians around the world; maybe it’s the world’s senate, an upper chamber to the General Assembly’s lower chamber, or maybe it’s something even more interesting. It would kick off high on talent and low on legitimacy, but perhaps that’s a challenge that can be overcome. Just a thought, anyway.

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