Features
Perils of ignoring the collective voice of the UNGA
It could very well be that UN protocol does not make it compulsory that these political leaders be present at these annual UNGA sittings but their presence at the world forum would have testified to their sensitivity to global opinion on the crucial questions currently confronting the international community. A ‘bad miss’ on the part of the relevant political leaders of UNSC permanent member states, some observers are likely to quip.
On this matter, the US scored above its UNSC counterparts. President Joe Biden was not only present at the UNGA sessions but went on to address the global body. It proved that the US was eager to get to know at first hand, the perceptions of the world community on current questions. It should be granted to the US that in terms of proving its concern for the world’s wellbeing, it has ‘stolen a march’ on other foremost global powers.
The commentator of international politics couldn’t be faulted for wondering whether the above ‘miss’ is a sign of sorts of our times, which are characterized by an overwhelming dominance of world affairs by the permanent members of the UNSC. A connected issue is whether the UNSC is increasingly and relentlessly upstaging the UNGA in international affairs. If so, the trend is to be regretted.
However, the trend has serious implications for the wellbeing of the global community. For, represented in the UNGA in substantial numbers are developing countries or the world’s South.
The UNGA is a principal forum where the majority of humanity could articulate its views on matters of the first importance to it, although the resolutions it passes in the UNGA have no ‘binding effect’ on the major powers represented in the UNSC. But the UNSC would be ignoring UNGA resolutions at its peril and that of the world, considering that unmet needs of the majority of countries have grave implication for world stability and peace.
Of course, all UN member states are usually represented in the UNGA in substantial fashion and the issues of the world are, in the normal course of things, duly conveyed to the respective national leaders, but a personal presence of UNSC political heads at UNGA sessions carries tremendous symbolic significance. Among other things, it means that the world could hope of having a reasonable hearing by the international community’s leading powers. This is bound to have a reassuring effect on the global South in particular.
However, it was in the fitness of things for the ‘G-77 and China’ to have met in Cuba almost at the time of the UNGA sessions. Needless to say, G-77 is a principal forum of the South and it has helped highlight some substantial issues confronting the developing world. It is incumbent on the South, going forward, to take up its causes with the UN community of countries in a united voice and to press relentlessly for pro-South positive change in the current world order.
In other words, the South should enable its numerical superiority in organs, such as the UNGA, to matter crucially. Theoretically, the South has on its side China and India and the challenge before the latter is to unflaggingly take on the most crucial issues of the South and work towards their resolution in the UN system.
The world could be said to be badly in need of a renewed and robust North-South Dialogue. Right now, it’s the issues of the North that are being made to matter and this is not surprising considering the decisive impact being made on international relations by the world’s foremost powers. That is, mainly the permanent members of the UNSC. In the process the issues of the South are tending to receive scant attention by particularly the Northern hemisphere.
This situation needs drastic changing and the major powers that identify with the South, such as India and China, are obliged to use their political and economic heft to usher the relevant Pro-South changes.
It was in order for Southern political leaders to highlight the yawning North-South gap in respect of scientific and technological progress at the Group of 77 Summit, for instance, but the question of economic equity within Southern countries and internationally, needs sustained and rigorous campaigning by the South and those sections of the North that empathize with it.
That is, ‘Bread’ needs to remain among the foremost of concerns of the international community. Equitable and fair international trade relations and other such questions that go to the heart of development, acquire substantive meaning only when they are made to matter in the question of advancing equitable economic ties within and without countries.
It will be found that when the international community, driven by the developing world, works towards these aims, problems such as the ‘Brain Drain’ and illegal international migration would prove resolvable. Likewise, achieving the MDGs would emerge as a realistic proposition.
Accordingly, the question is whether those major powers identifying with the South would be willing to go more than the extra mile to champion the legitimate aims of the world’s impoverished countries. They would need to place their power at the services of the poor since neglecting to do so would amount to imperiling global stability in increasing degrees. Among other things, they would need to be visible in the development forums of the world and provide clear evidence that they are indeed in earnest when they speak in terms of taking up the causes of the developing world.
The South, meanwhile, should come together on these issues and lay the basis for pro-poor ‘system change’. Reviving organizations of the South, such as NAM, and promoting South-South cooperation need to be considered tasks of the first importance.
As pointed out in this column last week, the UN would need to work very closely with Southern countries with a view to ushering democratic development within them on a sustained basis. UN aid needs to be tied to progressive change of this kind since not all Southern ruling elites are pro-people and in favour of the fair distribution of ‘Bread’. Instead, their hands itch for ‘Guns’. The UN should rap them over the knuckles by increasingly connecting its assistance to vigorous democratization.