The new international (dis)order

The Kyiv suburb of Borodyanka where 29 residential buildings were destroyed by Russian airstrikes in November 2022. Photo: Olga Kovalova / Shutterstock

The election and inauguration of the new US president and his first decrees have once again put the issue of international institutions on the agenda. Obviously, this whole system has long ceased to function, but what will happen next?

International institutions have usually been created after a major war to consolidate the world order that the victors sought. Following the Second World War, the slogan “Never Again” was used to make impossible what the vanquished had done before. The victors established the values ​​and rules of post-war life. This was the case with the League of Nations and the UN, which gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other documents that define the rules of our world. One can also mention older examples, such as the Peace of Westphalia.

However, after the Cold War, the defeat of communism was not celebrated. No new institutions were created, no new fundamental documents were developed, and no analogue of the Nuremberg trials took place. Instead, the victors immersed themselves in celebrating the “end of history”. Of course, a unpunished evil always returns, which is what we have now. Instead of “Never Again”, the world was greeted by the Russian revanchist motto of “We Can Do It Again”. Incidentally, this means that without Russia’s apparent defeat in the current war, the world will receive a security vacuum instead of a security order.

Maybe it is better this way, at least for the US? I doubt it. There are two alternatives: a world based on rules and agreements, and a world of the right of the strong. In such a world, the strong must prove from time to time that they are the strongest. Therefore, American blood will be shed, which is exactly what Americans want to avoid. The analysis of benefits and losses shows the benefits of a world of rules even for those who prefer something different. As the Chinese proverb says, “a person living in a glass house should not throw stones.”

Ukraine has the moral right to talk about restarting international institutions because we have acutely experienced their failure.

Obviously, the new world order must be based primarily on the recognition of the changing global balance. For example, the current UN Security Council does not include several of the world’s most powerful states as permanent members.

Secondly, the new world order must be based on the abolition of double standards, otherwise it will not stand. First of all, this concerns decolonization. The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples from 1960 became the basic document for the decolonization of most of the world, which prevented further imperial wars. The peoples of Africa, South and Central Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and Latin America gained freedom — but not the peoples of North Asia, colonized by Moscow. The Russian Empire survived, which resulted in the current war. That is why last year the European Parliament, PACE, and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly adopted resolutions in which the decolonization and “de-imperialization” of Russia are defined as the only path to a sustainable peace and democratic development, and the most recent PACE resolution openly calls for seeking the implementation of the above mentioned UN Declaration in the Russian Federation. Otherwise, we will have “the end of history in reverse”.

Thirdly, the system of project implementation in international institutions needs to be revised. The current system largely works on its own and does not fulfil assigned tasks; has its own internal performance indicators; is weakly connected to larger goals; and often lacks a systemic approach. Overall, the main measure of quality is comfort inside the bubble and not efficiency. An important change could be the transition to project implementation by local organizations. This will require more work in central and regional offices but will develop local capacity, which will directly affect the development of local institutions, which is the ultimate goal.

The indecision in implementing any plan to restart international institutions is explained both by fear and Russian money. It is also explained by the false tradition of “Russian studies”, which in Soviet times did not distinguish between Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Estonians and Uzbeks, and now does not see Tatars, Chechens, Buryats, Sakha (Yakuts) and other peoples. This fog is also made stronger by the unconscious, but generally accepted, classical idea of “historical” and “non-historical” nations introduced by Hegel. “Historical” nations have more rights, including the right to “zones of influence”, and they cannot face defeat, be embargoed, have their assets confiscated, or have restricted membership in international organizations, etc.

Russia began actively disrupting the world order in 2008, and the world turned a blind eye to it. But, as Herman Pirchner shows in his book Post Putin: Succession, Stability, and Russia’s Future, Russia had been violating most of the treaties it had signed long before that.

The first practical steps are described in the Sustainable Peace Manifesto, a fragment of which I will quote in the next paragraph.

Ukraine’s official position is that the gross and unprecedented violation of the UN Charter, which has been ongoing since 1991, when the Russian Federation bypassed the UN Charter procedure to inherit the seat of the USSR in the UN, should be rectified. In December 1991, this happened with the tacit consent of the member states of the Security Council and the UN Secretariat, thereby limiting the rights of all other UN member states to have their say on the matter through the General Assembly voting procedure, as provided for in Article 4 of the UN Charter. Moreover, in clear contravention of the UN Charter, the Russian Federation usurped a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. After all, the words “Russian Federation” are nowhere to be found in Article 23 of the Charter, which lists the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Instead, it is listed as the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”. Changes to the Charter have not yet been made, and there has not been a single vote of the General Assembly in support of transferring the USSR’s seat in the Security Council to the Russian Federation.

Section 1.3 of the Sustainable Peace Manifesto contains many other aspects of the problem of Russia’s membership in international organizations.

While this article was being prepared for publication, the need for a renewed rules-based international order was approved by a special PACE resolution, which, in my opinion, is a very important message to the world.

Without a restart of the system of international institutions, instead of de-imperialization, we will see “re-imperialization”, as described by the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, that is, “the arrival of new empires in place of the old ones, rather than the establishment of republics and democracies on their ruins.” He notes that in this case “…the world of the 21st century will be a world of new empires, no better than the previous ones. And then the “end of history” will occur with a completely opposite sign.”

Valerii Pekar is a chairman of the board of Decolonization NGO, the author of four books, an adjunct professor at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University, and a former member of the National Reform Council.

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global order, international justice, PACE, peace process, Russian invasion of Ukraine, United Nations