[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This Reader is about some of the acute failures of globalization leading to its demise, not even sparing the UN and certainly not sparing HR, this being the reason to deepen our commitment to overcome the declining neoliberal global restructuring also known as globalization. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
—Nostalgia is not a strategy; we believe that, from the fracture we are experiencing of the global order, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. (Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada)
1. Need proof?
- Empires in decline/fracturing tend to be reckless and vengeful, attacking in all directions, taking crazy risks, acting without a coherent plan, and wreaking havoc everywhere. (Angel Ferrero)
- When human rights treaties and the United Nations Charter are no longer respected and bullets start flying, along with human lives, international law is the first casualty. Appeals and voices of reason are of no use when leaders are blinded by power and the desire to impose their will. (Fernando Ayala)
- The five permanent members of the Security Council maintain a monopoly on the use of the veto. Since it came into effect in 1945, it was used for the first time the following year, and as of last year, it has been invoked 282 times, with Russia (129 times) and the United States (89 times) having used it the most –that is, 77% of the total. On 51 occasions, Washington’s veto power has been used in favor of Israel. That is the reality. Meanwhile, the voices of small countries go unheard. (F. Ayala)
So, we try to reform the UN for it to become more fit for purpose
—The ‘UN80’ Initiative (the United Nations’ ambitious, system-wide reform being proposed in 2026) is unfortunately the wrong answer to the right question. (Jordan Ryan)
2. UN Resolution 80 reflects sound intuition applied to the wrong problem. The question is no longer whether the UN needs reform, but whether its institutional design remains adequate for a world where major powers increasingly act outside the boundaries they are supposed to protect. What is required is not gradual reform, but reinvention: a redesign of the organization’s financing, the exercise of political authority, ergo its functioning within an increasingly interconnected system of global governance. Greater accountability (abolition?) in the use of the veto power and a reorientation of the UN as a platform for collective action are therefore required. [The veto was part of the 1945 constitutional pact that ensured the major powers would remain within the system in exchange for the ability to block actions contrary to their fundamental interests. That pact has clearly been weakened].
The UN needs to reinvent itself, not just reform
3. An initiative led by Liechtenstein and adopted by the General Assembly in April 2022 called for a formal debate following any use of the veto, thereby introducing a certain degree of political accountability. The measure remains voluntary, but it signals a growing expectation that the use of the veto must carry a political cost.
4. To be kept in mind is the fact that the UN’s comparative advantage does not lie in replacing existing networks (climate, digital regulation, human rights, humanitarian response, peace…) but in convening, legitimizing and connecting them on a large scale.
5. Major powers can impose their will, but imposition comes at a cost; middle powers, on the other hand, can convene. This convening function is increasingly fundamental to the functioning of global cooperation. (M. Carney) None of this will be easy. The political coalition for such a transformation does not yet exist. But redesigning the UN can no longer be postponed. Human rights cannot wait! (J. Ryan)
International politics is rarely neutral (Kurniawan Arif Maspul)
6. Leaders of countries rendered poor whose resources are being exploited* to service the social systems of developed economies remain helplessly dependent** on their overlords who use institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and other international security networks to frustrate their efforts and keep them in check. Any visionary leader from these countries who attempts to go against their dictates of these international conspirators is either termed a dictator or a communist. Consequently, the electoral processes of their countries are exploited to foist on them worthless leaders who will only dance to the tune of the metropoles. (Tersoo Nande)
*: In the historical calculus of global imperialism, a periphery is only as valuable as the resources that can be extracted, the markets that can be pryed open, and/or the surplus labor that can be exploited. [Up until this point, the aggressive territorial expansionism of Trump’s Donroe Doctrine in Latin America perfectly aligns with this classical Marxist understanding of imperial extraction. (Logan McMillen)].
**: The same hegemonic forces of dependency are shaping our youth; this force pushes them to extreme individualism (even romantic relationships have come to reflect this logic). The youth has become subservient to corporations. (Jaime Breilh)
… and in countries rendered rich? (also applies to many rendered poor)
7. Globalized neoliberalism led to massive inequalities in high-income nations as well, hollowing out the industrial working class and creating space for far-right demagogues to emerge. (Ron Labonte et al)
8. In these countries, it is fair to say that tax codes have become a distorted mess, shaped over decades by presidents to favor capital over labor, wealth over work, and obscurity over fairness and human rights. Furthermore, these codes need to close loopholes that allow the wealthiest and transnational corporations to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. [Take the eleven Silicon Valley centibillionaires that have $2.6 trillion in personal wealth. (Jeffrey Sachs) or, take Elon Musk, who has paid zero individual taxes for over 10 years (BBC)]. The tax codes we need have to legislate progressivity (i.e., “he who earns more, pays more”)
9. To continue tagging along every dollar these governments borrow, because they do not have matching tax revenue, implies lowering spending in the future (and you know who is affected by this…). Imposing austerity measures goes together with more borrowing that is needed to cover the additional interest the new debt generates (…and that money keeps going North…). Beyond a certain point, more borrowing forces painful decisions beyond austerity, namely inflation, financial repression or even default. In the past, governments in the North could sidestep hard choices when borrowing betting that economic growth would generate enough additional tax revenue to service and eventually repay the debt. But today, the era of easy choices is gone. (Era Dabla-Norris and Rodrigo Valdes)
As a purported antidote to globalization, economic degrowth has taken-on different meanings over time
10. The most important point is that degrowth cannot simply mean growing less or not growing at all; rather, growth cannot be the economy’s sole objective. This point is still not emphasized enough, which makes people fear that they will have to settle for even less than what pitifully trickles down to them. Degrowth is not an idea that will win many votes. Instead, we need to launch the idea that the economy must be changed radically, and this must be made clear to people in concrete terms. Above all, people must understand that the proposed changes will bring concrete improvements for them personally. In this direction, our language must be clear and accurate. (Francine Mestrum)
Bottom line
11. Responding to the current historic moment and opportunity, the idea is that –even as we frontface and deepen resistance to the US-Israeli imperial rampage with EU complicity —we urgently need to develop and together focus on strategies of what is to be done, namely directing our energies towards the building of a Global South Front and a new multilateral architecture —see HRR 818. (Corporate Power Project, TNI)
12. And do not overlook: Middle powers are setting the table so they won’t be left out of ‘the menu’. (Paraphrasing Laura Mahrenbach et al, Responsible Statecraft)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
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Postscript/Marginalia
-Chinese policies have sustained popular support, and because there is popular support, any narrative that implies that 1.4 billion people are living under an exclusively coercive regime is at best, naive and, at worst, reactionary and ill-intentioned. It is not yet clear how much the country would be willing to actively invest in the building of a peoples’ internationalism, towards a truly democratic world order though. Can China be the dynamic engine of such an effort without becoming a new hegemon purely guided by its own interests…? (TNI, Towards a Bandung de los Pueblos)
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