The United Nations is two things: an idea and an organization with structures, procedures, and personnel. Most of the criticisms of the UN from the Global North focus on its shortcomings as an organization. But for the Global South, the organization's enduring attraction is its symbolic identity as the world's only entity to house the divided fragments of humanity. Based on principles of transcendental global solidarity, at its most ambitious, the UN symbolizes a world in which those condemned to die in fear are given the chance to live with hope again, in which want gives way to dignity, and in which apprehensions become aspirations. The symbolism finds expression in the organization's four overarching normative mandates: security, development, environmental conservation, and human rights. For most of this agenda, the organization's primary focus is on the Global South. Yet for the UN to succeed in carrying out these mandates, the Global North must be invested in the Global South's success as an essential partner.
The world is interconnected through financial markets, infectious diseases, climate change, terrorism, nuclear peace and safety, food supply and water tables, fish stocks, ecosystem resources, and on and on. All are drivers of human insecurity and can provoke military conflict under the wrong circumstances. All require joint action to enhance national, international, and human security; improve welfare; reduce transaction-cum-compliance costs; and bring order and regularity to the world. The UN sits at the center of this interdependent, globalized, and networked multilateral order, well placed to tackle the world's problems more effectively and with more legitimacy than any other institution. Considering the short life span of its predecessor, the League of Nations, the UN's founders would have likely felt pride and satisfaction that their creation is still intact at seventy-five.
Longevity on its own does not denote accomplishments, of course. But here, too, the founders would have much to be proud of. Throughout its history, the UN has worked to prevent, manage, and resolve conflicts around the world; liberate colonized peoples and provide them economic and technical assistance; educate children; feed the hungry; shelter the displaced; tend to the sick while promulgating global health and human rights norms; and coordinate disaster relief. These years have not been all successes, however; far from it. Among other things, an internationalized social conscience should recoil from the fact that as of 2018, just twenty-six people owned the same wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest people in the world (half of humanity); and almost ten thousand people died daily around the world because they did not have access to healthcare.Footnote 1 This essay will articulate the case for redefining the terms of the North-South engagement to better reflect the changed balance of their economic and geopolitical weights, in areas from economic development and climate change to civilian protection, nuclear arms control, and human rights.
Changed Membership = Changed Policy Priorities
The primary mandate of the UN at its inception in 1945 was the maintenance of international peace and security. Very quickly, however, the quest for international security was polarized by the Cold War, and during this period, world affairs largely centered on the East-West conflict. Even before the end of the Cold War, however, this focus was challenged by the North-South conflict, with the Global North coinciding largely with the West and the Global South corresponding largely to non-Western countries (though not necessarily aligned with the East).Footnote 2 This challenge was largely brought on by decolonization, which resulted in a vast number of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, changing the regional balance of UN membership (see Table 1). In 1945, countries from Africa and Asia together constituted only 21.6 percent of UN membership. By 2020, largely as a result of decolonization, that percentage had grown to 55.5 percent. Already by the mid-1960s, the former colonies had inscribed their own concerns into the UN's agenda. State building, nation building, and economic development became the second great normative agenda of the UN.
UN geographic groupings, 1945 and 2020 (percent of total UN members)
Notes: WEO = West Europe and others (Australia, Canada, New Zealand); E Eur = Eastern Europe (including Russia); LAC = Latin America and Caribbean. In 2011, the “Asia” group became the “Asia and the Pacific” group. Due to rounding, percentage totals for both years do not equal 100.Footnote 3
This refocusing was not easy. The efforts were infected from the beginning by the poison of mutual mistrust between the countries of the North and the South, rooted in the long history of colonization. Even throughout the present day, this history continues to influence some of the most critical items on the UN's agenda. Lest anyone need reminding, for over one hundred years, European powers extracted resources from colonized countries to accumulate capital and flooded colonized markets with industrial products from the North. This resulted in the deindustrialization and impoverishment of the colonies, which sustained negative growth rates during this period. Asia's share of world income, for example, fell from 56.5 percent in 1820 to 15.6 percent in 1960, and its share of global manufacturing fell from being more than 50 percent to being only 6 percent over the same period.Footnote 4
Economic recovery in the Global South only began after decolonization, and by 2016, Asia's share of world industrial production had returned to close to its 1850 level. With the South's growing political self-confidence as a correlate of the changed balance of economic power, its members have pushed back against certain Western standards and normative expectations that work to their disadvantage. These countries are demanding to have a hand in writing the rules of the global game, including those that design and control institutions of global governance, including the UN. The rise of new groupings like the “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to refer to these countries presents an opportunity for less powerful countries to have their concerns heard on the world stage on a wide range of issues, including everything from climate change to access to affordable pharmaceuticals; international development finance and credit lines; environmental and labor standards in global trade; and protection of indigenous intellectual property rights.
Despite these demands, many developing countries continue to resist calls to accept the responsibility that flows from the privilege of having a seat at the table; for example, with respect to accepting the responsibility to protect (RtoP) victims of humanitarian atrocities (as articulated by The Responsibility to Protect report). At the same time, the five permanent members (P-5) of the UN Security Council (UNSC), only one of which is from the Global South, continue to close off many avenues to true universal cooperation and shared international policymaking. They are happy to exercise the benefits of international legitimacy and authority that flow from their collective decision-making on threats to international peace and security, but continually resist the reforms and constraints that would allow responsibility for these issues to truly be shared by all countries.
Development, Conservation, and Environmental Protection
Although substantial progress has been made over the UN's lifetime toward meeting various objectives in education, health, nutrition, and population growth, the rapid growth of global markets has not seen the parallel development of social and economic institutions to ensure that this growth is balanced, inclusive, and sustainable. The underbelly of globalization has let loose the forces of “uncivil society” and accelerated the transnational flows of terrorism, human and drug trafficking, organized crime, piracy, and diseases. All of these can best be addressed by the North and South acting in concert to strengthen state capacity and political resolve.
From the MDGs to the SDGs
In 2000, UN members adopted a set of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and eighteen related targets. From 2000–2015, these objectives provided a framework for the entire UN system for reducing poverty and promoting human development. They not only represented the high-minded ideas on which there was an emerging global consensus on development but also provided concrete metrics with which to measure a country's progress toward these goals. They also proved useful for policy and strategy dialogues among international development and national aid agencies in coordinating assistance packages for developing countries.
When the MDGs concluded, the official UN narrative was crafted by comparing the final measurements of development indicators in 2015 to those same indicators from 2000. All progress in these areas was then described as MDG successes, allowing the UN to boast that the MDGs had proven to be “the most successful global anti-poverty push in history.”Footnote 5 The claim was based on extreme poverty having been halved from 1.9 billion to 836 million, and a fall in the overall rate of poverty from 47 percent to 14 percent of the world population, relying on a conflation of statistical correlation with causal explanation. In truth, most of the global poverty reduction in the previous three decades—along with all the accompanying improvements in many other socioeconomic indicators—has occurred in China, with India also contributing significantly. The mostly linear trajectory of poverty reduction in China began before and was maintained independently of the MDGs. The record of success of the MDGs would thus be better described as “mixed.” The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in September 2015, are something of a follow-up to the MDGs, intended to build on their earlier success. In contrast to the rather pithy MDGs, the SDGs ended up being a smorgasbord of everyone's preferred causes to the point of meaninglessness (for example, we are left with a goal such as “significantly reduce all forms of violence”). From the MDGs to the SDGs, the number of goals more than doubled to seventeen and the number of targets multiplied many times to 169. It is too early, however, to evaluate the impact of the SDGs.
Meanwhile, there has long been a stated UN goal, since the 1969 Pearson Commission report Partners in Development, of getting developed countries in the Global North to give 0.7 percent of their GDP as official development assistance,Footnote 6 but this goal is unlikely to be reached anytime soon. And the role, efficacy, and importance of aid as an instrument of development policy remain fiercely contested. Does aid facilitate economic growth, institutional resilience, and good governance? Or does it rather foster international welfare dependency, give recipient governments an alibi for their own shortcomings, and assuage donor countries’ consciences for continuing serious barriers to trade and labor from developing countries?
Climate Change
The most pressing challenges to sustainability include climate change, food and water scarcity, desertification, and the loss of nature's life support systems for a variety of species, with all of these issues cutting across the global North-South divide. The UN system has been the primary forum for global efforts to address these challenges, but the North and South have been particularly divided on development-related environmental issues since the first UN conference on the environment in 1972 in Stockholm. The most contentious (and overarching) question has been how growth can be managed to sustain an acceptable lifestyle, while ensuring equity for different peoples within and among countries and also across generations. On the eve of the Paris Climate Change Conference in December 2015, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, wrote, “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.” He continued: “Justice demands [that] developing countries are allowed to grow.”Footnote 7 This is a good illustration of the symbiotic relationship between development and climate change on the global agenda, and also of the diverging interests and perspectives of the Global North and South, even on an issue that poses an existential threat to both of them.
All nations have an important stake in addressing the threat of climate change, a threat that is already sufficient to make collective action both necessary and urgent. Yet, developing countries have long argued that most of the planet's pressing environmental problems are the result of earlier industrialization in the North, and insist that environmental concerns cannot be used to limit their pursuit of economic development. Their difference in perspective is rooted in the vast asymmetry between aggregate and per capita CO2 emissions and variations in per capita electricity consumption. There is no objective formula for reconciling the two different measurements of emissions in the allocation of responsibility for transitioning to a decarbonized world.
Powered by fossil fuel energy sources, industrialization led to sharp increases in productivity, output, incomes, and living standards in the Global North. By 2020, though, there has emerged a growing environmental consciousness that it is developing countries, in particular, that have already begun to experience the devastations of climate change, even as they have less capacity to cope with damage than their developed counterparts. In these countries, there is also a growing realization that successful development will require them to navigate the harsh realities of climate change. The biggest challenge concerns megaeconomies such as China and India that have lower per capita energy and carbon intensity but higher net CO2 emissions. Whether these countries can switch to noncarbon sources before the world tips into an irreversible climate catastrophe remains an open question.
The UN provides the primary mechanisms for reconciling the intertwined yet conflicting perspectives of countries in the Global South with those in the Global North. The world's poorest people—living mostly in the Global South—will be the hardest hit by worsening drought, extreme and volatile weather, and rising sea levels. Countries in the Global South argue that because the current levels of affluence in industrial countries have been directly associated with cumulative carbon emissions, they must provide compensatory financial and technical support to developing countries. However, both industrial and emerging-market economies need to acknowledge their differentiated but common responsibilities, accept an equivalence of burden sharing, take national action, and negotiate an effective, UN-validated multilateral regime aimed at stabilizing global levels of carbon emissions within agreed tolerance thresholds.
Peace and Security and Human Rights
The UN Charter was created from the ashes of the Second World War, and, as a result, its provisions for underwriting international peace and security reflect a bias toward interstate war, with Western countries failing to anticipate the qualitatively different nature of the intrastate armed conflicts that have broken out in the postcolonial regions since then. The geographical theater of most internal conflict shifted from Europe to the Indo-Pacific regions, the Middle East, and then Africa. More recently, with the U.S. war on terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Islamic crescent, from Afghanistan through the Middle East to North Africa, has been subjected to massive volatility, terrorist activity, armed conflicts, and external interventions (some UN mandated, others unilateral), producing a swath of ungoverned territories, dysfunctional states, broken societies, and devastated economies.
Until 2000, the West was dominant in deciding where, when, and why to intervene in the non-Western world, with or without UN authorization. Perspectives on such interventions diverged sharply. In the West, they were viewed as attempts to stop bloodletting and restore order around the periphery, while those in developing countries often viewed them as a direct threat to territorial integrity. A brief post–Cold War period saw increased UN peacekeeping operations—thanks to a high degree of consensus among the P-5 countries—in which the South provided the troops, while the North provided the money and high-end logistical capabilities. This soon changed as the P-5 became divided, with China and Russia often opposing UN interventions, which remains the dynamic today. As a result, for the foreseeable future, the UN will not be able to act forcefully to end intrastate conflicts, and post-conflict and nation-building enterprises will likely have a less liberal template because of waning Western influence.
Meanwhile, by the end of the 1990s, the UN community had split sharply along West-“rest” lines over whether an emerging doctrine of humanitarian intervention could be used to halt atrocities inside sovereign jurisdictions. Western countries seemed to want to subject the internal use of force by developing-country governments to scrutiny both inside and outside the UN system, but when it came to their own use of international force, even when no Western country was under armed attack (as was the case with Kosovo in 1999), they rebuffed any such calls for scrutiny. Following the Kosovo conflict, the 113 members-strong nonaligned movement repeatedly rejected “the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention.’”Footnote 8 Five years later, RtoP was adopted by the UN at the 2005 World Summit as a principle that attempts to reconcile state sovereignty with the humanitarian instinct to save strangers. It redefined sovereignty as responsibility, permitting international interventions under certain conditions, but only when authorized by the UNSC. As such, at the UN it functions as the organizing principle for the international community to both prevent and put an end to atrocities. While today RtoP retains strong support in principle, it has attracted considerable criticism both for how it was implemented in Libya in 2011 and for the failure to invoke it to address the massive humanitarian crisis in Syria that has been ongoing since 2011.Footnote 9
The UN and Nuclear Weapons
There has been a similar North-South divide, albeit not a rigid one, on the most indiscriminately inhumane weapon of war thus far invented. The five countries that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1968, recognized as nuclear-weapon states (NWS) are the P-5, four of which are from the North. At the same time, of the four non-NPT nuclear-weapon states, three (India, North Korea, Pakistan) are from the South. Most developing countries shared India's sentiment that the NPT institutionalized nuclear apartheid between the P-5 and the rest of the world. Most also came to believe that the very destructiveness and inhumanity of the weapons rendered them militarily unusable and morally illegitimate. They voluntarily surrendered the option to obtain such a weapon in return for access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes under international safeguards, with the International Atomic Energy Agency acting as the UN's nuclear watchdog. The other key part of this bargain, however, is that the NWS would concurrently pursue good-faith negotiations toward responsible nuclear disarmament.
In July 2017, with the nine possessor states showing no sign of nuclear disarmament, almost two-thirds of UN member states (mostly but not solely from the South) adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. For the first time in the history of the UN, the UN General Assembly asserted its normative primacy over the united opposition of the geopolitical heavyweights of the P-5.Footnote 10 Consequently, while the NPT embedded the geopolitical preferences of the United States and the former Soviet Union as the two superpowers of 1968, this new treaty reflects the normative vision of the Global South, backed by like-minded states from the North. Harmonizing the two global treaties as the new institutional reality of nuclear weapons governance will be among the UN's challenges for the foreseeable future.
Shifting Priorities
Another contemporary security issue that cuts across the North-South divide is international terrorism and its relationship to the UN's development and human rights agendas. On one hand, the threat of terrorism in most developing countries pales beside the pervasive threats of disease from lack of safe water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS, and other deadly illnesses such as tuberculosis. On the other hand, the issue becomes more relevant because in efforts to thwart terrorism, many countries have curtailed civil liberties. For example, Australia has enacted eighty-two antiterror laws since 2001 to expand the surveillance, search, and arrest powers of intelligence and law enforcement services; to keep suspects in detention for longer periods before trial; and to strip dual nationals of Australian citizenship so they can be deported, among other things.Footnote 11
With the ongoing shift in power, wealth, and influence from the West to the rest, there is bound to be a further recalibration of the importance given to human rights promotion in the UN system. Former secretary-general Kofi Annan's emphasis on development, security, and human rightsFootnote 12 during his tenure is unlikely to survive the displacement of Western countries as the dominant principle of the UN system. For example, on October 29, 2019, the U.K. delivered a joint statement on behalf of twenty-three Euro-Western countries that condemned the persecution of Uighurs and called on China to uphold national laws and international obligations on human rights. But a larger group of fifty-four countries—mostly from the Global South, including Muslim-majority countries such as Egypt and Pakistan—submitted a competing joint declaration that commended “China's remarkable achievements . . . in protecting and promoting” development-centric human rights. This statement referred to the challenge of “extremism and terrorism” in Xinjiang. The remainder (a majority) of UN member states stayed silent.Footnote 13
The Coronavirus Pandemic
The current pandemic illustrates the key themes of this essay only too vividly. The novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 has been very segregated in its mortality rates, not just by age but also by North-South divisions. Deepak Nayyar looked at the deaths by continent, using the UN system of geographical groupings. By the first week of May 2020, Europe and North America, although they make up only 14.3 percent of the world's population, accounted for 86 percent of global COVID-19 deaths. By contrast, Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the Global South—make up 85.1 percent of the world's population, but their combined COVID-19 deaths represented just 13.9 percent of the world total.Footnote 14 One possible explanation, of course, would be that the elderly, by far the group most vulnerable to dying from the disease, are concentrated overwhelmingly in the developed countries.
The pandemic has demonstrated the inadequacies in the existing architecture of international health governance, centered on the World Health Organization (WHO), within the UN system. Yet, it is also a sharp reminder of the limits of unilateralism in an age of shared threats and fragility, but unequal resilience. As such, the pandemic has highlighted the need for global circuit breakers to identify, isolate, and quarantine systemic risks early. Aggressively nationalist responses of “Sicken thy neighbor” bans on exports of medical supplies and medicine will lead to widely damaging economic and trade deglobalization. The pandemic and the resulting socioeconomic crises also highlight the policy utility of reconceptualizing security threats within the analytical framework of human security that has been promoted by the UN system since 1994. Militaries the world over have been irrelevant in dealing with this crisis. The health and economic crises underscore the interconnectedness of peoples’ security: even though the pandemic originated in China, it spread rapidly across the globe and will remain a threat in the wealthy industrialized countries so long as it is still active in the developing countries.
Moreover, the crisis reaffirms the indispensable role of the WHO in addressing global health emergencies, while also revealing critical flaws in the organization's operations. It was too slow and tardy in investigating the gravity and immediacy of the threat; it deferred needlessly, and at great cost to lives everywhere, to the initial claims of Chinese authorities of the lack of human-human transmission of the virus; its messaging has been confusing and sometimes contradictory, for example, with respect to face masks;Footnote 15 and its ostracism of Taiwan, owing to appeasement of China's political sensitivity, has ensured a lack of dialogue with a government that has been astonishingly impressive in its handling of the pandemic. The pathology of politicizing specialized agencies is most acutely reflected in the balance between assessed financial contributions that go toward strengthening the institutional integrity (17 percent for WHO) and voluntary contributions that attempt to shape work priorities to donors’ agendas (80 percent).
The pandemic and the WHO together thus demonstrate the need to broaden our conception of security, the importance of a North-South partnership in addressing human security vulnerabilities, and the indispensable role of the UN system in coordinating and leading global efforts, but also the flaws that result in a suboptimal performance and hence the need for continual reforms. There is no substitute in the foreseeable future for the WHO's worldwide efforts to promote universal healthcare, monitor public health risks, prepare for emerging epidemiological emergencies, coordinate responses, set international health standards and guidelines, and provide technical assistance to developing countries. Thus, the pandemic underscores the need and provides an opportunity to reboot the ethic of global cooperation. The UN system is a trusted agent for the necessary tasks of surveillance, detection, and guidance on response measures because of its universality and resulting legitimacy; its expertise accumulated over decades of experience; its scientific objectivity alongside its political neutrality; its presence in the field in so many countries around the world, giving it a truly global footprint; and its unmatched convening authority and mobilizing capacity.
Reforms Are Necessary to Remain Relevant
The agenda of UN reforms is broad and extensive, including those of the WHO as just indicated, but the most critical and pressing reform is that of the UNSC. Looking at the total picture of reforms has become a political tactic to deflect attention from the UNSC's flaws, and so this essay concludes by highlighting only that, but within the central theme of the North-South relationship. During the UN's seventy-five-year history, African and Asian states have increased from just over one-fifth to well over half the total UN membership, while the Western group has shrunk from almost one-fourth to about one-sixth of the total. Despite this shift, the Global North retains its dominance in the UNSC, making up 40 percent of the total membership and 60 percent of the permanent membership. Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean combined make up 85 percent of the world's population, yet account for 53 percent of the Security Council's total membership and only 20 percent of its permanent membership. Because of the UNSC's crucial role in selecting the secretary-general, the North's dominance infects the choice of senior personnel throughout the UN system, including heads of departments, funds, agencies, and even special envoys.
This erodes the representative legitimacy of the UNSC as the UN's most critical organ and weakens its ability to make decisions guided by a full understanding of the development, security, human rights, and environmental dynamics in areas where peace is most threatened. And it diminishes the UN's capacity for effective implementation of all four normative mandates. This is why structural reform of the UNSC's composition, particularly its permanent membership, is critical. But because it is highly improbable in the foreseeable future, the most likely trajectory is for the UN's legitimacy, effectiveness, and authority to continue to erode, and the organization, in turn, to become increasingly marginalized and irrelevant. This is a shame, for the UN remains our best and only hope for unity in diversity in a world where global problems require multilateral answers, solutions without passports for problems without passports.
