In the dark times,
-Berthold Brecht
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
On Aversion to Pessimism Aversion
Many of us suffer from pessimism aversion. It can be a failing of analytic honesty and a characteristic of how institutions think. In the final pages of a book, or the conclusions and recommendations of a report, the acuity of our analysis too often evaporate into a rosy mist. It’s optimism by template, willing dead processes back into life, calling upon new values, ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking or ‘political will’ or some other magic ingredient to make the world whole—and staying safely within our designated lane.
Among the many homes of pessimism aversion are technology entrepreneurs, academic publishers, opinion page editors and multilateral organizations. The residents of these places are the ‘we’ of this essay’s opening paragraph.
My focus in this essay is multilateral organizations, such as the United Nations and its various specialized agencies, along with international financial institutions and regional organizations such as the African Union. They play a particular role in our global agenda, and they are particularly prone to pessimism aversion.
As writers, public speakers, or public intellectuals commenting on the state of our particular slice of the world, we’re obliged to pretend that our logic doesn’t lead inexorably to a bleak outcome. We fear that frankly recognizing that our evidence and analysis points to dark conclusions will demoralize and demobilize those whose engagement we want—policymakers, donors, public advocates. We pump up the hopeful.
We should, I think, be averse to obligatory optimism.
On the Dullness of the Multilaterals
It’s hard to get passionate about multilateralism. The word itself is geometric—’many sided’—and is at once rudimentary and vague. Multilateralism would lend itself to a two-dimensional shape on a monochrome flag, but few would want to fly it, and no-one would go into battle, risking life and limb, under this banner.
Some of us have spent much of our working lives working in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, the World Food Program, UNICEF or the African Union and its predecessor the OAU. Many more have passing acquaintance with them. As a policy intellectual, it’s much more fun to criticize these organizations than to applaud them or try to make them work better. The documents they produce can be deathly dull, not only in style but also in substance.
There’s a particular style of language that comes out of multinational, multilingual committee, written with an ear for translation into the working languages of the international community (itself a term that conceals and misleads as much as it reveals), and also worded with a sensitivity to the possibility of inadvertently causing outrage in some member state which takes offense, real or pretended.
Each time I am asked to review a document from one or other of these institutions, my heart sinks. Take as an example, the recent report of the UN’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism. Each of its sections is laden with vocabulary and syntax that deadens acuity and imagination—and injects obligatory optimism. Among them:
- ‘Six transformative shifts for a more secure and sustainable future.’
- On the multilateral system itself: ‘Improve legitimacy through inclusion and accountability’.
- On peace and preventing conflict: ‘Empower equitable effective collective security arrangements.’
- On anticipating global threats: ‘Strengthen governance for current and emerging transnational risks.’
Only those who are live and breathe this fog of vapidity, can discern the occasional flicker of critical thinking and possibilities for real change.
The substantive points within these formulae are also routinely diluted to vanishing point. Any agenda item for real change is usually so intricately coded as to be inscrutable save for the expert.
In Praise of Multilateral Institutions
Yet the fact is that multilateral institutions have, in many regards, actually delivered some amazing outcomes that changed people’s lives for the better. Even in their terribly eviscerated forms, the World Health Organization or the African peace and security architecture (a sort of Irish stew of multilateralisms) have done their job. And those who have made their academic living from mocking the double standards, misplaced missionary zeal, or complacency of the assorted residents of this citadel of pseudo-technocracy, are far more worried—in fact downright terrified—about the direction of the world without them. In comparison to banks, oil companies, Silicon Valley and the weapons business, the much-maligned multilateral organizations are in fact tiny, under-resourced and beleaguered, and worth preserving.
One area in which multilaterals delivered was humanitarian action. In the hundred years to approximately 1980, there was a regular drumbeat of massive famines that killed ten million or so people each decade. The number and gravity of famines then declined precipitously. There are many reasons for this, but among them was the growth of the humanitarian international—the network of relief agencies, national and international. They grew in size and developed in professionalism, and they ventured into areas (such as civil wars) previously off limits. They applied new technologies for saving lives and livelihoods, and crafted principles for how to operate under conditions of physical and moral hazard. They reflected on their failings and learned lessons. Millions of lives were saved.
Progress in ending mass starvation stalled in about 2016 and has gone into reverse, but the situation globally is nowhere near as bad as it was fifty or a hundred years ago. Liberal internationalism delivered something tangible for some of the poorest and most desperate people in the world, and that is worth applauding—and protecting.
We also saw enormous progress in global public health. There were serious efforts to extend treatment for HIV and AIDS, to roll back malaria, and to build a global system for preventing and containing new transmissible pathogens that threatened to cause pandemics. This was another ad hoc multilateral effort, and a case in which the UN promoted some remarkable human rights norms, especially for the rights of people most at risk of HIV, including men who have sex with men, sex workers, injecting drug users, and survivors of sexual violence and exploitation.
Progress—and these are fields in which that word has real meaning—became taken for granted, so that governments felt safe neglecting or even dismantling those systems on the assumption that the normal trend was for public health to get better and better.
Another arena was the African Union’s action against military coups and its insistence on recognizing only constitutional governments with credible civilian, electoral credentials. In the fifteen years after Africa adopted this principle, the number of coups was much reduced. Putschists have since staged a dramatic comeback, but the efficacy of a multilateral norm, when applied consistently and energetically, was demonstrated.
How did multilateralism deliver something real? It can be something more than flat and monochrome geometry. What gives it body and color are norms and principles, that are something beyond straightforward state-to-state cooperation. It’s these that enthuse citizens and communities. People cared about ending hunger. The UN’s efforts on HIV and AIDS involved people living with HIV and AIDS and representatives of a wonderful array of activist groups—indeed it was the mobilization of gay men in North America that was the model for efforts to overcome denial, stigma and discrimination. And the lineage of the African Union goes back to the anti-colonial Pan African Movement, by definition a people’s movement.
A Counter-revolution of Rising Expectations
The United Nations was conceived by a generation that had known dark times. In our summary mental history of its founding we may think mostly of the World War Two Allies, the Holocaust (the gravity of which was little known in the spring of 1945 and didn’t figure in the San Francisco conference debates) and Eleanor Roosevelt. We tend to forget the two decades before the war, when the viability of many European states was in doubt, when economies veered between mass unemployment and hyperinflation, and when Fascism intruded with its toxic appeal.
The formative debates for public intellectuals were questions over whether any form of liberal democracy could survive this economic turbulence, and whether smaller European states, such as Austria, could survive at all. The first conferences for the post-war multilateral order were the 1943 Hot Springs conference on food and agriculture and the 1944 Bretton Woods conference on a global economic and financial architecture. The 1945 San Francisco conference that formed the UN and adopted its Charter—what we might call ‘diplomatic multilateralism’—was the upper story, constructed on top of these.
The UN was born from collective fear and pessimism about the perils of unruly states and unshackled capital. Its basic purpose was to put the brakes to those who wanted to drive the world to hell. The language of early UN declarations contains the eloquence of urgency.
In the preamble to the UN Charter, we read its foundational aim: ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.’ Three aspirations follow: (a) reaffirming fundamental human rights; (b) establishing conditions ‘under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained’; and (c) promoting ‘social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.’ The second and third are enigmatic, but point to a deeper, richer vision of multilateralism than the bureaucratic citadel that has been constructed since.
The foundation of the African Union in 2001 similarly arose from the continent’s collective near-death experience over the previous decade—wars, military dictatorships, and genocide. Having looked into the abyss, some African leaders made the case that Africa would drown together, or swim together. The major powers’ disengagement from Africa created the space for them to act, setting their own agenda, even while it left them economically adrift. They demanded collective action to prevent military coups, wars and mass atrocities happening at a quickening pace.
Nonetheless, despite the dramas of wars and other crises, I suggest, the multilateral arena has become framed by a decades-old norm of rising expectations.
For a generation, we have been taught that the world is getting better—richer, more peaceful, with better opportunities for all—and have come to think of this as an entitlement, rather than a delicate edifice built in special, and problematic circumstances. A particular market-based political economy was supposed to deliver something for all and offer painless solutions to global problems. As historians of revolution know well, there’s nothing more perilous to a ruler than raising expectations and then dashing them. Much of the backlash against liberal democracy, and by association the liberal multilateral order, arises from this predicament.
This backlash provides the trope of plutocratic populism. Private fortunes are made from liberty redefined as consumer choice and fantasy of limitless prosperity, while political fortunes from the grievance that this isn’t actually being lived. A counter-revolution is born of expectations that most people know they will never fulfil. The marketization of democracy means that the daily plebiscite of the stock and bond markets, and the often opaque financial contributions to political campaigns, count for far more than citizens’ votes and the open debates on issues that might influence those voters’ decisions.
Meanwhile our global political economy, entrapped in the iron triangle of fossil fuels, finance and arms, which has captured states and their regulation of public goods and the natural world, has driven us far beyond the boundaries of a sustainable planet.
We face a scissors trap: deeper and more complicated problems, and weakening institutions for dealing with them. The leaders of the UN, AU and other multilaterals have quietly internalized their powerlessness and aren’t really trying.
In 1995, at a time of enormous optimism, Kofi Annan used the UN Charter’s intriguing final three words, ‘in larger freedom,’ to focus the UN on the Millennium Development Goals and to claim ownership of the norms, principles and institutions of multilateral organizations on behalf of the Global South. The problem with this was that it was too benign, sublimating real contestation with an optimism that all could share the prizes. The idea that there was a political struggle, with losers as well as winners, disappeared into the assumption of a normally better future for all.
That optimism that states would deliver democracy, that banks and corporations would deliver prosperity for all, and that armies would be refashioned as instruments for peacekeeping and atrocity prevention, has gone. But our multilaterals are still stuck in the tropes of that age and the train of lazy thinking that follows rosy premises. The language of consensus, capacity-building, governance, inclusion, achieving development goals, etc., remains obligatory, and is also trotted out although hardly anyone believes that it has delivered at scale, or will do so if we try harder. There’s an industry of consultants and grantees dedicated to justifying these frameworks—policy-based evidence making—that has just enough empirics with which to make its case. But, like the Red Queen in Alice’s adventures through the looking glass, institutional leaders are required to believe six (or more) impossible things before breakfast every day.
Unable to solve either the problems of the real world, or to reform their own institutions, multilateral leaders are acting in a play with an audience that no longer pretends to believe.
During the era of optimism, it would have been easier to have tackled the driving logics of today’s crisis—fossil fuels, a hubristic financial sector, the arms business, the dark face of the internet. But like Icarus, global leaders flew too high.
Reflecting on my own critiques of the multilateral system, my most consistent theme was unhappiness with its vaulting ambition, especially its addiction to military interventions. That overreach could be seen most acutely from Africa and especially from the places where people were ostensibly the most helpless, and where the ambition of the internationals was commensurately greater.
Minilateralisms
One of the dilemmas arising from the scissors trap is whether we—those who believe in the values of living in a manner that respects one another and the planet—should try to disrupt institutions or not. Disruption was long the home territory of the political left, and the default option for radicals when they didn’t have a clear plan of action.
Now, disruption has become the trope of the plutocratic populists. But they are disrupting the institutions that hold them accountable, politically and financially. They are creating turmoil with the goal of accumulating more money and power, because there’s profit to be made in creative destruction, even when the destruction far outranks the creativity.
What the right is not disrupting is the grip of money over public narratives and collective futures.
The exact opposite of collective action is individualized transactional politics, using the twin currencies of money and violence. This is what I have called the ‘political marketplace’. It’s the extension of the theory, erroneously attributed to Adam Smith, that the unlimited exercise of private vice (avarice, selfishness and will to power) adds up to the ultimate public good.
Under this calculus, there is space for security pacts, coalitions of the like-minded, trade deals and similar arrangements for rudimentary multilateralism or localized ‘minilateralism.’ This sprouts everywhere. Despite the disarray, state leaders are meeting as much as ever, and experimenting with these kinds of arrangements. A norm-based multilateralism needs a lot of supporting infrastructure, but much of what is happening today is forming ad hoc clubs to disrupt principled, global multilateralism.
In the United States, the mainstream commentariat (for example those who write for Foreign Policy) are concerned with alliance building, collective action by states to ‘combat’ global warming and pandemics (they like warfighting language) and American leadership (which they see as a good thing). The term ‘minilateralism’, coined by Moisés Naím in 2009 to refer to the minimum number of states needing to agree on an issue to achieve global impact, has gained currency—but now refers to ad hoc regional or transregional coalitions that subvert rather than facilitate global action. The Economist, an honorary leader of the transatlantic club, has written about the ‘transactional 25’, namely the largest non-aligned economies, such as India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The BRICS grouping is an exemplar of this. Now the BRICS-plus, it is framed by what it stands against rather than what it stands for. The major project that the BRICS-plus could undertake, and which its advocates are promoting, is a new world financial order to challenge or even replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency backed by natural resources, notably oil. But only China could do this, but it doesn’t want the risks and burdens associated.
The African Union commission is happily embracing self-inflicted irrelevance, parroting the slogan of ‘African solutions to African problems’ to resurrect the old idea that sovereignty is an entitlement that states exercise without corresponding responsibilities. It has co-opted anti-colonial rhetoric as a cover for this involution. The AU is either an aspirational union, in which it holds fast to its aspirational norms and principles, or it’s just a club of heads of state, as Julius Nyerere dismissed its predecessor. Precisely because it is so harmless, the AU has been invited to join the G-20.
There are plenty of good reasons for challenging the dominance of the U.S., the G-7 and the OECD. But the underlying problem needs to be diagnosed before it can be solved. And it will not be solved by putting another world power, or coalition of powers, at its head, nor even by knocking the U.S. down a few pegs. In rejecting western dominance, the alternatives are short on any analysis of the structural challenges, and disregard the norms and principles that made multilateralism into something more than a geometric exercise.
Addressing issues of planetary habitability requires global action, and the only viable form of that on offer today is collective, norm-based multilateral action. A minimalist working definition of world peace might be the necessary global cooperation needed to ensure that the planet remains livable. What is alarming is that achieving this modest goal requires bold and ambitious actions.
It will require disrupting the flaccid institutions that are currently that serve as alibis for business as usual, and directly addressing the centers and logics of power that are driving our current regress. The disruption needs to be strategic. In my view, the singular center of gravity to be exposed and disrupted is political money, open and dark, with its malign role in capturing states, the media, technologies (including AI) and public institutions including judiciaries. It’s what links fossil fuels, the arms business, and big finance (as well as big pharma and big farming). Political money is what the rightwing disrupters want most to preserve.
Some of the world’s problems in the era of the Anthropocene may be more impactful and more alarming according to various metrics, but none of them, I submit, can be resolved without first targeting political money. That is the correct focus of multilateral institutions if they are to rise above being instruments of the status quo and address planetary and global public challenges.
Multilateralism in Dark Times
The only honest appraisal of the current status of the world is pessimistic. The normally better future, of unending material advancement counted in dollars (or any other currency) is a shiny relic of the past.
The multilateralism for dark times is premised upon loss. This is the loss of people, of communities, and of hopes. It’s also loss of confidence in governing institutions to solve our problems. The problems themselves may be tractable, but the instruments for solving them are not fit for purpose.
The starting point for collective action is solidarity among those who are facing, without any false comfort, the demise of a normally better future. Rather than raising false hopes, instead of recoiling from the pessimistic conclusions that evidence and analysis dictate, this is a worldview that recognizes the hubris and overreach of the recent past and the realities of a world of struggle.
The problem, we recognize, is not any failings of human nature, but the capture by factional interests of the institutions that should be providing public goods.
This is not to abandon hope for a better world, but to redefine what we mean by a better world. It is to recognize the collective choices that must be made if there is to be a world in which we can live with mutual respect and dignity. Achieving those goals demands freedom from the tyranny of the toxic logics of militarism, financial capital and environmental and human pillage.
