UN summit of the future – what future?

Next week in New York, member states and United Nations (UN) diplomats will gather for the ambitiously titled “UN Summit of the Future.” Such a grand sounding name, in the midst of global violence and instability, aroused my curiosity, and, if I’m honest, some skepticism too.

What can such a summit actually achieve? On this week’s Inside Geneva, we got round the studio table with UN correspondents Christiane Oelrich of the German Press Agency and New York Times contributor Nick Cumming-Bruce, together with analyst Daniel Warner, to try to answer that question.

To start, we reminded ourselves what the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has said about the summit: “We can’t build a future for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents.” His aim, clearly, is to confront member states with the fact that the organisation’s structure is somewhat outdated.

That’s a point Warner brings up in our podcast, reminding us that “historically the UN for many people is still associated with the West. And the question of including the Global South still haunts the UN.”

What’s on the agenda?

But a trawl – a somewhat confusing trawl if I’m honest – through the documentation accompanying the summit does not seem to reveal a serious attempt to address the UN’s current anachronisms. The main one, of course, is the UN Security Council, whose five veto-wielding permanent members are still, after all this time, the victors of the Second World War: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia.

But those winners of 1945 have long since ceased to be allies, and the paralysis within the security council – over Syria, the war in Ukraine, and Gaza – is helping to prolong the most brutal of conflicts.

Instead, the Summit of the Future’s website is full of motivational optimism; it talks about building a “new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future.” Videos promoting the summit ask us to imagine a world in which we can collectively tackle climate change, prevent and solve conflict, and where we even have a fairer financial system.

How lovely that would be, I sense you thinking. In fact, the summit’s aspirations are, actually, not dissimilar from the goals on which the UN was originally founded. The problem is, 75 years later, not only have we not achieved them, we appear to be backsliding.

As Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times points out on Inside Geneva: “Since the Second World War there have been plenty of conflicts, but what we have seen in the last three or four or five years is the use of aggression and violence as an instrument of foreign policy.”

Member states must take responsibility

But should we blame the UN for these failures? Even seasoned UN correspondents tend to talk of the organisation as if it were a single entity, with unique power of its own. But of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as Oelrich with the German Press Agency explained.

“The UN is not an entity that does anything,” she told Inside Geneva. “I mean we can all blame it but what is the UN? It’s just the sum of its parts; the governments.”

“So if there are one or two – and especially members of the security council – blocking progress, on anything, on climate change and so on, it’s not going to happen.”

Nevertheless, Oelrich takes a positive view of the summit. Her native Germany is taking the lead, serving as co-facilitator together with Namibia. The partnership is interesting; Namibia is a former colony of Germany, and the choice of the two countries to work together is perhaps a nod to Warner’s point about the importance of involving the Global South in the UN’s policymaking.

And, Oelrich insists, just because some of the world’s biggest powers are making a mess of things, both inside the UN Security Council and on the battlefield, doesn’t mean we should all give up on the United Nations.

“The fact that some countries follow the path of aggression doesn’t mean that all the rest of the world has to talk about failure now,” said Oelrich.

Do we need multilateralism more than ever?

I admit I share both Oelrich’s view of the summit as positive, and a more cynical doubt about what it can achieve. If the summit can inspire member states to recommit to cooperation and tackle the challenges that face us all in a truly good-faith, multilateral way, that can only be a good thing.

After all, when faced with threats like climate change, or global conflict, we don’t actually have a choice. We work together to tackle them, or we slide, together, towards disaster.

So, I hope the summit does motivate individual governments, particularly those who have been either ignoring or criticising the UN without offering a single constructive proposal of their own. And I take my hat off to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for going ahead with it, despite all the other very difficult situations the UN is being asked to try to solve.

But I also hope the summit does not descend into a kind of happy-clappy UN word salad of nice-sounding but actually meaningless resolutions. We need an effective UN, made up of supportive, but not uncritical, member states.

As a senior US diplomat (and let’s remember the US has always had an arms-length relationship with the UN) once told me, “If the United Nations didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.”

Curious about the Summit of the Future? Listen to Inside Geneva!

Edited by Virginie Mangin