A video of the Finnish President, Alexander Stubb, speaking at the recent UN General Assembly is getting a lot of online praise for his clarity, calmness, and common sense. These are the speeches we need to be listening to more, since they illustrate hope not histrionics and hate.
President Stubb talks about the three foreign policy influences:
“In its simplest form foreign policy is really about three things – values, interest and power.” President Stubb
He stated that Finland, and many other smaller countries (like New Zealand), focus mainly on values & interests. Power (hard and soft) with a capital P – military and economic – is usually the luxury of bigger countries. However, he also emphasised that smaller countries can, and do, exert power through “smart diplomacy” and their capacity to cooperate with others.
The post cold world order is over, but President Stubb suggested that we don’t know what the new order will look like for another 5-10 years. He pointed to three different but related developments influencing geopolitics and the UN:
The growing tension between states favouring multilateralism (the rule of law) and those preferring multi-polarity (or what Stubb calls transactionalism). The latter he notes can’t solve the world’s biggest challenges (like sustainable development and climate change), while multilateralism has a better chance of doing so.
The balance of power is shifting towards the globe’s South & East, due to growing economic and demographic forces in places like Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Their hard and soft power will increase.
The need for reform at the UN. He pointed out that the structure of the UN still largely reflects world of 1945 when it was established, and it does not now sufficiently reflect the realities of today’s challenges and power dynamics. It does a poor job at being a forum to coordinate interests, and its core values are too often not respected.
Many foreign policies can be transactional, driven by interests, but Stubbs emphasises that they still should rest on values. If not, he points out that opportunism will eventually have to confront the problems it tried to avoid.
Reform not rejection
A failure for the UN to reform itself will result in greater transactionalism, Stubb contends. The Security Council’s five permanent members have too much power with their vetoes. That veto must go (which our Foreign Minister has also called for), and permanent seats need to be given to under-represented regions – Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Stubb’s advocates for a rebalancing of the UN’s power (held by the Security Council), interests (reflected by the General Assembly), and values (written into the UN Charter and rules of international law) dynamics. A State’s voting rights, he suggests, should be suspended if it ignores the UN Charter.
One of the key themes of this year’s UN General Assembly was reform of multilateralism. The Brookings Institute also declared that current multilateral arrangements are outdated and struggling with current global challenges.
“Multilateral institutions increasingly have been viewed as unrepresentative of a changing global economy and hampered by internal deficiencies and rigidities.”
A critical question is whether we should be giving up on organisations like the UN. While President Stubb sees the opportunity for stronger global institutions like the UN, The Brookings Institute sees a shift away from them to alternatives, such as bilateral agreements and plurilateral groups of regional or like-minded countries. They imagine a future of competing powers, with an increasing diversity of institutional arrangements.
In his Substack post Karl Schroeder picks up the “Middle Powers” (smaller States) point in Stubb’s address, noting that they can be very influential at regional levels, and even globally. Schroeder (and Stubb’s indirectly without naming names) emphasises that the UN is more important now as the US abandons its long-held leadership role, and Russia is embroiled in European conflicts. He suggests that the assumption that China will fill the global power vacuum could prove false, as the growing economic and political strength of smaller regional alliances may dissipate that vacuum.
President Stubb pointed out that we already have an unprecedented diversity of (socio-political and technological) innovations that can be used address global problems & challenges. These innovations will typically be tried at smaller regional scales. What is lacking is international cooperation and global institutions with a common set of shared values to help them be utilised effectively and more widely.
We should be taking more note of the quieter, more sensible, hopeful voices on the national and international stages, not the belligerent and pessimistic ones.