As world leaders descend on New York for the United Nations Summit of the Future this week, rules-based multilateralism is in a dismal state. Amid the international community’s failure to conclude a global pandemic treaty and the U.N. Security Council’s paralysis in the face of both Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict, it’s hard to recall the last success of multilateral cooperation.
Among governments, accusations of double standards and broken promises, from delivering COVID-19 vaccines to providing meaningful debt relief, are mounting. Against this backdrop, the summit looks like a desperate attempt to rebuild confidence—particularly among countries in the global south as they navigate a multilateral system that even the U.N. secretary-general describes as caught in “colossal global dysfunction.”
A survey conducted this July, on behalf of the Munich Security Conference, reached out to over 9,000 people across nine populous global south countries—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey—about their societies’ views on multilateralism and the global rules-based order. The results revealed that support for investments in multilateral cooperation is very low.
When asked whether their countries should prioritize bilateral relations with other countries rather than invest in multilateral initiatives and international organizations, absolute majorities in each surveyed country agreed—from 76 percent in Pakistan to 51 percent in both Saudi Arabia and Brazil.
There are many reasons for widespread doubt when it comes to the merits of international cooperation. International institutions such as the U.N. Security Council are regularly paralyzed due to growing tensions among great powers such as the United States, Russia, and China. Meanwhile, international financial institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund seem unable to adapt to the pace of newly arising challenges and needs of non-Western countries.
Yet a climate of distrust by countries in the global south when it comes to Western powers adhering to international rules and principles has only added to the multilateral malaise.
Nothing has epitomized this concern like Washington and other Western capitals’ inconsistent responses to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. For many governments, the way that the United States and Europe responded to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza after Hamas’s attack on Israel has reinforced the impression that the West tends to only criticize violations of international law and norms committed by geopolitical adversaries—and that they value some lives more than others.
With fresh memories of perceived vaccine apartheid and a two-year delay in developed countries meeting their promised international climate finance target, global south countries have raised serious doubts about the West’s commitment to mutually beneficial cooperation and to an international order that is binding and fair for all.
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When asked in our survey to compare the United States, China, Russia, and European countries’ commitment to international rules and principles, people in many countries said that Washington is the most frequent violator of international rules. For example, the share of people who said that China frequently violates international rules only exceeded the share who said the same for the United States in two countries: Brazil and India.
In some countries—namely Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—the United States scored even worse than Russia on the same metric. Moreover, in the same four countries, people said that European states violated international rules more frequently than Beijing. For example, in Saudi Arabia, 19 percent of respondents said European countries frequently violate international rules and principles, while only 8 percent said the same for China. Although by a tiny margin, among respondents in Saudi Arabia, even Russia scored better than European countries; 18 percent of respondents said Moscow frequently violates international rules.
The revival of rules-based multilateralism—the overarching goal of the Summit of the Future—thus hinges on Western countries’ ability to address the perceptions of double standards. In that regard, efforts to uphold humanitarian law and human rights everywhere should be made a top priority. The strongest catalyst of cynicism about international rules, as responses to Israel’s war in Gaza reveal, is the perception that many Western states act inconsistently when it comes to the protection of civilians, especially in conflict zones, and their basic human rights.
Moreover, Western countries need to abandon their zero-sum depiction of rule-breaking autocracies versus rule-abiding democracies that is clearly at odds with many countries’ experiences, as the survey shows.
Although the survey data highlights a grueling challenge when it comes to the West resetting its relationship with the global south, there is some hope. In particular, the data contradicts the impression that people in the global south have given up on the international rules-based order—something that Chinese and Russian propaganda seeks to amplify.
When asked whether they believe that international rules and principles represent the values and needs of “most countries in the world” or only those of Western states, in all the countries surveyed, absolute majorities said that international rules and principles represent the values and needs of most countries in the world, from 88 percent in Pakistan to 63 percent in Indonesia. According to the data, those surveyed did not subscribe to Russia’s and China’s narrative that international rules and principles are merely a Western illusion, as suggested by each country’s talk of the so-called rules-based order and so-called universal values.
It appears that reviving multilateralism does not have to start with reviving faith in the value of international rules and principles. Instead, at the U.N. Summit of the Future, Western states can try to regain their credibility by demonstrating their serious commitment to implementing the international rules and principles they rhetorically embrace.