The UN and the Global South, 1945 and 2015

Thomas Weiss, Pallavi Roy, Thomas G. Weiss, Pallavi Roy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315309279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

There is a woeful neglect of the current United Nations in the academic and policy literatures, and so it is unsurprising that an examination of that multilateral structure before 1945 shows an even more egregious absence of analytical attention. Such ignorance conveniently ignores the forgotten genius of 1942–1945, namely in the wide substantive and geographic relevance of multilateralism during the World War II and in the foundations for the contemporary world order. The wartime and immediate post-war United Nations was not simply dictated by the US State Department, Whitehall, and the foreign ministries of the West—even a generation before decolonisation had proceeded apace and two-thirds of UN member states moved into the limelight as erstwhile colonies. These essays interrogate the extent to which anti-colonialists and other nationalists resisting imperial rule embraced the promise of a rule-based world order as a normatively and operationally valuable projection in 1945. They critically review the worlds of 1945 and 2015, of then and now, to determine the role of continuity and change, of the continuing bases for compromise and for the clashes between the Global South and North. This book was previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

‘Idea-shift’: how ideas from the rest are reshaping global order

Amitav Acharya

School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, USA

ABSTRACT
An ‘idea-shift’ is taking place that may be of greater consequence for global governance than is the ongoing ‘power shift’ or the rise of new powers. A number of non-Western thinkers and practitioners – who may be called idea-shifters – have contributed to new concepts and approaches that have radically altered the way we think about development, security and ecology, among other areas. Their ideas are often dismissed or downgraded in the West as imitation, or the product of the Western education of their creators, or of partnership with Western collaborators, governments, donor agencies and multilateral institutions dominated by the Western powers. Challenging this view, this essay holds that ideas from the postcolonial world, its thinkers and policymakers have played an important role in the making of the postwar norms of governance, such as universal sovereignty, human rights, international development and regionalism. Moreover, some of the important recent ideas about development (human development from Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen), security (responsible sovereignty from Francis Deng and colleagues) and ecology (sustainable development from Wangari Maathai) have come from people who, while trained in the West, are deeply influenced by their local context or point of origin. Appreciating how much this local origin and context matters allows us to consider these as ‘ideas-from-below’ and a powerful driver of the unfolding global idea-shift.

Introduction

In The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition for Ideas, two prominent US academics, Steve Weber and Bruce Jentleson, argue that the West is no longer in a position to dominate the global marketplace of ideas.¹ The big ideas about capitalism, democracy and peace, promoted by the West in the 20th century, are neither universal nor as durable as once believed.

If Weber and Jentleson are right, and the dominant Western ideas of the past century are becoming obsolete, what might replace them? Where will any replacement come from? Relatedly, will the power shift that is unfolding extend to the world of ideas?

Almost everyone in the first half of the 20th century grew up thinking that all the good and great ideas came from the West. These include nationalism, democracy, human rights, capitalism, development and even the more controversial idea of national security. Moreover, these ideas are held to be universal standards that apply to all of humanity and should never be compromised or challenged. The role of the non-Western world is one of passive acceptance. Whenever there is a challenge, it is dismissed as radicalism or foolhardiness. Furthermore, we not only think that the big ideas always come from the West but that they also drive out bad ones in the non-West.

Moreover, many observers still think the West will continue to be the main springboard for new ideas about governance, development and peace. If good ideas are occasionally found outside the West, they often are dismissed as imitation. If they prove to be creditable, the credit is usually given to the Western training of the person who invented the idea or to his/her Western collaborators, or to Western governments and institutions that backed them. One way or the other a Western origin or connection is found to legitimise the idea.

The 70th anniversary of the United Nations is a good occasion to reflect on and challenge this prejudice. The UN system functions paradoxically as a symbol of both global solidarity and global injustice. As the apex body of the postwar ‘universalism’, the UN and its family of institutions have been crucial sites for the voices, ideas and demands of non-Western countries. It has provided a platform, although hardly exclusively so, for the development and dissemination of ideas from the developing world. Indeed, two of the examples provided in this essay, namely human development and the responsibility to protect (R2P), might not have acquired their prominence and impact without the UN (especially the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in the first case, and the UN General Assembly, Security Council and Secretariat in the latter).

At the same time the UN system has not fully adapted to a world that is undergoing not only the much talked about ‘power shift’ but also a far less acknowledged ‘idea-shift’, whereby ideas from postcolonial societies about governance, peace, development, rights and ecology are acquiring increasing importance. This is partly because, despite its global constituents and workforce, the UN and the multilateral system at large are persistently presented by Western liberals as a unique product of US hegemony (John Ruggie) or the ‘American World Order’ (John Ikenberry), giving too little recognition to the role of non-Western actors in promoting the ideas, norms and institutions of the UN.² Many if not all Western supporters also remain apprehensive of the reforms being demanded of the UN system and its modus operandi to make it more democratic and reflective of both the power shift and the idea-shift. As a result, the creation and diffusion of ideas ‘from below’ is yet to register and redefine perceptions in the UN system and the world at large.

We could mention, for instance, that, in the excellent book UN Ideas That Changed the World, of the 20 Nobel Prize winners in economics and peace (until 2009) who worked for the UN or were closely associated with it, only two – Ghana’s Kofi Annan (who won jointly with the UN) and India’s Amartya Sen (who was never a fulltime UN employee) – were from the non-Western world.³ Yet this does not mean that important ideas are not coming from people from the developing world who were not associated with the UN. One Nobel Laureate in peace, Muhammad Yunus, was not only outside the UN system, but clashed with the then president of the World Bank, Barber Conable, in 1986, when the latter claimed credit for the Bank for helping him to develop his ideas and pathways on microfinance, and he rejected a $200 million aid offer from the Bank.⁴ It is also noteworthy that Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel Prize for her work on sustainable development and peace, did not work through the UN system. Neither is a Nobel Prize necessarily a reliable indicator of exceptional contribution to ideas about economics and peace. While Sen, who got a Nobel for economics, made a major contribution to the idea of human development, the true pioneer of the human development idea was Mahbub ul Haq, who never got a Nobel.

This leads to a point about our understanding of how ideas emerge and diffuse. Thanks to the constructivist turn, international relations scholars increasing accept that ideas matter. But there remain disagreements and gaps in our understanding of how they matter or whose ideas matter. The initial work on norm diffusion took a top-down view of the diffusion of ideas.⁵ It tended to privilege Western norm entrepreneurs and their supposedly universal ideas that were successfully diffused to replace ‘bad’ local practices, especially in the non-Western world.

But a more complex picture of norm diffusion has emerged, which gives more attention to local actors, their ideas and capacity to resist, localise and repatriate ‘universal’ norms and to create and export new ones from local contexts. This literature has offered new conceptual tools about how ideas spread, including norm localisation, subsidiarity, circulation and protagonism.⁶ Although these concepts apply mainly to norms rather than to ideas per se (ideas become norms when they affect behaviour), they suggest a more complete multiple agency and two-way dynamic of ideational forces in world politics that opens the door to a better appreciation of the normative agency of postcolonial countries in making the contemporary world order.

As Richard Jolly et al note in UN Ideas that changed the World, many ideas have multiple points of origin, and the ‘economic and social ideas at the UN cannot be properly understood when they are divorced from their historical and social context’.⁷ This proposition would be even more meaningful if the term ‘local’ were used to qualify ‘historical and social context’, as this essay will demonstrate by highlighting how the origins and vantage points of the creators mattered in some of the key ideas about development, security and ecology in recent times.

A quiet but powerful revolution is taking place that challenges conventional wisdom. The non-Western world is increasingly coming up with critical ideas about governance, development and security. It is not simply a passive recipient of Western ideas but an active contributor in several ways. First, unlike in the past, when most ideas from the non-Western world were about resistance or rejection (eg of colonialism or superpower intervention), the new ideas are about solving the common problems of common people. For example, anti-colonial struggles produced a whole slew of ideas from the colonies such as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the New International Economic Order (NIEO). They made a dramatic appearance on the world stage but also caused a sharp North–South divide. The new ideas come with a more positive message and tone. Second, they are not necessarily coming from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) or from rising regions like East Asia but also from such far less fortunate places as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kenya. And together they offer the possibility of changing the face of development, security and politics in the world that we live in and our children will inherit. Third, new ideas are emerging because the past ones have failed us. Ideas such as democracy, human rights, capitalism, development and peace are held to be universal standards that apply to all and should never be compromised even if they leave big holes. They promise one-size-fits-all. Do they fit all parts of the world?

Human rights and democracy may seem genuinely universal, but do they address the problems of governance in all parts of the world? No one would object to these ideas, or to ideas of development and security. But these big pictures and principles often offer a poor fit for many parts of the non-Western world. To some, this may sound like cultural relativism. In reality, this is not about culture but about practicality.

Unlike Weber and Jentleson, this essay does not claim that the ideas of peace, development and democracy will be displaced. For a start, they are not uniquely Western. Rather, they are universal ideas that have their basis in all cultures and societies across time. What might disappear is the West’s monopoly over how peace, development and democracy are interpreted and pursued. This would bring out the multiple, global heritage of these ideas, thereby recognising and encouraging a rich diversity of human understanding and action that can only be good for our world. What follows are stories about how this is already happening.

The normative foundations of postwar world order

In April 1955 the leaders of 25 newly independent countries from Asia (including West Asia or the Middle East) and Africa met for five days in the Indonesian town of Bandung. This was dubbed by Sukarno, the president of host nation Indonesia, ‘the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind’.⁸ Despite the hyperbole, the Bandung Conference was more representative of the newly independent countries than the San Francisco Conference a decade earlier that drafted the UN Charter, which was dominated by Washington and the West. Otherwise why would the West do everything possible to sabotage Bandung? The USA was afraid that the conference would undermine its anti-communist crusade because many developing countries present, led by India, wanted to stay clear of the US alliances against the USSR and communist China. It joined with Britain, which worried about the conference’s potential to fuel the flames of anti-colonialism that would further shrink its empire. But their attempts to stop the conference by discouraging pro-Western Asian and African countries from going there and, failing that, by providing documents that told them what to say and what to do at the conference, largely failed.⁹ But the Bandung Conference was a success not because it undermined the USA’s Cold War policy and Britain’s fondness for empire but because it showed the positive role of the newly de...