Argument | COVID-19: Is This the End of Multilateralism or its True Beginning?
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the ineffectiveness of traditional multilateralism in addressing transnational challenges — where multilateral strategies fail, however, minilateralist policies may succeed.
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, while yet many uncertainties remain, the world seems to find itself at another crossroads for multilateralism. By now, the pandemic’s economic, social, and political fallouts are self-evident across much of the world. The shock from the pandemic exacerbated existing challenges like inequality, climate change, pollution, gender-based violence, and hardships faced by migrants and refugees. The world’s poorest countries wonder whether rich countries really mean what they say when they talk about solidarity. Amidst all this chaos, the world is left wondering if these international challenges mark the end of multilateralism — or a crucible to light the fires of its renewal.
The Birth of Multilateralism
After witnessing the tragedies of the Spanish Flu which killed roughly one-fifth of the world’s population during the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, the world came to realize that international cooperation is a prerequisite to ensuring security and promoting peace. The 51 founding member states established the United Nations (UN) in 1945 to serve as a global hub of dialogue and a platform for world leaders to build trust, settle disputes, and advance the world through multilateral engagement. Realist notions of power were to give way to liberalism’s advocacy of economic cooperation and interdependence.
Many neorealists eventually conceded that the state is not the only key actor in international politics. In order for each states’ national interests to be preserved, they constructed international forums to fashion multilateral accords to achieve their ends, each leveraging their political and diplomatic bargaining power internationally. In doing so, post-war multilateralism took its first steps. Unilateralist Realism is passing — in its place, a Realism that adopts Liberalism's internationalist approach is gaining steam. This is nothing new; the two main schools of thought in international relations have oft adopted elements of the other when their own approach proved false, adapting to the ever-furthering complexity of analyzing state behavior in international politics.
Unilateralist Realism's demise, in particular, is not so shocking. With the rise of greater connectivity, global people-to-people connections, NGO’s, the internet, and affordable international travel, it's increasingly difficult for unilateralist actors to ignore the burgeoning international community that it bore. Unlike the Realists that oversaw the twentieth century’s many wars, most modern Realists now acknowledge that international institutions matter for the pursuit of a state’s self-interest, and that states must work in concert with others often and continuously to pursue their self-interest. These are among the hardest-won arguments of the twentieth century — lessons learned at a harrowingly great price.
The Rise and Fall
Multilateralism, as a central feature of the modern state’s foreign policy, took off in earnest in the early 1990s. The growing interconnectedness of people worldwide prompted more actors from a multitude of sectors — both public and private — to participate in, influence, and take stances on diplomatic relations and foreign policy. Yet despite the apparent confluence of society around conversation and engagement, the realist preconception of anarchy still prevails throughout policy- and decision-making circles. International organizations are, after all, the creation of sovereign states, and ipso facto, they remain subordinate to the will of states and the contentious nature of international politics.
In effect, states retain autonomy and capacity, de facto, to determine whether or not to conform to global regimes and international norms. According to Richard Gowan, the weakness of the multilateral organization lies in its power structure, in which it serves as a platform for major countries to tussle for influence, if the competition between states increases, compromises become harder. The United States — under the Trump administration — proved this fact by withdrawing from the nearly universally-accepted Paris Climate Accords and halting funding of the World Health Organization. States like China can subvert the UN to serve their own interests, evidenced by Beijing’s exclusion of Taiwan from the WHO, despite that Taiwan should be credited for spearheading early COVID-19 global pandemic preparedness.
The raging international public health crisis brought on by COVID-19 revealed two very different faces of the modern state. Political Scientist W. David Clinton explains the two faces of the state’s national interest as: one, the primacy of the obligation to protect its own society and populace; and two, the objective of participating in and contributing to a greater collective through foreign relations. Countries such as Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Myanmar, Singapore, Indonesia, and New Zealand belong to this latter category — particularly as all worked closely to remove barriers to trade on essential goods during the pandemic such as food and medical supplies for humanitarian relief.
There are, however, certain countries that place overwhelming primacy and priority on fulfilling and protecting their own domestic interests by limiting exports of personal protective equipment, or PPE, including protective suits, masks, and other medical equipment. For example, in March of 2020, the European Commission increased restrictions on exports of medical goods to countries outside of the European Union (EU). Shortly after that, three of its major suppliers — namely the Czech Republic, France, and Germany — decided to restrict their foreign exports to other EU members. Consequently, the region’s collective supply suffered, exacerbating the pandemic throughout the region. Similarly, the U.S.’ halting of funding to the WHO imperils the U.S.’ public health responses as much as it does that of other countries. Retreating from the world as the world suffers changes that know no borders is folly — one that is repeated time and again, as rich countries hoard their supplies of PPE, medicine, and now vaccine doses while the pandemic rages in the Global South.
According to Hans Kluge, the WHO's European Director, 50 percent of the global case numbers of COVID-19 fell on Europe earlier in the outbreak. The initial European response restricted the export of supplies to combat the virus locally and focused almost exclusively on protecting EU citizens, demonstrating that in times of emergency, people often fall back on domestic institutions and responses — most often, the state.
In these instances, in particular, national interest or domestic stability may take priority over multilateralist engagement to address challenges. Nevertheless, the shift in prioritization of needs in states’ policies is not a permanent shift, but rather a reaction in accordance with its social safety net. After all, the primary responsibility of a state is to its own citizens. States may want to resume their multilateralist approach to be more strategic and targeted soon after the immediate crisis has passed. The vaccine race shows this paradox in which countries are less likely to succeed without a collaborative approach, especially when exchanging with global intellectual pools of research and development. Countries can benefit from cooperation with each other while still competing. This reveals hidden insights into the debate surrounding multilateralism.
The interconnected nature of the world’s economies and peoples is not as easy to reverse. Records show that states can pursue multilateralism while the world is confronting transnational challenges. Now, technological advancements like the internet tremendously augment states’ capacity for international cooperation, communication, and decision-making. The first UN General Assembly Resolution on COVID-19 was passed through a virtual platform — a feat without precedent.
COVID-19: A Wake-Up Call
With the multitude of challenges that states face today, we may well be looking at the end of multilateralism. Equally likely, however, we may be witnessing its rebirth, as nations finally begin to grapple with the international nature of the challenges they face. Despite the challenges to international cooperation, the WHO performed the best it could in leading and synchronizing global responses — with some exceptions — coordinating clinical trials to find an effective treatment for COVID-19, and helping to ensure the availability of timely and unbiased information. Knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic that prioritize short-term politics should be re-evaluated by considering the technology, resources, international infrastructure, and solidarity required to prepare for the next pandemic — a reality that the world may be forced to reconcile with sooner rather than later.
When major suppliers of medical equipment decide to restrict exports, it greatly affects the global supply and forces price hikes in many countries. The pandemic exposed the vulnerability and fragmentation of the complex multilateral weave of international society as a collection of individual actors reliant on the constantly reaffirmed will to collaborate with others to achieve collective ends. Ironically, as the world becomes yet more interconnected through its supply chains and commercial activity, it is all the more dependent on the designs of its component actors, be they governments, pharmaceutical companies, or other civil society organizations.
The traditional multilateralist approach displays a perpetual lack of international consensus: missed deadlines, unkept financial commitment and promises, and stalled execution of policies. Foreign Policy writer Moises Naim underscores this point — there both is an urgent need for multi-country collaboration and for countries to adhere to international commitments and implement the proper regulations in a timely manner, whether or not they create a universal response policy that all countries agree to, which often proves more challenging than necessary.
This strategy of smaller-scale coalition-building to address transnational challenges is called minilateralism, referring to what Naim’s suggested as collecting the magic number, the gathering of the largest possible number of countries which have the will and capacity to remain in lockstep on a given multilateral policy — in the case he gives, on global health policy — which incentivizes parties to adopt a more targeted approach to regional challenges to have the greatest possible impact. The idea, coined by Naim, is not entirely new — it has already borne fruit for stakeholders in the fight against Ebola, and now merits further exploration for its capacity to facilitate policymaking to address transnational challenges. In effect, existing institutions such as G7 and NATO already serve as examples of successful minilateralism.
A minilateralist approach would be open to those countries that share the same values, norms and understanding of human rights, rule of law, and principles of economic liberalization. It would not function well with the inclusion of authoritarian states or those that prioritize their own domestic well-being to the detriment of the collective. This strategy served well in combating the Ebola crisis by reducing the bar for regional cooperation from the seemingly impossible task of unanimity to a low-hanging fruit by effectively reducing the number of actors required to adopt policy by congregating numerous like-minded states into a handful of ad-hoc coalitions with distinct collective positions.
Emphasizing the creation of issue-based coalitions — unlike traditional multilateral institutions which emphasize inclusivity — simplifies the complexity of policymaking by limiting the number of actors required to reach a consensus to countries that are willing to address the issue before them, regardless of international unanimity. In the case of COVID-19, minilateralism might decrease the number of steps needed to adopt swift decision-making to achieve tangible results by limiting the pool of actors to the like-minded.
However, minilateralism is no replacement for traditional multilateral endeavors’ potential for sweeping impact and credibility; by its own informal, ad-hoc nature, minilateral approaches lack the legitimacy, structure, and effectiveness that international organizations — with the support of a broad, sweeping consensus — are able to bring to bear. For the same reason, minilateral coalitions are also more vulnerable to politicization as part of geopolitical power rivalries, which might stimulate the formation of mutually hostile, competitive coalitions. These might even define the problem the same way and seek the same ultimate solution to the issue at hand, but compete to ensure theirs is the group that takes credit for its resolution. In a state-level parallel, this kind of reputational competition is already on full display as China and India engage in a kind of vaccine rivalry across the Indo-Pacific.
Nevertheless, where multilateral endeavors fail to build requisite consensus to act, successful minilateral efforts can leverage similar multilateral mechanisms that already exist to progress towards a solution, thereby lowering the bar for international consensus — for instance, by operating a multi-level dialogue to achieve concrete results in a timely manner. Coordinating with other like-minded actors below the state level by including civil society, private sectors, and think tanks can also accelerate the rate of progress towards solutions where state-centric multilateral efforts might lag behind.
Although the world now has working vaccines, to heal from the environmental, economic, and societal damage and address the challenges left in the wake of COVID-19 will require comprehensive, diligent, and earnest collective strategy and policymaking. Devlen and Miller suggest three avenues of minilateralism that we can look to use to address the remaining challenges of COVID-19: first, creating a semi-formal forum that can focus on specific policy coordination on the global issue whose membership is defined by shared values and commitment, rather than by economy capacity or shared location.
Second, the creation of a minilateral arrangement can help to weather shifting geopolitical alignments and conflicts across regions of particularly heavy great power competition. An arrangement across the Indo-Pacific and Europe could be achieved by joining like-minded partners such as South Korea, Japan, member states of ASEAN, and key European partners to overcome Sino-American and Sino-Indian rivalries. Lastly, strengthening the political dimension of the Transatlantic community and revitalizing the importance of democratic values such as the right to PPE, medicine, and vaccines, could go a long way towards revitalizing existing minilateral coalitions among Western states.
In the face of global challenges, there is no nationalism, patriotism, or country-first policy that fails to promote multilateralism. Our only refuge is in our unity and collective action. A threat to one is a threat to all.
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not represent the views of The International Scholar or any other organization.
Photo Credits:
World Health Organization website page logo on laptop display with red background, by Jernej Furman, Flickr,
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