Global gridlock: how to overcome the crisis in international institutions


“Recent facts such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are not the causes, but rather the symptoms of the global political, economic and institutional crisis.”

The political scientist David Held is a professor at Durham University (United Kingdom) and director of the Institute of Global Policy

In 2013, the British political scientist David Held, currently one of the most respected scholars of democracy and globalization, published the book “Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation is Failing When We Need It Most”, in partnership with his colleagues Thomas Hale and Kevin Young. In the book , the three authors defend the idea that the main tools for formulating global policies, such as the international institutions and treaties established in the post-World War Two period, have become debilitated and no longer function properly.

This has happened precisely at a time when they are extremely necessary due to the prolonged impact of the financial crisis initiated in 2008/2009 and given the major challenges facing the 21st century, such as global warming and new threats to global security, among others.

“By depressing both students and readers around the world, that book had the opposite impact to what was intended. Therefore, I decided to write a second book in which I will revise some of our arguments, armed with a cautious optimism, and will seek to identify paths to overcome this impasse”, Held said during the round table discussion “Human Rights and Democracy: Is the World Moving Backwards?”, at the Fundação Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

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The new book, which will be published shortly entitled “Beyond Gridlock: Pathways to Impact”, will assess strategies to enable the world to progress in diverse essential areas. What may be expected from the social movements and from multilateral negotiations? Which areas of global governance should be prioritized? Which political reforms need to be undertaken in the key countries to reestablish belief in democratic institutions? These are some of the questions being studied by Held at the Global Policy Institute of the University of Durham, in collaboration with Tom Hale, of Oxford University, both in the United Kingdom.

“We are living in a period in which global politics is adrift, and we are seeing the advent of an authoritarian populism in the world, which is very dangerous. In our research project we have the intention of being moderately optimistic, but this cautious optimism will depend on the formation of coalitions of social and political forces and their collaboration with governments more open to change”, the political scientist stated in the opening of his talk.

Origins of a new global order

To explain his theory about how we have reached the current impasse in the mechanisms of global cooperation, the speaker returned to the period immediately after the end of the Second World War (1939-1945), when 51 countries met in San Francisco (USA) and, on October 24th, 1945, founded the United Nations Organization (UN), to replace the League of Nations. Its main body is the Security Council, whose five permanent members were chosen precisely from the nations that came out of the Second World War victorious: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union (substituted by Russia after the end of the USSR in 1991), France and the Republic of China (which changed its name to the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after the victory of the communist revolution led by Mao Tse-tung).

“The creation of the United Nations was a classic example of a peace project which sought the establishment of a new global order in which the five main winners of the war remained at the negotiating table. (This worked) for more than seven decades, engaging them in the construction of a new institutional structure for the post-war period, based on international law”, Held explained.

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In 1944, the USA and its allies had met in New Hampshire (USA) to launch the basis for a new international economic management system, the so-called Bretton Woods Agreements, which gave rise to diverse institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development).

“This institutional construction process was sufficient to drive a great crescent of development in the post-war period, which stabilized the international system. (The multilateral institutions, together with) an expanding capitalism and the emergence of new technologies produced a growing interdependence worldwide over the last 70 years, consolidating a relatively open, liberal and pacific global economic order which in turn led to the globalization process”, said the political scientist.

The creation in 1951 of the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of the current European Union (EU), was part of this process. One of its main objectives was to avoid the outbreak of a new war in Europe. “It is important for us to remember the reason for the foundation of the United Nations because people forget these things, the way part of the British public, by supporting Brexit, appears to have forgotten the reasons that led to the creation of the EU”, he commented.

The Paradox of the Cold War

Even the Cold War, the long decades during which the USSR and its satellites, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies, on the other, faced each other off in strategic disputes and indirect conflicts, represented a paradox which does not invalidate or weaken the reasoning exposed above.

“The Cold War was shaped by the secular conviction, and this is a premise, that the good life is here on Earth. This small group of secular leaders armed with nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world many times over realized that the countries they represented were mutually vulnerable and, for this reason, established a set of formal and informal arrangements that kept these countries talking to each other for almost 50 years”, said the professor.

“Evidently this premise would not hold true if one day these weapons of mass destruction came into the hands of religious leaders who believe that the good life is to be found in some other part of the universe. But it was precisely the threat of large-scale mutual nuclear destruction that ended up preventing the outbreak of a Third World War, even though during the Cold War a number of ‘proxy wars’ were conducted around the globe”, he added.

Reduction of global inequality

The globalization process intensified from the 1980s and 1990s, with the consolidation of Japan as one of the three major economic powers in the world, the emergence of the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan), the striking economic ascension of China and, from the 2000s, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, some of which are currently in crisis), in addition to the extraordinary wealth of the oil exporting nations on the Arabian Peninsula. This process resulted in the progressive dislocation of the world's economic center of gravity from the North Atlantic towards the East, principally, and the South.

“The migration of manufacturing industries to Asia, and the consequent changes in employment patterns in the industrial and service areas, created conditions for great dynamism and wealth in diverse developing countries, but, at the same time, generated the first signs of a growing resentment in parts of the West, such as Europe and the United States”, said Held.

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“Today China is the main market for 85% of all luxury products, it is the place where this transformation has taken place in the most extraordinary way. On the busiest nights of the week it is almost impossible to cross a road in Beijing or Shanghai because of the number of Mercedes, BMWs and other luxury cars in circulation. In the last 30 years, more than 400 million Chinese have left poverty behind, something never seen before on this scale in the world”, said the specialist, for whom the economic center of the world will be located between China and India in 2050.

“Therefore, we are experiencing a complex phenomenon whereby in the West there appears to be an increase in economic inequality, while at a global level the inequality between the wealthy and the developing countries is decreasing. Not everyone is benefiting, but the reduction in global inequality between countries is a major trend in the 21st century”, he said.

The global order in check

According to David Held, it was precisely the success of the institutional arrangement created after the Second World War that is making global governance and cooperation increasingly difficult and complicated in this second decade of the 21st century. “That virtuous period of interdependence led to some unexpected consequences that began to undermine the global order itself”, he stated.

According to the British political scientist, four recent phenomena have led to the impasse we are experiencing in global politics today.

1 - The emergence of multipolarity
When defining the rules that would direct the world economy for various decades at the Bretton Woods Conferences, the United States did not foresee that it was creating structures that would enable the entry of new actors, later transformed into competitors. “What we are seeing today is an increase in the number of states that matter in the most diverse questions, without which it would not be possible to reach an agreement”, Held explained.

An example of this is the substitution of the G7 (group of the seven largest economies in the world) by the G20 (group of the twenty largest economies) as the main forum for the discussion of the planet’s economic problems since the financial crisis that broke out in 2008/2009. “This did not happen because the USA and its rich allies became more inclusive, but rather because they are no longer able to solve the problems by themselves. Now there are more nations around the table”, he said.

Another example is the multilateral trade negotiations. According to a table presented by the speaker (see in Related Contents on the right of this page), in 1946 23 countries took seven months to conclude a commercial agreement on tariffs. Whereas the Doha Round, negotiations for which began under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 with the participation of 141 countries, has been underway for 132 months with no conclusion in sight.

2 - The emergence of major transnational problems
Another direct product of the enormous economic growth and global interdependence of recent decades is the emergence of increasingly complex transnational problems that affect more and more countries and people.

The main example is global warming, the result of the exponential increase in greenhouse gas emissions during the 20th century, and the difficulty in convincing governments worldwide of the joint responsibility for reversing this process. “Global warming is a phenomenon generated historically by the pollutant emissions from the developed countries in the West since the industrial revolution, but the developing world, especially countries like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa, also needs to take responsibility for controlling its current and future emissions”, the speaker said.

3 - Institutional inertia
The institutions created in the post-war period do not reflect the changes that have taken place in the global order in recent decades. The UN Security Council, on which only five powers have a permanent seat and the power of veto (another ten countries participate on a rotating basis), is the major example of this. “The last time I was at the UN headquarters in New York I had the clear sensation that the action was not taking place there. In diverse aspects, the period we are living through evokes the beginning of the 1930s (marked by the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism), when the international institutions were also in a very weakened state”, Held said.

4 - Institutional fragmentation
With the paralysis of the multilateral bodies, the space in which they act is being increasingly occupied by a large number of organizations who frequently compete with and enter into conflict with each other, without managing to establish coordination and a common agenda. To illustrate this pulverization process, Held recalled the major tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004. “Governments from all over the world offered cooperation, thousands of NGOs sent employees and volunteers to the most affected zones, but around 80% of the aid did not accomplish its objectives due to lack of coordination, to duplication and to waste”, he claimed.

Nationalism and xenophobia

This institutional weakening described by the speaker has accelerated during recent years as a result of the impact of the global financial crisis in 2008/2009, the cost of which, he claimed, was not borne by the financial system, but mainly by tax payers and citizens. “The prolongation of the austerity measures and the increase in unemployment have reinforced the perception that significant parts of the population are getting left behind, creating fertile ground for protests against globalization, for the emergence of nationalist movements and for the growth of xenophobia”, Held declared.

“This phenomenon is especially acute in the United States and in the United Kingdom, which explains Trump’s victory and the Brexit vote, but it could also have reflexes on the upcoming elections in France, in Germany, in other countries in Western and Eastern Europe, not to mention the strengthening of Indian nationalism and the re-emergence of conservatism in Japan”, he warned.

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“The problem is that, while problem solving mechanisms on a global level are inhibited, the advent of nationalism in diverse regions of the world will not resolve any of these problems, it will just accentuate them because it increases the risk of the use of force and violence”, said Held.

Similarly, the war against terrorism, initiated after the September 11 attacks, resulted in military interventions that were highly questionable from the standpoint of political stability and regional and global security in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Meanwhile Syria has become the stage for a “mini world war”, as it was described by the BBC, which has already lasted for six years and involved diverse countries in the Middle East, the USA, Russia and others.

“The complete destabilization of these countries opened the doors for the mass migration of refugees to the European continent, stimulating human trafficking in the Mediterranean area and North Africa, causing thousands of deaths in the process and complicating the political situation in Europe even further”, said Professor Held.

How to change the world?

Towards the end of his talk, David Held gave some indications about the content of his next book, due to be published shortly. According to the professor, “Beyond Gridlock” will throw some light on 15 different areas in which there may be some progress in the development of global policies, including monetary cooperation, the regulation of investments, human rights, climate change, control of arms of mass destruction, among others. “When analyzing these 15 areas, we will always pose the following question: which paths to change could produce effective results?”, he revealed.

A positive example occurred recently during the Paris Climate Conference at the end of 2015, when countries from all over the world accepted the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and committed to reviewing their targets every five years, closing the emissions faucet even further. “After 20 years of failed negotiations characterized by efforts to impose a top-down agreement, in Paris there was a change in strategy. A new mechanism, known as ‘pledge-and-review’ was introduced, whereby each country, in accordance with its conditions and limitations, committed to following a path towards a reduction in emissions. This mechanism will give local environmental groups greater power to demand that the promises made be kept”, Held stated.

Held pointed out three main paths to change:

1 - Pressure from the bottom up
According to the political scientist, movements and coalitions arising from civil society should seek to forge links of cooperation with reformist governments to advance towards the solution of important questions for the 21st century.  “To produce changes from the bottom up, social movements need to establish some kind of collaboration with the power of the state. If not, they will simply emerge, attract some degree of attention, but then disappear”, he said, mentioning the Occupy Wall Street movement as a negative example.

As examples of social activism that have led to significant policy changes in the past, he mentioned the Mine Ban Treaty, the creation of the International Criminal Court and the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

2 - Horizontal or lateral pressure
According to the speaker, when institutions gain autonomy and are able to adapt and act by themselves, an important factor of change emerges. As an example, he mentioned the commercial conflict resolution mechanisms developed by the WTO, which in spite of resistance from member countries, has managed to impose its decisions.

3 – Top-down actions
For Held, there are moments when states, mainly those with greater resources, manage to be efficient in combating serious problems. This became evident during the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 when, after some months of inertia, the USA made an effective contribution towards controlling the spread of the virus.

“In March 2014, the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières announced that the epidemic was out of control and that if nothing were done, more than a million people would die in a short time. Nothing happened in March, in April and in May, but in June two North Americans working in the affected areas in West Africa contracted Ebola. Then, Obama released funds for research into the virus and, more importantly, sent marines to assist in the logistics of combating the epidemic in Liberia, putting them under the direct command of the president of the African country, a hitherto extremely improbable occurrence. In other words, a real and present threat to the health of US citizens enabled international cooperation that produced relatively rapid results”, Held declared.

“What used to work previously, during the whole of the second half of the twentieth century, is no longer working in this second decade of the 21st century. The efforts to rupture this impasse depend fundamentally on our capacity to identify new paths towards international cooperation both at the level of society and government”, the British political scientist concluded.

Further information:

Democracias Turbulentas: o que acontece na Europa, na América Latina e nos EUA

A integração dos imigrantes na Europa: desafios e oportunidades

Watch  Diálogo na Web, broadcast via YouTube, “2017 à vista: uma nova (des)ordem mundial”, with the journalists Patrícia Campos Mello and Jaime Spitzcovsky. 

Otávio Dias is a journalist specialized in international affairs. He was the correspondent for the Folha in London, editor of estadão.com.br and chief editor of Brasil Post, a partnership between the Huffington Post and the Abril Group.