Oxford Guild

Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear Students,

It’s a pleasure to be here with you today. Thank you to the Oxford Guild for bringing us together.

Before we begin our discussion I would like to share some reflections as someone who has worked at the United Nations for the past 40 years.

I would like to reflect with you on how we arrived at this present moment; and explore what it teaches us about where we need to go next.

Start with the present.

This year started in much the same way as the last one ended - in a sense of perpetual crisis.

Armed conflicts that threaten millions and forced displacement at record levels.

Rampant inequality both between and within countries.

Escalating disputes over trade, sky-high debt, threats to the rule of law, attacks on the media and civil society.

And a runaway climate crisis that is wreaking havoc.

These ills affect people everywhere - in the West as much as in the East; in the North and in the South.

They are all connected: climate disasters entrench poverty; poverty breeds conflict; conflict triggers refugee flows, and so and so forth.

Together, these threats are deeply corrosive.

They generate anxiety and they breed mistrust.

They polarize societies – politically and socially.

They make people and countries fear they are being left behind as progress seems to benefit only the fortunate few.

And to be sure, not without reason:
̶ Can you blame people for questioning the legitimacy of an order in which 26 billionaires own as much as the almost 4 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world’s population?
̶ Can you justify to them a system in which companies lay of thousands of employees one day, only to report record profits the next?
̶ And can you really be optimistic about the future if your generation faces - for the first time in a long time - the very real risk of ending up worse than your parents?

Against these questions, explanations can sound like excuses - and it is not difficult to understand why faith in political and business leadership is waning; why trust in national governments and international organisations is eroding; and why populism is gaining popularity.

And yet: the question must still be asked whether this pervasive sense of perpetual crisis, of doom and gloom, this sense of living in the end-times is actually justified.
***

Consider for a moment the following counterpoint:

By virtually every measure of well-being, human life is better today than at any other time in history.

It’s a fact.

̶ Living standards, life expectancy, literacy rates and education levels have never been higher across the world.
̶ Child mortality, the risk of dying from disease or illness, from war or famine, has never been lower.

All of this and much more happened over the course of just a few decades. And all that progress is real. It has been broad, and it has been deep, and it all happened in what – by the standards of human history – was nothing more than the blink of an eye.

So why I am telling you this? Certainly not to give you the impression that everything is fine. It clearly isn’t.

Rather, these data points highlight an intriguing contradiction, namely that we seem to be both living in the best of times and in a time of existential crisis.

How do you reconcile it?

***

I think the answer has a lot to do with the challenges faced by the organization that I work for, the United Nations. And more generally: with the fate of the multilateral system and the very idea of international cooperation.

Let’s unpack it by going back in time.

By going back, in fact, exactly 100 years.

The year 1919: A continent in ruins; four empires collapsed; and an entire generation - many the same age as you are now - lost on the battlefields of Europe.

The First World War marked a watershed in many ways, and one of them was the bankruptcy of the old idea that balance-of-power politics could ever be a guarantor of peace.

Clearly, an alternative international order was needed and in this vacuum emerged the idea of multilateralism, finding expression in the League of Nations in Geneva.

To be sure, the inability of the League to prevent a second world war has long made it a byword for failure, a graveyard hopes.

Today, however, that simplistic, unfair view is giving way to the recognition that the League - despite its constraints and contradictions - nurtured the nucleus of a system that has since proved remarkably successful.

For when the United Nations was created out of the remnants of the League in 1945, the multilateral order finally caught on.

The audacity of the ideas that underlay the multilateral architecture remains astounding: to replace violence with the rule of law as the basis for global governance; to give each state - whether rich or poor, large or small - one vote; and finally, to declare human rights unconditional and universal.

Of course, there were many places in which the reality made a mockery of the ideal, where tyrants still ruled; where colonial regimes refused to give way to the forces of freedom. But they soon found themselves on the defensive.

And of course, the Cold War, and with it the terrible nuclear threat, cast a long shadow. But not only did we avoid open confrontation between the superpowers - and with it a third world war -, war itself came to be considered “illegal”, an idea that would have seemed simply absurd to earlier generations.

And with these political changes came sweeping economic changes - leading to the incredible gains in global wealth, in life expectancy and opportunity, that I mentioned earlier.

It’s no accident of history that the progress we achieved since 1945 coincided with the establishment of multilateral institutions like the United Nations. There is a direct connection here.

You can see the connection in measures small and large. Let me just mention three out of thousands of examples:

̶ You can see it conflicts prevented or defused across the world by the quiet workings of UN mediation - in places as different as El Salvador, Sierra Leone, or Nepal.
̶ You can see it in deadly diseases eliminated by actions led by World Health Organisation - like the vaccination programs that eliminated smallpox.
̶ You can even see it in the dialing codes you use to call friends and family abroad - a system developed by the International Telecommunication Union.

All of the above is multilateralism in practice.

And yet, for all the peace and prosperity underwritten by the international structures put in place since 1945, we today once again find ourselves engulfed in crisis.

What happened?

***

Sometime over the past decades, a complacency set in - a naïve belief as it turned out - that things would just invariably get better; that, despite some backsliding here and there, forward movement was inexorable and large-scale conflict a thing of the past. It was through this lens that many just assumed technological progress and globalization would produce benefits that, ultimately, would reach all.

This complacency bred inaction, and the twin forces of globalization and technological disruption - left unchecked - ultimately triggered the global backlash we are confronting today.

And so today, we hear troubling echoes of the past.

Some of these “echoes” I have alluded to already - from eroding trust in the democratic order to the outrage of rampant inequality.

But the one I want to explore further has to do with the breakdown of global cooperation, with the return of international politics as zero-sum competition.

Today, we no longer live in a bipolar or unipolar world; we are increasingly in a multipolar world.

We are in a kind of chaotic situation of transition.

The relationship between the three most important powers - Russia, the United States and China - has rarely been as dysfunctional as it is today.

And related to that, medium-sized powers are increasingly acting autonomously from the big powers. It’s impossible to look at Syria, for example, and not recognize the role of Turkey, Iran, and Saudi-Arabia. And the same is true for other conflicts around the world.

So power relations are becoming unclear; with the fragmentation of actions; with impunity and unpredictability prevailing; and with national and isolationist agendas superseding mutual trust and international cooperation.

The point is, however, that we have been there before - and that should worry us.

Because multipolarity without strong and accepted multilateral instruments - just as you had it in Europe in the wake of the First World War - might be a factor of equilibrium, but it is certainly not a factor of peace.

It’s inherently unstable, volatile, and downright dangerous.

So that is another echo of the past we hear today.

Yet to say that the world is poised on the brink of another 1914, as some suggest, is too simple.

Diplomacy works differently today, and so does politics. But how differently, and why?

***

One obvious yet profound difference is the diffusion of power.

Power that used to be firmly in the hands of the state has metamorphosed into something much more diffuse: whether it’s non-state actors challenging the state’s monopoly of violence; or whether it’s private corporations evading effective regulation by any one state - power in international relations today is altogether a more complex, messy affair.

One way to think about this change is as a contrast between hierarchy and order versus networks and entropy.

Whereas in the past, international relations were centralized - with core and periphery, with top-down commands and control - today, we live in an ‘age of entanglement’.

Global politics has been reconfigured. The traditional ‘chessboard’ of inter-state diplomacy may still exist, but it is joined by a new web of networks made up of governments, companies, NGOs, terrorist groups, philanthropists, and countless others - all wielding influence and cooperating or clashing at various points in time.

And these intricate connections are mirrored by the major existential challenges we face, which as I said at the outset, are more and more interlinked; are more and more interfering with each other.

All of which culminates in what the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres summed up two weeks ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when he said: “We are in a world in which global challenges are more and more integrated and the responses are more and more fragmented and if this is not reversed, it's a recipe for disaster.”

So what should we do?

***

The answer cannot be to defend multilateralism just by striving to restore the status quo ante, to go back to the way things were. Because if yesterday’s tools are inadequate to tackle today’s problems, they will outright fail to fix tomorrow’s challenges.

We cannot act like guardians of a status quo that has ceased to exist.

The key is to return to first principles - the foundational values that define what the UN, what multilateralism, is all about and made it work in the first place- and to make it fit for the new realities.

There is a lot we are doing at the UN itself to drive this change - and we can talk more about that in the Q&A - but the most important instrument we have in our arsenal that I want to talk about now extends beyond the UN.

It’s the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Agreed three years ago by all 193 Member States of the UN, it is the most ambitious development plan in history.

Think of it as our common global roadmap for creating a better world.

With 17 Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs for short) and 169 targets - covering everything from ending poverty (Goal 1) and achieving gender equality (Goal 5) to equitable economic growth (Goal 8) and the rule of law (Goal 16) - it gives us specific, tangible steps we need to follow to actually get there.

Three imperatives at the core of the 2030 Agenda capture this well:

First imperative: the SDGs leave no one behind.

The logic is simple and powerful: if the threats are existential, if power is dispersed and challenges are global and interlinked, then we really are all in this together, and no one wins unless everyone wins.

That means the benchmark for success is first of all the fate of those at the bottom; those most vulnerable; those excluded or cut off from the waves of progress.

Here, the 2030 Agenda continues a proud multilateral tradition. After all, when the International Labour Organisation was established alongside the League of Nations in 1919, it was on the explicit understanding that social injustice, economic exploitation and rampant inequality were at the root of conflict, indeed of war. And this very focus on root causes is also what defines the SDGs.

Second imperative: the SDGs are indivisible and universal. They recognize that if the challenges we face are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing, our responses must be just as integrated and comprehensive.

We cannot hope to avert climate change without reducing inequality, without making our economies produce and consume sustainably, without preventing conflict. It’s all connected: progress towards one goal drives progress in the others; but failure in one dooms all others.

And the third imperative: the SDGs are everyone’s responsibility. I just mentioned how yesterday’s tools won’t work to fix tomorrow’s challenges. And that’s largely because yesterday’s tools are tailored above all for states and governments, and not for the diffuse power relationships that define our world today.

The 2030 Agenda points towards a multilateralism fit for this century.

A multilateralism that connects international, regional and local organisations - a networked multilateralism.

A multilateralism that is more closely linked with civil society, the private sector and other stakeholders –an inclusive multilateralism.

A multilateralism in short, that implicates everyone - including everyone here, in this room.

***

Dear students,

There is no question that we’re handing you a messy world. And we’re placing a huge responsibility on your shoulders.

Think about it: you are the first generation that can end extreme poverty, but you are also the absolute last generation that can curb climate change.

We are betting on you, on your commitment, your creativity and your courage. To take charge and to take ownership. To be part of the solution, to not remain on the sidelines.

You are students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and I am sure all of you have exciting careers ahead of you.

Some of you might choose to go into business, others into public service, and some - I hope - are perhaps thinking about joining the United Nations.

But whichever route you pursue, here are some qualities and skills that will serve you well:

For one thing, open-mindedness, empathy and a desire to see the world: Personally, I learnt as much, if not more, working “in the field” in Mexico, Haiti, Iran and elsewhere as I did on the top floor of UN Headquarters in New York and Geneva.

Another quality is this: curiosity and a truly interdisciplinary outlook.

Looking at the ways in which technology and globalization are transforming our world, 5 years from now, you may very well be working at a company that hasn’t been founded yet. In 10 years, you may work in an industry that doesn’t exist today.

So that’s why curiosity and interdisciplinarity are so important: an ability to connect the dots across disciplines, to break down silos; an interest in other cultures, an appreciation for different viewpoints.

But whatever you end up doing - and let me close on this note - always remember this: your actions have consequences. But so will the actions you do not take.

I mentioned repeatedly the lessons we can draw from the First World War.

From the many lessons we can draw from the failure of the leaders that unleashed it, the most personal perhaps is this: that failing to do something, failing to consider the long-term consequences and risks of what we do or don’t do - all of the little instances where we fail to take action, fail to show courage, fail to show foresight, they can together balloon into disaster.

We all do well to remember this these days.

Progress is not inevitable, and the future not preordained. It’s open - radically open - and its shape depends on our own actions.

Our efforts - however small they may seem to us at any given moment - make a difference.

Because they really do. And not only tomorrow, but already today.

Thank you.