UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Work together. Go it alone. The apocalypse is at hand. But the future can be bright. The squabbles never cease, yet here are human beings from all across the world — hashing out conflicts with words and processes, convening under one roof, trying to write the next chapter of a common dream.
At the United Nations, “multilateralism” is always the goal. Yet so is the quest for a coherent storyline that unites all 193 member states and their ideas. Those two holy grails often find themselves at odds when leaders gather each September at the United Nations — a construct whose very name can be a two-word contradiction.
You hear a lot about “the narrative” these days in politics (and everywhere else). It’s a way to punch through the static and make sure people are absorbing your message — and, ultimately, doing what you want them to do. But how to establish a coherent storyline when the very notion of many nations with many voices is baked into the pie to begin with?
Which raises the bigger question, the one that sits beneath it all at this assembling of people trying to figure out how to run their patches of the planet and be part of an increasingly interconnected civilization: With the 21st century unfolding in all of its unimaginable complexities and conundrums, with fracture and fragmentation everywhere, can the world even be governed?
“Yes, it can, but only in the sense that the world has ever been governed, including in this highly institutionalized and regulated world — that is, minimally,” Jeffrey Martinson, an associate professor of political science at Meredith College in North Carolina, said in an email.
That truth becomes evident listening to the first two days of leaders’ speeches at the U.N. General Assembly this week. They are, to put it mildly, a global festival of competing wants and needs and complaints and demands — with climate and war and public health and inequality at the center of it all, but fragmentation and chaos ever-present.
“The world,” said Wavel Ramkalawan, president of the island nation of Seychelles, “stands at the brink.”
His sentiment embodies the main challenge that surfaces each year since shortly after World War II when leaders have gathered at the United Nations: how exactly to balance hope and cold reality.
For the past several years, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has set the tone with warnings of darkening skies. His imagery gets more dire each year, and this year he topped himself. First, in his opening speech Tuesday, he said that “our world is becoming unhinged.” Then, at a U.N. climate conference on Wednesday, he upped the ante even more — if that was possible — with the statement that humanity has “opened the gates of hell.”
Here’s a sampling of what followed:
• “We are going through a crisis — possibly the most significant one since the end of the Second World War,” said Alain Berset, the president of Switzerland.
• “We no longer trust any narratives,” said Nataša Pirc Musar, the president of Slovenia.
• “We believe that the world … needs to be reborn,” said El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.
• “Time is running out for all of us,” said Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo.
Not exactly excerpts from “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Yet in listening to the speeches, it became clear that some of this was merely an attention-getting device. Even Guterres, with his apocalyptic language, offered ways forward. His answer — unsurprising, since he hammers it home every year — is a world that is “multipolar” and multilateral, the collaborative foundations upon which the United Nations was founded.
