Global Concerns

38.6: Global Concerns

38.6.1: The International Framework in the 21st Century

Although international relations in the 21st century are increasingly characterized by the formation of international and regional institutions, their effectiveness alongside the sovereign actions of states has been questioned.

Learning Objective

Characterize the international system as it stands today

Key Points

  • The beginning of the 21st century has thus far been marked by the rise of a global economy and Third World consumerism, mistrust in government, deepening global concern over terrorism, and an increase in the power of private enterprise.
  • The United States emerged as the sole superpower after the Cold War, but China simultaneously began its rise and the BRICS countries aimed to create more balance in the global political and economic spectrum.
  • After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in ten years than it had in the previous four decades.
  • Though the UN Charter had been written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s the UN faced a number of simultaneous, serious crises within nations such as Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the former Yugoslavia that tested its founding principles and institutional effectiveness.
  • The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates international trade. Due to an impasse in negotiations within the WTO between developed and developing countries, there have been an increasing number of bilateral free trade agreements between governments.
  • The renewed academic interest in regionalism, the emergence of new regional formations, and international trade agreements like NAFTA and the development of a European Single Market demonstrate the upgraded importance of regional political cooperation and economic competitiveness.

Key Terms

confidence- and security-building measures
Actions taken to reduce fear of attack by two or more parties in a situation of tension with or without physical conflict. Confidence- and security-building measures emerged from attempts by the Cold War superpowers and their military alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact) to avoid nuclear war by accident or miscalculation. However, these measures also exist at other levels of conflict and in different regions of the world.
Short Twentieth Century
Originally proposed by Ivan Berend of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences but defined by Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist historian and author, this term refers to the period between 1914 and 1991, the beginning of World War I and the fall of the Soviet Union.
BRICS
The acronym used to refer to an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

 

The beginning of the 21st century has thus far been marked by the rise of a global economy and Third World consumerism, mistrust in government, deepening global concern over terrorism, and an increase in the power of private enterprise. The long-term effects of increased globalization are unknown, but there are many who are concerned about its implications. The Arab Spring of the early 2010s led to mixed outcomes in the Arab world. The Digital Revolution, which began around the 1980s, continues into the present. Millennials and Generation Z are coming of age and rising to prominence during this century as well.

In contemporary history, the 21st century essentially began in 1991 (the end of the Short Twentieth Century) with the United States as the sole superpower in the absence of the Soviet Union, while China began its rise and the BRICS countries aimed to create more balance in the global political and economic spectrum.

BRICS Countries

BRICS Countries. Countries highlighted in green include all BRICS countries:  Brazil, Russia, India, People’s Republic of China, and South Africa.

United Nations

After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in ten years than it had in the previous four decades. Between 1988 and 2000, the number of adopted Security Council resolutions more than doubled, and the peacekeeping budget increased more than tenfold. The UN negotiated an end to the Salvadoran Civil War, launched a successful peacekeeping mission in Namibia, and oversaw democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. In 1991, the UN authorized a U.S.-led coalition that repulsed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Brian Urquhart, Under-Secretary-General from 1971 to 1985, later described the hopes raised by these successes as a “false renaissance” for the organization given the more troubled missions that followed.

Though the UN Charter was written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s the UN faced a number of simultaneous, serious crises within nations such as Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the former Yugoslavia. The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the U.S. withdrawal following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, and the UN mission to Bosnia faced “worldwide ridicule” for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing. In 1994, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide amid indecision in the Security Council.

Beginning in the last decades of the Cold War, American and European critics of the UN condemned the organization for perceived mismanagement and corruption. In 1984, U.S. President Ronald Reagan withdrew his nation’s funding from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded 1946) over allegations of mismanagement, followed by Britain and Singapore. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, UN Secretary-General from 1992 to 1996, initiated a reform of the Secretariat, reducing the size of the organization. His successor, Kofi Annan (1997–2006), initiated further management reforms in the face of threats from the United States to withhold its UN dues.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, international interventions authorized by the UN took a wider variety of forms. The UN mission in the Sierra Leone Civil War of 1991–2002 was supplemented by British Royal Marines, and the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was overseen by NATO. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution for authorization, prompting a new round of questioning of the organization’s effectiveness. Under the eighth Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, the UN has intervened with peacekeepers in crises including the War in Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During this time, the UN has also sent observers and chemical weapons inspectors to Syria during its civil war. In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organization had suffered “systemic failure.” Additionally, 101 UN personnel died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the worst loss of life in the organization’s history.

The Millennium Summit was held in 2000 to discuss the UN’s role in the 21st century. The three-day meeting was the largest gathering of world leaders in history and culminated in the adoption by all member states of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a commitment to achieve international development in areas such as poverty reduction, gender equality, and public health. Progress towards these goals, which were to be met by 2015, was ultimately uneven. The 2005 World Summit reaffirmed the UN’s focus on promoting development, peacekeeping, human rights, and global security. The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 to succeed the Millennium Development Goals.

In addition to addressing global challenges, the UN has sought to improve its accountability and democratic legitimacy by engaging more with civil society and fostering a global constituency. To enhance transparency, the UN held its first public debate between candidates for Secretary-General in 2016. On January 1, 2017, Portuguese diplomat António Guterres, who previously served as UN High Commissioner for Refugees, became the ninth secretary-general. Guterres has highlighted several key goals for his administration, including an emphasis on diplomacy for preventing conflicts, more effective peacekeeping efforts, and streamlining the organization to be more responsive and versatile to global needs.

 

World Trade Organization

WTO members and observers

WTO members and observers. Green countries are members, blue countries are members that are dually represented by the European Union, yellow countries are observers, and red countries are non-members.

 

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates international trade. The WTO officially commenced on January 1, 1995, under the Marrakesh Agreement signed by 123 nations on April 15, 1994, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948. The WTO deals with regulation of trade between participating countries by providing a framework for negotiating trade agreements and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants’ adherence to WTO agreements, which are signed by representatives of member governments and ratified by their legislatures. Most of the issues that the WTO focuses on derive from previous trade negotiations, especially from the Uruguay Round (1986–1994).

The WTO is attempting to complete negotiations on the Doha Development Round, which was launched in 2001 to lower trade barriers around the world with an explicit focus on facilitating the spread of global trade benefits to developing countries. The conflict between free trade on industrial goods and services but retention of protectionism on farm subsidies for developed countries’ domestic agricultural sector and the substantiation of fair trade on agricultural products (requested by developing countries) remain the major obstacles. This impasse has made it impossible to launch new WTO negotiations beyond the Doha Development Round. As a result, there have been an increasing number of bilateral free trade agreements between governments. Adoption of the Bali Ministerial Declaration, which for the first time successfully addressed bureaucratic barriers to commerce, passed on December 7, 2013, advancing a small part of the Doha Round agenda. However, as of January 2014, the future of the Doha Round remains uncertain.

 

Regional Integration

Regional integration is a process by which neighboring states enter into agreements to upgrade cooperation through common institutions and rules. The objectives of the agreement could range from economic to political to environmental, although it has typically taken the form of a political economy initiative where commercial interests are the focus for achieving broader sociopolitical and security objectives as defined by national governments. Regional integration has been organized either via supranational institutional structures, intergovernmental decision-making, or a combination of both.

Past efforts at regional integration have often focused on removing barriers to free trade within regions, increasing the free movement of people, labor, goods, and capital across national borders, reducing the possibility of regional armed conflict (for example, through confidence- and security-building measures), and adopting cohesive regional stances on policy issues, such as the environment, climate change, and migration.

Since the 1980s, globalization has changed the international economic environment for regionalism. The renewed academic interest in regionalism, the emergence of new regional formations, and international trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the development of a European Single Market demonstrate the upgraded importance of regional political cooperation and economic competitiveness. The African Union was launched on July 9, 2002, and a proposal for a North American region was made in 2005 by the Council on Foreign Relations’ Independent Task Force on the Future of North America. In Latin America, however, the proposal to extend NAFTA into a Free Trade Area of the Americas that would stretch from Alaska to Argentina was ultimately rejected by nations such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. It has been superseded by the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which was constituted in 2008.

Regionalism contrasts with regionalization, which is, according to the New Regionalism Approach, the expression of increased commercial and human transactions in a defined geographical region. Regionalism refers to an intentional political process, typically led by governments with similar goals and values in pursuit of the overall development within a region. Regionalization, however, is simply the natural tendency to form regions, or the process of forming regions, due to similarities between states in a given geographical space.

Attributions