The world summit, meeting in New York on the occasion of the UN's 60th anniversary, ended in failure. In the wake of the speech by President Bush the debate focused for three days on terrorism, while other crucial issues such as disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation, poverty, human rights and the protection of the environment were largely neglected.
The summit's final document does not even mention arms control, or nuclear non-proliferation. Mostly, it confines itself to statements of principles. The Millennium Development Goals have been reaffirmed, but with the exception of an EU pledge to double its development aid for Africa no mention can be found regarding the means to pursue international justice. If we take into account that only a few developed countries will commit themselves to pursue the goal of 0.7% of GDP for development aid, the achievement of the aim of halving poverty by 2015 has been mainly entrusted to the free market. This is wholly unrealistic. After a time-span of five years from the solemn announcement, the Millennium Goals now seem to be yet another of those broken dreams that have scarred the UN's history.
The summit did decide on the creation of a Peacebuilding Commission, a Human Rights Council and a Democracy Fund. But despite these objectives being in accord with the current US Administration's policy of spreading democracy, positive action to achieve them failed to materialize.
For the first time a political commitment has been made to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, though when the question arises of how to assess the right moment to intervene, it is foreseeable that divisions among member states will inevitably emerge.
Terrorism was condemned once again, but no agreement was reached on a shared definition. Most Islamic countries asked that the notion of violence against civilians by fighters for freedom and independence should be excluded from the definition. This has the effect that the necessary conditions for entrusting the task of combating terrorism to the UN do not at present exist.
Lastly, the summit failed to produce a new architecture for the global system. Kofi Annan's proposals for Security Council reform met with strong opposition. The Big Five will continue to be the UN's masters, even though they have been weakened by the emergence of new powers.
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What obstructs progress towards UN reform is the asymmetry of the current world order characterized by the overwhelming political, economic and military superiority of the US. The US aims to submit the UN to its will whenever possible. Otherwise it acts unilaterally, free from any international discipline, as was shown by its decision to attack Iraq.
The fundamental lesson which can be drawn from the history of international relations is that only power can limit power.
This means that only when states are able to keep each other in check there is space to ensure the rule of law. This balance of power - that is, the mechanical interplay of opposing forces - can act as a brake on the aspirations of every member of the states system and thus play the role of deterrent against violations of international law. On the other hand, when one state acquires a dominant position, as was the case with the US after the end of the Cold War, it will act solely in accordance with its own interests, possibly infringing international law and disregarding the rights of other states. Relevant examples can be found in the fact that the US - at least in relation to itself - opposes the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court, disarmament, nuclear non-proliferation and a specific level of development aid.
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To propel the US along the multilateralist road the formation of one or more large regional actors is an inescapable pre-condition. In Europe this process has begun. The EU is the most intensively regulated region of the world. It is based on a stable balance of power. Its political institutions impose restraints on what sovereign states may do in their relations with each other, and in this it shows the way to what the UN could become in the future: namely, the guardian of international law and the framework of a process of constitutionalization of international relations.
The EU is not only a model for the UN reform. It is also the motor. In the monetary sphere the euro has triggered a process of evolution towards world multilateralism. A recent step forward was the decision of the Chinese Central Bank to unpeg the yuan from the dollar. This means that the emergence of a monetary multipolarism opens the way to a reform of the international economic organizations, i.e. a new Bretton Woods. The ECOSOC should be transformed into an Economic Security Council, in order to co-ordinate the various UN institutions and agencies dealing with economic matters, finance, trade, development, labour and environment.
But monetary multipolarism is not enough. A single EU foreign and security policy is the paramount condition of any move to defeat the pretension of the US to act unilaterally and to consider itself above the international community. To confront the present imbalance the way must be opened to a single European seat within the Security Council and to transform this body into the Council of the great regions of the world. With this reform, the US would eventually become the equal of other regional actors and therefore obliged to respect new rules of the game.
The EU's international prestige has, however, been considerably weakened by Germany's campaign, supported by France and the UK, to obtain for itself a permanent seat in the Security Council. In this attempt to revive anachronistic nationalist ambitions, the EU has made a pitiful spectacle of itself, and at the very moment when it should have been able to speak with one voice in the cause of the construction of world peace. Nation states in this age of globalization are little more than remnants of a bygone epoch. The future belongs to the great regional groupings of states and their co-operation within the UN.
At this summit, the African Union was the sole regional organization to challenge the Big Five's monopoly of the power of veto. It claimed two permanent African seats in the Security Council, with the right to veto. On the other hand it refused to support the ambitions of the four Security Council aspirants - Germany, Japan, India and Brazil - although they did not ask for veto rights. In the debate on Security Council reform Africa proved able to speak with one voice and demonstrated its ability to free itself from its condition of dependency and to participate in the crucial decisions concerning the future of humankind.
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In an article published in The Boston Globe on September 12, 2005 Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, recently put forward a characteristic argument against UN reform, namely that: "The UN must be a fundamentally limited institution because it has no democratic accountability but has at times pretensions of asserting legitimacy akin to that of a democratic nation state".
It is true that the UN is not accountable to the people. But what distinguishes the neocon viewpoint from that of world federalists is that, for the former, the UN is not, cannot and should not be a democratic institution. We should therefore ask what future would democracy have in a world where the significant decisions are taken at global level, while democracy itself does not reach beyond state borders. It is unacceptable for genuine democrats to leave these important decisions solely in the hands of big powers and of private actors, such as multinational corporations or criminal and terrorist organizations. In a globalized world, democracy is destined to decline unless it too becomes international.
That it is feasible to extend democracy to international level has been demonstrated by the European Parliament, which proves that it will be possible, in the not far distant future, to build a UN Parliamentary Assembly, conceived as a step toward a World Parliament.