When the United Nations Charter was drafted, the Cold War had begun. Still, the Charter laid down lofty Purposes and Principles: principles of international cooperation, rules of conduct, and legal obligations of Member States in respect of the maintenance of international peace and security, the promotion of development, and the universal promotion of human rights. During the Cold War the world faced the threat of nuclear annihilation but came through safely, despite moments of great peril, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The world in which the Charter was born was one of competing ideologies and world-views: capitalism versus communism, NATO versus the Warsaw Pact. Though not easy, it proved possible for the two camps to co-exist and cooperate to a certain extent. The UN made modest progress in all three of its main areas: peace, development, and human rights.  Preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, technical assistance for development, and normative statements on human rights laid building blocks for future cooperation.

New challenges to universalist ideas and the liberal international order 

Now there is the existential threat of climate change, and differing ideologies and world-views proliferate, with leading powers pursuing their own visions and interests. The liberal international order, if it ever existed at all,  is in visible retreat and universalist ideas are under open challenge from China, Russia, the United States, as well as from powers such as  India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, and others.

Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail is the apt title of Mark Leonard’s  highly rated book, just published by Polity Press. Leonard is the Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and has spent some two decades studying comparative Chinese, Russian, and Western approaches to international security. He writes with great authority and feeling.

The candidates to be the next Secretary-General of the UN – and their political  strategists – would do well to read this penetrating book to help them think through ideas and suggestions on how to navigate the future role of the UN in a rapidly changing world. As Leonard writes, “the world is on the threshold of enormous disruption” and there are contrasting Chinese and Western approaches to understanding the challenges of world order: those of the Chinese “artisan” and the Western ‘architect’. The Chinese approach, that of “the artisan”, is to anticipate the way that the world is already developing rather than trying to bend it to meet a preconceived model of progress. The western approach, that of “the architect,” is to lay down a blueprint and to work for its implementation. The Chinese approach involves ‘crossing the river by feeling for stones,’ to use Chinese statesman  Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase.

A split between ‘the artisans’ and ‘the architects’ 

Leonard expounds: “We will increasingly see geopolitics as a split between states and people who make grand plans and those who embrace change and adapt to it. The architects develop beautiful visions and are then often paralysed by the gulf that erupts between their plans and the world. The artisans try to understand where the world is going and prepare to make the most of the contingencies that erupt. Architects design and build grand structures from scratch; artisans, by contrast, repair, restore and adapt using inherited materials and practical knowledge. Architects can do well in a predictable world. But in a complex world of constant change, the artisans have an edge…Humanity is looking over the precipice with different paths to extinction. The world does not obey the rules. And artisans are better equipped to navigate a path through radical uncertainty.”

This, Leonard assesses, is an age of ‘Un-order’, that is to say, no order.  He advises that instead of mourning the world of yesterday or dreaming of the world of tomorrow, we need to adapt to the world we live in today. The biggest threat, he thinks, comes from historical forces and from four big changes that will define the rest of this century: capital, climate, chips, and civilizations.

Capitalism is lurching from crisis to crisis to crisis, bringing chaos and inequality in its wake. Scientists think we are on the threshold of irreversible changes to our climate. The exponential growth of computing power is driving a technological revolution that includes genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and the construction of new materials. The world’s population has mushroomed alongside economic and technological prowess from 2.5 billion people in 1950 to potentially 11 billion by the end of the century. More than eight in ten of the global population will come from Asia and Africa by the century’s end. Demographers forecast that more than half of the world’s countries will not have enough children to survive and will literally die out.

The artisans have been quicker to adapt than the architects 

The Chinese, Leonard adds, are looking at changes in the global economy and how capitalism is being transformed. They are looking at climate change and the carbon transition. They are looking at a fourth industrial revolution in technology, exemplified by the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the importance of chips. And, finally, they are exploring the changes in global demography and what that means for the balance between different civilizations: “Chinese artisans spotted these disruptive trends and leaned into them, while the architects in Western governments have been slower to react and often look like they are resisting the changes.”

He summarizes: “We are living in one of those hinge points in history where everything is being created anew: a new economy, a new politics, new society – even a new idea of what it is to be human.” He counsels: “It seems more likely that we will have a messier and more unpredictable world rather than a transition from a liberal international order to a bipolar world or a Sino-centric one.”

Leonard sees that as we hurtle towards the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama’s famous phrase), many powers are reaching back to ideas that predate Western hegemony. Vladimir Putin uses the idea of Russkiy Mir – Russia’s world – as a framework to justify his war against Ukraine; Xi Jinping often talks about Chinese civilization; India’s Narendra Modi has talked about a restoration of a Hindutva state; and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would like to recreate a Pax Ottomana – to name but a few.

Each of these states sees the restoration of these pre-Western identities as a political rather than a cultural project. Each of the great powers has different ideas about the main threats to order. They are divided by their definitions of key concepts such as ‘power’, ‘freedom’, and ‘justice’. And they have very different mental models both of our current order and of how a future order should be structured. These great powers disagree on what role their own countries should play in the system, how future rules should be made and what exceptions to the rules there should be.

A necessary transition from universalism to pluralism 

It will, Leonard thinks, be necessary to make the transition from universalism to pluralism. What this will mean for universal human rights is a big topic to be pondered. A related question is how to think about global ethics in a time of de-globalisation. How can Europeans protect the values that have been so hard won without appearing like imperialists to the rest of the world? “This means moving from an attitude of universalism, where we develop ideas and claim that they must stand for all humanity (often without talking to others), to one of exceptionalism, where we hold on to our values in our own political system but engage in a dialogue as equals about global norms.”

He advises:

• We need to go from thinking we live in an order that can be preserved to expecting a world that is constantly evolving;
• We need to go from promoting globalization uncritically to calibrating the connections that make it unpredictable and chaotic;
• We need to go from thinking the world should be bound by a single global rulebook to accepting that there are many paths into the future;
• We need to go from thinking that international institutions will protect our security to seeing the resilience of individual citizens and states as the most important guarantors of our security; and
• We need to go from imagining we have the power to order the world to understanding that we should adapt to its changes instead

There is much to think about here. The UN strategist of the future will need to think of ways of enhancing cooperation and reducing friction among nations. That is the essence of the idea of international cooperation in the UN Charter. It is the UN way.

And the UN way is that of the Charter. It is the fountainhead of contemporary international law. Everyone must be held accountable to it. Without it, humanity will be lost.

Dr Bertrand Ramcharan has served many roles at the United Nations. He was a former Chief Speech-Writer for the UN Secretary-General, Director in the UN Political Department; Director of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia; Deputy and then Acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the peace process in Georgia. He is the author of Preventive Diplomacy at the UN and Contemporary Preventive Diplomacy and was a fellow at the London School of Economics and Harvard’s Kennedy School.