Role of global governance amid dynamic shifts in world politics

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OPINION

By Abdurahim Ssemanda

Moments following his inauguration eight months ago, President Trump announced that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the World Health Organisation, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. If that was not shocking enough, the assault on other international bodies in the intervening time, not least the International Criminal Court, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation, and the UN Human Rights Council, has certainly been.

This tendency is representative of several different waves that the United Nations system has had to go against in the last couple of years. Eighty years after the two catastrophic wars that were the immediate motivation for the inception of global cooperation, it is incumbent on the international community to seriously reflect on the course of things moving forward.

Presiding over the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) plus meeting late last month, hence, President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) proposed the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) as one way to mitigate this crisis.

GGI is driven by five core principles, each speaking to a specific fracture in the present state of relations between countries. For the issue diagnosed in the first paragraph of this OP-ED, for instance, it is principle two (a commitment to uphold international law) that carries the antidote.

According to the PRC leader, this should be arrived at by adhering to the said norms unwaveringly, through, among other things, applying them fairly across the board. And when forging out new tenets, the participation of all nations should be ensured. The latter attribute especially answers to the disillusionment that has increasingly arisen in the Global South, and Prof. Wang Dong, the Executive Director of the Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding at Peking University, agrees.

Another of the current US administration bulwarks, i.e. trade tariffs, is addressed by the GGI in calling for multilateralism. Rather than discriminate against their counterparts in some cases while isolating themselves in others, the Global Governance Initiative suggests that nations aim to harness resources for the common benefit of all humanity. This it argues, best allows for the realisation of the intentions of the UN Charter.

State sovereignty is also at the heart of GGI. The details here are that regardless of a state’s size or economic capacity, her counterparts should not intervene in its internal governance– political, social, and economic. This notion certainly goes far back in the history of diplomacy, but given that it has faced real threats in recent times, China’s call serves to remind the world of how significant it is for political stability.

The other two GGI themes (people-centeredness and effectiveness) go hand in hand. If the global order is not effective, then the individuals to whom its policies are aimed will see no benefits. The concept paper which explains the full GGI picture, rightly points out that as it stands, an example of where the status quo can be improved is fast-tracking the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

But it is not enough that the proposal sounds nice; it must be attainable, too. For China, this question is answered by the fact that it has already been extensively involved with different players for years in efforts that will no doubt augment GGI. The signing of the Tianjin Declaration at the recently concluded SCO summit, for instance, showed that the superpower already has several strategic allies behind its back.

Further, the different but related global programs coming before GGI tell us a lot about how effective the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been when it comes to steering the waves of geopolitics.

The greatest testimonies here lie in the Global Development Initiative (introduced by President Xi at the 76th UN General Assembly session), the Global Security Initiative (introduced by President Xi at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference in 2022), and the Global Civilization Initiative (introduced by President Xi at the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting in 2023).

Taking the second of the trio, a 2024 assessment of the project found that it had already received support from over one hundred countries and that its principles had been adopted in no less than ninety bilateral/multilateral agreements.

GGI is therefore an answer to several issues that have been plaguing international relations for a while now. And from the vision as articulated and the evidence of what China has accomplished previously, there is no doubt that its promise will come to fruition as the years unfold.

The writer is a research fellow at the Development Watch Centre and a Postgraduate Student at the Huangpu Institute for Advanced Study of Social Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences