The current global order — a fraying around many edges

António Guterres, the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations, is sounding increasingly pessimistic about the future of the UN. The world has changed At stake is the post-World War order whose foundations were built even as the Second World War raged on, reflecting a structure that the Allied powers — eventually the victors of that conflict — felt would prevent another global conflagration. In negotiations that stretched beyond the 1942 Declaration, the Soviet Union was further drawn into the fold with a 1943 American proposal of enforcing peace through ‘four policeman’, the U.S., the Soviet Union, the U.K. and China, in effect rewarding major Allied powers with a permanent veto. This might have held the Soviet Union closer to the Allies and ensured China’s help with defeating Japan, but the veto effectively set in stone the power structures of early 19th century Europe, even as growing calls for decolonisation and the ravages of a global conflict were reducing the dominance of the imperial powers. The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 established the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and, in 1947, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which was succeeded by the World Trade Organization in 1995.