What is wrong globally with domestic politics, and could the UN Pact for the Future help?
Thoughts prepared for the 2024 Global Citizen Forum at Drake University
Even when we think, talk and agree at the global level about what needs to be done to improve humanity’s situation and keep the planet inhabitable, as reflected in the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, the follow-through depends largely on domestic politics and institutions. And that’s where the trouble lies.
While each of the UN’s 193 member states has its specific problems, and regions of the world have theirs, there are a few things that are problems of domestic politics virtually everywhere — in the Global North and the Global South alike, even if felt more acutely in certain parts. The four horsemen of our current apocalypse are impunity; nonresponsive decision-making; short-termism; and struggling states.
Impunity
Some of my earliest memories are of Watergate and of my parents rejoicing on a beach in Wales fifty years ago when the news broke of Richard Nixon’s resignation. I don’t have an equally vivid memory of Nixon then being pardoned for his crimes, but I did become aware that he was being allowed to live out his years in comfort, readmitted to polite company and fêted as an elder statesman. From his “full, free, and absolute pardon” in 1974 to his state funeral twenty years later and onward to the death of his security adviser, Henry Kissinger, late last year, there runs a tarnished thread of people with power evading justice of any kind — legal, natural, poetic.
Levels of impunity vary, but most countries have a problem to some degree. Considering how much upheaval there has been in all corners of the world since the 1980s, in the form of revolutions, conflicts, crises, and countless scandals, we have not seen a commensurate reckoning that holds the powerful more accountable than in the past. Hardly any autocrats ever have to answer in a courtroom for having people tortured, raped or murdered, while the chances that a long-serving dictator over the age of 65 (such as Vladimir Putin) will die peacefully in office are 50 percent. Hardly any bankers have been jailed for wrecking economies, and lawyers caught helping clients evade billions of dollars in taxation can get lighter sentences than shoplifters. (Perhaps the framework convention on tax that the UN General Assembly initiated last November will make some difference.)
If we look to the global level to make up for shortcomings of domestic judiciaries, we see that in almost 20 years of activity, the International Criminal Court has fully convicted six men. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted 61 persons, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted 90.
I don’t mean to trivialize the important work those bodies have done; it just seems like a very small fraction of all the people who should have been in the dock. (And the UN has an impunity problem of its own.)
Nonresponsive decision-making
In an age when public opinion can be closely tracked by polling or mined by techniques such as sentiment analysis, there is no excuse for politicians not to be responsive to majority preferences. It would seem to be obvious in a democracy, but even an unaccountable autocrat might still want to know and act on what the people want, so that discontent not reach the point of revolt.
Political scientists go back and forth on the extent to which politicians are in sync with their publics, but there is evidence of a gap, or at least a time lag. A number of studies find that even in “high-quality” democracies, elected representatives are more likely to prioritize issues that are also prioritized by males, the wealthier, the better educated, the more informed or engaged. There is also a growing, and disturbing, literature that suggests that representatives think they are being responsive but carry around very skewed perceptions of what their voters want, because officeholders can be nobbled by constituents with greater access or resolve. In many countries, legislators are not adequately supported by teams of aides who can help them resist pressure from organized interests or bureaucrats. Autocrats may believe they are well informed because they have ears and eyes everywhere, but secret police just pass along the lies that everyone tells while concealing their true opinions.
Of course, majorities can be tyrannical, and leaders should have the discretion to reject demands that would harm protected or vulnerable classes. The people’s preferences on individual issues might not be reconcilable, which is why it is ultimately prudent to leave almost all decisions to representatives rather than referendums. But when I look at global polling by the Pew Research Center and other outfits, I find most countries’ majorities seem quite moderate and reasonable, and could be trusted to want their governments to do the right thing.
Short-termism
The perverse incentive of democratic accountability, as is often pointed out, is that it is rational for elected representatives to focus on policies that will help them remain elected representatives. Policies that will bear fruit much later and benefit unborn generations have to take a back seat to ones that will pay off in two, three or four years. Difficult, unpopular decisions get punted, and if one is taken, rival parties might seek votes on a promise to reverse it. (Consider New Zealand’s recent U-turn on changes to the legal age for smoking that would eventually have banned it.)
This is not just a problem in democracies. In more corrupt and clientelistic settings, politics is a quid pro quo to preserve the status quo, with no place for boldness. And there is scant evidence that autocrats take advantage of their autonomy (and disregard for formal term limits, if they exist) to strategize about the long-term good of the country, as they often have to focus on placating predatory factions in the ruling elite (developmental regimes like South Korea’s before 1988 are rare).
States that struggle
When Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace but not in handcuffs, the international economic system was undergoing a massive transition: the postwar Bretton Woods order was giving way to something more fluid, turbulent and open. With globalization came predictions of the obsolescence or waning of the sovereign state. But even if the state has indeed surrendered some of the controls it used to wield, we still turn to it first for protection from terrorists and foreign armies and viruses, for rescue from market failure, for shelter from the forces of enraged nature. Some kinds of public goods and insurance can still be delivered only by the state, or can be delivered by the state more efficiently than by private firms or NGOs.
Most states, of course, have never come anywhere close to the “Westphalian” Weberian ideal type still commonly featured in comparative politics textbooks; the disenchanting, ordinary sovereignty experienced by postcolonies in regions like the Caribbean was always much more the norm. It was fitting that the accords that formally ended Bretton Woods were signed in Jamaica in 1976, a year that ended with a violent election that almost took Bob Marley’s life, and Jamaica today is somewhere around the global median on the Fragile States Index, just over the line into the “Warning” zone.
States don’t all have to be on the level of Norway or Iceland; governance just needs to be “good enough”. Judging by the Fragile States Index, around 30 states are high-functioning and another 35 (including the UK and USA) are “good enough”. But that probably leaves around 120 countries with states that struggle to do even the minimum that might reasonably be expected today. That has consequences for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, which are “seriously off track” for 2030.
Could the UN Pact for the Future remedy these problems?
To try to get things back on track, per the Common Agenda “wake-up call” sounded by Secretary-General Guterres, the UN will convene a Summit for the Future on 22–23 September. Heads of state and government will agree on “Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow” that will be sealed in a Pact (an “action-oriented outcome document”). The organizers acknowledge that what urgently needs to be done has long been known and agreed to at many previous summits; the challenge is how to recommit the signatories to meeting their pledges and Sustainable Development Goals.
If the 20-page draft Pact for the Future published in January 2024 is a reliable guide to what will be approved in September, it will be a commendable document that contains interesting ideas for reform of the UN itself (perhaps even of the broken Security Council), but will offer little to tackle the core problems of impunity, nonresponsive decision-making and weakness in the member states themselves, many of which will sign the Pact in bad faith.
As for the problem of short-termism, I’d like to be more hopeful about the Pact’s chapter on Youth and Future Generations and the planned annex to the Pact, a Declaration on Future Generations.
- The draft Pact directs “all States to establish national youth consultative bodies with a mandate and the requisite resources to formally engage in national policymaking and decision-making processes and call upon the United Nations system to support this process at the national level, as relevant and appropriate.”
- Stakeholder consultations for the draft Declaration in January 2024 heard “large endorsement” of the idea of a UN Future Generations Special Envoy; an annual future generations report to guide and inform policies, with metrics; the recognition of the rights of future generations and intergenerational equity; and establishment of country-level “platforms” for future voices.
The idea that contemporary politics needs to build in some consideration of the future and representation of unborn generations is increasingly accepted or at least entertained theoretically. A growing number of countries have legislative committees with mandates to factor the future into lawmaking (they held their second world summit last September). But only Wales has an independent commissioner to remind politicians of their duties to future generations (or look at least 25 years ahead, in practical terms); this is presumably the kind of “platform” that the Declaration could direct other countries to emulate.
With the Pact and Declaration, the UN has the potential to “mainstream[…] future-proofing”, in the sense of “improving the capacity of institutions, policies and processes to enhance the long-term survival of humanity, by accounting for the interests of future generations and addressing extreme risks.”
That is what I want to see. That, and Putin in a cell at the Hague.
Kieran Williams teaches political science at Drake University. His latest publication, co-edited with David Danaher, is Václav Havel’s Meanings.
