United Nations 75th anniversary

The birth of the United Nations marks the birth of the liberal order like few other events. An organisation that aimed to establish an international system where independent and sovereign states would sit on an equal footing in an Assembly, representing all nations and peoples not subject to any kind of colonial ties, with the aim of harmonising their development and promoting orderly processes of independence.

From there, international banks and cooperation instruments and programmes were promoted for the construction of a fairer world and the achievement of more dynamic relations in their capacity for growth and commercial activities. And with a Security Council, led by the powers that won the Second World War, with the right of veto, as the guardian of a collective security framework, which should be observed by state actors, defence alliances or revisionist non-state groups in order to address their political decisions and military action projects.

A few years after that exciting birth, made possible by the horrific memory of horror, the violent decolonisation process and the surrounding Cold War became the phenomena which, for 40 years, darkened the future of the organisation and also of the countries and leaders with impassive memories.  

This is how President Donald Trump could have begun his speech on the 75th anniversary of the UN, but he preferred to stop making jokes and get down to business: China is responsible for the coronavirus pandemic and represents a threat to the international order, which, by the way, I have not had time to describe in these seven minutes. It pollutes more than anyone else and is unreliable in view of the disdain with which it treats trade and technological relations which are now both civil and political but may soon be equally technological but essentially military and strategic.  

In a seven-minute election campaign with foreign-policy arguments, he was unable to explain the United Nations' achievements in humanitarian interventionism or recall that, within the same Security Council, the United States' intervention in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was given the green light. After the UN had served as a negotiating framework for the peaceful dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the adaptation of the global order to the post-Communist era. Nor did he propose any multilateral action to combat the pandemic, which he predicted would end happily in 2021.  

Xi Jinping did not respond to Trump's comments with counter-messages but revived the good-natured discourse that China does not intend to bring about any deterioration in the increasingly colourless and insipid world order.

And Putin did not refer to his stubborn intention to present a multipolar system of powers, with defined areas of influence and not subject to the dictates of an organisation that serves him to highlight the evils of his rivals and the goodness of his projects.

Macron spoke at length of Europe and France as a symbiosis of multilateralism and medium power, to warn of the new threats that are changing the context and scenario, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, but not the basis, terrorism and the strengthening of complex groups and interests, in a world whose path, the scant power and European and French genius, cannot even provide guidance.   

In the window, now virtual, of the United Nations Assembly podium where Yasser Arafat went one day with a gun and dressed as a guerrilla, like the sad and fortunately unarmed revolutionary Guevara, the leaders of the great powers have failed to agree on how to set the world straight in this decade. The unhappy 1920s. The years in which the organisation invented by Roosevelt lost its memory and artifice.