Multilateral system needs an upgrade: MEA policy advisor

The multilateral system of the world needs an upgrade as 21st century concerns and issues require institutions to be rebuilt and reformed, Ashok Malik, policy advisor in the Ministry of External Affairs, said on Thursday.

The multilateral system of the world needs an upgrade as 21st century concerns and issues require institutions to be rebuilt and reformed, Ashok Malik, policy advisor in the Ministry of External Affairs, said on Thursday. Speaking at the India Global Week 2020 via video link, Malik said institutions that were set up in the middle of the 20th century at the end of the second World War are simply not appropriate for this century in their current form.

Multilateral system needs an upgrade, he asserted. "The principal concern today is not a nuclear strike but a cyber strike....There are 21st century concerns, issues, definitions and realities or even geographies like the Indo Pacific that matters today in a way the Trans Atlantic mattered," he said.

"These are issues that require institutions to be rebuilt, upgraded, reformed and resourced," he asserted. Former Indian Ambassador to the UN Syed Akbaruddin said the COVID-19 pandemic has made human frailties of institutions and organisations evident.

"What is now different is that we have moved or are certainly moving from an age of cooperation to one of competition and perhaps even confrontation," he said. "That is why we are seeing some of these (multilateral) institutions not measuring up because they were built with the goals of working in a cooperative manner. What we today have is that two of the largest countries pulling in different directions," Akbaruddin said.

On one hand there is the US which has walked out from about 12 multilateral or plurilateral arrangements or treaties and on the other hand there is China trying to work to the detriment of others. Tanya Spisbah, Director, Australia India Institute, and Richard Moore, Director General for Political Affairs at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, UK, also participated in the panel discussion on 'Damaged Goods: A Relevance Crisis for Multilateral Institutions'.

At another session, senior Congress leader and former UN Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoor said he hopes that "when COVID-19 is behind us, the world will actually get together and look hard and fresh at the rules of global governance". "It is the 75th anniversary of the UN. There couldn't be a better landmark to think of this as an opportunity to reinvent the way in which the entire UN system works," he said.

The rapid and global spread of the coronavirus pandemic is a devastating reminder of the consequences of inadequate global governance, Tharoor said. "In many ways, it is a timely memo to sovereign states that the reassertion of sovreignity that we are seeing worldwide must not imply an abandonment of global responsibilities," the Lok Sabha MP said.

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