Global Governance for the 21st Century

Article originally published by Center on National Security

The Swedish Foundation felt that the United Nations system was no longer fit for purpose – it no longer fulfilled the aims for which it was established. Clear evidence for this is the fact that we are confronting a range of global catastrophic risks which are putting enormous pressure on our existing institutions, which have remained largely frozen in time in their essential features and find themselves increasingly unable to cope with the challenges that we face in a world that bears little resemblance to the one we had in 1945, at the outset of the postwar period. To take a few examples.

On the issue of climate change, scientists are increasingly alarmed about the consequences of rising sea levels, extreme weather conditions, and biodiversity loss and what these might mean for food production in the context of steady population growth. The recent reports of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) highlight the rapid narrowing of opportunities over the next decade, to take urgent actions to mitigate possibly large-scale disruptions to our social, economic and political order.

Another issue is nuclear proliferation, which has been a constant during much of the last 75 years and has not disappeared as a problem with the end of the Cold War. Add to this a renewed arms race and 9,000 nuclear warheads, with enough firepower to convert our planet into what Jonathan Schell termed “a republic of insects and grass” . . .