“THE REST” MATTERS

In practice, the first edition of the Forum will host around 2,500 people in the Grande Halle de la Villette, a former slaughterhouse turned cultural center on the northeast edge of Paris. Attendees from government, businesses, NGOs, foundations, the media, think tanks, and religious institutions from all corners of the world will take part in dozens of simultaneous debates—or agoras—on global challenges, will wander around stands presenting and raising support for 119 global governance projects—selected from a pool of 848 applicants—or will join the live hackathon on global financial transparency.

France has decided to adjoin the first edition of the forum to the commemorative celebrations of the 1918 armistice, so as to ensure strong heads of state and/or government participation and offer some war-and-peace gravitas to the forum. The world leaders will attend a lunch at the Élysée Palace after the ceremonies, then travel by bus to the forum, where they will listen to opening speeches by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, before participating, on a voluntary basis, in workshops, debates, and other gatherings within the Grande Halle. At the time of writing, it is still unknown who will do what.

The forum was born out of the ambition to secure France’s place on the map of arenas where the fate of the world is discussed—such as the Munich Security Conference, the Shangri-La Dialogue, or Davos. Most other forums deal with security and the economy, and France hoped to make a different kind of contribution. The country’s priorities as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and a major advanced economy are far from parochial, and there are few global challenges which France does not want to touch. “Peace,” a universal ideal, is the umbrella concept for the five themes of the forum: development, environment, inclusive economy, new technologies, and peace and security.

The forum is intentionally non-Western-centric. The 119 projects selected to be presented at the forum originate from 42 countries and 10 international organizations. The 15-member steering committee gathers prominent individuals from five continents. France views itself as a bridge between the North and the South in yesterday’s world, the West and the Rest in today’s. Its four-corners-of-the-world colonial past gives France a massive network of partners and allies, in the name of which the country enjoys speaking in international organizations—although, in their eyes, France remains most often a European power, suspect of grandstanding for the sake of its own grandeur.

The French state hardly contributes financially to the forum, and the organizers preferred looking for non-Western support. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation is a founding member and Abu Dhabi’s environment agency a “grand partner,” but American philanthropy (Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation) and German public and foundation money (Germany’s development agency GIZ, the Körber Foundation) end up being unavoidable—that is where the big bucks are. The French have also publicized the forum outside Europe and North America as much as possible—and ended up flying in participants from poorer regions to reach their objective of inclusivity. A diverse crowd will be one of the metrics of the forum’s success.

THE WORLD WITHOUT TRUMP

At this point, it is too early to tell whether the forum will have sustaining power. Will the press, the public, and the participants become interested enough in the projects that they are willing to see their progress through (10 projects will be honored at the end of the forum, and monitored afterwards)? Will participants from non-Western countries feel represented and valued, rather than being used by Macron to give the forum a veneer of inclusion?

Regrettably, the Paris Peace Forum will not address some of the most pressing issues regarding peace and security in the world today: civil/proxy wars in Yemen and Syria, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, or rising tensions between the United States and China. Truth be told, these are long-term crises implicating great powers’ spheres of influence and high-stake military interests, hardly solvable by a bottom-up approach.

Yet, Macron, who likes to portray himself as a clear-eyed pragmatist willing to engage with autocratic or populist leaders, imagined the forum to be a platform where everything can be debated—including a very un-French ban on nuclear weapons. All leaders in attendance will have a chance to present their vision, including Russian President Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The Chinese president is not in attendance, yet his big political project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), will be presented by the Chinese embassy as a project under the label “inclusive economy.” Beyond the obvious understatement of BRI as a simple “project,” its inclusion is indicative of the ambiguity of the French approach: Should committed multilateralists be focused on the diffusion of liberal norms and standards? Or should the forum be truly inclusive, up to the point of presenting all worldviews, including those antithetical to the idea of a rules-based order?

In that case, what about Donald Trump? In the most recent phone call between Trump and Macron in October, the French president did not even mention the forum to his American counterpart—and keep in mind that this is a presidential initiative gathering 60 world leaders, not a small event. The limits of the Macron-Trump partnership is on full display here: It works as long as they deal with bilateral issues, but they stand on opposite side of the political spectrum on everything else. So as to avoid jeopardizing their relationship, the Frenchman appears to be avoiding all irritants, including the forum.

The American president’s absence at the forum reflects the American unmooring from the world of multilateralism.

Yet this is a mistake. Donald Trump needs to hear what the “good will powers,” as French minister of foreign affairs calls them, and civil society from all over the world have to say. At its heart, the Paris Peace Forum fundamentally aims to be a rejection of the world of Trump, Putin, and Xi, a “civil society” answer to the deficiencies of great powers, and a “populist” response to out-of-touch governments and sleepwalking institutions, in the hope of transcending the status quo and reviving multilateralism. American NGOs, think tanks, foundations and businesses are heavily invested in the project. But the American president’s absence at the forum reflects the American unmooring from the world of multilateralism and international institutions that it did much to shape since the armistice, from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of power in the 21st century. Once again isolating itself under President Trump, the United States is losing an opportunity for America to influence tomorrow’s rules of engagement, and gifting others, including China and Russia, a chance to advance their competing visions.