The future of the United Nations as a strong international organisation was under threat, said Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Wednesday.
Addressing delegates at the World Customs Organisation conference in Fourways, Johannesburg, Manuel said: ”Globalisation is bringing about increased economic and political integration. The reality however is that the same processes that are bringing us all together in a global village are placing the residents of the global village in different positions.
”Some have emerged as the dominant and others as the dominated with the dominant being the decision-makers and the dominated being the recipients and implementers of these decisions.”
He said this situation called for the development of institutions that work in the interests of everybody.
”South African and a number of other developed and developing countries have accordingly strongly advocated for a strong, effective and popularly accepted United Nations.
”Recent dramatic events have threatened the United Nations as a strong international multilateral organisation. We are faced with the choice of establishing a strong multi-polar international system that focuses on the interests of all its constituents, or a uni-polar world where the law of the jungle prevails.”
Manuel said ”… the distribution of international power is not in the interest of all the players”.
Depending on the place people occupied in the world, they had different priorities.
”The rich are concerned about maintaining the status quo and the poor are interested in changing their condition for the better.”
The failure of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Cancun meeting with delegates unable to agree on a mandate for the next round of trade negotiations had ”thrown into disarray the immediate future of the multilateral trading system”.
This failure was ”the latest in a trend of failed WTO negotiations, the most spectacular being the fiasco in Seattle in 1999,” said Manuel.
”In many ways the seeds of failure were laid in the outcome of the Uruguay Round (of trade negotiations), which started in 1986 and ended in Marrakech in 1993.
”At the heart of the Uruguay Round outcome was a structured imbalance in the benefits derived by the rich and poorer countries respectively,” he said.
There were however some gains at Cancun. There was a strategic realignment of power in the WTO with the emergence of the Group of 20+. This Group ”significantly
strengthened the bargaining power of developing countries.
”The result was an important moral and political victory, which sought to constrain the dominance of the powerful countries.
”Despite the gains, it must be recognised that this was at best a defensive victory. By itself, the collapse of the talks does not advance the interest of developing countries. It merely points to the need for change in the terms of engagement.”
Manuel said the challenge was to ensure people world-wide had confidence in the ”multilateral system in all its various dimensions” and that this system was capable of addressing matters of concern to everybody.
”We need to maintain vigilance in regard to prospects for increasing bilateralism and the risk that such developments may effectively marginalise developing countries,” he said. – Sapa