Reflections on the META-UN inaugural conference, 6-7 February 2025
On 6-7 February 2025, META-UN was launched with the inaugural conference “The United Nations: Looking Towards the Future. From history to the current and future challenges of global governance and law”, held at the Palais des Nations, the European headquarters of the United Nations. META-UN is a so-called global outreach project, established jointly by Flagship 2 of the 4EU+ European University Alliance and HUM:Global. META-UN aims to create a lasting interphase with the UN system to engage in a sustained and constructive dialogue on (a) challenges to UN decision-making and international law; (b) contemporary challenges for global governance; (c) the history, historical heritage and archival preservation of the UN’s eight decades of multilateral work.
The conference gathered close to forty academics (from law, political science, history and beyond), UN officials and other practitioners for an honest, open and multifaceted discussion about the current state of multilateralism and the United Nations, the long trajectories leading towards the present, and the many challenges and possibilities that are on the horizon. Without giving a detailed resume, there were three key takeaways from the conference.
(1) Multilateralism is in crisis due to longstanding developments systemic imbalances, and new, disruptive tensions in the international system. This means that the United Nations is under unprecedented pressure, due to deep-seated conflicts among its member states, increasing budget constraints, and a receding investment in the procedures, policies and rules of multilateral cooperation and global governance among key actors. For the United Nations as such, the problem seems to be moving from disagreement with policy priorities within the organization to disengagement with the UN as an organization.
(2) This is emphatically not true, however, if we have a global contemporary and historically more nuanced view of what the UN was and where it stands now. The UN has always been an arena for cross-ideological and political contestations and cooperation and never solely an ‘instrument’ for a purely Western or liberal “rules-based order”. Measuring the UN against such a yardstick would therefore miss the point. This was indeed one of the key takeaways from Alanna O’Malley’s (University of Leiden) and Sandrine Kott’s (University of Geneva) enlightening twin-keynote at the conference. Indeed, many of the discussions at the conference brought home the message that from a global perspective, the UN has been an arena to leverage the influence of what some term “the Global South”. Despite deep disappointments and the institutional imbalance of the UN (particularly prevalent in the UN Security Council), therefore, many member states - spanning the east, west, north and south - are urgently concerned with institutional reforms and strengthening. Moreover, as several of the panels of the conference highlighted, the decentred, diverse and deeply institutionalised nature of the UN’s multilateralism, developed over the last century (including the League of Nations), increases its resilience in times of crisis.
(3) Last, there is a deep desire in academia, civil society and within the UN itself, to seize this moment to create a dialogue that is deeper than before. The conference showed that there is a need to mobilize the vast repositories of critical knowledge that are available among scholars, to listen to the experiences and institutional know-how of UN officials, and to engage with civil society globally on these issues. This trialogue, which META-UN will play its part in forging, needs each corner of the triangle to remain true to its ethics and priorities - indeed, herein lies the potential.
Accordingly, META-UN is set to launch several important education, research, engagement and policy-science initiatives in the coming years. Stay tuned!
Haakon A. Ikonomou, Director HUM:Global, University of Copenhagen