Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied, Richard Falk, and former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, are the authors of Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope (Stanford University Press, 2024). In this question and answer with Daniel Falcone, they break down the main arguments of their book, along with the relevance of the UN Summit of the Future, as well as the consequences of neoliberalism, and the impacts of the western world’s rightward drift. Falk and von Sponeck complicate the geopolitical term, “realism,” and discuss the ramifications for how global governance can move forward with hope, while drawing on key thinkers and young leaders in the present.

Daniel Falcone: Can you discuss the general thesis or main arguments of the book and how they connect to, take say, specific UN matters in terms of making a difference in Ukraine and Gaza, along with the respective reasons for the challenges in these areas of conflict?

Richard Falk: From our perspective there were several interlocking themes that induced us to write this book:

1) The UN exhibits an increasing marginality with respect to the maintenance of global security in relation to political conflicts and ecological stability at an historical moment where institutional guidance and multilateral cooperation was most needed to address urgent present and future challenges.

2) The world needs global venues most legitimately provided by the UN to facilitate multilateral cooperation on a series of planetary challenges—war prevention, climate change, nuclear disarmament, genocide, and regulation of AI; a strengthened UN is the best hope for mitigating the current manner by which geopolitical centralized management of power and security and the more decentralized primacy accorded national interests exert control over conflict, diplomacy, and ecological resilience.

3) Although the UN has been disappointing to peace-minded and justice inclined sectors of public opinion, it has been a force for human betterment in such domains of international life such as health, childcare, development, financial assistance, cultural heritage, environmental protection, labor, disaster relief, and human rights, making it clarifying to distinguish between a war/peace UN and a functional UN.

4) To perform in an effective manner that responds to the global public interest, the UN urgently needs structural and procedural reforms, including an expanded and more independent funding base, and more empowerment for the General Assembly, Secretary General, and International Court of Justice.

5) As the well-intentioned SG’s September initiative ‘Summit for the Future’ made evident, political traction for a benevolent reform agenda does not presently exist at the level of the P5 nor as a priority of media or public opinion in the West, making the future of the UN and the protection of longer-term human interests and ecological resilience depend on the transnational activism of civil society.

Overall, despite the declining interest in the UN throughout the global West, especially the US, the UN currently plays an important role in promoting the daily betterment of tens of millions of human lives throughout the world. To strengthen its relevance to situations such as presented by the Ukraine War and the Gaza Genocide requires fundamental reforms as noted and a strengthening of UN capabilities to offset, and even overcome, the role of current forms of geopolitics in the management of global power and security, which has taken hegemonic, and militarist turns since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than 30 years ago.

Hans von Sponeck: I consider three issues discussed in the book of major importance:

1) We reviewed in our book the cooperation of the executive/operational UN of specialized agencies, funds and programmes over time and concluded that this system has come a long way during the past eighty years – from splendid isolation; in the early years, when individual UN entities executed their programmes without any outreach to their UN counterparts to broad-based inter-agency integration in recent years. The result: one UN system programme, headed by one UN official, the UN Resident Coordinator, working with one budget, and being housed in one building – a pattern which has been adopted by more and more UN country teams. This, we argue, should become the mandatory approach wherever the UN system has programmes.

2) There is another level of ‘link-up’ which is significantly more complex: the cooperation between the UN’s political and peace-keeping missions concerned with conflict prevention and peacebuilding and the UN country teams involved in economic and social development. As we indicate, only recently has the red line between the Security Council and the General Assembly and the operational UN become less red allowing integrated UN approaches. We consider this a valuable and far-reaching accomplishment and a milestone on the UN’s road to liberation. We would hope that the UN Pact for the Future and the UNGA will lead to structural coherence and coordination in multi-lateral circumstances.

3) The third major area of concern, we have addressed, has to do with the financing of the UN. The budget at the disposal of the UNSG has been pitifully inadequate at all times. In 2022 it amounted to $3.1 billion, or less than 45 cents/pp on the planet. We have recognized three serious financing issues: i. the perennial annual cash shortfall and the aggravating late payments by many member governments; ii. the absence of alternative sources of finance which could provide much needed additional resources and also help to protect the organisation against financial blackmail; iii. the defunding threats by some governments to influence UN policies, UN work content and the appointment of senior UN officials.

Daniel Falcone: What do you think will be the tone and approach for the upcoming UN Summit of the Future based on the findings you present in the book?

Richard Falk: As suggested, the UN Summit of the Future prepared documents and held meetings of governments that set forth in comprehensive and ambitious frames what needs to be done by sovereign states and the UN to address presently perceived principal global challenges. This provides both desirable policy guidelines, positive world order agendas and goals, and markers of progress. It also will determine whether there is sufficient political traction to lessen corporate and nationalist short-termism, promote respect for Charter values including enhanced respect for international law, and induce governments to align their behavior and advocacy with global and human interests. To achieve such results also would benefit from an improved UN pedagogy, which our book hopes to encourage, on the benefits of a more autonomous UN more endowed with the capabilities needed to perform along the lines pledged by the Preamble to the UN Charter. The realist narrative that best tells the UN story from the time of creation is one of realism without hope to realism with hope as reinforced by moral, ecological, and survivalist imperatives.

Despite such reasoning, there is little reason to be hopeful in the present atmosphere of distrust and enmity, especially so long as the US insists on coercively managing global security and Western hegemony within a framework of alliance politics that is no longer able to enjoy the confidence or even the acquiescence of most countries in the Global South. What is more probable in reaction to these anarchic and hegemonic features is the increasing formation of likeminded de-Westernizing coalitions in the Global South that seek to balance Global West ambitions and strategic concerns, especially with respect to trade, finance, investment, energy, and environmental protection.

Hans von Sponeck: The UN General Assembly has passed a resolution on a ‘Pact for the Future’ (GA/12641 of 2 October 2024). In 52 action points which include such key reform issues such as the adoption of an ‘inclusive process to adapt international cooperation to the realities of today and the challenges of tomorrow’ and ‘the most progressive and concrete commitment to Security Council reform’ and ‘the representation of the SC redressing the historical underrepresentation of Africa’. This can only be welcomed. As there is no reference in this resolution of the ‘how’, the ‘who’ and the ‘when’, the GA has taken no more than a small step in what is undoubtedly going to be a long and complicated reform process. What is most disconcerting is that member countries were not given an opportunity to debate the draft resolution but only asked to react to a draft. This explains the decision by seven countries, including the P5 member Russia, (and Iran) which have voted against this resolution. The reform debate has thus started on a confrontational note.

Daniel Falcone: How can the United Nations regain its footing in terms of its effectiveness and legitimacy, in your view, without succumbing to the dangers of a global rightward drift?

Richard Falk: I believe that the Global South with the support of China should focus on the need for Charter reform that reflects the will of governments sensitive to the material needs, as well as social protection and equitable distributions of wealth that benefit the great majority of the world’s peoples. With the collapse of European colonialism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as the developmental progress of many countries, the political landscape of 1945 is hopelessly out-of-date if one objective of the UN is to reflect contemporary realities, priorities, and challenges. The UN must be empowered to play a much greater role with respect to war mitigation and genocide/atrocity prevention.

The current, largely voluntaristic approach, to respect international law must also end and be replaced by an ethos of obligatory respect. Such changes could take various forms, above all, placing restrictions on the P5 right of veto in the Security Council, lessening of limitations on General Assembly authority by allowing the passage of binding recommendations, enhancing the role of the  International Court of Justice (ICJ) by way of decisions, submission of international legal disputes between states, the absence of assured enforcement of decisions due to a dependence on the Security Council for implementation, and the designation of international law guidance in response to UN requests for clarification as authoritative for legal issues now labeled as ‘Advisory Opinions.’

The existing UN Charter does not situate international law in such a way as to give its legal assessments the force of law in the manner of a well-ordered national society. Such a framework of international law as the UN has embodied up to this point could be satirized by humorists as an Orwellian trope that strains the limits of language usage.

This ambivalence toward international law is what has made the UN as a political actor compatible with a behavioral code within the UN acknowledging the primacy of geopolitics in relation to the management of security and power in international relations. In effect, during the Cold War, this geopolitical dimension of the UN was most significantly exhibited by the standoff between the NATO alliance and the Warsaw Pact that formed the basis of mutual deterrence, respect for geopolitical fault lines, and the self-limitations of Great Power conflict to ideological hostility and peripheral warfare (as in Korea, Vietnam, East Europe), combined with a mutual commitment to avoid escalation in the context of geopolitical confrontations.

When Russia replaced the Soviet Union with reduced global political leverage and China stayed out of the costly game of geopolitical rivalry, the US-led Western rivalry took over geopolitical space, arming the world and accepting the expense of constructing a non-territorial ‘global state.’ Even before the Ukraine War, which among other things represented a Russian attempt to reenter geopolitical space, and the Gaza Genocide that illustrated how far the Western alliance would go in violating the global public interest in upholding minimal morality and its own supposed ethical values as well as respecting certain outer limits on the internal uses of political violence, it became obvious that this post-Cold War period of international relations was coming to an end in a manner that gave no positive edge to the behavior of the most liberal democracies as compared to the more internationally engaged autocracies.

This meant that the UN would swallow its institutional pride and accept its continued marginality when it came to global security and relations among the centers of military and economic power. Or the UN and its membership must challenge such an identity in a coherent and persuasive way with rising support from deeply worried and aroused civil society forces that seek to tame both geopolitics and its corporate and finance beneficiaries. Already there are signs, especially in relation to the world economy, that if the UN is not de-Westernized considering its postcolonial identities, then forms of inter-governmental institutional cooperation will be increasingly relied upon to achieve the sort of reforms reflective of the changed realities. Both the increasingly active BRICS and the Chinese cooperative development frameworks are illustrative of how the role of the UN is being addressed by an awakening Global South.

Meanwhile, an American bipartisan political elite is entrapped in a delusional trance, believing that ‘the world’ welcomes and needs US global leadership of the kind that evolved in the post-Cold War era, which hastened another kind of retreat from earlier claims of establishing a UN for the peoples of the world. The Clinton, G.W. Bush, and Biden efforts to connect the American model of capitalist democracy with peace, justice, restraint, and internationalism was not even convincing to half of its own citizenry, nor can it can it be said that the non-Western formal democracies, such as India, Indonesia, and China were more disposed to sacrifice national sovereignty than were the leading Western democracies that themselves gave few signs of any willingness to make the scale of reforms that would allow the UN to become more effective.

Such a portrayal of the UN in crisis needs some modification. During the Gaza Genocide the forces of the Global South were more inclined to rely on international law and public opinion to end the Israeli onslaught on Palestinians and shame the complicit Western supporters of Israel that failed to use their political leverage even to gain a permanent ceasefire agreement, combined with hostage release and IDF withdrawal. Although ICJ performed its role in a highly professional manner that enhanced its global reputation by issuing interim orders in the opening months of 2024 that ordered Israeli restraints in its Gaza campaign with the objective of mitigating the growing humanitarian catastrophe until a final decision on genocide could be reached. The tangible results of the ICJ rulings were minimal so far as the Palestinians are concerned. Israel was defiant. The complicit governments somewhat toned down their explicit support for Israel but refrained from exerting available forms of leverage to induce compliance such as imposing an arms embargo.

This pattern of an authoritative delimitation of international law with respect to Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestinian Territories followed by Israel’s defiance that included Netanyahu’s denunciation of the UN from the podium of the General Assembly as ‘the swamp of antisemitic bile,’ ‘the anti-Israel flat-earth society,’ ‘the shredding of the UN Charter by Israel’s ambassador from the GA podium, and the formal decree declaring the UN Secretary General as ‘persona non grata’ in Israel were part of unprecedented anti-UN defamation by a UN Member, a country that Biden kept bonding with as sharing Western democratic values. Such defamation of the UN did not even lead to criticism from the liberal democracies, reinforcing the impression that a democratic internal structure lent no assurance of behavior supportive of UN values or positive institutional reform.

In my judgment, rescuing the UN in the peace and security area will not happen in a peaceful manner without a pedagogical interlude in which the US and other Western countries by way of their foreign policy elites recalculate their own interests considering international realities of the 21^st Century. Should governments with the support of their citizenries conclude that a stronger, more law-governed world order would serve the interests of their citizenries better than the militarized control system that has evolved since its mid-17^th century Westphalian origins it would undoubtedly include a policy agenda for drastic UN reform. I think such a welcome dynamic would have relatively little to do with whether Western-style democracy prevailed in the states leading the way toward a stronger UN. More significant by far would be the willingness of political elites and leaders to give sufficient weight to longer term behavioral adjustments and policy goals.

Hans von Sponeck: There is no ‘global’ rightward drift. Such drift exists in west-oriented countries. The western and non-western worlds, however, have two things in common, a trend towards extremism within individual countries and polarisation in their international relations. The 52 action points for reforms included in the UN Pact for the Future, if being tackled in earnest, will start a process of ‘democratization’ of the ‘political’ United Nations (SC &GA) replacing unipolar power politics with multipolar decision making. It would be an illusion, to assume that structural UN reforms will commence during the current confrontational geopolitical reality. The ongoing wars will have to end first, and new leadership of major powers must become convinced that cooperation is for everyone the better alternative to confrontation. Groups of countries, joined by civil society, will have to be the engine for such a profound pivot.

Daniel Falcone: I am particularly interested in how you incorporate neoliberal globalization and the Washington Consensus into the various themes of the book. The definition of these terms and their consequences seem crucial. How would define them and assess their respective impacts?

Richard Falk: The role of private sector influence is both direct and indirect in the functioning of the UN exerting influence over the allocation of budgets and using monetary contributions to discourage criticism and to allow corporate concerns to condition especially the declarations and programs of the functional UN where economic approaches are prominent. This includes health (and its relation to property rights of ‘big pharma’; oligopolistic control of ‘industrial agriculture’ (with its biasing of policy toward ‘smart agriculture’ and away from ‘agroecology,’ ‘resilient agriculture,’ and traditional forms of ‘small-holder farming.’) This corporate influence over UN health and food activities, entrusted within the UN system mainly to the WHO and FAO allows this behavior to slip by almost unnoticed even by UN observers and the media. And when, for instance, in the work of the Human Rights Council, the harm to humans and animals from the excessive use of pesticides is reported objectively, the corporate wrongdoers hire investigators to discredit experts who prepared the damning reports.

As part of his presidential campaign in 1988, George H.W. Bush agreed to use American influence to dissolve the UN Center of Information on Multilateral Corporations, and he delivered. Nothing subsequently has been established. In effect, in the last decade of the Cold War and the first decade of the post-Cold War where neoliberal globalization and the Washington Consensus dominated political consciousness signaling the geopolitical triumph of capitalism as legitimated by adherence to constitutionalism and free elections. It was George W. Bush who in 2002 articulated the prevailing view in the West that market forces plus constitutionalism was the only legitimate form of government in the 21^st century and that it was the US that would look after global security by force projection on a global scale. The earlier American national security doctrine as revised by the 9/11 attacks advised China to concentrate on trade, investment, and economic development, and not waste its time or money in challenging US leadership with respect to upholding global security.

The UN reflected this two-phase US led approach to world order, with the first phase dominated by the triumph of neoliberal globalization, and a post-Cold War economistic preoccupation with trade, investment, development, and a unipolar global world economic order. The second phase involved the re-securitization of US foreign policy in purported reaction to the 9/11 attacks, generating a counter-terrorism assault on various countries in the Global South. The Iraq War of 2003, launched by US/UK regime-changing, state-building, and punitive armed intervention in Iraq despite the UN Security Council rejecting an appeal for authorization to use force outside the scope of self-defense, represented a post-Cold War reaffirmation of the previously degraded war prevention role of the UN. Bush, US president at the time, predicted that the UN would become ‘irrelevant’ in war/peace situations if it failed to give its green light to the US/UK Iraq War scenario of aggression, regime change, and long-term occupation.

The war went ahead without UN authorization, and the Bush prediction has been confirmed by subsequent UN practice. The realities of neoliberal globalization as embodied in the Washington consensus has fallen out of favor as descriptive of capitalist ideology or US leadership, but many destructive features of contemporary capitalism remain, including growing patterns of inequality, squeezing the middle classes when it comes to health, education, and family size, ecologically unsustainable energy policies, short-termism, and worker insecurity due to automation and AI.

Hans von Sponeck: Neoliberalism, capitalism, and de-regulation have their origin in the west. The consensus was reached not in Moscow but in Washington! The impact of their existence has been documented throughout the book as part of the west-centric policy tool kit used to control the current global order.  We support the view that a ‘NIEO’, a new international economic order, following the failure of the Doha round of trade talks, is a precondition for more equitable playing fields globally. International financial policies have been determined until recently by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury, with the US$ as the only reserve currency. Even though the IMF and the WB are two UN agencies, they have unfailingly represented western interests, thereby contributing to global distortions disadvantageous to the rest of the world. We therefore consider the reform of the international financial architecture as one of the prime UN reform issues. We note in this regard that the UN Pact for the Future has referred to the need to ‘strengthen…the representation of developing countries’ in such reformed financial structures.

Daniel Falcone: I’m interested in your subtitle, Realism with Hope. I assume this refers to forms of left realism in certain capacities. Does this phrasing refer to how policy and academia can complement one another? Or, in other words, another challenge for the UN seems to be how it balances its commitments to a top-down, NGO institutional framework versus a more focused, bottom-up approach of confronting real-life situations without legalistic terminology in guiding discussions and solutions. Is the UN overwhelmed with technocrats at the expense of activists?

Richard Falk: Your question here raises several complex issues. At least my understanding of the use of ‘realism’ in this context is not concerned with ‘legal realism’ but rather with ‘political realism’ that continues to exert decisive influence over the foreign policy of dominant states. Such realism tends to be dismissive of international law if these constraints clash with strategic national interests involving security concerns, alliance relations, geopolitical ambitions, and internal sovereign rights.

The dominant state in the post-Cold War period has been the US, backstopped by the NATO alliance and the Israeli partnership, with China in the double role of moderating influence and rising rival, and Russia since the Ukraine War as the chief challenge to this structure of global security as managed almost exclusively by and for the Global West.

So far, the UN is mainly preoccupied by the interaction between the geopolitical P3 (of the P5 status SC members) and the rest of its 193 Member States. It has made gestures to include civil society representatives of NGOs in the functional side of its undertakings where advisory and informal guidance may be helpful, especially to least developed and smaller states. To date, the UN has given almost no direct role to populist forms of activism. Its most objective and respected political organ is the International Court of Justice, which in 2024 demonstrated its apolitical, professional character in addressing both the Gaza Genocide and the prolonged unlawfulness of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The ICJ is limited, again as recent proceedings confirm, by its lack of independent enforcement authority or capabilities, and it is totally dependent when it comes to implementation by recourse to the veto-prone Security Council.

The hope expressed in our title is both a recognition of the manifest inadequacy of realism as the foundation for the geopolitical management of global security and relations among the leading states and furthermore, a growing awareness that alternative structures are possible and not necessarily intrusive when it comes to territorial sovereignty. The UN has limped along on a design that was imposed on the Organization by the winners of World II, which was never entirely appropriate or up to its assigned tasks. Over the 79 years since it was established, the UN has become less and less reflective of the political landscape. Major shifts have occurred throughout its history, including the collapse of the European colonial empires, the ending of the Cold War, the health, food, and supply chain disruptions associated with the COVID pandemic and its inflationary impact that particularly strained the world’s least developed countries. Related disruptions associated with armed combat also illustrated limits on the capabilities of the UN to help societies in need. The UN has never really been staffed by technocrats or shaped by the goals of activists. It has, especially when it comes to the war/peace agenda, been dealt with by diplomats representing Member States as facilitated by UN civil servants, and if events were of concern to activists, by demonstrations and side events at UN headquarters in New York and Geneva.

Hans von Sponeck: In a paper entitled ‘Liberating the UN to Serve the Global Public Good’, we recommend a ‘rethinking’ of realism as a policy guide for those involved in the process of reforming the UN to become an organisation based on ‘human, and ecologically sensitive realism’ that benefits humanity world-wide. Cooperation between UN policy and academia in this respect would be of benefit for both. I would argue that such cooperation should be based on synergy rather than complementarity. The assumption, of course, is that there is an interest in cooperation in the first place. The UN University in Tokyo and the operational UN of specialized agencies, funds and programmes is a perfect example of inadequate cooperation even though both are devoted to the Charter objectives of peace and progress. In recognition of the value-added for both of such cooperation, the UN reform process must make serious efforts to define concrete steps that create the necessary linkages. UN civil servants – technocrats or activists? There is an oath of office all staff must make. It includes work that must be carried out ‘in all loyalty, discretion and conscience…with the interests of the UN only in view’.

This means, at least in theory, that staff at all levels are ‘activists’ in the pursuit of ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion’ and ‘for harmonizing…actions in the attainment of these common ends.’ As I participate in debates of the global order, my views and positions are often equated with being a ‘leftist’. My reaction to this classification is that anyone who is working for the UN and has taken Charter principles and purpose seriously, is, by definition, reflecting ‘leftist’ philosophy.

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