Richard Gowan is UN Director of the International Crisis Group and an Associate Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. You may follow him on X @RichardGowan1.

There has been something a little surreal, or even other-worldly, about negotiations at the United Nations on this year’s Summit of the Future. Secretary-General António Guterres first proposed the Summit as an opportunity to find “consensus on what the future should look like” in 2021. The three years since then have been among the most turbulent in the world organization’s post-Cold War history, with huge rows in the Security Council and General Assembly over Ukraine and Gaza. The UN has often looked like an organization at breaking point. Yet in parallel, diplomats have plugged away at talks on the technicalities of the Summit of the Future, combed through successive drafts of a Pact for the Future line by line, and got tangled up in minor drafting disputes.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres introducing “Our Common Agenda” to the member states

Weary UN officials and ambassadors often note the apparent disconnect between talks on the Summit and the wider sense of chaos at the UN. Many grumble that it is an inauspicious moment to be talking about the long-term future of multilateralism, just as the UN is conspicuously failing to handle immediate crises. One important theme in preparations for the Summit of the Future is the need to consider the interests of future generations. But, as one Arab diplomat put it in December 2023, this feels too abstract when children in Gaza and Ukraine risk death daily. With UN members at each other’s throats, real consensus on what the future should look like seems remote.

But the Summit of the Future has not simply been a victim of poor timing. The last three years of debates on the Summit Pact have pointed to deeper problems with the multilateral system. One is that UN members see very different threats to their core national interests—and have equally divergent views about what the multilateral system should prioritize. In his 2021 report entitled “Our Common Agenda,” which proposed the Summit of the Future, Guterres urged states to focus on shared challenges like pandemics and other potential catastrophes. But in the wake of Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine, Western countries have been more focused on classic national security. Developing countries, by contrast, have been grappling with economic shortfalls and mounting international debts. It has been hard for the negotiators of the Summit of the Future to look beyond these pressing concerns to focus on the broader risks raised by Guterres.

There have also been questions about what an event like the Summit of the Future can deliver. In the post-Cold War era, world leaders have often gathered in New York to make pledges about the future of international cooperation. In 2005, UN members used the World Summit marking the organization’s 60th anniversary to paper over the divisions over the Iraq War and initiate UN reforms such as the creation of the Human Rights Council. In 2015, leaders signed off on both the Paris climate pact and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a pair of agreements that set highly ambitious targets for reining in global warming and eradicating extreme poverty.

Yet there are now doubts about the efficacy of this mode of pledge-making, and the plethora of commitments, follow-up summits, promises of accelerated action and the like that come with it. As Guterres has repeatedly reminded member states, it now looks exceedingly hard (if not absolutely impossible) to keep global warming to the limits defined in Paris. And the UN’s own data suggests that the world is going to miss some four-fifths of the goals outlined in the SDGs, absent a huge international effort to get them back on track. This poor track record has left many diplomats at the UN skeptical of the value of additional summits and additional commitments. As Fred Carver, an expert on the SDGs, has noted, there is still no shortage of summits on aspects of the development goals, but these events increasingly look like “conversations convened because rehashing the conversation is an alternative to actually doing something about the issue.”

It is also uncertain whether the sort of international summitry that made sense in the hey-day of post-Cold War cooperation is suitable for a new era of international competition. For all their flaws, agreements like the SDGs and Paris pact were products of an era in which most UN members more or less believed that multilateral agreements could yield positive-sum benefits for all parties. Today, by contrast, many states increasingly view international affairs in zero-sum terms, and instinctively distrust other powers’ willingness or ability to keep their promises.

States also appear suspicious of giving international institutions—including the UN—greater authority in sensitive policy fields. The year 2024 has seen negotiators at the World Health Organization struggle to agree on a pandemic preparedness treaty, as governments have fallen out over issues including financing, intellectual property, and the role of the WHO in managing future health crises. Although this process has been distinct from the Summit of the Future negotiations, it has shown exactly how hard it is for UN members to prioritize global goods.

For all these reasons, many UN members have had fairly low expectations for what the Summit of the Future can achieve. Yet some have also seen the Summit—and the negotiation of its main outcome document, the Pact for the Future—as an opportunity to show that multilateralism is not completely moribund. As one ambassador from a country that has been supportive of the Summit process notes, the underlying goal of the summit is less to redefine multilateralism for a new era than to show that, for all their rifts, UN members still believe in the basic principles of cooperation and negotiation. The Summit of the Future may ultimately be judged both a failure and minor success, depending on how one looks at it. Judged by the standards of the Secretary-General’s call for a “new consensus” on international cooperation, it will fall short. Viewed as a chance for UN members to prove that they can still do multilateral diplomacy, it may be a win.

 

The Guterres Challenge

How did we get here? Secretary-General Guterres set the winding process leading up to the Summit of the Future in train with his 2021 report “Our Common Agenda,” which made a strong case that all UN members face a set of common set of threats and dilemmas, all demanding a common response. These included not only all-encompassing crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic—a truly global shock that set the tone for the report—but problems such as how to govern new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emerging domains for competition, such as outer space. “Our Common Agenda” was an appeal for leaders and states to put aside their immediate differences, and take a global, non-zero-sum view of this array of challenges.

The report was not an idealistic outline of why international cooperation is good. It has some notably dark undertones. It makes clear that if states do not coordinate better, they will likely struggle to deal with future pandemics and other global shocks. While emphasizing the promise of technologies such as AI, it also flags their risks. Guterres also did not gloss over the weaknesses of the existing multilateral system—of which he has always been critical—in dealing with new developments, especially in science and technology. The report deliberately spelled out the choice facing humanity as one between “further breakdown and a future of perpetual crises, or a breakthrough to a better, more sustainable future, peaceful future for our people and planet.”

Even before Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine up-ended UN diplomacy in early 2022, some diplomats worried that “Our Common Agenda” was too broad and ambitious to act as the basis for concrete UN reform discussions. Some felt that the Secretary-General had spent too much time sketching out big ideas and novel threats, and skimped on details about how existing UN tools—such as Blue Helmet peacekeeping—could be improved to sort out urgent crises.

Yet in retrospect, “Our Common Agenda”—and a small host of follow-up reports and studies released by the UN in 2023—was an important conceptual challenge to the UN’s members. It is a clear statement of a genuinely globalist (not used as a pejorative term) perspective on currents risks and trends. As and when we face future pandemics, or see the dangers of new technologies more clearly, the report may look like a perceptive warning of mankind’s shared vulnerabilities.

Nonetheless, “Our Common Agenda” had some weaknesses that would come to dog talks on the Summit of the Future. One was that it had little to say about the role of multilateralism in preserving international peace and security. This was a gap that UN officials acknowledged at the time of its publication, but seemed justifiable after COVID-19 had shown that non-traditional threats might sometimes be more disruptive than traditional armed conflict. But this shortfall came into sharper focus once Russia launched its all-out attack on Ukraine. From that point onwards, Western diplomats were consumed with the Russian threat to their own countries.

More broadly, many UN members felt that the war—and Moscow’s frequent use of nuclear threats as a diplomatic tactic—underlined the weaknesses of UN peacemaking and disarmament. It also fueled increased talk of the need for Security Council reform, given the Council’s obvious inability to affect events in Ukraine (a fault repeated and magnified over Gaza). The drafters of “Our Common Agenda” had not necessarily wanted the Summit of the Future to get mixed up in the toxic and long-running topic of Council reform, but that was unavoidable after February 2022.

A second problem was that, while “Our Common Agenda” did go into depth about economic issues, diplomats from some poor and middle-income countries worried that it was taking attention away from the SDGs. The Group of 77 (G77), the main caucus of developing countries in the General Assembly, insisted that the Summit of the Future—originally intended for 2023—should be pushed to 2024, to avoid clashing with a pre-scheduled summit on the SDGs.

For many states, the Secretary-General’s original emphasis on common and global threats was thus rapidly overshadowed by more immediate national interests and fears. The Secretary-General and his advisers have tried to assuage all sides’ concerns, with varying degrees of success. In 2023, Guterres released a “New Agenda for Peace” that aimed to fill in the peace and security-shaped hole in “Our Common Agenda.” This contained useful ideas about how to bolster existing UN peacebuilding efforts, but could offer no easy solutions to the problem of aggression by a permanent member of the Security Council. Turning to developing countries’ concerns, the UN secretariat has dutifully included detailed references to the SDGs in Summit-related documents.

A final challenge associated with “Our Common Agenda” was simply that it raised some very complicated topics. Diplomats, especially those from smaller missions, complained that they lacked the background knowledge and time necessary to dig into the finer points of AI governance or cooperation in outer space. The Secretary-General aimed to open new field of discussion at the UN, such as the need to safeguard the planet for future generations, but national negotiators had little time to process what this would mean. UN officials associated with the Summit of the Future found some of these complaints exasperating, pointing out that the world could not wait for diplomats to do their homework before addressing urgent challenges. But the Secretary-General undeniably set UN member states a complex test both intellectually and diplomatically.

 

Getting to the Pact of the Future

Once UN members started to get into detailed consultations on the Pact of the Future—and especially after Germany and Namibia, the Pact’s co-facilitators released a first draft in January 2024—diplomatic gamesmanship and national interests inevitably started to edge out big picture thinking. This was almost inevitable. As Edward C. Luck, a veteran observer of the UN, noted at the time of the 2005 World Summit, processes of this type follow a fairly predictable arc, as UN member states demonstrate “conservative interests and fear of change” in negotiations. This tendency has been on display in New York through the course of 2024, as Pact negotiators have recycled commitments and ideas from past agreements to fill out large parts of the document.

The talks on the Summit of the Future also continued to highlight UN members’ prioritization of immediate concerns over long-term common threats. Developing countries made it clear that their top priorities were securing steps to increase their economic security, and in particular improve their access to international financing through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In addition, although more aspirationally, they also called for reforms to the governance of the international financial institutions to give them greater decisionmaking powers. Western diplomats expressed sympathy for their counterparts’ concerns, although they insisted that concrete decisions on these issues must take place at the Bank and IMF themselves.

Although a group of hardline G77 members have aimed to put maximum pressure on Western states on these topics, the bulk of developing countries took a more pragmatic line. Recognizing that the Summit can only deliver a political push for changes in the financial architecture, they have been willing to settle for extensive language in the Pact emphasizing their concerns, which they hope that decisionmakers in the international financial institutions will act upon quickly.

It has been harder for UN members to find common ground on security issues. While Austria and Kuwait led an unusually energetic set of talks on Security Council reform in early 2024—with groups of states making televised pitches for different reform models—they unsurprisingly found that there is no one vision of how to reconstruct the Council that can win consensus. While many states also pushed for the Pact to include strong language on nuclear disarmament, Russia pushed back firmly against this—while other nuclear powers may have been quietly happy to let Moscow do the dirty work. Nonetheless, negotiators managed to eke out compromise language on nuclear issues—based on states past commitments—that means that the Pact should not be silent on the topic. The Pact is also set to include more solid language on less contentious UN-related security issues, such as the need to review the organization’s peacekeeping and peacebuilding work, and some more vague material on the need to manage the security implications of new technologies.

All in all, the Pact will not fulfill many states’ ambitions on either the development or security fronts. But it contains enough material on both for diplomats to argue that the UN remains a useful arena for discussion on these files. This may be enough for now, although developing countries will judge the utility of the Pact according to whether it does unlock any new financing for them in the fairly near future. The UN Secretariat will at a minimum need to follow up quickly on the Summit with concrete policy proposals on boosting the organization’s peacemaking tools.

The prominence of economic and security concerns in Pact negotiations does not means that all of the more far-reaching ideas about global risks and multilateralism framed in “Our Common Agenda” have been lost. The report’s emphasis on the need for international cooperation to manage AI in particular has influenced ensuing UN debates. The U.S. and China, although both wary of multilateral regulation of their AI industries, both successfully tabled UN General Assembly resolutions on the positive uses of this new technology in 2024. The Pact of the Future is also set to incorporate a “Global Digital Compact” to provide guidance on future cooperation in this area. A further addendum will be a “Declaration on Future Generations” which, while quite vague, could be the starting point for more serious work across the UN system about how to take a longer-term view of protecting human interests. There is no guarantee that these initiatives will take root, but if they do, they will be a big part of the Secretary-General’s legacy, although he had hoped for much larger steps forward, such as the creation of a new UN agency to oversee AI.

 

A Partial Success?

For the time being, however, the Summit of the Future looks like a partial validation of the UN’s continued relevance in international affairs. It has shown that states are still able to sketch out areas of agreement on multilateral cooperation through the UN system. But it has also shown that, contrary to the Secretary-General’s appeal in “Our Common Agenda,” it is almost impossible for states to look past their immediate national concerns to prioritize global goods. On a more parochial note—but one that matters a lot to rising powers like India—it has also shown how difficult it is to move forward to structural reforms to UN bodies like the Security Council.

The resulting impression is that the UN is an organization in a holding pattern. Its members still see an interest in protecting a degree of cooperation and are very cautiously open to identifying new areas of cooperation for the future. But for the time being, they do not have the shared political will to risk big new initiatives or reforms to adapt the world organization to face the sorts of global challenges that Guterres outlined in “Our Common Agenda.” For some advocates of greater international cooperation, it is past time to move beyond inter-state diplomacy as the standard means for resolving global problems. The futurists Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman have recently called for the creation of a new set of “planetary institutions,” such as a Planetary Pandemic Agency, to handle such issues. Yet a cursory glance at the UN—and the world beyond—indicates that states are currently becoming less willing to give up even limited aspects of their sovereign powers in the name of cooperation. The process of international institution-building that accelerated after the Cold War is now at best stuck in neutral, and at worst facing decline.

What comes next is unlikely to be resolved in conference rooms in the bowels of the UN, or even big-ticket events like the Summit of the Future. This history of the UN shows that summits can help reshape the organization, but it is generally urgent crises—ranging from the 1956 Suez crisis to the collapse of the Soviet Union—that really drive international cooperation forward. The future of the UN may similarly be dictated by what sort of crises loom. New wars, including major power wars, could either push the UN’s members further apart or create openings for the organization to rediscover its peacemaking role. Conversely, further planetary shocks—worse pandemics or the accelerating effects of climate change—could by contrast persuade recalcitrant governments to take the cooperative logic of “Our Common Agenda” more seriously than today.

The Summit of the Future has brought some of the current weaknesses of enduring resilience of the multilateral system into sharp relief. But UN members cannot be certain what the future will hold—and how it may change the world organization.

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