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‘Redefining multilateralism: the Commonwealth as a catalyst for change?’

Date: 30 Nov 2006
Speaker: Secretary-General Don McKinnon
Location: Seminar hosted by the Foreign Policy Centre and Hill & Knowlton

Redefining Multilateralism

I am delighted to accept my second invitation this year from the Foreign Policy Centre – proof, I hope, that I said at least some of the right things when I attended their seminar on ‘Enhancing the Rule of Law in Africa’ in May. 

I have always appreciated the Centre and its work, even from the months before my election as Secretary-General when in 1999 you published an excellent pamphlet on ’Reinventing the Commonwealth’ by Kate Ford and Sunder Katwala. 

I remember one line in particular: ‘there should be nothing shocking about debating the idea of Nelson Mandela as the next Head of the Commonwealth, or considering Delhi or Lagos as the seat of the Secretariat.’  I remember with a smile that many of the old guard were asking just ‘where do these people come from?’!

So thank you to Stephen Twigg and the FPC, and also to Hill & Knowlton, well known to many of us as one of the world’s top communications agencies. 

Thanks too to John Battle, such an energetic Chair of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development, whom I also remember as a very committed Minister on our Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (which I’ll come on to discuss). 

Now there aren’t too many situations in British national life where we can safely say that ‘Leeds United’ is in the vanguard of solving our problems… but in the world of development we certainly do expect great things from him (the MP for Leeds West), and from Hilary Benn, who as well as being the UK Secretary of State for International Development, is MP for Leeds Central.

***

Our starting point today is UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s address at Georgetown University in Washington on 26th May, the third of a series of foreign policy speeches. 

Introducing how we could meet global challenges, the Prime Minister asked us first of all to acknowledge that we do indeed live in a truly globalised world where a challenge or a crisis for one is a challenge for all.  Second, he asked us to acknowledge that we do indeed share the same global values of liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice – values which unite nations, faiths and races; values which can inspire and unify.  In the context of combating terrorism – but widening his message to address all the issues of our time – issues of poverty, of climate change, of world trade …. – Mr Blair was unequivocal: ‘the answer’, he said, ‘is the universal application of global values’.

Mr Blair in fact rightly questions whether we all understand the same things by those values, and whether we all want to go down the same collective route to reach them.   Today isn’t the time to debate those values.  All I say now is that yes, these are absolutely the values which I and the Commonwealth espouse. 

He went on to look at what we call the ‘architecture’ of international organisations which hold the keys to safeguarding and delivering on those values.  He made big proposals:

First, on reforming the UN.  Making the membership of the Security Council more representative, giving the Secretary-General more power, streamlining and strengthening humanitarian and development operations.  I completely concur.  I am also interested in his further suggestion that we need a UN Environment Organisation.

Second, on reforming the World Bank and the IMF – de-politicising the latter and making its decision-making more geographically representative; keeping the former focussed on poverty.  Again, I concur.

Third, on establishing a multilateral system for the safe enrichment of nuclear energy; and fourth, for the G8 continuing to meet as the G8 + 5, with China, Mexico, India, Brazil, and South Africa (two Commonwealth countries in there…).  I concur with both.

***

So do I promise you total concurrence today?  No.

My first query is with the Foreign Policy Centre’s preamble for this seminar.  It talks of, quote, ‘growing calls for a reformed United Nations system’ as if they will neither be heeded nor work.  They simply must work.  The UN is the only place in which the world can come together as one, and make change for the better.  It is the world’s stage.  Period.  We are agreed that we want to update and improve the institutions of 1946, to allow them to meet the needs of the world of 2006.

You also talk of, quote, ‘the increasing irrelevance of the World Bank in meeting today’s global development challenges’.  Not so.  Under Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank completely reoriented itself towards meeting development challenges.  Under Paul Wolfowitz it remains the foremost development agency, ahead of any of the UN agencies, the EU and any bilateral programmes.  Again, it must work – we must make it work.

I can safely say that I believe in almost all of these multilateral and regional organisations.  Only a month ago I was in Brussels lauding the EU for its development work, and telling it where I think it could do better.  I give the same reasoned messages to the African Union, CARICOM, SADC, the Pacific Forum, and more.

Which brings me, in a necessarily roundabout way, to our topic today: the Commonwealth, its own brand of multilateralism, and how it might catalyse change.

Here, I stress that the Commonwealth can catalyse change in others – but it has no wish, or capacity, or indeed ‘right’, to supersede them. 

So my purpose today is to tell you more about how we in the Commonwealth ‘do’ multilateralism. 

***

Here are four ways in which multilateralism is the centre of our being.  I would go as far as to say that it is the source of our authority.  That is not the authority of raw power – military or financial.  No, it is better seen as the moral authority of 53 states which have come together and committed themselves to defined values.

First, multilateralism gives us the power of the combined voice. 
 Take just one example: on the eve of last December’s WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong, the 53 Commonwealth countries spoke as one on the subject of multilateral trade and the need for a true ‘development’ outcome to the Doha negotiations, to let poor countries trade their way out of poverty.  The result was the Valletta Statement that individual countries used in their own regional discussions in the WTO.

Second, our multilateralism is enhanced by the fact that we speak the ‘same language’.  Not just English as the agreed working language: I mean the shared language of institutions, parliaments, legal and education systems.

Third, it’s the multilateralism which gives voice to those who are not often heard.  32 of the 53 are officially ‘small states’, all burdened with typical problems – environmental degradation, crime, under-development, isolation, lack of critical mass, and more.  
 As I said, in the Commonwealth, Tuvalu has every bit as much of a platform as India.  We are all freely and equally associated: Britain is as important as billion-strong India and 10,000-strong Tuvalu. 

Fourth, it’s the multilateralism deriving from the power of family – of people who have come together almost by accident – who may, in family parlance, have sibling rivalries and barely thought-about distant cousins, but who still feel bound to an organisation, its beliefs, and its opportunities. 

***

So how does this Commonwealth multilateralism manifest itself?  Again, here are four ways.

First, the Commonwealth works by invitation not intervention, and we have built up our reputation as a trusted partner as a result.  Never more so than in what we call my ‘Good Offices’, carried out by me or a small group of my Special Envoys, who are invited into situations where the future of democracy in a particular member state, for a variety of possible reasons, has come under threat.  In highly sensitive situations, access is often granted to the Commonwealth, where it’s denied to others.  
 We have deployed our Good Offices in the last year in Cameroon, The Gambia, Guyana, Kenya, Swaziland, Tonga, Maldives.  As a result, in the last year or so Swaziland has adopted a constitution, Guyana has held peaceful elections, and Cameroon is about to adopt an independent elections commission.

Second, we have the unique forum of a biennial retreat for Commonwealth Heads of Government.  It was Pierre Trudeau in 1971 who got Heads to agree that they would never come to Meetings with prepared speeches, nor with any civil servants.  It’s a hot-house for business: I mentioned the Valletta Trade statement which was hammered out in a lively debate among the 53 leaders at the Malta CHOGM last November 

Third, we hold each other accountable, to the principles which we formally committed to Singapore in 1971 and Harare in 1991 – those global values of the Blair Georgetown speech.  Just as the Heads of Government Retreat is one of the oldest types of peer review mechanism, so too is what we call the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, or CMAG. Unlike the UN Security Council it meets at ministerial, rather than officials’ level.  All decisions are made by consensus.  CMAG can suspend members from the Councils of the Commonwealth: it has been prepared to do so, and those sanctioned have not taken this lightly. 
 In Nigeria, for instance, where suspension was followed by a return to democracy. Likewise in Fiji and Sierra Leone, where un-constitutional breaches in governance were followed, after great effort, by a return to democracy and order.  CMAG currently has one country on its agenda: Pakistan.  By virtue of its continuous review and monitoring, the Commonwealth is perhaps the key international political organisation actively involved in working for a return to full democracy in Pakistan today. 

Fourth, we are far more than a Commonwealth of Governments.  We are a Commonwealth of peoples, and very specifically of civil society organizations, who tend to be the most natural representatives of peoples’ interests.  You will know how some 90 civil society organizations worldwide bear our name.  You will know that alongside our Heads of Government meetings we hold a People’s Forum, with literally thousands of civil society organizations present and in active debate – not least with Heads of Government and ministers themselves.

These, then, are the elements of our Commonwealth multilateralism from which others can perhaps learn.  I repeat the word ‘consensus’: all of our decisions are communally reached.  Consensus is sometimes painful, and sometimes the places we reach are lowest denominators, not highest multipliers.  But when our 53 countries take decisions they do not vote – they reach consensus.  And it is our consensus decisions which have also seen the Commonwealth’s fundamental values defended and extended, CHOGM by CHOGM.
 
We are in general passive with our multilateralism.  It’s for others – not ourselves – to say that we’re a model and a replicable one at that.

***

But let me end by recounting how we do, sometimes, actively take our views on multilateralism directly to others within the international community.

Take the UN.  A powerful research project coordinated by the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit led us to make a bold statement on the need for UN reform at the last heads of Government meeting in Malta.  Our argument was the same as Tony Blair’s: it’s just that ours had 53 countries behind it. 

Take the whole global aid architecture.  We presented a paper to Commonwealth Finance Ministers in Colombo in September.  It asks: how can current ways of delivering aid and debt relief to developing countries work better?  How to handle increasing aid volumes (which by 2010 will have doubled in 15 years to $130 billion) and the hundreds of financing mechanisms (for instance there are 90 global health funds alone) through which they are delivered?  How to build on the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of April 2005 – signed by bilateral and multilateral donors, recipients and NGOs alike – and improve the way international aid programmes are aligned with national Government priorities, and coordinated amongst themselves? 
 We had run regional workshops in London, Bangladesh and Cameroon to find out.  We looked at ways of shifting more aid out of bilateral programmes into multilateral; and empowering recipient governments by giving them more comparative information about which donors to do business with, and which to avoid. 

Take the European Union.  I mentioned the constructive criticism I have offered the EU recently: above all wanting it to focus on poverty – not politics – in its aid programmes, and to use more local knowledge and sensitivity when it does so. 

Take the regional organizations - the institutions of multilateralism - like the African Union, Pacific Forum and Caricom.  We have built up their capacity: we have Commonwealth advisers in each.

Take the WTO, as the multilateral rules-based organisation which we think should protect and police world trade.  We have placed trade experts in regional organizations and individual developing countries which are trying to get into the WTO.  We carry out this project alongside the EU and La Francophonie.  

Take the World Bank.  We have worked well alongside both Jim Wolfensohn and Paul Wolfowitz – for example in encouraging them to take up the mantle of small states, and getting them to endorse our official measurement Indicators for youth development programmes.  We were also the first to lobby them over the need to embrace the concept of multilateral debt write-off in the early 1990s, some years after it was us again in the Commonwealth who first launched bilateral debt cancellation through the HIPC initiative.

So we are not shy about preaching the gospel of multilateralism, Commonwealth-style.

***

I end where I began, with Tony Blair’s global values which are at the root of all our global attempts at multilateralism.  ‘Liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice – values which unite nations, faiths and races; values which can inspire and unify.’

Those views are seriously under threat at the moment, as much in the Commonwealth as anywhere.  Blair’s speech, remember, was essentially about the response to terror, which so many now equate with religious fundamentalism. 

We in the Commonwealth feel that fundamentalism is not confined to any one religion or any ideology.  All of us – wherever we are – have multiple identities, which go far beyond faith.  We believe that the roots of terrorism can be found in many things – in faith, ethnicity, culture, nationality, poverty, economic and political causes, and more. 

It’s this Commonwealth spirit of our multilateralism which makes us look at the principles by which societies and communities do and don’t function.  Not just the way people of different faiths and ethnicities sit side by side, but also people of different wealth, or sexuality, or politics, or more.  We ask how true cultural integration works, even in the smallest ways. 

So I leave you with the news that I shall leave this meeting at 5:30, and go and launch the new Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding – an extraordinarily talented team, boasting two Nobel Laureates and under the chairmanship of Professor Amartya Sen – which we are asking them to show us which Commonwealth communities have found ways to bridge all the divides – and why, and how – and then how we can replicate those models within our 53 nations, and beyond.  Heads of Government requested this of us at CHOGM Malta in November 2005; and we will report back to them at CHOGM Uganda in November 2007.

Again – in the words of the title of today’s event – this new Commission sees the Commonwealth ‘redefining multilateralism’ and ‘catalysing change’.  Because it’s only through multilateralism, and organizations like the Commonwealth, that we can achieve global cooperation and action to face together the challenges of our common future.

Thank you.

ENDS

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