For best results: Why countries group together, despite the UN
The earliest of these groupings – NATO – dates to just four years after the United Nations was formed. What role does the UN play, amid these alliances?
Within four years of the formation of the United Nations — the institution meant to keep the peace and help member states peacefully resolve disputes — came the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in 1949. This military alliance had 12 member countries across Europe and North America. (It now has 32.)
By 1955, the Warsaw Pact, between the Soviet Union and members of the Eastern Bloc, had come to life as a countermeasure to NATO.
And there you had it. It took less than a decade after the world’s most brutal war, for military alliances to make a comeback. In the wake of NATO, new US-led military alliances took root in South-East Asia and West Asia; the Soviet Union followed suit, where possible, with its own variants.
Proxy wars erupted in various theatres. Nations were anything but united.
For the vast swathes of the world emerging from centuries of colonialism, scarred by oppression, the priority was to avoid yet another conflict that had little to do with local realities. So these states began to form groupings too, aimed at safeguarding their sovereignty and autonomy of action — and using this autonomy to engage with both the capitalist and communist worlds. From the seeds of solidarity between Asia and Africa, the Non-Aligned Movement was born, in 1961.
Other groupings of states formed on questions of global economic and developmental justice, such as the Group of 77 (G77; formed in 1964), eventually evolved into key pressure groups within the UN too.
On a parallel track, there emerged a growing recognition that the fate of nations, especially those in close proximity to each other, was often tied together. Europe, the site of the 20th century’s greatest horrors, also became the site of a new experiment where, step by step, countries in Western Europe ceded parts of their sovereign decision-making powers to create a community (in 1957) and eventually a Union (in 1993).
The site of so much of European brutality, Africa, saw the formation of the Organisation of Africa Unity, in 1963. Caribbean states formed the Caribbean Community and Common Market, or CARICOM, in 1973. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) took shape in 1967, while much later, a weaker variant, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or SAARC, emerged, in 1985.
Fast-forward to today and neither an overarching international organisation nor a tightly bound military pact, neither regional organisations nor ideological groupings, represent the most effective form of coming together for states. Instead, besides bilateralism, the preferred means of engagement is plurilateralism, where countries simply come together to negotiate on issues of interest to their small group.
This has been the defining marker of the geopolitics of our era.
Geographical proximity and shared political systems play little to no role in a plurilateral grouping. Countries may be part of multiple groupings that contain rival factions. It is in these cross-cutting arrangements — even “partnership” is too strong a term — that states pursue diplomatic aims.
Take India. It is a member of Quad, the anti-China grouping formed in 2007, with the US, Australia and Japan. It is a part of BRICS, the grouping originally set up in 2006, with Brazil, Russia and China, with South Africa added in 2010, and a number of other countries added since, all of whom have a shared scepticism of the West and West-created international structures.
India is part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO; 2001), focused on Eurasia, where it shares space with China and Pakistan. It is part of IBSA, established in 2003 along with Brazil and South Africa, two other major democracies of the Global South.
It is a member of I2U2, the grouping established in 2021, with the US, Israel and UAE. And this itself is a product of the Abraham Accords of 2020, which have seen Israel and a range of its Arab neighbours establish diplomatic ties.
This list is just a microcosm of the arrangements that exist on a global scale.
None of this can be a substitute for the UN. Indeed, the United Nation’s push to minimise competition and build arenas of cooperation is perhaps more vital as the world divides itself into more of these overlapping groupings, with their cross-cutting interests and rivalries.
When fading or dysfunctional multilateralism doesn’t meet a country’s interests, it will find other ways to exert influence or extract resources. It is this that makes it necessary to have a body that exists to promote international cooperation.
It is here that the UN still serves some of that original purpose, even if it hasn’t ever succeeded in keeping states secure, or maintaining the peace.
