Given EU’s underperformance in Gaza and Ukraine can global platforms like the Global Governance Initiative (GGI) be the right way forward?

It was 80 years ago that the world’s largest simultaneous war escalations concluded. It was the same year of 1945 that the United Nations was founded with the main scope to promote multilateralism, global cooperation and peace. Has the United Nations been successful in the last 80 years?

In the meantime the books haven’t cited the word “World War III” for that matter. Not yet at least. So, as a matter of fact the UN has served its purpose in the sense that it has empowered for almost a century now formal global diplomacy and strived for peace with all its tools. But is the UN system perfect? Certainly not, as every human structure is far from perfect. Would things be worse without the UN? Definitely yes!

First things first though. The recent war devastation in Ukraine as well as the utter genocide in Gaza show that the UN in the 21st century direly needs an energy booster to cope with the new sad unilateral order of things.

What is GGI?

Earlier this month China’s President Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus introduced something promising, the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), a global governance system advancing multilateralism and boosting the United Nations roles in the world. The GGI has been so influential to the UN that the mere Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres came to welcome GGI and support its usefulness in the United Nations system.

China’s President announced the five core values of that Initiative. First, all member countries of the GGI are envisaged to have an equal say as sovereign actors in this Initiative. Special care is to be paid to the smaller developing nations to foster growth. Second, the GGI is aspired to be a solid pillar of international rule of law and the status of international Organizations like the United Nations is to be adhered to overall. Third, the GGI is to support the role of the UN for multilateralism and abstain from unilateral moves like for instance Israel’s unilateral decision to execute a genocide in the year 2025 or to bomb everybody from Lebanon, Iran, Qatar, Yemen you name it. Fourth, the role of people in global governance is to be prioritized. Fifth, global cooperation is to be strategized and result in concise actions.

What’s in for the EU?

The recent turn of events in global crises like the COVID-19, the Ukraine war, the Gaza genocide, or the unreasonable Trump tariffs have apparently undermined the role of the EU as a global stakeholder. For one thing, in none of the four global crises of the past few years the EU has shown the strong caliber one would anticipate from this huge political and economical structure.

First of all, in the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU, after 2,000 years of human and scientific evolution, sufficed to promulgate the importance of wearing masks and wash hands with soap or made super lucrative and some questionable even deals with large pharmaceuticals, with numerous vaccines expired and destroyed. Second, in the Ukraine war front, the EU has launched some 20 rounds of sanctions against Russia with limited results or scarce and vague impact even. Third, when it comes to the Gaza genocide whereby people are tacitly led to utter death by starvation in the year 2025 and nobody does anything about it, the EU is just watching this global charade remaining numb and abruptly inhumane. Fourth, in Trump’s unprecedented trade war the EU went to Scotland to watch Trump play golf and surrendered unconditionally to the US bully tactics making a fool of all Europeans.

EU +1

It is thus self-explanatory that the EU is underperforming in leading global collaboration efforts and its role is sadly not taken too seriously these days. Instead, the EU is sadly more than often treated as a +1 at a cocktail party, nice to have you there but really not essential. Go ahead and have a look above at the article’s photo during the meeting in the US last August; the EU’s flag is the last in the background, after all countries concerned and after NATO. They might as well put the EU flag under the WC sign.

It is also indicative that last month Trump met with Putin in Alaska only to fail brokering peace, without even sending an invite to the “+1” EU, which is obviously a crucial interested party in this war. Not to forget that these days Russian drones invaded an EU member state, Poland.

So, instead of issuing a press release here and there or taking smiley pictures with Donald Trump hoping to stay in power at the EU conglomerate a bit longer, the EU leaders have better understand the new state of play. Today it is unilateralism of the US or Israel or others against multilateralism which is the cornerstone of our world’s stability and peace till recently at least, the United Nations and now possibly the new Global Cooperation Initiative (GGI).

Since the UN rushed to welcome GGI as a needed missing leg in the three leg broken chair outside the UN Headquarters in Geneva, to contemplate its caveats and endorse global cooperation, multilateralism and peace, the EU could also roll up the sleeves and observe and discuss GGI. The world has changed, the UN apparently cannot do the job on its own and needs initiatives like GGI, while the EU is somewhat powerless to counter US/Israel/others’ unilaterism while the EU citizen cannot afford to be treated as a +1.

A no brainer

Therefore, it is a no brainer that the EU and the whole world explore seriously alternative and new multilaterism platforms and by doing so further strengthen the multilaterism of the UN system, democracy and the fight against zero sum games, and extreme far right sentiments that fully spread today like COVID-19 used to, from France and Italy to Germany and Argentina, and pretty much all over the world in larger or smaller scales.