Well before US president-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated in January 2025, the UN has been atrophying in power, credibility, and even relevance. The international organization has faced many challenges since its establishment in 1945 in the shadow of the most horrific chapter in modern human history. Yet few chapters of the UN have been darker than its meek looking on as Israel livestreams the genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza with “total impunity”.
The fact that Israel’s ongoing genocide is armed, funded and shielded from accountability by powerful western states, led by the US, has made this impunity more blatant than ever. Western hypocrisy in slapping Russia with the most severe regime of sanctions ever following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while fully enabling Israel’s genocide and underlying, decades-old system of settler-colonialism, apartheid and illegal military occupation has also reached unprecedented levels, making a mockery of the west’s claim of even caring about universal human rights. Indonesia’s foreign minister at a recent UN debate on Gaza called on states to not “bury the Principles of the UN Charter and international law under the rubble of double standards, trust deficit and zero-sum game”.
Congolese-American sociologist Pierre van den Berghe has coined the term, “herrenvolk democracy”, that is “democratic for the master race but tyrannical for subordinate groups”. The dystopian “might makes right” hovering over the ruins and amidst the endless Palestinian corpses in Gaza, coupled with the rise of fascism in the US, Europe and elsewhere, poses a credible threat of the world slipping into an era of herrenvolk international law – wielded exclusively by the mighty oppressors against the dispensable and oppressed who dare to resist subjugation and seek emancipation. A preview of this has come earlier this year, when US secretary of state Antony Blinken said: “If you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu.”
In this context, the long overdue issuance of arrest warrants by the international criminal court (ICC) against Benjamin Netanyahu and former war cabinet minister Yoav Gallant on 21 November could not have come at a more opportune moment. Though tens of thousands of Palestinian bodies late, the ICC’s decision gives a glimmer of hope that Palestinians may yet see some semblance of justice from The Hague after years of prevarication and deadly apathy. Crucially, this ICC decision, which defies years of daunting threats and bullying by Israel and the US, may also help to rehabilitate, at least partially, the rule of international law when many, especially in the global south, have all but lost faith in it.
But treating the ICC’s belated decision as the ultimate triumph of justice over brute force would be unrealistic, if not altogether delusional. It would also turn us all into spectators of a show of deterministic inevitability in which our agency plays no role. Of the many things that need fixing in this world to stop the genocide in Gaza and prevent any power from ever again doing “a Gaza” on any vulnerable community, decolonizing the UN may be of utmost priority. The looming throning of a wrecker-in-chief in the White House makes this task most urgent.
By decolonizing the UN, I mean a transformative process that integrates the perspectives of marginalized and most affected communities and nations, particularly those who are still suffering the brunt of the colonial legacy, manifested in loan bondage, unequal development, and outright pillage of natural resources. This radical yet incremental process aims at reclaiming the UN as the heritage of humanity at large and as the only organization that can actually embody the principles of justice, peace, human dignity and collective salvation.
This multi-faceted, exceptionally demanding process would entail addressing the issues of truly democratic and inclusive representation; elimination of the veto; and revamping the grossly inflated UN structure, making it leaner, more agile, more efficient and, as a result, less corrupt and less dependent on the strings-attached largesse of Washington and other western capitals. The ludicrously high salaries and benefits that the mostly western top echelons of UN officials make can alleviate poverty in small nations, after all.
Moving the UN headquarters from the soon to be Trump-ruled territory to a more democratic, less authoritarian territory like South Africa may be crucial in this process. South Africa is no utopia, needless to say, but it symbolizes the victory of humanity and democracy over a ruthless era of western settler-colonialism and apartheid, despite the long path ahead to ending economic and social injustice.
In anticipation of the inevitable wrath of the emperor in Washington, though, and the expected severe cut of US contributions to the UN, and in the spirit of decolonization and democratization, I propose a progressive annual UN tax to be levied from every adult worldwide, calculated according to each country’s GDP per capita and paid by states on behalf of their citizens.
A citizen of Singapore or Qatar, say, would be expected to pay far more than a citizen of South Sudan or Afghanistan, but everyone contributes to the world government. With this comes the right to have a say in the UN governance and effectiveness to maintain its utmost independence and relevance to humanity’s most persistent challenges, and to truly reflect the longing of most of humanity for a cleaner, safer, more sustainable, less militarized, more peaceful and just world. Multinationals would be governed by stringent rules that put people and the planet ahead of greed and bloody profit.
This may all sound quite idealistic, even impossible, given the reigning power dynamics in the UN and the world at large. But many changes in history have begun with out-of-the-box, unorthodox ideas that may look impossible until they become possible. We, with our agency, can make them possible. Before the rising wave of fascism and imperial insanity turn the UN into a truly comatose body, before more nations end up on “the menu”, we all must imagine a different reality and strive with all what we’ve got to achieve it. We only have one world.
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Omar Barghouti is the Co-founder of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights, co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award
