With the Israelis responding savagely against Hamas’ attack – in which 1400 of their citizens were killed –by now dropping bombs into Gaza and killing almost 10,000 civilians, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine almost two years ago – and still slogging it out as thousands of civilians are killed – has almost become a footnote. These outrages must have been a factor in Maduro’s recent bellicosity and troop deployment on our Essequibo border, since he would have concluded that the multilateral institutions created after WWII to prevent such contingencies have now broken down.
The major one, of course, is the UN system, with which we have taken refuge with our case that the controversy created by Venezuela over our Essequibo was definitively settled back in 1899. The UN had been formed against the backdrop of the failure of the League of Nations to prevent WWII in which over 50 million had been killed and was supposed to provide mechanisms to prevent wars between States. Through evolving doctrines, such as “the Right to Protect” (R2P), it was even beginning to intervene in domestic situations when the rights of citizens were being flagrantly violated.
But here it is – in the very theatre where that “war to end all wars” was conducted – we have the UN reduced to being a mere spectator. Ditto for the genocide being conducted by Israel in Gaza. Expecting the legal certainty that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule in Guyana’s favour, Maduro has already said in so many words that he not only will not accept any judgement but does not even accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction to hear the case. He is thumbing his nose at the UN and while we have made much fanfare of our resort to that institution on his “referendum”, we will soon discover that nothing will come out of that.
Another multilateral institution that has failed is the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that was formed in the mid-1990s to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and which, like the UN, was supposed to deliver greater justice between the developed, underdeveloped and developing worlds. This time in the most critical area of equalising the terms of trade that offered greater advantages to the developed countries that were recent colonisers and retained the premises of that arrangement. The dispute resolution mechanism has ground to a halt since the US refused to appoint its representative on the Appellate Body two years ago. For Guyana, this is a great disadvantage since we are totally dependent on increasing our exports in the agricultural sector that we have strategically identified as necessary for sustainable development. We can foresee that some countries may, for instance, erect barriers to those exports.
Then there are the financial “Bretton Woods” multilateral institutions – the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) – that were supposedly designed to also introduce some degree of equity between the developed and developing worlds in terms of financial needs and flows. One of the reasons for their demise has been one that we experienced firsthand: its “one size fits all” formula of severe austerities and conditionalities for countries that accumulated unsustainable debt in a system that was stacked against them through the terms of trade, etc. After its disastrous intervention in the Far Eastern economies in 1997, there have been determined efforts by regional economies to use alternative financial mechanism. The latest one is the Development Bank launched by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) grouping. The African Union’s foray into Guyana with its Afreximbank is another example of movement towards bilateral rather than multilateral relationships.
All of the above are symptoms of a more fundamental shift in the world order in which the US – which became a hegemonic superpower after WWII – is now being challenged and a new multipolar world is evolving. The challenge was articulated by Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
