Alexandre Guerreiro (Portugal) speech at the Global Conference on Multipolarity
Alexandre Guerreiro (Portugal) – Political and Security Analyst Academic, UNHRC TV Commentator
Bom dia a todos os elementos da organização, aos colegas palestrantes e a todos os que nos acompanham um pouco por todo o mundo, em particular, endereço os meus cumprimentos ao Professor Aleksandr Dugin, à Nova Resistência (Brasil), à Iniciativa Nova Ordem Internacional (Turquia), ao Movimento Internacional Eurasiático (Rússia), ao Fórum de Pensadores (China) e ao Movimento Internacional Russófilo.
For centuries, relations between peoples were dominated by the prevalence of individual interests, thus contributing to permanent tension and conflict.
Later, the “social contract” has reached relations between peoples and the States in which they are located, but it took a while to reach relations between States and between the peoples of different States. It is fallacious to say that the countless sovereign States currently form an “international community”, since a community corresponds to the essential aspirations of human nature and there is a communion of values and solidarity among its members.
In fact, until 1945, States coexisted based on a model of “international society”, aiming to coexist in an environment that would allow them to jointly pursue certain deliberately chosen ends and in which the corresponding social bonds would always be created by the will of the members of the society.
With the end of World War II, it also ended the notion of “absolute sovereignty” – meaning no recognition of any entities above each State and granting them full exclusivity over their territory. The International Court of Justice, for example, was one of the first institutions to recognize the conditional and limited character of the exercise of the right of sovereignty, which moves away from the view of absolute sovereignty that tended to prevail in the period immediately prior to World War II and consolidated the ideal of peace and security as achievable through the fulfillment of duties vis-à-vis third States.
The world witnessed a progressive communitarianization of several domains of the old and classic international society, in such terms that its communitarian traits overlapped its societal characteristics. Thus, after 1945, International Law entered a new phase destined to restrict the unconditional right of States to wage war and to harass other countries; and, additionally, to transform the mere coordination of sovereign States into a system of cooperation and mutual benefit.
Humanity had reached such a point of wear that it felt the need to reconfigure the order on which coexistence between states was based as a way of ensuring international peace and security. It was therefore no accident that the victorious States chose the expression “We, the peoples of the United Nations” over “We, the States” or “We, the Governments representing the peoples”. After all, we can have a People without a State, but we can no longer have a State without a People.
This is a clear allusion to the subjects of International Law who express a common will to entrust the United Nations with the pursuit of the aim of “maintaining international peace and security”. More than treaties celebrated between States, the international order that was formed from 1945 onwards reflected the celebration of a real “social contract” between the different peoples that recognized the pursuit of common objectives, as well as the use of a forum where everyone would have equal value and where agreements would be debated and reached that mirrored the will of humanity as a whole: the UN.
By being celebrated by agreement of the peoples and by raising the peoples to the top of the hierarchy of subjects of international law, the Charter of the United Nations established a multipolar international order that assumes as fundamental the participation of all peoples, in their multiple political, social, economic and cultural differences, in the formation of values and norms that underpin the “international community” and without being the target of interference.
Based on the efforts launched by the peoples to legitimize the UN and taking into account the set of resolutions adopted and the conventional instruments celebrated between the States in representation of the peoples, there is a global conscience, at least since 1945, that peace and international security can only be effectively achieved if the challenges that fall to the States are addressed from a perspective of community and not isolation and if the horizontality between all State actors is effectively respected.
From this derives a notion of equality that determines, on a practical level, that the right of a State to sovereignty can only be fully achieved if that State respects the right to sovereignty of the rest and if it complies with the principle of sovereign equality, thus recognizing multipolarity as an essential condition for healthy coexistence in an international community. We will thus have relations between States that are based on a principle of sovereign equality that presupposes a horizontal relationship between all States. In this way, any sign of unilateralism demonstrates a legally non-existent verticality, as well as an absence of the sense of community that seems capable of affecting international security and peace.
Political and social multipolarity found its catalyst at the end of the Cold War with the evolution and consolidation of the concept of humanity and with the notion of an international community of States being deemed of secondary importance. In fact, there has been a transition from a paradigm in which different States coexist and make efforts to find points of balance that guarantee peaceful coexistence among all, to a reality in which the borders of States are overcome, continuing, primarily, the defense of humanity through the recognition of a core of values common to all human beings.
In an era in which unilateralism has consequences – not only at the level of international responsibility, but also at the political and diplomatic levels – interstate relations forced on the basis of the will of a State or a group of States deserve international condemnation for the most varied levels. It takes legitimacy to do so.
Thus, the multipolar order can only truly exist and contribute directly to international peace and security if it is accompanied by multilateralism. The loss of confidence in the UN and in the Charter of the United Nations resulting from unilateral decisions outside the forum that represents the multipolar order can give rise to a multipolar unilateralism, in which each people, while recognizing the other peoples, insists on taking precedence everyone, creating imbalances and threats for everyone. It is not possible, therefore, to recognize as multilateralism a set of dynamics or initiatives in which one party imposes its conditions while demonstrating relative inflexibility to yield and the others have no alternative but to assent.
Hence, one of the great challenges of Public International Law in the 21st century is to find mechanisms capable of combining the effects of the phenomenon of globalization with the unavailability of States, as a whole, to maintain their identity and sovereignty while recognizing the need to harmonize concepts in transversal areas.
This transfer of issues and matters to the UN domain seems to us to be an important evolution of the system insofar as it reinforces the need for multilateralism in matters that thus favor greater involvement of the community in matters of general interest and the deterrence of unilateral actions – both in the sense of shielding the States in the commission of acts against the interests of the peoples in their own territory, as well as protecting it from unilateral interpretations and approaches by third States.
In the end, it is fundamental to understand the importance of self-determination as an essential component of a multipolar multilateralism. The principle of self-determination has matured since the beginning of the 20th century and had a strong impulse from 1945 onwards, with special focus on the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty, of 1965, in which not only was it declared that no State has the right to interfere in the internal or external affairs of another State, but it was also reiterated that the right to self-determination must be exercised freely and without external pressure. Therefore, Resolution 2131 (XX) reflects the intention to accelerate the decolonization process in a context of growing threat arising from unilateral interference in a bipolar world.
Accepting unilateralism or an unipolar order would actually mean going back to the first decades of the 19th century and, in a way, recovering the genesis of Iberian Catholic doctrine for the Americas, initiated by Francisco de Vitoria in the 16th century and based on the idea of a superior morality of an elite that gives this elite legitimacy to conquer territory and change a previously established legal and social order.
