The governments of Germany and Namibia have overseen the drafting ot the Pact for the Future, a document, that can easily put you to sleep. However, if you do read to the end, despite the authors` best efforts to keep you from doing that, you will be startled out of your reverie by Action 57 (of 60). The work can be found on the website of the UN Summit on the Future in the version of the 3rd revision. Action 57 reads:
“We recognize the need for a more coherent, cooperative, coordinated and multidimensional international response to complex global shocks and the central role of the United Nations in this regard. Complex global shocks are events that have severely disruptive and adverse consequences for a significant proportion of countries and the global population, and that lead to impacts across multiple sectors, requiring a multidimensional multistakeholder, and whole-of-government, whole-of-society response. (…) We request the Secretary-General to present for the consideration of Member States protocols for convening and operationalizing emergency platforms based on flexible approaches to respond to a range of different complex global shocks, including criteria for triggering and phasing out emergency platforms, ensuring that emergency platforms are convened for a finite period and will not be a standing institution or entity.”
The pact itself eveals very little about what a “complex global shock” is and what should happen once the Secretary-General has declared a state of emergency. There is room for suspicion that this opaqueness is intentional, as what is planned could upset people and provoke resistance.
Details in a policy brief from 2023
In a short report for experts, called “Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 2” from March 2023, the UN Secretary-General explained in more detail which emergency rights he would like to obtain:
“I propose that the General Assembly provide the Secretary-General and the United Nations system with a standing authority to convene and operationalize automatically an Emergency Platform in the event of a future complex global shock of sufficient scale, severity and reach. (…) The Secretary-General would decide when to convene an Emergency Platform in response to a complex global shock.”
The UN Secretary-General wants the right to declare a global state of emergency on his own authority and handpick the people and organizations to be put in charge with dealing with the cirisis. After the experience with the strong resistance to giving such dictatorial powers to the head of the World Health Organization in the framework of a pandemic treaty, the German and Namibian governments probably did not want to write this into the draft of the pact for all to read.
In the Policy Brief, the Secretary-General also revealed who should all work together to steer the world’s destiny in the event that he has declared a global crisis and what would be expected of them:
“An Emergency Platform would be inclusive and allow for the participation of all relevant actors with an ability to contribute meaningfully to the global response. This should include relevant actors from all parts of the world, including the private sector, civil society, subject-matter experts, academics and others. The SecretaryGeneral would be responsible for identifying such relevant actors and for overseeing their contribution to the response. (…)
Once activated, it would bring together leaders from Member States, the United Nations system, key country groupings, international financial institutions, regional bodies, civil society, the private sector, subject-specific industries or research bodies, and other experts.
Any response mechanism must ensure that participating actors make clear commitments that directly and immediately support the global response to a complex shock. This may, for example, include a commitment of financial or technical resources, a commitment to advocate with key actors and/or a commitment to a significant policy shift that would have a meaningful impact on the response. Participants would need to accept accountability for delivering on these commitments.”
The Secretary-General would select “willing governments”, institutions, companies and organizations at his discretion. The participants, including the participating governments, would be asked to make committments, in effect bypassing parliaments. Governments of poor countries will be put under pressure by the participating international financial organizations as these can make any support in the crisis dependent on a constructive attitude towards the recommendations of the emergency platform.
Checking the website of the Future Summit for participating groups and companies to get an idea of who might be allowed to steer the fate of the world in the event of a crisis, will not get you anywhere. The hand-picked invitees have not been made public. And the negotiations will take place behind closed doors.
Corona crisis as the role model
If you can’t help thinking of the handling of the coronavirus crisis when you read this pact full of hackneyed phrases and the anti-democratic approach hidden behind these, you are on the right track. Corona is repeatedly cited as a prime example of a complex global shock. The lesson the Secretary-General draws from this unfortunate episode is rather peculiar:
“Despite the best efforts of the multilateral system, the pandemic showed that national Governments and the global multilateral system were ill-equipped to deal effectively with the scale and complexity of this emergency. The result was a global response to COVID-19 that was insufficiently coordinated (…).”
This is an astonishing finding, as it was much more striking how globally coordinated and practiced the pandemic communication of governments and media was, and how the whole world suddenly implemented more or less the same radical measures that had not been part of pre-existing pandemic plans. This was partly achieved by the international financial organizations, the World Bank and IMF, making aid loans for poor countries conditional on the imposition of lockdowns and other measures.
Had the emergency platforms already been in place, this coordination could have taken place openly. Representatives of the US government, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the Wellcome Trust, the EU, the Edelman PR agency, the IMF and World Bank, the WHO, Charité and Harvard University and compliant associations would have consulted under the aegis of the UN and made “non-binding” recommendations that hardly any country could have resisted implementing.
This coordination model, which worked so brilliantly during the coronavirus crisis to the benefit of pharmaceutical companies and IT multinationals, is to be formalized and applied to any future crises. The open list of possible complex global emergencies in the Secretary-General’s Policy Brief is as follows:
- a) Large-scale climatic or environmental events that cause major socioeconomic disruptions and/or environmental degradation;
- b) Future pandemics with cascading secondary impacts;
- c) High-impact events involving a biological agent (deliberate or accidental);
- d) Events leading to disruptions to global flows of goods, people or finance;
- e) Large-scale destructive and/or disruptive activity in cyberspace or disruptions to global digital connectivity;
- f) A major event in outer space that causes severe disruptions to one or several critical systems on Earth;
- g) Unforeseen risks (“black swan” events).
Just based on the first item, the Secretary-General could call a global emergency today, if he had the requested authority.
The significance of this attempted power grab by an unelected technocrat is well expressed by the famous words of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt (translated):
“The sovereign is the one who decides on the state of exception. (…) the authority proves that it does not need to be right in order to create law. (…) The exception is more interesting than the normal case. The normal proves nothing, the exception proves everything; it not only confirms the rule, the rule lives only from the exception.”
Conclusion
By obtaining the right to declare a global state of emergency at will, the UN would become a quasi-world government; a world government with no democratic control, one which could decide at will which elected and unelected people and entities would be put in charge. Although formally only able to make recommendations, the participating organizations would be powerful enough, to make sure that these recommendations are taken as orders. This is all the more alarming as the UN has been made dependent on donations from large corporations and voluntary contributions from large member states through systematic financial starvation. It is therefore to be feared that a quasi-world government of the UN would primarily serve the interests of powerful global corporations and the most powerful government.
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