Barbados' Mottley Warns Small States 'Will Simply Cease To Exist' Without An Equitable Rules-Based Order
UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 8 Of 15
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Addressing the General Debate on Thursday, September 24, Mottley argued that the world's problem was not a lack of knowledge but a failure to act on it, and that UN reform could not stop at administrative changes. "We cannot move swiftly to reorganize offices and reporting lines while allowing the most consequential questions of power and representation to remain unresolved," she said. "Reform cannot be selective."
"So yes, let us improve the machinery. But let us also reform the exercise of power," she said.
She pointed to Africa's lack of a permanent Security Council seat and to the absence of assured representation for small island developing States, which she said face threats that fall within the Council's mandate, including climate insecurity, illicit arms flows, organised crime and displacement. "And yet, despite constituting one quarter of the world's states, we have no assured representation within the council," she said.
On the veto, Mottley announced that Barbados had joined more than a hundred other member states in supporting the Franco-Mexican initiative to restrain its use in cases of mass atrocities. "Where populations face genocide, crimes against humanity or large-scale war crimes, the veto should not be allowed to paralyse the Security Council when action is most urgently needed," she said.
She described Barbados as a co-sponsor of the P4M, a grouping formed to strengthen multilateralism "and to beat back the undertakers who are waiting to bury it". Barbados was among the initial co-sponsors, with Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, India and Kenya, of a declaration titled "A Joint Commitment to Multilateralism, International Law, Peace and Prosperity", issued in New York on September 21.
Closer to home, she called for the Caribbean to remain a zone of peace, rejecting any drift toward the region "becoming a theatre for confrontation or for the unilateral and unjustified use of force". The remark came more than eight months after the US operation in Venezuela that ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.
On technology, she said the rules for artificial intelligence must not be written by a handful of powerful countries and companies. "A technology that will affect every State must be governed by the rules that every State has had the opportunity to shape," she said.
Commitment to multilateralism, she argued, "must be measured not only by what we ask of these institutions, but by our willingness to support them", and the UN needed the resources to act "before the guns speak and not after the guns start to fly".
Mottley's intervention captured a position shared by many small states: wary of any order in which power alone decides, and more invested than most in rules that bind everyone equally.
The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading, but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.