The World Is Bigger Than The Room Built For It: What UNGA81 Revealed About The Coming Order
UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 15 Of 15
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The Secretary-General set the terms on the opening morning. "We are clearly moving towards a multipolar world. And that movement is irreversible," António Guterres said in his final address to a General Debate before his term ends. He did not present this as good news or bad news. He said multipolarity could take two shapes: a world of "fragmentation and transactionalism", or a "networked" one in which several centres of influence coexist within shared rules. "In many respects," he said of the first, "that is the trajectory we are on today."
Over the next six days, the debate split along that line. What stood out was not that some governments called for a multipolar world, which some have done for years. It was how many governments, with very different interests and allies, described the same problems in almost the same words.
Only a handful used the word itself. India's S. Jaishankar said the world was "well on our way towards a multi-polar world" and that "the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities". Russia's Sergey Lavrov said "a more just, multipolar world order is emerging before our very eyes" and, quoting President Vladimir Putin, that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok". Finland's Alexander Stubb, from the other side of the Ukraine war, warned that the world was heading towards "a non-cooperative multipolar world order" of "zero-sum deals, transactions, and unrestrained power", and told fellow Western governments that "the Global South and East are an expanding economic and political force".
These three leaders agree on almost nothing else. Russia is at war in Ukraine. Finland is a NATO member that calls that war "unlawful, unjustified and unprovoked". India has steep US tariffs on its goods and sits between both camps but all three described the same thing, that one order is passing and another has not yet settled.
Most speakers did not use the word "multipolar" at all. They described its symptoms instead, and three came up again and again.
The first was coercion. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was "on life support" and condemned those "who use tariffs as a weapon of coercion and blackmail". South Africa's Ronald Lamola spoke of "the wielding of economic weapons to coerce countries into abandoning their chosen development trajectories". Jaishankar warned that "everything is being weaponized", from finance and market access to supply chains and technology. Stubb, in a phrase that could have come from any of them, said: "We have entered a world of coercion, where dependencies are vulnerabilities." China's Han Zheng said "protectionism produces no winners". Iran and Cuba, under war and sanctions in Tehran's case and a fuel blockade in Havana's, brought the most concrete evidence of what that coercion looks like in practice.
The second was the veto. Calls to end it came from Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, under his slogan "the world is bigger than five", from Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from Stubb and from Malaysia's Mohamad Hasan, who said simply: "We are sick of it." Barbados joined the initiative led by France and Mexico to restrain the veto in cases of mass atrocities. Brazil said all member states were "held hostage by the inaction of the Security Council". Once a demand mostly heard from the Global South, abolition of the veto was argued this year from inside NATO and the European Union.
The third was representation. Ghana's John Dramani Mahama called Africa's lack of a permanent Security Council seat "fundamentally unacceptable in the 21st century". South Africa noted that 70 per cent of the Council's resolutions over the past decade concerned Africa, though the continent has no permanent voice in them. Barbados's Mia Mottley pointed out that small island states make up a quarter of the world's countries and have no assured seat. Several speakers carried the same complaint over to money: Mahama said developing nations borrow at interest rates up to eight times higher than industrialised ones, and Lamola said climate finance was "stacked against developing nations".
Where they disagreed was over what comes next, and this is the more important finding of the debate.
One group wants to build alternatives. Russia and Belarus used the week to launch work on a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the 21st Century. Nine states took part, and Belarus will chair the talks. Belarus's Maxim Ryzhenkov described the European Union as defending a "slipping dominance".
A second group wants the existing system adjusted, not replaced. India argued that the post-1945 institutions must make room for new realities. Finland proposed specific new permanent seats for Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Barbados warned that without an equitable rules-based order, smaller states "will simply cease to exist". Barbados, India and Brazil were among the initial co-sponsors of a declaration on multilateralism issued in New York on September 21.
China positioned itself between these two groups. Beijing has long championed multipolarity, and Xi Jinping had called it irreversible in Bishkek on September 1. In New York, though, Han Zheng did not use the word. He presented China as the defender of the post-war order, against bloc confrontation and against unilateral military action taken without Security Council authorisation.
The debate's paradox was that the system almost everyone criticised was the one almost everyone still turned to. Even the harshest critics addressed their demands to the United Nations. Cuba warned of a slide into "the law of the jungle" and still asked the Assembly to reform and defend the organisation. Iran, under bombardment, said it was ready for "dialogue and diplomacy". Small states and middle powers, Mottley and Mohamad among them, argued that rules matter most to those without the power to impose their own.
The obstacle is written into the UN Charter. Any amendment to change the Security Council's composition or the veto must be ratified by all five permanent members, the same powers whose privileges the reform would reduce. That is why this year's speeches matter more as a record of opinion than as a forecast of change. They show that dissatisfaction with the 1945 arrangement is no longer confined to one region or one ideology. It now runs from Brasília to Helsinki, from Accra to Kuala Lumpur.
The year's events supplied the backdrop: a US-Israeli war with Iran in its eighth month, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, a fuel blockade on Cuba, and a US President who told the Assembly he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Seen together, these explain why so many governments now talk about sovereignty and coercion in the same breath.
The new Secretary-General, due to be chosen by the end of the year, will inherit the question this debate left open. Power is plainly spreading. The open question is the one Guterres posed on the first morning: whether the world ends up fragmented and transactional, or builds the kind of shared rules Stubb called "a new San Francisco moment". The 14 statements we examined show that most of the world would prefer the second. Whether the most powerful members will allow it is a question the UN has been unable to settle since 1945.