Sir Keir Starmer’s comment in 2023, which I doubt he would now repeat, that he preferred Davos to Westminster, is an important insight into the old world order that Mark Carney said this week “is not coming back”. However, did it ever really exist, and if so, for how long?
The immediate post-war era saw the establishment of a series of multinational bodies, in an effort to ensure that the tragedies of two world wars were not repeated. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were set up to secure financial stability and to grow weaker economies. The World Bank has given a great deal of support to emerging economies over the decades, and the IMF has bailed out feckless nations, including famously the United Kingdom.
The United Nations was established to provide a stronger, more effective version of the League of Nations, a body that could ensure, in Churchill’s terms “jaw, jaw” rather than “war, war”. It provided and provides an arena where competing powers may talk to each other in a theoretically neutral territory. It has a host of subsidiary bodies that concentrate on specific areas, such as the World Health Organization and the International Court of Justice.
A Utopian looking for world government could have seen the beginnings of it in these structures with the financial institutions as the treasury, and the UN as the constitutional base, including within it a proto-executive in the Security Council, a legislature in the General Assembly, and a judiciary in the ICJ.
Alongside these bodies were regional organisations, especially the European Union, and security ones, most importantly NATO. The EU was set up as a counterpoint to American hegemony and the founders were clear-sighted in their ambitions, regardless of the prestidigitation of the politicians who did not want to admit to their voters what was going on, with a few noble exceptions. This is very well set out in Tom McTague’s excellent book Between the Waves. NATO is a rather different beast, as it was not set up to bring nations together but to be prepared for war, and hence to ensure peace through strength.
Since these organisations were established, events have divided into three periods: the Cold War, the Neocon era, and the new Trump reality. During the Cold War, these nominally international bodies were mainly a means of exercising American power while paying lip service to European sensibilities and past glories.
