MOSCOW, May 23. /TASS/. The UN agrees with Russia that discussing the current global situation is absolutely necessary, Miguel Angel Moratinos, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General, High Representative for the UN Alliance of Civilizations, said in an interview with TASS.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier that a discussion between the leaders of P5, the five nuclear powers, permanent members of the UN Security Council, was long overdue.
"Any occasion to discuss the situation in the world is absolutely necessary. Of course, the permanent members of the [UN] Security Council are important, but the world today is more than the P5," he said when asked a corresponding question. "If the P5 want to discuss [the global situation they’re] welcome. But from my point of view, we have now to add other actors to understand what are going to be the challenges, and how each of us, I mean each of important actors, can contribute to a better world," Moratinos added.
"I think that the alliance is becoming more relevant. You know, we all talk about multilateralism. Multilateralism is only the result of geopolitics. After the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust people said ‘never again’, ‘let’s go and create a common house for everybody’, so they created the UN and established the Charter of San Francisco, 1945. And there was the Security Council with the P5, who were the ones to lead the world at that time. It didn’t last long because after a few years the world became bipolar: the former Soviet Union and the United States were the two great political actors, and it worked more or less," he explained. "But they maintained the Charter, they maintained the multilateral framework," in which all countries participated, but ultimately decisions were made by two main poles, two bipolar players, the official said. "Then, came the end of the Soviet Union, and the so-called unipolar world of the United States. So they maintained the multilateral framework but with one pole, the United States," he said.
This also did not last long, from the 1990s to the 2000s, Moratinos added. "There were new actors coming. There was the new Russian Federation, there was China, there was South Africa, there were emerging countries. So now, after 80 years of the UN, we have to adapt to the new geopolitical scene and a multipolar politics, to the multilateral framework. <…> We have to adapt the UN for the next century to have not only one pole, not only two poles, but multiple poles. In this multipolar world, there most probably will be, of course, Europeans for sure, but also there will be Russia, there will be China, there will be maybe India - a new reality of geopolitics of today and tomorrow," he concluded.