Speaker: Multilateral leaders need vision, ethics, and political courage

Despite many current global threats ¨C including increasing conflicts, economic shifts, and climate change ¨C there is hope, said a former United Nations Under-Secretary-General in a lecture at Xi¡¯an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) on 8 May.

Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond

Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond, now a Senior Policy Advisor at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, discussed the advantages of multilateral over bilateral diplomacy in creating a better world and requirements for multilateral leadership.

¡°Multilateral diplomacy is often more complicated, because you¡¯re talking to many different people with different interests, but at the end, it¡¯s usually fairer and leads to better results than if you do things just one-on-one,¡± he said.

Diplomacy that unites all countries is necessary to fight against the world¡¯s most pressing problems, like climate change, he said.

¡°It¡¯s a problem that affects everything, everybody from small Pacific Island states to the biggest states like China and the US,¡± Hochschild Drummond said. ¡°So you cannot handle it through bilateral discussions. You need multilateral diplomacy.¡±

Intensified issues

Beyond the universality of a problem like climate change, some threats are interlinked and made worse by each other, he said. For example, clashes may occur over water rights in areas where climate change causes droughts, but also resilience to climate change is made worse where there is conflict, he said.

Today the world sees not only increased conflicts ¨C there have been more wars in 2025 than at any time since 1946 ¨C but also external actors exacerbating these conflicts, Hochschild Drummond said. Yet, formal intergovernmental organisations like the UN that were set up to handle wide-reaching and complicated world problems have waning influence, he said. Instead, countries are joining informal alliances like BRICS, G7 and G20 that create agreements that are not universal, he said.

¡°What this leads to is a fundamental contradiction, at a time that we face an increasing number of global threats, the very institutions that were set up to deal with those global threats are being weakened,¡± Hochschild Drummond said.

The UN, which was set up based on the global power distributions in 1945, needs to be modernised to better fit the current world, he said.

Staff and students at Hochschild Drummond lecture

Common vision

Hochschild Drummond discussed a global study he led in 2020 on what young people across the world think.

The study found that young people across the world shared views, he said: ¡°What we found was, in a way, surprising ¨C that the immediate priorities of young people, whether they're in China or Chile, whether they're in the US or Australia, whether they're in Bhutan or Scotland, are remarkably similar.

¡°There are priorities in the short term: for economies that look after the poorer better, for global solidarity, and for access to basic services. In the long term, they're worried about corruption, climate change, conflict, poverty. These were the same answers we got from people across the world.

¡°So there is a common vision, somehow, a common diagnosis from people about what our problems are and what the future should look like, and that is a good reason for hope.¡±

Hochschild Drummond said that the survey led to the 2024 Pact for the Future among member states. In the pact, nations committed to fulfilling goals in the areas of development, international peace and security, science and technology, youth and future generations, and transforming global governance.

Multilateral leadership needs to be able to rally international diplomacy behind a single global vision, he said. In the UN, with 193 member states, multilateral leaders need to find the common interests and to actively find the opportunities that will make a difference, he said.

¡°It takes courage to lead in a multilateral context,¡± Hochschild Drummond said.

Such leaders must build alliances, nurture leadership across the system, be entrepreneurial in their approach, be resilient, be determined, and look for long-term gains, he said.

Hochschild Drummond: ¡°We need world leaders, multilateral leaders made strong by vision, sustained by ethics, and revealed by political courage.¡±

¡°However much we do to change the mechanisms,¡± he said, ¡°ultimately, the quality of global governance, the quality of multilateral institutions, depends on the quality of leadership behind it.¡±

Professor Qiuling Chao, Vice President for Student Affairs and Information at XJTLU, welcomes Hochschild Drummond

By Tamara Kaup
Edited by Patricia Pieterse