Multilateralism

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Multilateralism is  a term in international relations that refers to multiple countries working in concert on a given issue.

Most international organizations, such as the United Nations and  the World Trade Organization, are  multilateral in nature. The main proponents of multilateralism have  traditionally been the middle powers such as Canada, Australia and  the Nordic countries. Larger states often act unilaterally, while the smaller ones may have  little direct power at all in international affairs aside from participation in the United Nations (by consolidating their U.N. vote in a voting bloc with other nations, for example).

The converse of multilateralism is  unilateralism in terms of political philosophy.

[edit] History

The first modern instances of multilateralism occurred in the nineteenth century in Europe after the end of the Napoleonic Wars where the great powers met to redraw the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna. The Concert of Europe, as it  became known, was a group of great and  lesser powers that would meet to resolve issues peacefully. Conferences such as the Conference of Berlin in 1884 helped reduce great power conflicts during this period, and  the nineteenth century was one of Europe's most peaceful.^{[citation needed]}

Industrial and  colonial competition, combined with shifts in the balance of power after the creation - by diplomacy and  conquest - of Germany by Prussia meant cracks were appearing in this system by the turn of the twentieth century. The concert system was utterly destroyed by the First World War. After that conflict world leaders created the League of Nations in order to try to prevent another conflict of similar scale. A number of international arms limitation treaties were also signed such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. But the League proved insufficient to prevent Japan's conquests in Eastern Asia in the 1930s, escalating fascist aggression and, ultimately, the outbreak of the Second World War from 1939.^{[citation needed]}

After the Second World War the victors, having drawn experience from the failure of the League of Nations, created the United Nations in 1945 with a structure intended to address the weaknesses of the previous body. Unlike the League, the UN had the active participation of the United States and  the Soviet Union, the world's two greatest contemporary powers. Along with the political institutions of the UN the post-war years also saw a wide array of other multilateral organizations such as the GATT (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank (so-called 'Bretton Woods' institutions) and  the World Health Organization develop. The collective multilateral framework played an  important role in maintaining world peace in the Cold War.^{[citation needed]} Moreover, United Nations peacekeepers stationed around the world became one of the most visible symbols of multilateralism in recent decades.

Today there are  myriad multilateral institutions of varying scope and  subject matter, ranging from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and  Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW); although many such organizations were founded or  are supported by the UN, by no means are  all of them maintained within the UN system.

[edit] Challenges

The multilateral system has encountered mounting challenges in the period since the end of the Cold War. The United States has become increasingly dominant on the world stage in terms of military and  economic power at the same time as it  increasingly questions the relevance of multilateral processes to its interests, in some cases.^{[citation needed]} Concurrently, a perception has developed among some internationalists that the United States is  more inclined to act unilaterally in situations with international implications. This trend began when the U.S. Senate, in October 1999, refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which President Bill Clinton had signed in September 1996. Under President George W. Bush the United States has rejected such multilateral agreements as the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel land mines and  a draft protocol to ensure compliance by States with the Biological Weapons Convention. Also under the administration of George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which the Nixon administration and  the Soviet Union had negotiated and  jointly signed in 1972.

[edit] See also

• Democratic mundialization
• Mundialization
• Unilateralism (antonymn)