Imagine if we had no secrets, no respite from the truth. What if everything was laid bare the moment we introduced ourselves? Catherine Doyle
So it became the law of universe, to have the profoundest of the words cloaked in the darkest of the masks. Jasleen Kaur Gumber
We all become what we pretend to be. Patrick Rothfuss
Masked, I advance. Rene Descartes
How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough? Jeanette Winterson
Done with hiding and weary of lying, we’ll reconcile without and within. John Mark Green
It is a sultry mid-summer morning in New York City, a Sunday following an intense and difficult week both for my country and for the United Nations system as a whole.
At the UN, the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) and its focus on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came to a close; the Security Council held a discussion on the pervasive problem of “sexual violence in conflict” with briefers including UN Envoy Angelina Jolie; and the annual Nelson Mandela lecture was turned over by the Foundation bearing his name to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who proceeded to outline what seemed to be an endless series of urgent global challenges from a podium in New York rather than in South Africa.
In the aggregate, these UN events highlighted the urgency of effective multilateral engagement while calling attention to the policy areas where such engagement has not yet produced sufficient results; has not brought justice for victims, has not overcome health disparities or digital divides, has not resolved conflict consistently or reversed most human-inflicted damage to our climate, has not ensured welcoming borders for displaced persons seeking refuge from armed conflict or grave rights abuses.
Indeed, one of the subtexts of the HLPF as it drew to a close is the number of sustainable development commitments which seem to be headed in the wrong direction – certainly on climate but also on food security, on the protection of civic space, on societies which are genuinely inclusive of cultural minorities, persons with disabilities, and other groups too often destined to remain on national margins. Thankfully, there was no attempt at the close – including by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed — to deflect attention from the reality of our current deficiencies, especially on development finance, but nor was there any lack of rhetorical support for the UN’s role at the center of fulfilling the promises on sustainable development made to global constituents.
As most UN watchers will recognize, at least in part, talk can be a bit cheap around the UN, perhaps even more so in the digital realms to which UN events have been confined over these past few months. An insight from Egypt this week, that this not the time to “make a point” but to “make a difference,” actually served to underscore a problem which has long plagued the UN – that “difference” is made at national level, that the power of implementation resides in national capitals, and that progressive-sounding words by UN diplomats are as likely to mask government intentions as to clarify them.
This rhetorical mask-making is often well-represented in UN policy engagements. Diplomats come to New York to represent national interests and to hopefully do so in a way that does not needlessly jeopardize the possibility of multilateral breakthroughs. But the job also involves creating impressions of countries more progressive in their outlook than is often the case, creating in effect the mask that hides realities at national level including, at times, realities which even directly contradict the policies advanced by national diplomats in multilateral settings.
Such policy mask-making affects many states far removed from Egypt. My own country, for instance, continues to posit itself as a beacon of justice and freedom in multilateral settings despite the many instances in which we have twisted our own values, let alone those of the UN Charter, to serve mostly partisan interests. This is not a phenomenon unique to this current administration, and yet we must be clear that authoritarian tendencies sweeping parts of the planet expose masks of progressive multilateralism that diplomats continue to wear and whose contours the UN is desperate to maintain.
In my own country, there are images in abundance of men in military garb (and with no identification) beating and tear-gassing lawful protesters. There are images of leadership deliberately suppressing COVID-19 information under the absurd guise that if you don’t count an infection, it never happened. In a country where so many have given so much of themselves to advance the values that we say we cherish, the refusal to wear masks to prevent viral spread has somehow been turned into a symbolic exercise of American “freedom,” a misleading and ultimately risky dimension of this expertise-denying, scapegoating and conspiracy-obsessed cultural moment where we all believe what we choose, and where much of what we “believe” is indulgent of the grievances of our tribe. We forget that cloth coverings are not the principle masks we routinely employ to confound others regarding who we really are and what we really care about.
All while distancing itself from the work of UN agencies and failing to fulfill core responsibilities as the “host state,” my country continues to do what many other countries at the UN do, exhibiting masks of progressive multilateralism with scant expectations that policies espoused in Turtle Bay will be reflected in policy commitments in capital. And since the UN is dependent on its funding from these very same states, its arsenal of coercion beyond expressions of normative intent is highly circumscribed.
But as conflicts resist resolution and some development goals threaten to recede into functional indifference, UN leadership seems to be reaching a point of considerable frustration, if not outright panic. SG Guterres has been a bit over-exposed of late, but he has also been increasingly strident in promoting the SDG “blueprint” for the world, rightly highlighting some of the many changes that we need to make now to ensure a greener, healthier planet with forms of governance that “deliver better,” and with divides digital, gendered and economic which are finally being narrowed.
Responses to Guterres’ agenda have often been borderline effusive. Diplomats seem to affirm the value of his pronouncements, agreeing (as with Morocco) that the world we are obligated to build is one which must be built together. But laying out our urgent circumstances is only part of the responsibility of leadership, leadership which the CEO of the Mandela Foundation noted yesterday is now more prone to consolidating power than inspiring people to contribute their best. We are now only rarely inspired to lower our masks and take up our practical duties to justice and sustainability, to move beyond rhetoric and help build that “new social contract” called for by the SG which can help guarantee that promises made by leadership are also promises kept.
One of the week’s most striking moments for me was in the Security Council where a civil society activist, Khin Ohmar, was describing the sexual violence that routinely occurs in Myanmar and which is grounded in “structural gender discrimination” which the Council has done relatively little to address. “I am not the first person to bring this issue to your attention,” Ms. Ohmar observed. “You’ve heard this all before.”
We have indeed heard it all before: on sexual violence, yes, but also on climate and hunger, on refugees and torture, on oceans and weapons. We’ve heard it over and over, more times than we can count and certainly more than we can psychologically process, descriptions of a world that is careening into an uncertain future where both human rights and development progress are under considerable strain and where all of the hand-wringing we do has not affected “root causes” nearly as much as it needs to.
Frankly, this narrative of dysfunction has begun to wear us down. We don’t need more recitations of our half-failures so much as we need inspiration to re-energize our most important commitments, including the task of ensuring that investments of our time and treasure are fully relevant to the problems we wish to address. And we must also find the means to inspire UN diplomats to direct more multilateral energies back home, to remind their own leaders that the real key to preserving multilateralism is not about the quality of our UN statements but about the willingness of states to put into more urgent practice the values that attracted them to multilateral frameworks in the first place.
Inspiration at this moment is one of the rarest of commodities, that Mandela-like combination of passion and honesty which believes in human potential even as it cuts through our masks of misleading rhetoric, our tendency to “hide” behind protocol and position, our feeble attempts to reconcile from a distance, our ability to hear only what we want to hear and then act on only a small portion of that. As the SG likes to say, “time is not on our side.” What we have to say in response is that higher levels of inspiration will be required if we are to make the best possible uses of the time we have left.
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