You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough. Frank Crane
Trust dies but mistrust blossoms. Sophocles
When trust improves, the mood improves. Fernando Flores
How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown? Mary Renault
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think. Toni Morrison
Trust, even when your heart begs you not to. Alysha Speer
To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Jeanette Winterson
Trust starts with truth and ends with truth. Santosh Kalwar
This past week, under the Swiss presidency, the Security Council held a general debate on the topic, “Futureproofing trust for sustaining peace.” This “debate,” chaired by the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs, gave delegations the chance to both assign blame for the current, largely dismal, state of multilateral affairs, but also to be more thoughtful than is often encouraged about how trust-building is a more essential element in the success of such affairs than has often been recognized.
Amidst the cold winds blowing through the UN since the height of the pandemic, specifically with regard to NGO and civil society access, we have noticed more and more delegations taking up – in rhetoric if not always in practice – the normative elements that we and others have been promoting for some time. More and more it is recognized that the comfort we share within our UN bubbles is often not shared by constituencies at large; that our predispositions to craft language (especially on peace and security) watered down by a misreading of “consensus” and then foisted on a needy world with little or no interest in how such language is to be implemented does not appear to others to be quite the breakthrough that we imagine it to be in the realtive conform of UN conference rooms. Indeed, there are, and likely shall remain, trust deficits which will inevitably occur in situations where the norm-makers have little or no responsibility to ensure that norms crafted can actually breathe hope and life into the communities ostensibly served, communities who generally have little or no say in their crafting.
As we know from our own training and investigations, and as this week’s Council debate reinforced, trust is no simple matter. Indeed, like “love” and many other of our cherished normative categories, trust is far easier to invoke than to either define or maintain. Indeed, in a world which seems at times to be spinning out of control, the tendency in policy is to focus too much on the criterion govering our own trust issues rather than on criterion for cultivating and enabling trust in others. Moreover, in the context of multilateral relations, it is too easy to forget that the priority of trust-building has a history, one in part of colonial powers and other large states which has “borrowed against trust,” over and over again, throwing their weight around, imposing values that they do not always practice themselves, telling only the part of the truth which serves national interests, crafting agreements with abundant loopholes which preserve options for some and limit them for many others, insisting on ending impunity for smaller, offending states while dodging accountability for themselves, insisting on a “rules-based order” without a thorough vetting of who made those rules and the starkly uneven ways in which they are often enacted.
We should be clear here. We have sat in UN conference rooms with laptops open and mouths closed for a generation now. Despite the aforementioned “cold winds” which we experience on a daily basis, we continue to believe that the flaws in this system, flaws which impede the full-flowering of what is still a rather remarkable experiment, can and must be fixed. Despite the extraordinary diplomatic and learning opportunities occurring routinely within its walls, we have long since moved past honoring the resolutions which are dead on arrival, the endless COPs and other of what Kenya referred to this week as our “ceremonial meetings” which too –often deliver even less than half a loaf, those diplomats who insist that the UN is solely for its member states without reminding the small but attentive audiences that the decisions which hopefully bind are made mostly in national capitals not in UN conference rooms, the often-fruitful discussions which are now more frequently webcast but which are more likely to raise constituent expectations than satisfy them.
Despite calls by the African Union and several other delegations speaking at the “Futureproofing” event to bring multilateralism closer to the people, gaps of trust remain, gaps which cannot be written off as the fruits of vaccine inequity or the painful Russian aggression against Ukraine. These are gaps of “good faith” as noted by Mexico this week, of the absence of justice as Ireland insisted, of promises made and then broken as suggested by China, including the promise to break down “the high walls over small spaces” that more and more states seem desperate to maintain. For its part, Brazil warned of the rapid spread of resentment (and we would add “grievance”) which is toxic to trust-building as is (well-put by the Swiss Minister of Foreign Affairs) our current climate of unpredictability which causes some states to retreat into an unhelpful “nostalgia” and others to dig in their heels and refuse to budge on policy until their own (largely un-named) trust issues are duly addressed.
It is not so difficult for each of us to grasp the complexities of trust; we only have to examine our own relationships, our own mishandling of the truth including the truth about ourselves, the unexamined hurts we carry around in our hearts which impede both the risks of trust but also a clear-eyed examination of the hurts we have inflicted on others. Trust is no simple matter, neither for institutions like the UN nor in our own domestic contexts. Whether local or global we continue to “borrow against trust” in ways that only serve to shrink our personal circles and policy worldviews, narrrowing options for both promise keeping and service provision.
During the Council meeting on “Futureproofing Trust,” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk (who doesn’t pull many punches) cited what he called “atrocious ruptures in the social fabric” which make trust in governing institutions a high hill to climb. Unfortunately, this “high hill” also applies to our personal and domestic contexts as well. Study after study has chronicled a growing sense of loneliness and isolation amongst many of our populations, people whose primary companions have become cell phones and social media outlets, people who tend to place more trust in apps than in neighbors, people who wouldn’t dream of talking to a stranger but will bare their all in front of a camera to be consumed by thousands of perfect strangers.
The “atrocious ruptures” chronicled by the High Commissioner thus have implications both within and beyond multilateral structures, pushing peoples and their representative into harder positions and more well-defended spaces from which stems too-little hope, too-little confidence, too-little trust, too-little courage. The “torment” which verily comes from living in a world characterized by staggering levels of mistrust now constitutes a metaphorical “superbloom,” one which coveys little beautfy but rather continues to narrow personal and policy options and perspectives. This torment is simply something we must choose to live without.
If we are to scale the peaks on which are very lives likely now depend, we will need to replace the interminable “code red” warnings of our hearts with heart-friendly investments, refusing to be lonely and isolated, refusing to make promises we have no intention of keeping, refusing to pay lip service to the trust that we desperately require at the core of our souls and institutions, the trust that can “improve our collective mood” and bridge divides of truth and action that threaten to turn gaps into the ruptures which we all would do well to fear.
Switzerland opened a door this week in an eminent policy space to reflect on a topic both exceedingly complex and largely neglected. The takeaway is that we are running short of time to adjust our ways and means such that we might trust with greater courage and improve prospects for maintaining the trust of others. Trust in the end is the glue which can hold together our increaingly unglued societies and their increasingly bewildered citizens. We must continue to make spaces conducive to exploring and examinuing ways to build and share the trust on which our collective future likely hinges.
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