The Broken System: The Failure of International Governance midst the COVID-19 Pandemic

Lina María Zuluaga | September 15th, 2020

The world we live in today looked a lot different back in 1918 when the Spanish Flu swept across the globe, claiming the lives of at least fifty million people. At the time, public health concerns had been a matter of national or local interest and global health governance was in the premature stages of its development.(1)

The year 1851 witnessed the first International Sanitary Conference held in Paris to manage and address the cholera outbreak in European nations. Eleven more conferences and the establishment of two new international health organizations followed in the next six decades, yet when the first wave of Spanish Influenza hit, international health cooperation, at the time, was no match for it. National governments were left to fend for themselves, and consequently, the Spanish Flu became one of the deadliest public health emergencies of modern times.(2)

The World Health Organization (WHO) was created in 1948, as a specialized body of the UN, to establish a robust infrastructure capable of managing international public health emergencies. With the years it has risen in significance and developed into an entire multilateral ecosystem of global health governance beyond “the wildest dream[s] of the national leaders who confronted the 1918 influenza pandemic alone.”(3) Yet, despite the different existing institutions established to combat the current public health emergency and any of its socio-economical and political collateral effects, most countries have chosen to confront the COVID-19 pandemic by themselves.(4) As a result, the statistics stand at just under a total of thirty million people infected and almost a million people dead.(5)

In view of these rising numbers and the collective global failure to contain the pandemic, many have been quick to point fingers at the international governing bodies to the extent that they have questioned their relevance and efficacy today. Notwithstanding, I argue that the blame has been misallocated. While it is true that the global governance response to the outbreak of the virus has been unsatisfactory, at best, I side with the experts that contend that the institutional and political vulnerabilities of these organizations are not rooted in the lack of effort or expertise of the institutions themselves, as implied by others; rather, I agree that at the heart of these vulnerabilities, we find the lack of political leadership and unwillingness to cooperate and comply on behalf of other member states.(6) In colloquial terms, as first coined by the late Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the UN, blaming the failure to contain the pandemic in the UN or WHO is like blaming the Scotiabank Arena for the Raptors playoffs loss.(7)

This being said, it is then important to recall the anarchical nature of the international governing system. While member states of organizations, like WHO, assign more and more tasks to the organization each year, they simultaneously limit their independence and resources to act efficiently. International governing bodies do not, and cannot, by design act autonomously, even in times of crises, like the current pandemic.(8) While the secretariat members may take initiative, they ultimately depend on states to cooperate as bound by the principle of sovereignty.(9) Thus, the institutional failure of these organizations can be understood as a reflection of member states’ ambivalence to give more independence to these bodies, yet simultaneously demanding effective, resource-intensive, and timely-appropriate responses from them.(10)

The latter is best exemplified by the power given to WHO to declare an emergency of global public health concern and thus require all member states to develop and maintain the appropriate mechanisms to prevent, respond and detect disease outbreaks effectively. This power was given to the director-general of WHO as a result of a revision of the International Health Regulations in 2005. Yet, the updated regulations also left a big loophole that allows member states to deter from WHO guidelines in times of crisis if they believe their measures will deliver greater results. The loophole has been used as a justification to close borders, impose travel bans, and visa restrictions regardless of the WHO’s endorsement of the policies, which has only become more problematic given many governments have failed to notify WHO of said measures.(11)

However, the biggest vulnerability of these institutions is their need for sustained political leadership and direction. As aforementioned, without political support, international organizations lack the means to act even if they have the right objectives.(12) And, in the current pandemic, key member states, like the U.S. and China, have routinely failed to exercise their political leadership and power to effectively help alleviate the global public health emergency. From the beginning, the US has shown no signs of willingness to participate in a global collective response. Instead of pushing for a global agreement on managing the pandemic and helping allocate resources, the US has consistently prioritized its national interests and spent its time “boycotting agencies and running a tally with China.”(13) It is worth remembering that the US received the most credit for enabling these institutions to work. After all, they are credited for coordinating the establishment of postwar institutions, many under the UN (like WHO), that regulate everything from international security, to trade, to global health. It is then only natural that they are now credited with its shortcomings and therefore be held responsible to reclaim and modernize them.(14) Yet the US’ current behaviour shows no interest or willingness to act to this.

On the other hand, China has not exactly been the poster child for global political leadership either. Despite increasing their contribution to the WHO by $30 million and offering assistance to stricken countries, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak, China prevented a collaborative response to halt the pandemic, while simultaneously, silencing doctors and hiding crucial information from the WHO, the US Centres for Disease for Control and Prevention, and its own people. In addition, when the UN Security Council finally met on April 9th, China held the council’s rotating presidency. Consequently, they prevented calls to declare the pandemic as a threat to international peace and security, which then blocked crucial binding resolutions from being passed. This, as an attempt to minimize China’s role in the crisis and the pandemic itself.(15)

The jury is still out on global governance and its institutions. I am confident, however, in the belief that in the end, they are what member states and leaders make of them.(16) While the US and China are busy with political rivalries, almost a million people have lost their lives to this deadly virus. In view of this, it is then crucial for other member states to step into the role of leadership and recognize the value and importance of making these global political institutions more effective by providing the necessary support and mechanisms they need to work as desired—whether that be more autonomy or more resources. This pandemic has demonstrated that weak international cooperation “is not a vulnerability but a choice,”(17) and in the end, what is killing us is not “connection [but] connection without cooperation.”(18)

The pandemic did not break the system, it exposed a broken one.

Endnotes

1. Stewart Patrick, "When the System Fails," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-06-09/when-system-fails.

2. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

3. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

4. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

5. Wordometer, "Coronavirus Update (Live)," Worldometer, last modified September 10, 2020, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/.

6. Thomas R. Pickering and Atman M. Trivedi, "The International Order Didn’t Fail the Pandemic Alone," Foreign Affairs, last modified May 14, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2020-05-14/international-order-didnt-fail-pandemic-alone.

7. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

8. Pickering and Trivedi, "The International Order Didn’t Fail the Pandemic Alone."

9. To read more about the Principle of Sovereignty please refer to, Samantha Besson, s.v. "Sovereignty," in Oxford Public International Law (Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law, 2011), accessed September 10, 2020, https://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1472.

10. Pickering and Trivedi, "The International Order Didn’t Fail the Pandemic Alone."

11. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

12. Karen De Young and Liz Sly, "Global institutions are flailing in the face of the pandemic," The Washington Post, last modified April 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/global-institutions-are-flailing-in-the-face-of-the-pandemic/2020/04/14/39630b96-7e8e-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html.

13. De Young and Sly, "Global institutions are flailing in the face of the pandemic."

14. De Young and Sly, "Global institutions are flailing in the face of the pandemic."

15. Pickering and Trivedi, "The International Order Didn’t Fail the Pandemic Alone."

16. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

17. Patrick, "When the System Fails."

18. Gideon Rose, "The World After the Pandemic," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2020, 8.