The new UN Secretary General takes over in the coming days. The US President-Elect has just called the UN a club for people to sit around talking and having fun. I’m not sure the delegates on the UN’s budget committee would recognize the fun part. And, ironically, it is UN action (on Israeli settlements) rather than inaction that has led to it being attacked this week. There is no doubt that the UN has its flaws, as I’ve blogged in the past. But the mounting threats to the values it represents make it more important than ever in 2017. I’ve seen UN officials doing extraordinary, humane and courageous work in the toughest places on earth, on behalf of the rest of us. With America and Europe in periods of introspection, and the wall builders crowing, we all have an interest in getting behind the new UN leadership. 

Monocle asked me to write an open letter to the new SG for its 2017 Forecast edition. Here is a lightly edited version. I’ve also written to him with private advice on social media. Our report on the Digital UN will come out in April. Do get in touch if you have ideas.

Dear Antonio,

Congratulations on your appointment. You will bring extraordinary heart, soul and experience to the role. The United Nations is the best idea for global citizenship that mankind has yet had. If the UN did not exist, we would desperately need to invent it.

And you are going to have to reinvent it. Because we face a century of change unlike no other in history. States, ideas and industries will go out of business. Inequality is growing. The world feels leaderless. And the scaffolding that your predecessors built around global security and peace is fragile. What the UN represents – a system based on states, hierarchies, the status quo - is becoming weaker. Digital technology empowers other sources of power; make it harder to retain public trust; and creates new oversight. The UN must urgently innovate and evolve, with creativity, determination and patience. Or face a slow slide into under resourced decline and irrelevance.

I hope that Syria will be top of your in-tray, because it is the grimmest example of what happens when the UN fails. We have to show Syrians that there is more to choose from than a barrel bombing tyrant, the box office barbarity of ISIL, and the perils of a Mediterranean raft. And we have to prove through your personal engagement that diplomacy can still work.

I think that there are also three great 21^st century freedoms to fight for in your term: freedom of opportunity, freedom to create, and freedom to coexist.

First, opportunity. For moral and pragmatic reasons, our greatest challenge is now making more people less poor. And an individual’s freedom of opportunity should not be defined by where they are born. We need to get an education to 75 million children not in school. And we should be overhauling the global education system so that future global citizens have equal access to the best we can teach them.

Second, creativity. Our ability to keep pace with the dangerous political and social implications of technological change depends on our brightest global minds coming up with ingenious solutions to global challenges, from climate change to economic instability. We should be unashamedly backing freedom of the internet, so that the smartest people in the world can create together the extraordinary ideas that we don’t yet know we need.  The UN itself can also take advantage of the huge opportunities of the Digital Age, in order to counter the growing threats of the Digital Age. My team are preparing detailed ideas for you on how. How we can use solar drones for better peacekeeping and provision of education. How we can create digital citizenship to increase security and reduce identity fraud and international crime. How you can use your personal social media effort and transform UN digital content to engage and build a new generation of global citizens. How to build the online rights to match the offline rights your predecessors promoted. How to overhaul the global system for humanitarian giving. How the UN can respond to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence. And how big data and machine learning can improve not just disaster response but the whole UN effort.

Third, coexistence. We were all migrants once, and the 21^st century will make many of us migrants again: improved communications, the internet, climate change, conflict will create more people on the move than any previous era. So we need to learn how to absorb, assimilate, coexist. This pursuit of coexistence is at the heart of diplomacy. It was what motivated the first ever diplomat – the caveman who persuaded another caveman to stop clubbing him for long enough that they could hunt together.

The freedom to coexist also means making the hard decisions on protecting the most vulnerable. Whether children are bombed in Gaza, Aleppo or Mosul, they look the same – small, broken, undefended. You can show that we have not reached the limits of our compassion. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is mankind’s greatest text of all time. The problem is not that we don’t understand our duty to our fellow citizens, but that we don’t have the will to deliver it. You can rescue the noble idea of Responsibility to Protect from the rubble of Aleppo.

The great dividing line of the 21^st century is not between East and West or North and South, but between two human instincts – to live together, or to build bigger walls.  We need the UN more than ever because the implications of diplomatic failure are more catastrophic than ever. I hope and believe that under your leadership, the UN can reconnect with the magnetic sense of purpose and optimism that characterises this flawed but vital organisation at its best. 

This is going to be an exhilarating decade. I know that you will not fail because of a lack of creativity, humanity or courage. Solidarity and support for you as you take on the world’s toughest and most important job.

Best wishes,

Tom

Photo credit: UNHCR / Andrew McConnell