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

International organizations, such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization are multilateral in nature. The main proponents of multilateralism have traditionally been the middle powers such as Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the Benelux countries 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 UN vote in a voting bloc with other nations, for example). Multilateralism may involve multiple nations acting together as in the UN or may involve regional or military alliances, pacts, or groupings such as NATO.

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

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 19th century was one of Europe's most peaceful.

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 20th 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.

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 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (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. 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 Organisation 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.

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, which has led certain countries (such as Iran, China, and India) to question the United Nation's multilateral relevance. Concurrently, a perception has developed among some internationalists, such as former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, 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.

See Also

Hegemony

Polarity in international relations

New world order (politics)

Bretton Woods system

United Nations

Category:International relations theory Category:Multilateral relations

de:Multilateralität es:Multilateralismo fr:Multilatéralisme id:Multilateralisme ka:მულტილატერალიზმი ja:多国間主義 no:Multilateralisme pl:Multilateralizm (politologia) pt:Multilateralismo ru:Мультилатерализм fi:Multilateralismi sv:Multilateralism tl:Multilateralismo zh:多邊主義

Name	Kemal Derviş
Office	Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme
1blankname
1namedata	Ban Ki-moon
Term start	15 August 2005
Term end	28 February 2009
Predecessor	Mark Malloch Brown
Successor	Helen Clark
Office2	Minister of State for Economic Affairs
Term start2	3 March 2001
Term end2	10 August 2002
Primeminister2	Bülent Ecevit
Predecessor2	Recep Önal
Successor2	Masum Türker
Constituency mp3	Istanbul
Parliament3	Turkish
Term start3	3 November 2002
Term end3	9 May 2005
Birth date	January 10, 1949
Birth place	Istanbul, Turkey
Nationality	Turkish
Party	Republican People's Party
Spouse	Catherine Derviş
Alma mater	London School of Economics (B.Sc., M.Sc.)Princeton University (PhD)
Profession	EconomistPoliticianAuthor
Data1	}}

Kemal Derviş (; born 10 January 1949) is a Turkish economist and politician, and former head of the United Nations Development Programme. He was honored by the government of Japan for having "contributed to mainstreaming Japan's development assistance policy through the United Nations." In 2005, he was ranked 67th in the Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll conducted by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. He is currently Vice President and Director of the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution.

Early life

Derviş was born on January 10, 1949 in Istanbul, Turkey to a Turkish father and a Dutch-German mother.

Career

As Minister of State for Economic Affairs in Turkey when Bülent Ecevit was Prime Minister, Derviş was the architect of Turkey's successful three-year economic recovery program launched in 2001. Before being named to head the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), he was a member of the Turkish parliament, and a member of the joint commission of the Turkish and European Parliaments. He previously was a member of the Convention on the Future of Europe.

A member of the Advisory Group at the Center for Global Development, member the Task Force on Global Public Goods and the Special Commission on the Balkans and associated with the Economics and Foreign Policy Forum in Istanbul, Derviş was instrumental in strengthening Turkey’s prospects of starting membership negotiations with the European Union.

Strobe Talbott announced that Derviş joined the Brookings Institution on March 30, 2009 as vice president and director of the Global Economy and Development program.

He is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spanish Socialist Workers' Party's think tank.

Derviş is currently married to his second wife, Catherine Derviş, an American citizen. He is also the author of "Recovery from the Crisis and Contemporary Social Democracy", which was published in 2006.

Studies and World Bank Career

Kemal Derviş earned his bachelor (1968) and master's degrees (1970) in economics from the London School of Economics and his PhD from Princeton University, U.S. (1973). From 1973 to 1976, he was member of the economics faculty of the METU in Ankara, Turkey, and served also as an advisor to Bülent Ecevit during and after his Prime Ministerial duties. From 1976 to 1978, he was member of the faculty, Department of Economics at the Princeton University.

In 1977, he joined the World Bank, where he worked until he returned to Turkey in 2001. At the World Bank, he held various positions, including Division Chief for Industrial and Trade Strategy and Director for the Central Europe Department after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1996, he became Vice-President of the World Bank for the Middle East and North Africa Region, and in 2000, Vice-President for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management. In the first position, Kemal Derviş coordinated the World Bank’s support to the peace and reconstruction process in the Balkans (Bosnia) and the Middle East. In the second position, he was responsible for the World Bank’s global programmes and policies to fight poverty and the development of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) initiative that had just been launched. He was also responsible for the operational coordination with other institutions, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and United Nations institutions, on international institutional and policy issues.

Ministry of Economic Affairs

When Derviş became Turkey’s minister of economic affairs in March, 2001, after a 22-year career at the World Bank, the country was facing its worst economic crisis in modern history and prospects for success were uncertain. Derviş used his independence from domestic vested interests and support of domestic reformers and civil society to push through a tough stabilization program with far-reaching structural changes and sweeping bank reforms that protected state banks from political use. Derviş also strengthened the independence of the central bank and pushed through deep structural reforms in agriculture, energy and the budget process. These reforms, and his reputation and top-level contacts in the U.S. and Europe, helped him to mobilize $20 billion in new loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Rapid economic growth resumed in 2002 and inflation came down from an average of nearly 70 percent in the 1990s to 12 percent in 2003; interest rates fell and the exchange rate for the Turkish lira stabilized.

Derviş resigned from his ministerial position on 10 August 2002 and was elected to parliament on 3 November of that year as a member of the main opposition Republican People's Party.

United Nations Development Programme

On May 5, 2005, the United Nations General Assembly, representing 191 countries, unanimously confirmed Kemal Derviş as the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Derviş started his four-year term on August 15, 2005. The UNDP Administrator is the third-highest ranking official in the United Nations, after the Secretary-General and the Deputy Secretary-General.

In 2009, he decided not to seek a second term as Administrator of UNDP.

Honors

Order of the Rising Sun, Grand Cordon (Japan), 2009.

Selected works

2008 – "''A Better Globalization: Legitimacy, Governance and Reform''"

2006 – ''"Recovery from the Crisis and Contemporary Social Democracy"''

Notes

References

Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Japan), "2009 Autumn Conferment of Decorations on Foreign Nationals," p. 1.

External links

Derviş's expert page at the Brookings Institution

Biography of Kemal Derviş, Administrator of UNDP

BBC profile of Kemal Derviş

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Category:1949 births Category:Living people Category:People from Istanbul Category:Turkish economists Category:United Nations officials Category:Administrators of the United Nations Development Programme Category:World Bank people Category:Alumni of the London School of Economics Category:Princeton University alumni Category:Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun Category:Middle East Technical University faculty Category:Ministers of Economic Affairs of Turkey Category:Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun

de:Kemal Derviş fr:Kemal Derviş nl:Kemal Derviş no:Kemal Derviş pt:Kemal Derviş fi:Kemal Derviş tr:Kemal Derviş