Stroke of G-nius…

Before Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there were low probability events that actually took place and had a major impact. Before Malcolm Gladwell, trends reached and then passed the threshold levels after which the "momentum for change become unstoppable." Before Fareed Zakaria there were democracies that existed pretty much in name only offering their constituents much less than original idea promised.

In each of these cases however, the introduction of a new term… like "black swan" or "illiberal democracy" or the popularization of one that already existed like "tipping point" in a narrower context (epidemiology)… not only captured an important idea, but facilitated discussion of that notion. That’s what the best such labels do. In fact, terms like these go further, they energize discussions by enabling more people to join in. Typically, such terms also gain popularity because they not only provide an easy handle for a key concept but they also come along at the right moment.  In other words, the publication of The Tipping Point represented a tipping point in the life of the idea of tipping points, gaining popularity because whether we knew it or not, we were groping for the term around the time it was offered to us. 

In his essay for FP called "Minilateralism," I think Moisés Naím offers us another such term, one that has floated about among specialists before but now deserves the mainstream place I hope his article will give it. Like the other idea framing works mentioned above, his article also arrives at precisely the right moment. In area after area of foreign policy, it is clear that multilateral solutions are the only ones that will work. This is true not only because we have come to see the deep flaws associated with unilateralism, but also because it is clear that global challenges require agreement among and action from the broader community of nations. Yet, such solutions are also notoriously (and as Moisés argues, increasingly) hard to come by. The divergent interests of different nations of different sizes at different stages of development with different national interests makes achieving global consensus the ultimate exercise in herding cats. Indeed, organizations that seek such consensus have, by virtue of having set such a generally unrealistic goal, sentenced themselves to the most extreme form of lowest common denominator based irrelevance not to mention major frustration-induced headaches for their members.

So what’s a planet to do? Moisés identifies (and gives a useful name to) the only practical path. He observes that on most big issues, Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule provides a short cut to effective action. Because on most big issues…whether they pertain to trade or to environmental concerns, to nuclear weapons proliferation or military force…there are a smaller percentage of countries with vastly disproportionate power. Get them to agree on a solution or an action and you have gone a long way toward achieving something of global impact. And Palau and Andorra don’t need to be at the table complicating matters or inflating a summit’s catering budget.

This concept has been knocking around for years, of course, in various forms. Like-minded countries and countries that share common attributes or distinctions, have been gathering for years in sub-groups often identified by a letter, commonly the letter "G", and a number. Of course, we’ve seen the G-7 and the G-8 and the G-20 and the G-30 and the G-77. Recently, we’ve seen lots of excitement over the emergence of the United States and China as the G-2. And on environmental issues, we’ve heard some discussion of them as the E-2. Hillary Clinton referred to a similar grouping on climate issues during the presidential campaign as the E-8. And so on. We’ve also had other kinds of groupings like this that make a difference whether the name simply describes the number of countries in a different way (as does the Quad) or they take the name of a place they once convened, as in the Cairns Group, or their first initials as with the BRICs. 

But as in the other well-coined phrases of recent vintage, Moisés’s concept gains power not just because it well captures an important idea, but because it comes at a pivotal moment in the history of the idea, at the moment where we need a strategy to effectively advance urgent global interests better than the ways we are now doing it. The Doha Round teeters on the brink of irrelevance because it is becoming so hard to get all the WTO signatory countries to agree on key ideas. The Copenhagen Climate talks are likely to suffer similarly, producing an outcome that is too thinned by compromise to effectively address the urgent issues that led to convening the nations of the world in the first place. The U.N. has for decades been rendered only minimally effective by its requirements for inclusiveness.

In short, we have seen that without the minilateral option, progress will elude us. Of course, simply getting the biggest and most powerful or the most relevant to any particular question to agree raises several important challenges. One is that the power of the idea comes in part from the notion that the smaller group producing an initial agreement is actually representative of the broader array of positions that exist among nations and so, by achieving agreement among this group, it is hoped that we go a long way toward nearing a position that will be acceptable to all or almost all. Of course, this is not always true. The big carbon emitters might be key to achieving a climate deal, but their interests are very different from countries that don’t have an emissions problem. Thus agreement among them may still leave deep rifts. More importantly perhaps, is the fact (noted by Moisés ) that minilateral solutions smack of oligarchy or, depending on the group, tyranny of the majority. 

Nonetheless, as I have often written before, we find ourselves at an extraordinary moment at which virtually every major international mechanism requires rethinking or revamping and other important ones require creation. From trade to climate, from WMD proliferation to containing pandemics, from maintaining international security to managing the global economy, we need to make collective progress. And since it is unreasonable and unwieldy to expect to do so with everybody around one big negotiating table from hell, the Table of Babel, embracing minilateralism and making it work is effectively the only path open to us. We just need to be good minilateralists, looking for 80/20 distributions not just of power but of interests, to ensure outcomes that are genuinely sustainable and the full promise of this approach is realized.