Rethinking Multilateralism in an Age of Contestation
In an era of strategic rivalry and fractured consensus, the future of multilateralism lies not in restoring hegemony but in building institutions capable of working amid contestation
Multilateralism is not collapsing; it is being contested. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned in January, “Global problems will not be solved by one power calling the shots… Nor will they be solved by two powers carving the world into rival spheres of influence.” His warning captures a dilemma: the system still needs shared institutions, yet major powers increasingly disagree on who should shape them, what rules should bind them, and how far sovereignty should yield to collective restraint.
Ahead of the Munich Security Conference, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “the old world is gone… and we live in a new era in geopolitics,” requiring allies to “reexamine… what our role is going to be.” Yet this “new era” is unfolding inside institutions built for a different balance of power. The post-1945 architecture — above all the UN, IMF, World Bank, and later the WTO — encoded a particular distribution of authority that no longer corresponds to geopolitical realities. Emerging market and developing economies now account for about 61 percent of world GDP in purchasing-power terms, while their formal influence through votes, seats, and agenda-setting power within key international institutions has expanded only marginally.
Europe, shaped by decades of integration and a post-war political tradition that has generally privileged negotiation, law, and institutional constraint over the use of force, often approaches power differently from the United States
These imbalances and fractures are not only about a West–East divide; they also reveal growing divisions within the West itself. Europe, shaped by decades of integration and a post-war political tradition that has generally privileged negotiation, law, and institutional constraint over the use of force, often approaches power differently from the United States. Yet disputes over sovereignty, migration, technological regulation, and policy toward Russia and China show that Western cohesion cannot be taken for granted. Today, within the EU, common positions are hard-won as some member states push a more explicitly geopolitical posture. In practice, this revives the old question often attributed to Henry Kissinger: “Who do I call in Europe?”
Nor is the so-called “East” monolithic. India’s strategic posture differs from China’s, and within Asia responses to China vary. Vietnam is widely analysed as practising hedging, combining engagement with selective balancing. The Philippines, too, illustrates how fluid these positions can be: policies toward China have shifted sharply across administrations — from Aquino’s more legalist and alliance-forward approach, to Duterte’s downplaying of arbitration and accommodationist turn, to Marcos Jr.’s renewed emphasis on the 2016 South China Sea arbitration ruling and closer security cooperation with the United States. Many Southeast Asian states pursue hedging as a risk-management strategy, seeking room for manoeuvre through diversified partnerships rather than committing to fixed alignments.
If the distribution of power has changed, so has the grammar of cooperation. The practical task is no longer to recreate a liberal order that depended on US primacy, nor to resign ourselves to sealed blocs. It is to design multilateralism that can function under strategic rivalry by reducing incentives to obstruct institutions and expanding the space for problem-solving. In this sense, multilateralism after hegemony has to be built to operate under contestation and not assume consensus. That design challenge begins with a distinction between rivalry and breakdown, and with the recognition that rivalry is here to stay, but paralysis is not. The goal is not harmony, which has long been one of humanity’s enduring utopias, but guardrails: rules and procedures that reduce miscalculation, keep bargaining channels open, and protect core institutional functions even when major powers disagree. A workable multilateralism therefore has to do three things simultaneously: increase legitimacy, preserve functionality, and lower the temperature of rivalry — an agenda consistent with scholarship on competitive and contested multilateralism.
The practical task is no longer to recreate a liberal order that depended on US primacy, nor to resign ourselves to sealed blocs.
Moving from diagnosis to design doesn’t mean pretending there’s a neat solution; it simply means shifting from naming the problem to thinking seriously about what institutional choices can still make rivalry manageable rather than paralysing. India has been consistent in insisting that legitimacy and effectiveness are linked. In his India–EU joint press statement at the beginning of this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed “respect for multilateralism and international norms” as a shared priority and argued that reform of global institutions is essential to meet contemporary challenges. Legitimacy can no longer be treated as an abstract virtue, as it shows up in concrete questions: who has a seat, who has a vote, and whose priorities reach the agenda.
The Global South has been increasingly vocal and increasingly specific on this point. A recent African Union (AU) statement can serve as an illustrative example. The AU Commission Chairperson noted that “eighty years after the UN’s creation,” Africa, with around 1.4 billion people and 55 states, still has no permanent seat on the Security Council, adding, “this is not just unfair to Africa; it weakens the Council’s credibility.”
In the Bretton Woods institutions, the legitimacy problem is just as concrete and can be seen in the mechanics of power: quota and voting formulas, influence on executive boards, and the informal traditions that shape top appointments. Minor adjustments have done little to change the basic perception that key choices — like who gets emergency liquidity, how debt is restructured, and what conditions apply — still follow an older hierarchy. In the UN system, the legitimacy issue is even starker simply because it is existential. Rules lose authority when they are seen as binding for some but optional for others, and when they are seen as stable only when they protect the powerful.
Rules lose authority when they are seen as binding for some but optional for others, and when they are seen as stable only when they protect the powerful.
So, even when legitimacy is contested, the more immediate question is often simpler: can the institutions still function? Universal institutions are still indispensable, but they are increasingly asked to deliver what great-power politics often prevents them from delivering. In large, consensus-based forums, contentious issues are easily trapped: negotiations slide into the lowest common denominator, or they stall as rival states use the stage to signal positions, especially for domestic publics, rather than close deals. That is why cooperation is increasingly built in smaller, issue-specific “modules,” like plurilateral agreements on standards, regional arrangements for finance or connectivity, and technical coalitions that can move ahead without waiting for unanimity. These formats can act faster and go deeper, but they can also harden into exclusive clubs that fragment the wider system.
The third and most delicate issue is how to lower the temperature of rivalry without pretending that rivalry can be overcome. “Guardrails” are often invoked here, but they should be understood modestly — not as trust, but as procedures that reduce miscalculation and keep channels open when trust is absent. Regularised crisis communication, deconfliction mechanisms in contested theatres, and risk-reduction understandings in domains that escalate quickly, such as cyber incidents, space assets, and critical infrastructure, are not a peace plan. They are a form of cost containment.
A single global regime is unlikely, but partial alignment is still possible, such as shared baseline expectations on safety, transparency, and accountability that lower systemic risk without requiring political convergence.
In an age of contestation, can East–West cooperation still work? At times, but it will be narrow, practical, and judged by results, not slogans. Climate is the obvious test case: what matters is not another round of declarations, but deliverables — finance that makes transitions cheaper, common reporting standards that allow comparability, and adaptation projects that actually get built. In global health, the same logic applies: early-warning systems, surveillance capacity, and supply chains that don’t collapse in the next emergency. Technology is the hardest arena. A single global regime is unlikely, but partial alignment is still possible, such as shared baseline expectations on safety, transparency, and accountability that lower systemic risk without requiring political convergence.
None of this guarantees success. But it clarifies what is at stake: multilateralism after hegemony will be judged less by rhetoric than by whether it still works under pressure, whether it can absorb contestation without hardening into blocs, and whether it delivers pockets of cooperation without pretending the old era of consensus can be restored.
Nina Sajić is a Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Banja Luka.