Lord Williams warns of ‘erosion of ethics’ in international relations

‘We are moving towards a world in which constructive mutual relatedness becomes less and less possible, as people retreat into the corners of the room, fail to understand the interdependence of the crises and challenges, fail to interrogate their own rights and claims.’

True global security will not be possible if it continues to be merely treated as “the banner under which to fight against someone”, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said.

He said the United Nations Security Council must urgently “become something other in our minds than simply my guaranteed well-being at the expense of everyone else’s well-being”.

Speaking at a conference on “reimagining directions” for the UN after 80 years, hosted by the Oxford Network of Peace Studies (OxPeace) on 9 May, Lord Williams urged the UN to “invest more fully, more imaginatively, and more durably” in mediation, which he said depends on “a notion of security as necessarily a negotiated, and always a re-negotiable, matter”.

He also warned that we are “not confronted simply with the collapse of the international order”, but also with “a growing collapse in the ethics of public life and the ethics of conflict”.

“We’ve been reminded already that the protocols around the conduct of conflict are not only ineffectual, but seriously outdated. That collapse of ethics is evident in the apparent unconcern with which the obliteration of entire civilisations is threatened.”

He was speaking before Pope Leo XIV published his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which states that just war theory is “outdated”, and which has been met with approval by US Vice President J. D. Vance, who had previously invoked the theory to attempt to justify the US’ war on Iran.

The encyclical published on 25 May also praises the UN as an “essential instrument for promoting a civilisation of love”, but says that it needs “profound reforms” in order to “direct multilateralism toward the true common good”.

Lord Williams said the collapse in ethics “goes alongside the erosion of politics”: “You might say that the problem is not that the UN is a political body, but that it is not political enough.

“If politics is about negotiation, if politics is about the interrogation of trade and security of all that means, if politics is about learning to sideline the assumption that my right is absolute, then what is the forum in which politics can actually be conducted?”

He also said it is a “paradox” that at a time when awareness of the interlocking nature of the crises we face is growing, “we are investing less energy and imagination in those ways in which we can learn to act collaboratively”.

“Pandemics don’t present their passports at national borders, and the crises that occur on the other side of the world have immediate measurable impact in various ways we might not have expected.

“The environmental crisis impacts immediately on other areas, including economics, as climate-related migrancy grows a major source of potential conflict in the next generation, if not already now.

“The conflict between Iran and the US is not only about the supply of fuel for motor vehicles, it’s also about a whole range of petroleum-related products, including fertilisers. The blockages in the Strait of Hormuz affect what can be grown in Milan.

“Very often we are not global enough in our perspective in this respect. We don’t register properly and effectively enough. Our crises here create and worsen crises there.”

“The question is not if we can find a hurt-free and cost-free world, but if we can find and create a world in which we are at least delivered of some levels of fear by the knowledge that the hurt and the cost are shared, and that we have local and global communities in which hurt and cost can also be held and healed.”

Lord Williams also said that we can “learn a great deal about interdependence and a kind of peace that you can characterise as constructive, creative interrelatedness” from scripture and the early Christian tradition.

“A state of peace is not a state where there is no tension, but a condition where all involved are contributing to one another, building each other up, making one another more alive, more free, more capable of continuing to contribute,” he said.

“If you’re thinking of active mutual relationships, peace has to be constantly alert to, and responsive to, changing conditions, changing conflicts, the complex reality of other people.

“Peace would be very simple if other people were not there. One of the fundamental insights of Christianity is arguably the challenge to cope with the fact that other people are not going away.”

Pope Leo’s defence of human rights, social justice and multilateral dialogue welcomed

UN anniversary reminds humanity to choose ‘diplomacy’ not ‘vengeance’, says Nichols

Fratelli Tutti can guide a United Nations system struggling with misaligned values

Stay updated — add us as a preferred news source on Google: