In a thoughtful recent essay in the Financial Times, economist and former IMF Chief Economist Raghuram Rajan argues that the world’s “dog-eat-dog” international order urgently requires rethinking. He laments the erosion of the postwar rules-based system and calls for the reinvention of multilateral institutions better adapted to an increasingly fragmented and multipolar world.

His diagnosis is largely persuasive. But the roots of today’s crisis — and the reforms required to address it — run deeper than he suggests.

Born from catastrophe

The post-1945 international order was indeed built partly on enlightened self-interest. States understood that cooperation, restraint, and institution-building would ultimately serve their long-term prosperity and security better than unrestrained rivalry. But the system was also born from something more profound: the moral shock generated by the devastation of two world wars, culminating in roughly 60 million deaths between 1939 and 1945.

The founders of the United Nations did not merely seek a more efficient framework for interstate relations. They sought to prevent humanity from once again descending into barbarism. The UN Charter emerged from an acute awareness that unrestrained nationalism, militarism, and contempt for international law had nearly destroyed civilization itself.

This moral dimension matters because today’s crisis is not merely institutional. It is also ethical and political.

Inequality and democratic erosion

Rajan is correct to identify rising inequality as one of the forces undermining support for the rules-based order. Over recent decades, many citizens in advanced economies have come to believe that globalization distributes its benefits unfairly. While elites and highly skilled sectors prospered, many working- and middle-class communities experienced stagnation, insecurity, and declining social mobility.

This has had profound political consequences. Already in the 1980s, important academic research showed that high levels of income inequality increase the probability of democratic breakdown and delay democratic transitions in less developed societies. When large segments of the population feel excluded from economic progress while watching others flourish, resentment inevitably grows. Under such conditions, demagogues and authoritarian populists find fertile ground.

This is not simply a social problem. It is one of the greatest threats to democracy itself.

Rajan also correctly notes that the rules-based order loses legitimacy when the powers that designed it fail to respect its own principles. This problem has become increasingly acute.

The UN Charter’s Article 2(4) states clearly that all member states shall refrain “from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Yet some of the very countries entrusted with safeguarding international peace and security have repeatedly violated this principle when it suited their geopolitical interests.

When major powers disregard rules they themselves established, they lose the moral authority to insist that others comply with international norms, whether in relation to human rights, humanitarian law, or democratic governance. Selective adherence to international law corrodes the legitimacy of the entire multilateral system.

Global problems, global solutions

This erosion of credibility has consequences far beyond geopolitics. It weakens the international community’s capacity to respond collectively to global challenges precisely at the moment when such cooperation has become indispensable.

Climate change, pandemics, financial instability, nuclear proliferation, mass displacement, cyber insecurity, and widening inequalities do not respect national borders. They cannot be solved by unilateral action. The alternative to effective international cooperation is not renewed sovereignty and stability; it is escalating disorder and systemic breakdown.

In this respect, Rajan is surely right that the world needs a new international order. But reform cannot stop at improving the governance of financial institutions or adjusting voting formulas in multilateral agencies. The deeper challenge lies at the level of the United Nations itself.

This is one of the motivations behind the Global Governance Forum´s initiative to draft a proposed Second UN Charter: an effort to rethink global governance for the realities and dangers of the twenty-first century.

The central objective is to strike a better balance between legitimate national sovereignty and the obligations states freely assume as members of the international community. Sovereignty cannot become a blanket justification for violating fundamental human rights, discriminating against minorities or women, disregarding humanitarian law, or threatening international peace and security.

States cannot invoke sovereignty selectively — demanding respect for their independence while simultaneously ignoring obligations embedded in the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Reform must begin at the UN

Rajan’s proposal for more operationally independent multilateral leadership is also compelling. In fact, the proposed Second UN Charter calls for a single non-renewable seven-year term for the UN Secretary-General. Such a reform would strengthen the independence of the office by reducing pressures to curry favor with the permanent members of the Security Council in pursuit of reappointment.

But reforms to the UN system are necessarily more complex than those applicable to institutions such as the IMF. The governance challenges of the United Nations involve peace and security, disarmament, climate governance, human rights, development, and international justice — areas that require a much broader institutional architecture involving the General Assembly, the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and other bodies.

Nor should we assume that concentrating excessive authority in any single leader offers a durable solution. However intelligent, ethical, or experienced individuals may be, human beings remain fallible. Effective global governance ultimately requires stronger institutions, clearer legal frameworks, greater accountability, and mechanisms capable of constraining power rather than merely trusting in enlightened leadership.

The deeper principle at stake is simple: global problems require global solutions.

The postwar generation understood this with painful clarity after witnessing the collapse of international order into global catastrophe. Our generation faces different dangers but an equally consequential choice. We can continue drifting toward fragmentation, geopolitical rivalry, arms races, democratic erosion, and climate instability. Or we can recognize that humanity’s growing interdependence demands institutions capable of managing shared risks in a cooperative and lawful manner.

The current disorder is not inevitable. But neither will a better order emerge spontaneously. It must be consciously built.