Dialogue on Globalization Occasional Paper No. 10 Executive Summary The future of multilateralism after Monterrey and Johannesburg JENS MARTENS At the world conferences held in recent years it was emphasized again and again that global eco­nomic, social, and environmental problems can be overcome only by means of intensified multilate ral cooperation. The United Nations Millennium Summit, the Monterrey International Conference on Financing for Development, and the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development called emphatically for a strengthe ­ning of multilateralism and the structures it invol­ves. At the same time, however, these conferen­ces pointed to the limitations and inadequacies of a conference diplomacy based solely on govern­ment consensus and at which the pace of progress is invariably dictated by the heel­draggers. Deficits and blockades in multilateral cooperation The ongoing debate on the crisis and future of multilateralism is being shaped by the forced unilateralism which has, since the 11 th of Septem­ber 2001, become the hallmark of US foreign policy, reaching its culmination in February 2003 in the US' self-authorized war against Iraq. But multilateral cooperation is faced with a whole array of additional obstacles and problems that are impeding the development of democratic global governance structures. These include the fragmentation of the G-77, which is growing increasingly less effective as a negotiating block of the developing world; the dominance assumed by the neoliberal economic doctrines of the Bret­ton Woods institutions vis-à-vis the more welfare ­state-oriented approaches of the United Nations; the underrepresentation of the developing count­ries in the IMF and the World Bank as well as in the negotiations of the WTO; the simultaneous weakness of ECOSOC, which is rooted in the UN Charter itself; a lack of coherence between interna tional trade policy on the one hand and international environment and development po­licy on the other, which must be also seen as a reflection of conflicts of interest at the national level; the lack of authority and resources with which international environment and develop­ment organizations, UNEP and ILO in particular, are forced to contend; and finally, the global governance vacuum in certain subareas of international cooperation, e.g. in international tax cooperation. The UN conferences in New York, Monterrey, and Johannesburg The Millennium Summit and the Monterrey and Johannesburg conferences discussed(either offi­cially or informally) these deficits of multilateral cooperation and contributed in a threefold man­ner to finding solutions: first, in their official declarations, programs of action, and follow-up processes the conferences sought to formulate political solutions geared to coming to terms with governance problems; second, the conferences themselves were something of a testbed for new forms of multilateral cooperation – be it on the basis of a stronger involvement of the private business sector and civil society in official confer­ence processes, be it in the form of pragmatic initiatives launched by like-minded governments and going beyond the official conference resolu­tions; and third, these conferences were also places at which it was possible to discuss further­reaching,„visionary“ ideas and concepts on the future of multilateral cooperation which were beyond realization in the short term. Like the Millennium Declaration and its follow-up documents, the Monterrey and Johannesburg programs of action contain some statements on these issues. In essence, the task at hand is to strengthen the United Nations in political terms, in particular the General Assembly and ECOSOC, and to improve the involvement of the develo­ping world in world economic decision-making processes. But these resolutions are not sufficient to overcome the deficits and blockades with which multilateral cooperation is presently confron ted. At the same time, the international conferences of recent years have led to a growing acceptance