Multilateral Leadership & Norm Setting

Merchant cities across northern Europe formalised a trading confederation that had operated informally for over a century, coordinating trade policy, mutual defence and legal standards among member towns long before the modern nation-state existed.

The Concert of Europe brought great and lesser powers together to resolve issues peacefully through periodic conferences. It helped make the 19th century one of Europe's most peaceful, and established multilateral consultation as a normal instrument of statecraft.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the great powers convened between November 1814 and June 1815 to settle European affairs collectively. This is cited as one of the first modern instances of multilateralism, establishing the practice of great-power conferences to resolve disputes.

The Berlin Conference was one of the set-piece gatherings of the Concert system, used to reduce power conflicts among the European states. It illustrated how multilateral conference diplomacy could be applied to colonial and industrial competition.

Industrial and colonial competition, together with the shift in the balance of power following Prussia's creation of Germany, had already cracked the Concert system by the turn of the 20th century. The First World War ended it entirely, discrediting informal great-power consultation as a guarantee of peace.

After the First World War the League was founded as the first general-purpose international organisation and the precursor of the United Nations. Although it failed in its security mission and the United States never joined, it spawned specialised agencies that still operate, and American philanthropic support began a tradition of mixed public and private participation.

The years after the Second World War saw the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, later the World Trade Organization, alongside the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Together with technical bodies such as the World Health Organization, these made the new multilateral system far more powerful than the League system.

Meeting in New Hampshire before the Second World War had even ended, delegates designed institutions to stabilise currencies and finance post-war reconstruction, establishing a template for permanent multilateral economic cooperation among sovereign states.

The UN was founded with the active participation of both the United States and the Soviet Union, unlike the League. Its political institutions, and the peacekeepers later stationed around the world, made it the central symbol and instrument of multilateral engagement.

The agreement launched a multilateral system of negotiated tariff reductions among founding members from every inhabited continent, evolving over subsequent negotiating rounds into the rules-based trading system later formalised as the World Trade Organization.

12 North American and Western European states committed to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, creating a durable multilateral security alliance that later expanded into Eastern Europe after the Cold War.

The mutual-defence treaty bound the Soviet Union's Eastern European allies into a unified military command, formalising the Cold War's opposing bloc structure until the pact dissolved in 1991.

Six Western European states created a common market with shared institutions, establishing a template of pooled sovereignty and binding rules that later evolved into the European Union.

Newly independent states created a continental body to support decolonisation, promote unity and coordinate positions in international forums, laying the institutional groundwork for the African Union that succeeded it decades later.

The five founding states created a regional body intended to promote economic growth and stability and to manage disputes among neighbours, later expanding to 10 members and becoming South-East Asia's principal vehicle for collective engagement.

The ABM Treaty was a landmark negotiated arms-control agreement between the two superpowers. Its later abrogation by the Bush administration became a leading example of retreat from treaty-based cooperation.

Jakarta's accession, confirmed at the start of the year, extended the bloc's reach into South-East Asia for the first time and was presented by Indonesian officials as complementing rather than replacing its other international partnerships.

Ratifications from two-thirds of the WTO membership, including a wide range of developing and fishing-dependent states, brought into force a treaty first agreed in 2022 to curb subsidies that contribute to overfishing.

The accession, agreed after more than a decade as an observer and applicant, extended the bloc for the first time since 1999 and required Dili to align its laws and institutions with ASEAN's economic and political frameworks.

Leaders declared the political conclusion of a trade and cooperation agreement linking the EU with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, though ratification by individual EU member states remained pending amid opposition from farming groups.

Beyond formal membership, the summit created a category for states including Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Nigeria and Turkey to engage with the bloc without joining outright, widening its network of relationships across the Global South.

The gathering focused on trade, investment and energy cooperation between the two blocs, formalising a relationship that had previously been conducted mostly through bilateral ties between individual member states.

Several governments used the International Court of Justice's procedure for third-party intervention to state their own legal positions on the case, illustrating how multilateral judicial bodies have become an arena for registering positions on contested conflicts.

The shared payments infrastructure, built to let businesses settle cross-border trade in local currencies rather than through third-currency intermediaries, extended to more central banks and commercial lenders as implementation of the continental free-trade area continued.

Jakarta pursued membership talks with the Paris-based club of mostly wealthy economies at the same time as it joined BRICS, reflecting a strategy of engaging multiple blocs rather than choosing between them.

Unlike Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE, which took up their invitations from the start of 2024, Riyadh kept its position under review, preserving flexibility in its relationships with both the bloc and Western partners.

Emerging powers argued that bodies such as the UN Security Council reflect the global power distribution of 1945 rather than modern realities. Their pressure for reform became a central question over the legitimacy and future shape of multilateral engagement.

The United States exited the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed in 1972. The withdrawal is presented as an instance of a leading power stepping back from binding multilateral and bilateral arms-control commitments.

The Senate declined to ratify the treaty Clinton had signed three years earlier. The rejection is cited as a central challenge to multilateralism, showing how domestic politics can block participation in cooperative regimes.

Negotiated under the UN climate convention, it bound industrialised countries to specific greenhouse gas reduction targets for the first time, establishing a template for multilateral climate governance later built on by the Paris Agreement.

The United States signed the CTBT, a major multilateral arms-control instrument. Signature without ratification exposed the gap between executive commitment and domestic legislative consent in multilateral treaty-making.

The Marrakesh Agreement gave global trade rules a permanent institutional home with binding dispute settlement, extending multilateral trade governance from tariffs alone into services, intellectual property and a wider range of national regulations.