Report on two high-level roundtable discussions - The ‘Berlin Call’ initiative:

This project, coinciding with the 75-year anniversary of the end of World War Two and the founding of the United Nations, aims to contribute practical recommendations to a vital global conversation on the state of multilateralism. [...] Arising from this, the key issue for world order reform and the rebooting of international cooperation is the relationship between the state – or rather the leaders of states – and the structures and practices of international relations. [...] It was widely felt that we need to move away from traditional views of world order as something run by a handful of powers – be it the European powers in the colonial era, the US and the Soviet Union from World War Two to the end of the Cold War, or the US and China (and maybe Russia and the EU) now. [...] In contrast to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in which the G20 played the role of crisis-buster, neither the G20, nor the G7, has yet to make anything other than minor contributions to the management of the post- Covid-19 era. [...] We need to develop a position on the future of globalisation in the context of both its negative and positive characteristics, taking account of the trends in the direction of de-globalisation and de-coupling.