Through our able ambassador in Moscow, Mohamed Al-Badri, the Russian Council for International Affairs invited the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs for a joint conference. The topic was “Russia-Egypt: Bilateral and regional dimensions.” One of the conference sessions was “Global Governance Issues: Egyptian and Russian views.” I was one of the speakers at the session. I pointed out that in recent years, the term “global governance” has become a frequently used expression. The term global governance, often corresponding to “good governance”, is evaluated by the World Bank as referring to the following qualities: “willingness to encourage foreign investment; high regard for the rule of law; determination to prevent corruption; and the ability to formulate and implement sound fiscal, economic, monetary, foreign currency and trade policies.” While “global governance” can be defined as the “government, management and administration capabilities of the United Nations, World Bank and other international organisations, various regimes, coalitions of interested nations and individual nations,” global governance — or world governance — is a movement towards the political integration of transnational actors aimed at negotiating responses to problems that affect more than one state or region The modern question of world governance exists in the context of globalisation and globalising regimes of power: politically, economically and culturally. The term “global governance” may also be used to name the process of designating laws, rules, or regulations intended for a global scale. The global organisations entitled to deal with these issues include the United Nations and UN organisations, treaty organisations (regimes) that have been prominent recently in the fields of the environment and human rights, regional organisations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), regional arrangements, including ASEAN and the Japan-US Security Treaty, loose confederations of nations, including the Group of Eight (G8), and individual nations dealing with global issues. Global issues include security, terrorism, non-proliferation and disarmament, international criminal organisations, poverty, population, the environment, climate change, human rights, and infectious diseases. Global issues concern the whole world community, and as such, and given their complexity and transnational nature, they must be faced globally, as even a major power cannot deal with them individually. A global concerted approach became very much needed. In my presentation, I focussed on two major global issues and threats: terrorism and nuclear proliferation, as based on the Egyptian experience. On terrorism, Egypt experienced terrorism in the 1990s. Out of this experience, Egypt warned the world community that terrorism is not a local phenomenon but will develop to become a global threat and must be dealt with as such. Egypt's warning was not taken seriously, until the 9/11 terrorism incidents. Since then, the US, a major power, adopted the strategy of a global “war against terrorism”. The whole story we all know. Including how the American war against terrorism, while inflicting heavy losses on terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda, spurred new terrorist organisations to emerge. This is the dilemma the world community is facing today. In the process of facing terrorism, the major question is what motivates terrorists to engage in these activities. Very briefly, debate started between those who attributed the emergence of terrorists and their organisations to their environment, amid authoritarian and non-participatory regimes, to poverty, corruption and unemployment, etc. Accordingly, a war was launched against states. Recently, particularly after the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) group, where it managed to recruit followers among educated and well-off youth, the debate shifted to focus on the ideas dominating the thinking and behaviour of terrorists. Ideologies and ideas are not defeated with guns; they are defeated by better ideas — for example, by bolstering the true interpretation of Islam. As all are agreed that terrorism is a global concern, it needs a global approach, one that is more concerted, more focussed, with more agreement on short- and long-term ways to combat terrorism. On nuclear proliferation, it started when the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, concerned about possible nuclear proliferation, concluded in 1968 the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Since then, a large number of states have signed and ratified the treaty. In the highly sensitive and troubled area of the Middle East, the only state that remained outside the treaty was Israel. Concerned about its security and the security of the region, Egypt in the early 1980s suggested creating a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the Middle East. Israel resisted this initiative, supported by the US, ironically. While the US mobilised the world against the prospect of Iran possessing nuclear weapons, it ignored the nuclear programme of Israel, with its established basis of 200-400 nuclear warheads. When the P5+1 reached an agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme, the US president was enthusiastic, saying it would guarantee the security of the region. We addressed a letter to him arguing that the region would not be secure until established as a WMD-free zone, pointing to the one country that declines to remove its nuclear weapons. Addressing a Russian audience, and as Russia has a vested interest in the neighbouring strategic region of the Middle East, I expect that Russia will play an effective role in establishing a zone free of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The writer is a former ambassador and member of the Egyptian Council of Foreign Affairs.
