A stronger UN needs more voices at the table

As the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly convenes in New York this month, world leaders will gather beneath a system whose founding premises appear, for the first time in decades, genuinely fragile: protracted conflicts that continue to test the principles of the UN Charter, trade fragmentation that has strained the multilateral trading system, climate-driven displacement and artificial intelligence reshaping the distribution of power faster than any treaty can regulate. Multilateralism faces serious challenges, and defending it requires acknowledging that its architecture has not kept pace with the world it is meant to govern.

The international system established around the United Nations in 1945 reflected the realities and power structures of the time.

Eight decades later, entire regions still carry less weight within that architecture than their demography, economic significance and diplomatic maturity now warrant.

Africa, home to the world's youngest population and to resources central to the energy and digital transitions; Latin America, with more than 600 million inhabitants; South Asia, home to nearly a quarter of humanity; and Southeast Asia, through one of the world's most successful models of regional cooperation in ASEAN. All deserve, eight decades on, a role in shaping the rules of the system commensurate with their weight in it. This is not an argument for dismantling what exists but an argument for strengthening and updating it, so that these regions become co-architects of the system rather than its latecomer guests.

This updating will not be achieved by major powers alone. It will also require the active participation of middle and developing countries. It requires broader cooperation among middle powers, developing countries and other stakeholders. Such cooperation is already taking shape, if unevenly, through plurilateral trade initiatives that seek to advance cooperation despite the World Trade Organization's paralysis and regional development banks that give emerging economies greater opportunities to participate in development financing and decision-making. Portugal belongs in that company, and its own position illustrates why.

I write as a Portuguese academic. My country is, simultaneously, four things that rarely converge within a single state: European, a member of the most advanced project of regional multilateralism in the world; Atlantic, a natural hinge between Europe, the Americas and Africa; Lusophone, through the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, linking Portugal directly to Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Timor-Leste; and Ibero-American, through a historical and linguistic relationship with Brazil and Latin America that few European nations share to the same degree.

To these must be added a fifth and older thread: Portugal's longstanding relationship with China, particularly through Macao, which today remains an active platform for cooperation between China and the Portuguese-speaking world. The peaceful return of Macao to China in 1999, achieved through dialogue between the two countries, demonstrated how historical questions concerning sovereignty can be resolved peacefully through consultation.

Few European Union member states combine all five of these dimensions at once. This plurality of belonging is what grants Portugal standing to engage, within the same conversation, with Brussels, Brasília, Luanda, Maputo, Dili and Beijing, without being regarded as an outsider at any of these tables. And with it, a particular responsibility to contribute constructively to the debate over reform.

Portugal's forthcoming term as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2027-28 should be read in that light: not as a ceremonial distinction, but as an opportunity to put this standing to practical use, to carry into the Council's deliberations the concerns of regions still under-represented within the system's core institutions, to keep proposals for reform grounded rather than performative and to argue that the system's legitimacy grows in direct proportion to the number of its members who regard it as genuinely theirs to shape and not merely theirs to join.

The crises confronting multilateralism today will not be resolved through a nostalgic return to the arrangements of past decades, nor through their abandonment. Eight decades of genuine service to peace and cooperation are precisely why the system merits renewal and reform rather than mere criticism.

As the General Assembly opens this September, the task before it is to transform this moment of forced reconstruction into a system in which Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Southeast Asia are no longer latecomer guests but co-architects. Nations formed, as Portugal has been, from more than a single belonging bear a particular responsibility to help make that case credible on every side of the table.

The author serves as director of the College for Transformation and Leadership at the University of Évora. He is the former secretary of state for international trade and foreign investment of Portugal.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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