On the table or on the menu? A new power play begins at the UN

A curious new grouping has appeared on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Partners for Multilateralism, or P4M, brings together India, the European Union, Canada, Brazil, Kenya, Australia and Barbados in an effort to strengthen and reform the multilateral system.

On paper, it looks too loose and politically diverse to wield much power. But its unlikely composition does say something important about the changing mood in world politics. Countries in the Global South and the traditional Western camp too are beginning to discover a common interest in having more room to manoeuvre between the great powers.

A grouping without a bloc


P4M was launched on September 21, ahead of the UN General Assembly's high-level debate. Its initial co-sponsors are India, Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, the European Union and Kenya. The declaration commits them to strengthening international law, reforming global institutions and working together on issues ranging from trade and development finance to artificial intelligence and climate change.

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The language is deliberately non-threatening. P4M says it is not intended to become another exclusive bloc or international bureaucracy. Instead, it wants to provide an open framework through which countries from different regions and political traditions can build coalitions around particular issues.

All that sounds sensible but also immediately raises the obvious question that why create another grouping when the UN already exists.

The Lowy Institute has made precisely this point about P4M. The UN is already the world's multilateral forum. P4M has no treaty, independent institution or enforcement mechanism. Its members do not have a common security policy and do not agree on many major questions. Without machinery to turn political declarations into action, there is a risk that P4M would at best be another summit producing another communiqué.

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The idea did not appear out of nowhere

The unlikely membership of the coalition, which includes nations rich and poor and from global north and global south, makes more sense when seen against the changes of the past few years.

The Ukraine war exposed the limits of the existing international system in dealing with conflict involving a major power. The Gaza war has produced another profound dispute over international law and the credibility of multilateral institutions. US-China competition has increasingly spilled into trade, technology, investment and supply chains. Tariffs and economic coercion have become more prominent tools of statecraft.

The P4M declaration itself acknowledges this changing environment. It warns about polarisation, protectionism, coercion and the use of economic interdependence as leverage. It describes the international system as operating in a world that is increasingly contested and multipolar.

For many countries, the lesson has not been that multilateralism should be abandoned but that the existing version of it gives too much weight to the largest powers. India has been saying this in increasingly direct terms for years.

Jaishankar's argument was an early version of this

The Russia-Ukraine war brought India's position into unusually sharp focus. When European governments pressed India to take a harder line against Moscow in 2022, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar responded that India was not "sitting on the fence" simply because it disagreed with Western governments. He argued that the world could no longer be Eurocentric and pointed to the different security concerns of countries in Asia.

At the Raisina Dialogue that April, Jaishankar also pushed back against the idea that Europe could lecture India about the rules-based order without acknowledging how those rules had been treated elsewhere. India's position on Ukraine, he said, was to demand an end to the fighting and a return to diplomacy while maintaining its own assessment of the conflict.

Jaishankar, during the 17th edition of the GLOBSEC Bratislava Forum in Slovakia in 2022, replied to a question on India's stand in the Russia-Ukraine war, and said, "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems."

India was not arguing that Russia's invasion was acceptable. It was rejecting the proposition that defending the international order required accepting a Western hierarchy of whose security concerns mattered most. That position became a practical policy and India did not join Western sanctions on Russia and sharply increased its purchases of Russian oil after the invasion. Jaishankar subsequently described the resulting increase in India-Russia trade as unlikely to be a temporary phenomenon.

At the same time, India began giving the "Global South" idea a more organised diplomatic form. The Voice of Global South Summit, convened by India in 2023, brought together representatives from 125 countries and put reforms of global institutions at the centre of the discussion.

The message was that the choice need not be between the Western camp and a China-Russia camp. There was supposed to be space in between.

Then Carney made a bombshell speech at Davos

What makes P4M more interesting is that a remarkably similar argument began emerging from an unexpected quarter -- inside the Western camp. At Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech that was unusually candid about the weakening of the international system. He argued that the old rules-based order was no longer functioning as before and called on middle powers to cooperate rather than negotiate individually with larger states.

"Middle powers must act together," Carney said. "Because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu."

Carney argued that a middle power negotiating bilaterally with a hegemon does so from weakness. His alternative was issue-by-issue coalitions involving countries with enough common ground to act together. He described this as a possible "third path" between competing great powers.

Coming from Canada, this was striking. This was not a Global South government complaining about Western dominance. It was a traditional Western ally arguing that middle powers themselves needed greater strategic autonomy. That is the intellectual territory into which P4M has now moved.

The problem with P4M

There is an obvious ceiling to what the group can accomplish. The United States, China and Russia are not members. That matters enormously if the objective is reform of the UN Security Council. The existing permanent members retain veto power and therefore considerable leverage over any fundamental restructuring.

P4M also contains countries with very different interests. India and Canada have had a difficult bilateral relationship. India and the EU disagree on trade and other issues. Brazil's priorities are not identical to Kenya's. Australia has its own security calculations in the Indo-Pacific. Calling this a new geopolitical bloc would therefore be misleading.

New international forums often begin with ambitious language and then drift into meetings, communiqués and working groups. The UN itself remains the place where the hard bargaining has to happen, as per the Lowy Institute analysis. P4M cannot solve that problem simply by creating another table.

Then what's the point of P4M?

A more interesting interpretation can be that P4M is not trying to become a bloc at all. India does not want to choose between Washington and Moscow. Brazil does not want its diplomacy defined by the US-China rivalry. Canada and the EU remain deeply connected to the Western system but have growing reasons to develop their own strategic room. Kenya and other developing countries want greater influence over institutions that were largely designed before their economies and populations acquired their present weight.

These interests may overlap without being identical, and that's what makes P4M worth watching.

It may represent the beginning of a different kind of coalition politics where countries cooperating on particular questions without first agreeing on which great power they belong to. They can remain members of BRICS, the G7, the Quad or other arrangements while simultaneously building smaller coalitions across those boundaries.

As the idea is still embryonic, P4M may turn out to be little more than another annual summit. It has no independent source of power and no guarantee that its members will act together when their interests diverge. But something has clearly changed in the political vocabulary.

For years, much of international politics was framed as a contest between the US-led West and an opposing Russia-China axis. The emerging conversation is different. It is increasingly about what countries that are neither superpowers nor subordinate allies can do collectively. That does not make P4M powerful but surely makes it a useful marker of a changing international mood.

The real test will come when its members have to use their collective weight inside the UN, the WTO, the G20 or other institutions to win something concrete. Until then, P4M is less a new power centre than a new mood in the world where middle powers are increasingly thinking beyond established groupings and alliances.