European societies are ageing. In 1950, only 12% of the European population was over age 65. Today the share has already doubled, and projections show that in 2050 over 36% of Europe’s population will be 65-plus years old.
The culprits are fertility rates and longevity. In the past, a woman in Europe had on average more than two children. Since 2000, the fertility rate has fallen below that threshold. Europeans are also living longer now: 78 years on average, up from 66 years in the 1950s.
Prolonged human life is a sign of Europe’s prosperity, but combined with the region’s low fertility rate it is also creating an array of social and financial problems for the continent.
Perhaps most critical is the fact that the share of working people who can provide care to the older persons is shrinking, even as the number of people needing care grows.
This imbalance between demand and supply, which leads to shortages in nurses and other professional care providers, is already challenging the fast-ageing countries of Germany, Finland and the United Kingdom.
The increased demand for care will also require significant financial resources. In 2014, OECD countries were spending on average 1.4% of GDP on long-term care, but these costs are projected to rise substantially through, reaching 6,4% by 2060.
Public spending on long-term care is highest in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries (where it costs 3% to 4% of GDP) and lowest in Central and Eastern Europe. In Poland, Hungary and Estonia, less than 1% of GDP is spent on long-term care.
This difference in expenditures reflects not only the share of the population that’s ageing but also the diversity of long-term care systems in Europe. The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries, for example, have well-developed systems of formal care for older persons, which offer a broad range of government and private-sector services at home or in institutions.
In Central and Eastern European countries, on the other hand, elderly care is largely seen as the responsibility of families. In these countries, as in Mediterranean countries, an elderly person who needs daily care for a lengthy period of time will most likely move in with children or relatives, who provide social support and arrange medical assistance when needed.
This informal care system is facing new challenges in the modern era, too. Women, who around the globe have traditionally played the family caretaker role, are increasingly working outside of the home, further reducing the number of family members available to provide informal care for older persons.
Informal care challenges
Even as they seek to grow their stable of professional long-term care providers, countries are endeavouring to make informal family-based care – which is believed to be more beneficial for older people and exert a lower social cost – more feasible.
In Germany, unpaid caregivers have the option to reduce their working hours with a medium-term paid-leave benefit. In the Czech Republic and Ireland, there are tax exemptions for informal care givers to compensate for their efforts.
This type of support will continue to play an important role in both Western and Eastern European countries. But it also raises questions about quality control. How do countries know that their elderly are being given adequate care? And who monitors their well-being?
Informal caregivers, such as family members and neighbours, generally do not have specialised training, which means that overall they lack skills and knowledge about recognising symptoms and thus, about the type of health-care needed.
As the designated protectors of individual rights and social values, governments still have the obligation to monitor informal care provision and ensure that its elderly citizens are in good hands. Establishing quality-monitoring mechanisms in informal care is itself a formidable challenge.
Today’s seniors are not passive in this process. Widespread digitisation of society and higher tech-savviness has given older people better access to information, which may increase their expectations for the quality and type of care they should receive.
Finding new long-term care systems
Across Europe, from the wealthy west to the developing east, there are always competing demands for public resources. Any money spent on growing long-term elder care systems could also be used to meet other pressing social needs – launching new public-health or environmental programmes, for example.
In Western Europe, where extensive care structures are already in place, their increasingly hefty price tags will make them difficult to sustain in coming years as the population in need continues to balloon.
Eastern European countries face a different policy dilemma: providing care for elderly relatives takes a considerable toll on family members, and public resources for creating nursing homes and elderly houses remain scarce.
At present, as each country begins to ponder a future in which its population is working less but needing more, it is still unclear whether their paths forward will converge. Europe could respond to its divergent but shared problem with a unified response, perhaps via the European Commission, which executes all European Union programming.
To date, the Commission has begun stimulating cross-country collaboration on elderly care with such supranational platforms as the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing, a portal that helps institutions, professionals and researchers in the healthcare and ageing field to find training resources, best practices, care models and the like.
This is a relatively small step towards grappling with a region-wide social problem. But one immediate hurdle to working together on care for the elderly is the fact that the European Commission has no mandate over healthcare; every EU member state is free to decide how to arrange its own healthcare provision.
In the past, the EU has responded to the need for coordinating similar national issues such as agriculture, for example, by defining subsidies, regulations and investments for EU countries.
A similarly, common European ageing programme based on the commitment and initiative of individual countries could work too, helping each EU member state construct a context-specific care system that benefits both their oldest citizens and society at large.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.