UN 75 Dialogue On Multilateralism- Culture, Tourism, Sports

On the eve of the 75^th anniversary of the UN Charter, young researchers discuss the future of Sports, Culture and Tourism with top international officials

Around the world, the United Nations’ 75^th birthday on the 26^th of June is providing the backdrop for a global discussion about the future of the organization and the role multilateralism can play in resolving today’s challenges.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought a new urgency to this discussion, highlighting even more the benefits of cooperation across borders, sectors and generations but also the impacts it has on culture, sports and tourism – the focus of an event today in Geneva, the UN’s European hub, in which young researchers exchanged views with top representatives of the key international agencies in these areas.

“Multilateralism has always been an interplay of national and shared global concerns and it is increasingly so as we are now more interdependent, more interconnected than ever. Culture, tourism and sports, be it in different forms, have all served as inspiring expressions of national identity and pride, ” said Fabrizio Hochschild-Drummond, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General, addressed the audience in an inaugural video message.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has brought us to a pivotal moment. Although many are longing to get back to normal, now it’s precisely the time to end ‘business as usual’, he said.

“Now, it’s the time to put into practice the commitment to future generations that it is central to the UN charter and to make progress on the future we want. That is the spirit in which the UN75 anniversary is conceived of by the Secretary-General last year.”

The UN75 event was organized by UN Geneva, in cooperation with the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, the University of Geneva and foraus, the Swiss Think Tank on Foreign Policy. In addition to hosting many UN agencies, Switzerland is also home to a number of international sports organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Covid-19 had had a massive impact on large sports events, and has led to such as the postponement of the Olympic Games in Tokyo this year.

“This UN dialogue comes at an important and most appropriate time. The world is looking for new ways to better understand and to address the far-reaching consequences” said Thomas Bach, President of the IOC, in a video message in which he stressed sport as a school of life that can teach values.

“The first lesson we all learn from this crisis is: we need more solidarity. Solidarity within societies and solidarity among the nations of this world. Solidarity is at the heart of the Olympic games which unite the world in all our diversity. In these difficult times, we need the Olympic values of excellence, friendship, respect and solidarity more than ever,” Bach said.

In a post-Covid-19 world, the relationship with culture is being increasingly mediated through the digital interface. However, this relationship continues to be fraught with several socio-economic, as well as legal-ethical tensions.

For Paras Arora, a Master's degree candidate at the Graduate Institute “the virus has entered our cultures now, right. That is it ok for us, to attend for example the death of a very close relative, a Sunday sermon for that matter through Zoom. How is that impacting our religious engagement with, you know, ourselves? So, to treat cultural changes at this point of time as deeply ethical changes with herself is also extremely important. And that can only happen with a more multilateral engagement across borders and across levels of governance”.

Tourism, a complex sector of the economy was badly hit by the pandemic. Beyond a spectacular drop at the international and national scales, local impacts of the crisis are very difficult to quantify. For Raphael Languillon-Aussel, Researcher at the Université de Genève "it is difficult to synthesize the diversity of impacts that tourism has at the local level and it is true that local actors are a little invisible behind major events and large international groups that focus their attention on the media, they focus people's attention”.

Sports can work toward multilateralism in many aspects particularly through the Sustainable Devleopment Goals (SDGs). “If we think about multilateralism and also our SDG’s, actually I think it is number 5 and number 10 that are talking about gender equality and also to reduce all kinds of inequalities”, said Yalan Liu, Graduate Institute, Swiss Forum on Foreign Policy (Foraus). “We think sports can have a strong social impact for increasing this kind of social inclusion. We want to gather people, like both female and male of all ages, of all kind of race, to be together to have the strong solidarity to overcome this global health crisis and we believe sports can play a role in building back strong”.

UN 75 Dialogue On Multilateralism- Culture, Tourism, Sports

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