Contested embraces: the UN and China’s Belt and Road Initiative

The “great fracture” between the US and China is said to be one of the defining features of today’s international relations, including the United Nations (UN) as the world’s most inclusive multilateral organisation. While the US is still the foremost funder of the UN, China has become its obvious counterweight, at the UN itself but also through dynamics taking place beyond formal UN structures. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has arguably been the epitome of this trend: so far, more than two thirds of UN member states have signed agreements on China’s infrastructure mega project. While BRI officially unfolds outside UN structures, it remains largely unclear how the UN – as both a member state forum and a set of organisational entities – is to engage with BRI as the most visible feature of China’s impact on the geographies of international cooperation. This paper focuses on how UN agencies, funds and programmes have dealt with the rise of BRI against the backdrop of tensions between its arguably two most dominant member states. While a range of UN entities have wholeheartedly joined BRI initiatives, notably to “green” infrastructure projects, others have been all but reluctant, notably due to contestation from not only the US and Australia but also India. This paper traces BRI engagement of UN entities and examines the factors behind concrete engagement patterns, including leadership appointments, member state coalitions and funding structures. The broader conceptual implication is that, in order to safeguard their standing as relevant and legitimate players in an evolving international landscape of power and wealth, multilateral organisations need to find a complex balance between (1) embracing initiatives that are seen as contesting their own standing or that of their traditional supporters, and (2) accommodating the challenges to this contestation by traditionally dominant players. Case studies of individual UN entities show what this – necessarily evolving – balance can look like, and what these idiosyncratic sets of contested embraces mean for the future of the UN.