Multilateralism solves extinction.

The public narrative has become so saturated with these general terms that there is often no reflection on what they actually mean. Multilateralism is a method of coordinating national policies in groups of three or more states through ad hoc arrangements or institutions. It relates to globalization as does a method to a process. Multilateralism is the sine qua non of globalization, as it is of the UN convention on genocide or the European Parliament, but not vice versa.

Blaming multilateral approaches for the deficiencies of globalization or the spread of the pandemic is politically dangerous because it diminishes social trust in international cooperation, the only tool capable of addressing a special category of threats: the global existential ones.

The majority of the global population only fears a handful of international threats. According to a Eurobarometer poll, the greatest EU concerns are immigration (34 percent), climate change (24 percent), the economic situation (18 percent), and terrorism (15 percent). According to a Pew survey, the top three concerns in Asia-Pacific and Latin America are cyberattacks, climate change, and terrorism. In most polls, Africans fear economic hardship the most, but the 2019 Afrobarometer also found that a majority think climate change is making their lives worse. According to an early Pew survey after the pandemic in the United States, Americans feared infectious diseases the most (79 percent) followed by terrorism (73 percent), nuclear weapons (73 percent), cyberattacks (72 percent), a rising China (62 percent), and climate change (60 percent).

These first-tier global challenges—climate change, terrorism, mass migration, infectious diseases, nuclear weapons, economic hardship, and cyberattacks—are not only substantively but also qualitatively different. That quality rests neither on the number of victims nor on the kind of perpetrator (state, individual, or natural) but instead on the potential to threaten the existence of humanity. Three threats have this potential: climate change, highly infectious diseases, and nuclear weapons. Of course, abstract scenarios are easily imagined in which human existence is endangered because of a massive cyberattack, mass migration, or vicious artificial intelligence that leads to a conflict in which nuclear weapons are used and humanity kills itself. Such potential futures, though, require a chain of events, whereas the three existential menaces are present and direct. Unlike other threats, they are all global and equal. No community is immune from them or their aftermath. All three can reach a tipping point, after which the danger spirals out of control.

This set of existential threats is not conventionally recognized. The term existential threat has proliferated in political debates to mean anything across a spectrum of minor and major challenges: the opiate crisis to the policies of the Donald J. Trump administration. In twentieth-century politics, the expression was barely used despite the omnipresent danger of the nuclear bomb. For the past two decades, it has been mostly associated with terrorism. Terrorism, however, is not a threat to human existence—not even to Middle Easterners, where 95 percent of deaths from terrorist attacks occur. Classing mass migration as an existential threat is even more preposterous given how little insecurity migrants have brought to already stable host countries. Similarly, little suggests that inequality or economic hardship are existential threats, though their complex forms and far-reaching consequences render them categories of their own.

The distinction between existential and other international threats matters for multilateralism and global governance in light of the functional difference in the roles of the state in fighting them. The former can be taken on only by international efforts. Other concerns can be fought in other ways: a unilateral national decision to act internally or on another state; or a national bottom-up societal effort to reduce terrorism, disrupt cyber capabilities, or influence local migration patterns. Climate change, nuclear weapons, and infectious diseases, however, require global multilateral efforts to prevent their destructive potential from manifesting itself.