00:00Well, Germany is asking some pretty fundamental questions about its failure to retain its seat on the UN Security Council,
00:07and the government is facing intense pressure from the opposition and its coalition partners.
00:12Richard Kozl-Wright is Professor of Sustainable Structural Transformation at SOAS
00:18and former Director of the UN's Globalization and Development Strategies Division.
00:25There are some important developments, I think.
00:28Obviously, the fact that the Philippines lost to Kyrgyzstan, I think, was an important development.
00:40Philippines has recently aligned itself more closely with the U.S.
00:45Kyrgyzstan has a diplomatic ambition, so I think that's an interesting development.
00:51Bigger voice for Central Asia, which has been neglected, I think, in a lot of UN discussions.
00:57So I think that was certainly an important development.
01:00Obviously, a lot of focus was on Germany not getting the European seat, losing out to Portugal and Austria,
01:09and that's quite significant.
01:13Germany entered the race very late and said that the problem was that it didn't really have time to prepare,
01:19but it ran under a slogan of respect, justice, and peace.
01:25And I think a lot of people looking at German foreign policy over the last few years would not really
01:30associate those words
01:31with what they've been doing with respect to Gaza, with respect to the war on their own eastern border,
01:39with respect to a whole series of international incidents where I don't think Germany has taken a particularly progressive and
01:46multilateral line.
01:48So I think there are some important changes there, for sure.
01:51Does this vote then reflect changing diplomatic priorities among developing countries?
02:00I think so.
02:01I mean, the difficulty in the developing country block is a very large and diverse block,
02:07but I think there's a growing awareness that they need to take more of the international agenda into their own
02:15hands,
02:17and the suspicion, I think, of the way in which the more advanced economies have driven and dominated that agenda
02:27over the last few years.
02:30So I think there is that sentiment that is growing in the developing country world.
02:36An interesting development that is related to the elections in the Security Council was also the election of a new
02:45president of the General Assembly,
02:47and that went to Bangladesh, and they defeated Cyprus in that election,
02:55which also is an interesting development, a very competent Bangladeshi foreign minister,
03:00a former colleague of mine from the United Nations in Geneva.
03:04So that's also, I think, part of that shift away to a kind of more independent view by many developing
03:10countries.
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