International Relations and Defence Committee

22 July 2026

Contents updated on 22 Jul 2026

The Chair opens the session on multilateralism, explains the inquiry context and procedure, declares his interest in the Strategic Defence Review, and asks both witnesses to introduce themselves and assess whether the multilateral system is in crisis and why.

Committee Wed, 22 Jul 2026 House of Lords

00:00 - 01:34

Speaker 2

Welcome to this, the eighth session of the committee looking at the issue of multilateralism, and welcome to our two expert witnesses here today. And we look forward to this session. It's live on Parliament Television, and I believe that there is an audience for it, apart from the large public gathering we have today. You'll get a transcript in due course, which you can change for any minor defects that is there, and I ask members of the committee to declare any interest that they have before they ask any questions. I would ask the first question.

I was the lead reviewer of the Strategic Defence Review last year, and I think it's probably the only relevant interest to this particular inquiry. So both of you have a lot of expertise in this area, and I just wonder whether in introducing yourselves to the committee, you might also look at the main characteristics that you believe of the existing multilateral system, and whether or not you believe that it is, as a number of witnesses have said to us, is actually in crisis, and if so, why? So I will ask Professor Dercon to start off with.

01:34 - 03:26

Speaker 1

Thank you very much, and thank you for asking me to comment on this. So my background is that I'm an academic at the University of Oxford. I was also the Chief Economist of DFID for a considerable period of time in the 2010s, and subsequently I advised various ministers in FCDO as well. As far as I'm concerned, the way I would look at it is that, you know, there is obviously a real challenge in the multilateral system, as you were implying. We should not forget it was built essentially on a bargain between, say, US and European countries and the rest of the world, where the design was done by the West, where and in return for this, access and also possibilities for stability in the rest of the world were essentially guaranteed.

I think definitely after the end of the Cold War, that definitely for decades should be the kind of feature of it. And of course the geopolitics has changed dramatically. I'm not saying that multilateral system is on the brink of disappearing, but its legitimacy and credibility for a lot of players internationally has definitely been questioned, and indeed its powers of enforcement of the rules of the game internationally are shortened. I think we are in a situation of huge fragmentation that is happening because when legitimacy is questioned, other countries are looking for alternative ways of doing this. So you get proliferation of the G20s, the BRICS, and all kinds of new kind of regional banks and so on in the whole system.

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