The United Nations and the Global Mandala

Grey M¹*

1. Bond University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

In 1998 the United Nations General Assembly, responding to the call by Mohammed Khatami, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared 2001 to be the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. One product of this civilizational engagement was the preliminary articulation by UNESCO of a new paradigm of International Relations. UNESCO characterized the dominant Realist model as “governance through exclusion”, with reliance on the concept of enemy as the “tool of power management” and the connoting of diversity as “a synonym of threat” facilitating “demonization of the other” – clearly a global scenario of largely unengaged communities. The agency called for a new paradigm that could be judged not by defensive attributes but a capacity for engagement or bridge building across civilizational divides. A relatively new discourse, termed mandala politics and reflecting the civilizational perspectives of Asia, has been proposed as just such a model of engagement and this paper gives evidence of how such a model might be applied to the fractious scenario of international politics. In particular it shows how this Asian paradigm might be applied to the United Nations itself, to produce greater intercivilizational engagement and empowerment in global affairs.