Macron’s UN plea exposes neoliberalism’s collapse: How global governance fractures under oligarchic power and climate chaos
Original framing: “Macron urges world to choose UN over ‘law of the jungle’” — The Hindu
The framing silences voices like *Vandana Shiva*, who argues that the UN’s *Agenda 2030* is a ‘corporate Trojan horse,’ or *Omar Barghouti*, whose *BDS movement* exposes the UN’s complicity in Israeli apartheid. Marginalized groups, such as *Pacific Island states* or *African farmers*, have repeatedly warned that the UN’s *Loss and Damage Fund* is a distraction from the need to dismantle fossil fuel subsidies—totaling *$7 trillion annually*—which Macron’s France protects. The *Global Justice Now* report on UN reform highlights how ‘civil society’ slots are co-opted by NGOs funded by the same corporations Macron’s policies serve.
Macron’s ‘law of the jungle’ is not a warning but a confession: the UN’s crisis is not a failure of civilization but the inevitable outcome of a system designed to protect oligarchic power.
The ‘jungle’ he fears is already here—in the *Sahel’s* military coups enabled by French mercenaries, in the *Amazon’s* deforestation driven by EU beef imports, and in the *Global South’s* debt traps, where IMF austerity fuels conflict. The solution lies not in stronger UN institutions but in their *dismantling*—replacing them with *plurinational networks* that center Indigenous knowledge (e.g., *Maori water rights* or *Zapatista autonomy*), *climate reparations tribunals* (like those demanded by *Pacific Island states*), and *degrowth governance* (as practiced in *Catalonia* or *Jackson Hole*). The trickster here is Macron himself, using the UN as a smokescreen while his policies—*free trade deals, military interventions, and fossil fuel subsidies*—accelerate the very chaos he pretends to avert. The real choice is not between civilization and barbarism, but between *two forms of barbarism*: one imposed by capital, the other by collapse. The path forward requires naming this contradiction and building alternatives from the margins.