The Grassroots of Multilateralism

1. You have spent your career in multilateral diplomacy. Why did you agree to chair the Board of Senior Counselors of a project dedicated to bilateral relations?

Because the two are not opposites. In more than four decades of diplomatic work, from Skopje to Berlin, from New York to Vienna, I have come to one enduring conviction: there are, at their core, only two states of international affairs. The state of war and destruction, and the state of peace and cooperation. Everything we do in diplomacy, in global governance, in the quiet daily labour of building trust between peoples, is an effort to move the world from the former to the latter.

Multilateral frameworks have traditionally been seen from the top down: a charter, a resolution, an institution. But those structures stand on something. Bilateral relations are the grassroots of every global structure. They are where trade is negotiated, where cultural exchange begins, where a diplomat learns that the colleague across the table shares more concerns than divides them. When Ambassador Grgić showed me a system that makes all 18,528 of those relationships visible, side by side and on the same terms, I recognised something I had not seen in my career: the full architecture of bilateral cooperation, laid out for the whole international community, built from the bottom up.

I agreed to chair the Board because the project is fully compatible with the mission of the UN Charter, and because it represents a genuine innovation in how nations can learn to think about one another: not through the lens of rivalry or indifference, but through the lens of shared possibility.

2. You presided over the General Assembly in 2007 and 2008. What did that experience teach you about how countries actually understand one another?

That they often do not, and that the problem is rarely ill will. It is usually a lack of time and a lack of material. The General Assembly brings together 193 delegations, each arriving with a national position shaped at home. In the corridors, in the side rooms, in the bilateral meetings that fill every day of a session, those positions meet. That is where the real work of the United Nations is done, and the quality of that work depends on how well each delegation understands the one it is talking to.

As President I watched hundreds of those encounters. The most productive ones were between delegations that had done their homework, that knew not only the other country's stated position but its economy, its demography, its constraints, its history with third countries. The least productive were between delegations that knew each other only through headlines. I said at the presentation in September that during a single high-level week there are thousands of bilateral meetings in that building, and most participants have very little time to prepare. If a diplomat can open one volume and see the relationship whole, the conversation starts from a different place.

3. You have written that multilateralism faces a crisis of confidence. How does a bilateral approach help?

At a time when global institutions are questioned and collective action falters, bilateral cooperation offers a different path, one rooted not in abstract obligation but in concrete mutual understanding. Two countries can agree on a trade arrangement, a scientific exchange or an environmental measure long before 193 can agree on anything. Those agreements are not a retreat from multilateralism. They are its building material. Ultimately, bilateral cooperation is about creating the synergies that underpin multilateralism.

If we are to build a new culture of international relations, it must begin here: between two countries, two peoples, two perspectives brought together in a spirit of honest inquiry. What Bilateral Navigator adds is that the inquiry is no longer left to chance. Every pair of countries gets the same questions, the same forty domains, the same benchmark against the rest of the world. That discipline is what turns good intentions into a method.

4. What convinced you, personally, that the method works?

The volume on North Macedonia and Croatia, for which I wrote the preface. These are two countries I know intimately, and I expected to learn nothing. Instead I found the relationship described in a way no ministry brief had ever described it: not just the political and economic headlines, but the domains where the two countries quietly resemble each other, the areas where cooperation is far below its potential, and the people on both sides who hold the relationship together.

J. William Fulbright once wrote that educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanising of international relations. That sentence is the best description I know of what these books do. They are a tool for that humanising: a way for the people of two countries to see one another clearly, and to find in that understanding the foundation for deeper cooperation. The search for a better world begins between two flags, within those pages.

5. On 25 September 2026 you took part in the presentation of Bilateral Navigator at UN Headquarters under the auspices of the President of the 81st Session. What did that day mean?

It closed a circle for me. I had stood in that building as a Permanent Representative, as a foreign minister and as President of the Assembly. This time I came as the chairman of a research institution founded by a serving ambassador of a small member state, to present a complete collection of 192 volumes, one for each of Croatia's relationships, together with a second collection for Bangladesh, the country of the President of the Assembly.

I was glad to see the Prime Minister of Croatia, the Foreign Minister and a former President of Croatia in the room, because it showed that a government had understood what its ambassador had built. And I was moved by the President of the General Assembly, Dr Khalilur Rahman, calling the project a gift of Croatia to the world. He also asked for the one thing I would have asked for: that the work be kept current and made available electronically, so that every mission can use it. That request is now shaping the next stage of the project.

A small country cannot have a mission in every capital. It can have a method. That is the lesson of Croatia and Bilateral Navigator.

6. What does the Board of Senior Counselors actually do?

Three things. First, it keeps the project honest. A benchmark covering every member state must be seen as impartial by every member state, so the Board looks at how countries are described, how sensitive subjects are handled, and where the editorial line should sit. Second, it opens doors. Many of the ambassadors, consuls and professionals who have contributed to the volumes, more than a thousand of them, responded to an invitation that carried my name, and I take that responsibility seriously. Each contributor who is accepted receives a Bridge Builders Between Nations certificate signed by the author and by me, and I think of that signature as a promise that their contribution will be treated with respect.

Third, the Board connects the project to the institutions it is meant to serve. The United Nations, the regional organisations, the foreign ministries. My role there is to make sure that Bilateral Navigator is understood as what it is: an independent research institution offering a shared analytical commons, not a commercial product looking for official endorsement.

7. What would you say to an ambassador who receives a Bilateral Navigator volume about their own posting?

Read the chapters you think you already know. That is where you will be surprised. Every ambassador knows the trade figures and the political history of their posting. Fewer know how the two countries compare in education, in science, in media, in migration, in the dozens of domains that never reach the ministerial agenda but shape how two societies see each other. And then write back. The volumes are not finished documents. They are built to be corrected and enriched by the people who live the relationship, and an ambassador's interview or observation becomes part of the record for everyone who follows.

8. Where would you like to see Bilateral Navigator in five years?

Inside the daily routine of diplomacy. I would like a Permanent Representative preparing for a bilateral meeting during high-level week to open the relevant edition as naturally as they open their instructions from home. I would like the United Nations itself to have the complete collection, all 18,528 relationships, available to every delegation, and I would like the work to be updated continuously rather than printed once.

Beyond the diplomatic world, I would like the method to reach the people who build relationships without ever calling it diplomacy: exporters, scientists, universities, cities. If they can see their counterpart country clearly, they will find partners the official channels never thought to look for. And if that happens, we will have done something I have believed in for forty years: we will have strengthened multilateralism from below, one relationship at a time.