UNITED NATIONS, US
Pakistan’s new prime minister
stepped onto the U.N. podium and faced world leaders, ready to spin
a tale of floods and climate change and more than 33 million people at
risk. Shahbaz Sharif began: “As I stand here today to tell the story of my
country ...”President Joe Biden addresses the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, at the U.N. headquarters.
At its core, that was what
every world leader was here to do during the past week.
One after another, they took
the stage; different leaders from different traditions that, under a single
roof, reflected most of the world’s history. All had a fleeting opportunity to
craft a story about their nation and the world that would — they hoped — make
others sit up and listen. Some did it better than others.
We are storytellers, we
humans. And even in an era of globalized politics and instantaneous streaming
simulcasts, the story — the way it’s told, the details used, the voice and the
cadence and the passion (or lack thereof) — can win the day.
Yet the dawn of storytelling
at scale over the past two decades — regular people amplified globally right
next to world leaders, and entire industries devoted to disseminating
disinformation across continents — makes it harder for even the most powerful
to get their messages noticed.Prime Minister of Pakistan Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif addresses the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, at the U.N. headquarters.
“In a public-discourse
environment where people are just choosing to believe what they wish to
believe, the challenge for a speaker at the U.N. is tremendous,” said Evan
Cornog, author of “ The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative
Has Determined Political Success.”
“It is so hard to break
through,” Cornog said. “And I think it’s become much harder. In Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s age of politics, there was more of a predisposition to think, ‘I
should listen to this person.’ Today the predisposition is, ‘This is all
propaganda, and I should pay no attention to this.’”
Nevertheless, to watch a week
of what is effectively an open-mic night for the people who rule the world
revealed that in the attention economy, particularly for nations that aren’t in
the spotlight at the moment, how you tell the story can make all the
difference.
Urgency was a key theme.
“Inflection point” came up a lot, as did “the moment to act.” Said Bharat Raj
Paudyal, Nepal’s foreign secretary: “We are living indeed in a watershed
moment.”
Tandi Dorji, the foreign minister
of Bhutan, read a letter from a child about climate change. “Help and save our
tiny village from global warming,” it said, and it was hard not to stop and
notice.
Other speeches were more
workaday. Some were simply bullet points about priorities. Some were
adjective-rich screeds about old enmities. Some were, bluntly, quite wonky.
Yet some leaders (or their
speechwriters) have honed storytelling to a persuasive art. Ukraine’s Volodymyr
Zelenskyy, for example, got a dispensation to be the only world leader allowed
to speak
on video this year thanks to his status as a wartime president. In
doing so, he got handed some advantages:
He controlled the production
values. If he made a mistake, he could rerecord. Most of all, he could take
advantage of the storytelling optics that have served him so well
since Russia invaded — his trademark olive T-shirt, his flag in the background,
his ability to dominate his own environment rather than be framed in the same
green marble as everyone else.
Then there is the case
of Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of the island nation of Saint Vincent
and the Grenadines. His speech Saturday brimmed with metaphors and language
that some might call epic and others grandiose — but were highly noticeable
either way.
“I ask the relevant and
haunting questions: What’s new? Which world? And who gives the orders? The
future of humanity depends on satisfactory answers to these queries,” Gonsalves
boomed.
Storytelling, of course, goes
beyond oratory — even in the context of a speech. Some of the most memorable
U.N. stories have been told by leaders who went past words.
Consider Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev, whose fabled
shoe-banging at the 1960 General Assembly was a defining moment of his
public life — and he wasn’t even at the podium at the time. And Libya’s Moammar
Gadhafi, who spent 1 hour and 36 minutes uncorking his anger at the United
Nations before pulling out a copy of its charter and ripping it
up.
Most speeches are not that
lively and, in fact, would be boring to many people. That’s in part because the
storytelling is often aimed at audiences different from a general international
one.
Sometimes a story is intended
for fellow assembled leaders, or for a specific leader (many U.N. General
Assembly speeches have been delivered for an audience of one: the president of
the United States). Sometimes it is intended for a financial institution, like
the World Bank. Sometimes it is told for a domestic media audience, or for the
people of a country next door.
“They’re still learning. Heads
of state are learning how to tell stories, how to use this format to get their
message out there,” said William
Muck, head of the political science department at North Central College in
Illinois.
“They’re not always great
storytellers,” he said. “But we now have the means and the technology to share
those stories. So somebody who’s adept at storytelling can really thrive in
that space.”Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds up a graphic showing the May 28, 2021 front page of The New York Times while addressing the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Friday, Sept. 23, 2022, at the U.N. headquarters.
One story that faded into the
background some this year: that
of COVID-19. The dominant narrative at both the all-virtual 2020 U.N.
General Assembly and the hybrid 2021 edition, it receded to a B-story this time
around as war, climate change and food insecurity elbowed to the front row.
Beyond the global desire to move on, there seemed to be recognition that it was
time for other stories.
Just outside the General
Assembly Building this month, a mockup of an outdoor classroom with pupil desks
and backpacks was set up for a summit
on transforming education. Every day, delegates walked past and saw these
words etched on the blackboard: “Only one in three 10-year-olds globally can
read and understand a simple story.”
The message was clear. Telling
stories, understanding them and casting both an appreciative and a critical eye
on them sit at the heart of 21st-century literacy. It is a central part of
being a citizen, a smart consumer — and a leader.
It is also, as some here say,
a way station on the path toward what the United Nations covets most of all:
peace. - AP
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