The new UN secretary general, António Guterres, has described the world as “largely chaotic” and said that a united Europe is essential to prevent it succumbing to deepening conflict.

In an interview before two critical global meetings this week in Bonn and Munich, Guterres warned of the advent of a particularly dangerous moment in history, drawing a parallel with the run-up to the first world war. Only a renewed commitment to multilateral cooperation could head off the gathering danger, he said.

“It’s no longer a bipolar world, a unipolar world, but it’s not yet a multipolar world. It’s largely a chaotic world in many aspects,” Guterres said in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian and three other European papers.

“Impunity and unpredictability tend to prevail and not only are conflicts becoming more and more interconnected but they are also interconnected with this threat ... of global terrorism.”

Guterres was referring to a precarious world order in which American pre-eminence has given way to challenges from both China and Russia, and in which multilateral institutions are arguably weaker than at any point since 1945.

Guterres, who served as UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, has inherited the secretary general’s mantle at a particularly fraught time for global security.

The Syrian and Yemeni conflicts are still raging, four famines are looming in parts of the developing world, and the rise of a white nationalist backlash to immigration and globalisation has upended political cultures in Europe and the US.

Guterres warned against surrendering democratic values to win votes and an embracing of “alternative truths” – an echo of “alternative facts”, which has become a buzzphrase of the Trump White House. The new US administration loudly opposes many of Guterres’s core principles, like multilateral governance and a generous approach to the world’s refugees.



With other powers rising, he said, a more multipolar world was inevitable but not necessarily less antagonistic than the unipolar world we are leaving behind.

“It might also increase the dangers of confrontation,” he said, in his first interview with a British newspaper since taking office on January 1. “The point is, in my opinion, the multipolar world without strong multilateral institutions is not necessarily a peaceful one.”

“Europe before the first world war was a multipolar Europe but there was no multilateral governance mechanism and the result was the first world war.”

Europe’s ability to keep faith in its unity and cohesion could be a key stabilising factor at a perilous time, he suggested. “I think to move into a functional multipolar world, the role of Europe is absolutely essential,” Guterres said, declaring himself “a strong believer in a united Europe” on the world stage, playing a positive role politically and in terms of development and humanitarian aid.

He made his remarks to reporters from the Guardian, France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung and La Stampa of Italy, part of a collaborative media group known as Europa.

He did not directly criticise the UK’s Brexit vote, calling it a “sovereign decision by the British people”, but he argued it was important for Europe to “learn the lessons of Brexit”, which he said were “a more effective integration, reconciled with the European public opinion”.

Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister, said that more effective integration would only be possible with political leaderships that risked telling the truth about the challenges of globalisation, rather than simply blaming immigration.

“I think that political leaders need to be able to tell the truth and assert their values, even if that means losing the next elections,” he said. “What we sometimes see are political leaders who forget about their values, use alternative truths as propaganda tools, just to win the next elections.”

Mainstream parties that pandered to prejudice to win votes, Guterres argued, tend to lose in the end to populists, because “when people have to choose between the original and the copy, they tend to choose the original”.

Given his past role as a passionate defender of refugee rights, Guterres is generally expected to play a more activist role that his predecessor Ban Ki-moon when it comes to reforming UN institutions, and act as a moral conscience to great powers in the security council.

He said he did not see himself as a protagonist in global problem-solving but rather “a bridge-builder, a convener, an honest broker, to help find solutions”.

But he also made clear he saw an advocacy role for himself. “The secretary general must be in the frontline of the defence of all the principles that are essential in the UN charter, and namely all aspects of human rights,” he said.

Guterres said he had had “extremely constructive” meetings so far with the new US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley. But after the interview she blocked Guterres’s pick of Salam Fayyad as the UN’s Libya peace envoy on the grounds that Fayyad was a Palestinian.

Speaking later in Dubai, Guterres expressed his disappointment with the US veto, saying ruling out Fayyad was “a loss for the Libyan peace process and for the Libyan people”.