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Most bitterly contested is membership of the UN Security Council, which has the right (whether exclusively or not is hotly debated) to decide what constitutes a threat to world peace and security, and what to do about it. In the UN’s other big decision-making institution, the General Assembly, all the world can have its say, and does. But here outsiders take their revenge: a caucus of mostly developing countries called the G77 (but these days comprising 130 members including China) tends to dominate and filibuster.
Might it assuage resentment and improve the council’s authority and the UN’s effectiveness if America, Britain, France Russia and China invited other permanent members to join them—and considered giving up their veto? When the P5, as they are called, first grabbed the most powerful slots, the UN had 51 members; decades of decolonisation and splintering self-determination later, it has 192. The obstacles to reform grow no smaller either.
Most recently a concerted effort by Brazil, Germany, India and Japan (a self-styled G4) to join the council’s permanent movers and shakers was thwarted by a combination of foot-dragging, jealousy and stiff-arming. African countries failed to agree on which of their several aspirants should join the bid. Regional rivals—Argentina and Mexico, Italy, Indonesia, Pakistan and others—lobbied to block the front-runners. China made it clear it would veto Japan; America, in supporting only Japan, helped destroy its friend’s chances.
New permanent members would broaden the regional balance. That could add authority and legitimacy to council decisions. Bringing in not only nuclear-armed India, but soft-powered Japan and the rest, would undercut the notion, perpetuated by the P5, that to be a winner you need first to crash the nuclear club.
But might the price of a larger, permanently more diverse council be more potential spanner-tossers and thus greater deadlock? The hope would be that once difficult outsiders got their feet permanently under the table, sharing the responsibility for managing the world would stop them protecting bad elements, as South Africa (currently a rotating member) has been doing with Zimbabwe, in part to defy the permanent five.
Prising the P5 from their vetoes might, however, have adverse effects. It was dependable veto power, ensuring their vital interests were never overridden, that kept America and Russia talking at the UN—and Nikita Khrushchev shoe-banging—through the darkest episodes of the cold war. Russia will not forget the mistake of the brief Soviet boycott of the council that led to force being authorised to repel North Korea at the start of the Korean war in 1950. China shows no sign of veto self-effacement, either.
But staying at the table does not guarantee agreement. The UN is deliberately an organisation of states, and states differ for reasons good and bad. George Bush went to war in Iraq without explicit backing from the Security Council (just as NATO went to war to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, despite Russia’s certain veto had the issue come to a council vote). But the council’s divisions on the most contentious issues have not prevented responsible stewardship elsewhere. A Security Council summit in 1992 agreed that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was a “threat to peace and security” to be dealt with forcibly if need be. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, new resolutions were passed to curb terrorists’ finance and keep nuclear, chemical and biological weapons out of their hands.
There has been a huge increase over the past 15 years in the numbers of blue helmets, with 100,000 soldiers and police currently deployed. This is credited with helping to reduce the number of conflicts between states, as well as calming civil wars from Bosnia to Haiti, from Cambodia to Sudan, from Congo to Lebanon. Acceptance, at least politically, of a “responsibility to protect” takes the council towards territory which, earlier this decade, it would not have approached: an International Criminal Court, for example, separate from the UN but able to take its referrals, and ready to prosecute the worst crimes.
Yet divisions among the P5 have often slowed deployment of peacekeepers where they are most needed, such as in Sudan’s war-torn province of Darfur. Pessimists doubt that China and Russia, both arch-defenders of the Westphalian principle that state sovereignty trumps all, will ever seriously contemplate authorising forceful intervention even to end a genocide. A new UN Human Rights Council has yet to prove it is any better than its discredited predecessor at bringing brutal governments to book.
Meanwhile it took years, and North Korea’s 2006 bomb test, for China to condemn Kim Jong Il’s nuclear cheating and let the Security Council pass judgment on it. The P5 plus Germany have worked together over the past three years, slapping a series of UN resolutions and sanctions on the regime in Iran for defiance over its suspect nuclear work, yet Russia and China have doggedly watered down each text, line by line.
Doing it for themselves
There is much the UN Security Council will never be able to do, no matter who occupies its plushest seats. And there are lots of other ways to get useful things done these days. The internet helps campaigners on human rights, as on other issues, to get their message round the world rather effectively. Stung by constant exposure and criticism of its policy in Sudan and Darfur, China appointed a special envoy (who soon found he had a lot of explaining to do) and shifted ground on the need for a UN force, even though deployment is agonisingly slow.
In some cases, regional organisations are better equipped to take the strain. Enlargement of the EU and NATO has helped stabilise Europe’s borderlands, with mostly European troops and police these days in the Balkans. Russia may protest, but its western frontier has never been more peaceful.
On a similar principle of African solutions to African problems, the African Union has provided troops in Sudan and elsewhere. But devolving security jobs to the neighbours can be a disaster: the AU delegated the problem of what to do about Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to a southern African grouping, SADC, which left it to South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, who did nothing. The hard-pressed people of Zimbabwe are still waiting for relief.
East Asia, the other big potential battlefront in the cold war, used to look very different from Europe, which has long had more than its share of shock-absorbing regional clubs and institutions. Now, alongside the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), a still limited talking-shop, other regional conversations are starting up. The ASEAN Regional Forum draws in not only China, Japan and Korea, but Americans, Russians and Europeans; ASEAN-plus-three summits are clubbier, involving only regional rivals China, Japan and Korea. A new East Asian Summit excludes America but brings in India and Australia, among others; Americans naturally prefer to boost the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). Meanwhile Russia, China and their Central Asian neighbours have founded the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, in part to counter Western influence in the region as NATO battles on in Afghanistan, but in part so that Russia and China can keep an eye on each other. Annual joint military exercises are a new feature.
Problem-solving groups come in all shapes and sizes, from quartets (for promoting Middle East peace or trying to settle the future of Kosovo) to entire posses. Some 80 countries in the Proliferation Security Initiative (an “activity not an organisation”) exchange information and train together to sharpen skills for blocking illicit shipments of nuclear or other weapons materials. Like the P5 plus 1 talks on Iran (sometimes called the E3 plus 3 by Europeans), there are six-party talks hosted by China on North Korea (and including America, South Korea, Japan and Russia), which could yet evolve into a formal north-east Asian security dialogue.
More countries are taking the initiative. China, Japan and South Korea, East Asia’s rival powers, will meet this year for a first 3-minus-ASEAN summit. China, India and Russia meet from time to time to re-swear allegiance to multipolarity. They may have little more in common than an ambition to put Europe and America in the shade, but earlier this year the foreign ministers of the four BRIC countries got together for the first time; their economic and finance ministers will soon meet too. And with a wary eye to China’s growing economic and military weight, America, Australia and Japan have formed something of a security threesome, though Japan’s plan to include India too was deemed a bit provocative.
Quirky but familiar globe-spanning organisations include the Commonwealth, which knits together Britain’s former colonies plus other volunteers and does good works in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, and the Non-Aligned Movement, a cold-war hold-over with 116 members and communiqués that leave no prejudice unrecorded. But what of Mr McCain’s endorsement of a League of Democracies?
The notion isn’t new. An American sponsored Community of Democracies got going with fanfare in 2000. There is nothing wrong with mobilising freedom-loving governments to speak up for democracy. But there are difficulties.
the previous debate is here:
