Permanent Deadlock

Everyone knows the UN Security Council needs reform. How can it be changed without being changed?

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has released a great new roundtable (thankfully, in text!) regarding UN Security Council reform. It’s a broad group whose extent reflects how much power has dispersed compared to the 1940s, when the United Nations was founded—there are thoughtful contributions regarding the perspectives of Africa, Brazil, China, France, German, India, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA. (Even this lengthy list leaves out the Arab Middle East and the Caribbean, as well as Oceania!)

Students in my classes love to talk about the United Nations, and I’m badly equipped to help them. As a U.S. foreign policy specialist I know a lot more about the operations of the National Reconnaissance Office than I do about UNESCO. I’m not even sure if it’s the “U.S. foreign policy” or just the “U.S.” part that matters, because my broad impression is that Americans just care a lot less about UN stuff than many other countries—UNESCO heritage sites are a lot less prominent in U.S. conversations than they’ve been in the discourses of other countries I’ve lived in. That may be because for Americans we just assume that whatever is tops in our country is automatically of international interest (hey, have you heard about the World Series?). But it’s also a consequence of being a hegemon, or at least a recent hegemon, and feeling that international organizations are more a means of management than a source of power. None of that may be accurate, by the way—this is a subjective, thumbnail sketch of a gestalt, but my impression is that largely Americans, even American policymakers, are pretty folk-realist in their view of international institutions.

Here’s a hell of a “to be sure”: To be sure, most of that is wrong. A lot of U.S. power is infrastructural. Ikenberry’s not right about everything but he is right that the United States earns a lot of its power by having set up international institutions to inscribe its preferences into international law and order. And although the United States isn’t as strong relative to the rest of the world as it was in 1945, institutions do facilitate how the United States operates—it’s much easier to have a permanent International Monetary Fund and World Bank than to try to create new institutions on the fly every time that a problem needs to be solved. (This is why “coalitions of the willing” are a bad way to run foreign policy.)

So I appreciate forums like these. They’re a great survey of the debates over something that’s technical but important and urgent. In this case, it’s the fact that the United Nations Security Council—the closest thing that we have to a world government, and the basis for the “liberal international order”—is wildly unrepresentative. Just to remind you: the UNSC has the legal ability to authorize the use of force within international law (and, yes, that matters). There are fifteen members, of whom five—the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China—are permanent members who can veto any UNSC measure.

For decades, there’s been talk of reforming the UNSC to add more members (as was done in 1965, taking it from eleven to fifteen) and more permanent members, with or without a veto. Of course, this hasn’t gone anywhere. Adding another veto member would dilute the power of the Permanent Five (P5), while adding still more members would begin to make the UNSC itself (even more) unwieldy. There’s also the problem of who any new members would be. The grossest oversight is that India isn’t on the P5 (or P6, I guess), because when the UN was set up India was a colonial possession. As Rohan Mukherjee says in the contribution regarding India, this omission on its own makes the UNSC’s composition “obsolete, privileging a group whose claim to centrality—being the victors of World War II—is outdated.” And you can go on from there (four of the five P5 countries are white-coded, three of them are Europeanish, etc).

Debates over reform have to keep separate very different tracks. One is effectiveness—is the UNSC currently able to command legitimacy for its active decisions among a global audience that’s much different from the council of victors of the Second World War? Without such legitimacy, the UNSC would really be just a talking shop. Another is outcomes—does the UNSC produce policy outcomes that satisfy what we’d want from an institution charged with overseeing the international order? Another is representation—does the UNSC sufficiently represent different parts of the international community, and if not how would we change it? (Okay, nobody believes that it’s representative, so it’s really a question about the second part.)

These are different because you can imagine a UNSC that’s fully representative but not particularly effective. Effectiveness would require an institution that could bind or at least sufficiently shame the great powers. The record of UN General Assembly votes regarding American and Russian foreign policy shows that maximal representation does not produce maximal effectiveness, even if UNGA votes aren’t costless to those on the receiving end of them. You can also imagine an institution that produces somewhat satisfactory outcomes across a range of policies (like peacekeeping) but which is unrepresentative…because that would, yes, be the current UNSC. So these are different dimensions. As Carnegie Senior Fellow Stewart Patrick writes:

The obstacles to council reform are daunting. They include the high procedural hurdles to amending the UN Charter; divergent member state positions on the acceptable size and terms of any enlargement; disagreement over current veto provisions and their potential extension to any new permanent members; and gnawing uncertainties over whether any plausible enlargement—even if it made the council more representative—would improve its functioning. Any change to the council’s composition or voting rules would require the approval of two-thirds of UN members—including each of the P5—accompanied by relevant domestic legislation. Given intensifying geopolitical rivalry and deepening political polarization in many countries, prospects for updating the council appear slim.

Again, with the hellishly big “To be sure” paragraphs: To be sure, it’s far from clear that the current UNSC is sustainable over the next couple of decades. And it’s wildly unjust from the perspectives of all countries being equal. Sithembile Mbete, a South African intellectual, writes:

African states have long advocated for the expansion and reform of the Security Council. …Nations from the Global South make up more than two-thirds of the UN’s membership, while the Security Council represents only 8 percent of member states. When the UN was established in 1945, most of Africa was still under colonial rule. The only Security Council expansion to date took place in 1965, in the early stages of the continent’s decolonization. Although African conflicts take up over 50 percent of council meetings and 70 percent of its resolutions, no African country has a permanent seat—only three nonpermanent seats that rotate among the continent’s subregional blocs. Many African leaders see this as a “historical injustice” and have argued that the council must be reformed to better represent the world’s population and reflect contemporary geopolitical realities.

Mathias Spektor, a scholar from Brazil, notes that Brazilian leaders have made claims on similar bases, even if he sees this as wrapped up with a quest for status. As part of the G4 group (Brazil, India, Japan, and Germany), Brazil has routinely made rhetorical gestures regarding joining the permanent seats, but such aspirations have gone nowhere. Former German ambassador to the UN Christoph Heusgen notes somewhat acerbicly that the United States and Russia joined with the PRC to squelch one reform attempt during his tenure, for instance. (Who says international cooperation is dead?)

Attempts to increase representation for representation’s sake have little traction with the great powers. But interests are interests, and the great powers do have an interest in a stable international system as long as it suits them. Alexandra Novosseloff, research associate at the Centre Thucydide, Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas “It should be underlined, however, that representativeness is not in the DNA of the Security Council, which has been structured with effectiveness foremost in mind.” It does seem unlikely that an expanded council of at least twenty-six members, with four to six new permanent members, would be any more effective—and it’s certainly hard to see what configuration of new members would be in the interests of the Western P5 countries and Russia and the PRC.

Barçin Yinanç, a Turkish journalist, notes that it’s not like the current UNSC has prevented war—for instance, when Russia invaded Ukraine. But the test should really be whether the world would be worse off if the current UNSC were made less effective. Zhang Guihong “Although it has been subject to various criticisms and reproaches, it is undeniable that the world would be a more chaotic and even dangerous place without it.” If structural reform is a nonstarter, then, what nonstructural changes could be made?

Fordham University professor Anjali Dayal, representing the United States in the roundtable, notes that there’s ample room to make real changes without making real change:

There are two main routes for the council to become more just and equitable: one is expanding its membership to be more representative; the other is promoting more equitable outcomes via mechanisms like enhanced transparency or agreements to restrict veto use. The former, which would require UN Charter revisions to add new, veto-wielding permanent seats, is extremely unlikely to happen. Instead, if the United States wants to push the body in a more just and democratic direction, it is likely to have better luck embracing the multilateral norms and new working methods and diplomatic practices that other member states have championed at the UN.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Biden administration is already pushing for reforms that would promote norms of responsible behavior, including endorsing a requirement that UNSC vetoes would have to be explained to the Security Council. That change, and related ones, would be “shifts in diplomatic practice” that could “produce more equitable outcomes”. (To this, I’d add that the United States itself could become a more conscientious and responsible member itself, perhaps by fully funding its assessment to UN peacekeeping (and other) operations—a routine, overly familiar way in which U.S. domestic politics hinders U.S. contributions to world order.)

Institutions are great but they’re also sticky. An institution that functioned well enough in the 1940s may not function that well today, but just well enough to make reform undesirable because of the risks that it might function even worse afterward—if a reform can be accomplished in the first place. That’s one reason why, even though it might seem incrementalist, turning to behavior and expectations could be a powerful way to remake how an institution operates without changing what can’t be changed.