The United Nations Security Council neither represents the power realities of the contemporary era nor factors the security considerations of developing countries into its structure. The body’s makeup represents the power realities that existed immediately after World War II; an upgrade is long overdue. The global power realities have not merely undergone changes over time, greater representation of the Third World can only ensure that the body meets the emerging security challenges more efficiently and effectively.
Genesis and Structural Anatomy of UN Security Council
While Europe is overrepresented by the presence of the United Kingdom, France and Russia, other geographical regions comprising mostly developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America are underrepresented. The developing countries’ security concerns have needed to be represented by China as the only permanent member of the Asian continent.
Representatives from 50 countries who gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to endorse the collective security system under the United Nations were mostly from Europe and North and South America and thereby formed a homogenous community insofar as their perceptions, values and fears were shaped by the European experience of rivalries leading to two world wars. The Allied Powers’ war against the Axis including Germany, Italy and Japan was framed and presented as a moral fight against evil forces from the beginning, which also appealed to the morality of the countries that were present at the San Francisco conference, and which prevented them from questioning the motives of the victorious powers in designing the collective security system favouring their power position.
Max Jacobson, a Finnish diplomat as well as a journalist, in his book The United Nations in the 1990s: A Second Chance? notes: “The legitimacy of the Security Council acting as a supranational body with war-making powers is derived from the military victory achieved by the permanent members in the Second World War over [the] evil forces of [Adolf] Hitler”
From the developing world’s perspective (countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America were subject to colonialism in different forms), Allied powers such as Britain, France and the US were imperialist powers (no less immoral actors than the Axis powers) and therefore, the selfish designs of these powers would have been questioned, had all these countries participated in the proceedings of the conference.
Many Afro-Asian countries were not politically free to join the UN as founder members. Former Indian diplomat Arthur Lall in an article titled “The Asian Nations and the United Nations” in 1965 notes how India, even while, signed the declaration of the UN on January 1, 1945, as a founder-member, could not reflect the aspirations of Indian people, since it was not an independent country at the time. As a result, while the Indian delegation was able to introduce only four proposals and amendments at the conference, independent Australia could initiate 29 proposals and amendments and Egypt, a newly independent country then, could introduce 25 proposals and amendments.
An eminent former academic of Jawaharlal Nehru University, K P Saksena, observes: “All in all, European interests and traditions provided the guiding force. The problems and the difficulties that were to confront the newly emerging nations of the Third World were not envisaged and provided for in the Charter. Indeed, their emergence as such was not foreseen”.
Even while some of the representatives to the conference objected to the proposal of permanent membership and conferment of veto power to the permanent members, they finally had to acquiesce to the prevailing power realities. In this context, Arthur Lall notes: “The United Nations was left with a hegemonic counter-piece and one that the truncated community of nations of 1945 had to accept faute de mieux”.
By the time the declaration was signed, notwithstanding the reality that the French economy had been shattered while Taiwan, whose ruler was considered the legitimate ruler of China, was a small state with few military and economic abilities, France and Taiwan until 1971 were permanent members of the Security Council. US support for Taiwan and withdrawal of recognition from the communist government of China and Britain’s support for France in order to sustain their imperial rule in the face of challenges emanating from the forces demanding decolonization were crucial in this context. The 50 participating countries in the San Francisco conference were not only subject to the prevailing power realities, many of them were also swayed by the moral justifications made by the victorious powers.
It must be noted that the UN Security Council still reflects the post-World War II power realities. In fact, the idea germinated among the Allied powers to manage and regulate international politics while that war was still raging. It is pertinent to note that the US president at the time, Franklin Roosevelt, unfolded such a plan in an after-dinner conversation at the White House in May 1942 with the foreign minister of the USSR, Vyacheslav Molotov. The US president believed that the US, the USSR, Britain and China could police the world in the aftermath of the war. His thinking underlying such a belief was that their power position and a combined population of more than a billion could go a long way in defending small and incapable nations.
However, more than their intentions of protecting incapable countries from aggression, crude realities guided the formation of the UN Security Council.
Changing Security Dynamics
The UN, in the current century, has to deal primarily with the security problems of the Third World as intra-state conflicts and civil wars have grown manifold compared with inter-state wars that were part and parcel of recurring imperial struggles among Western powers. With the passage of time, while Europe has integrated under the banner of the European Union, the Cold War between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union has subsided. However, the countries of Asia and Africa that once served as the colonies of imperial powers still suffer from the problems of numerous socio-economic malaise and political instabilities.
According to a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report in 2023 there are 56 active armed conflicts (intrastate conflicts) at the global level. However, most of these conflicts afflict the Third World countries from Asia and Africa. Corroborating such arguments, a SIPRI report of 2017 on the pattern of armed conflicts laid bare the fact that out of 49 active conflicts in 2016 most of which still continue, 47 were fought within states and over government (22), territory (24) or both (one), indicating a clear trend toward a sharp rise in the number of intrastate conflicts compared with inter-state ones. The report further noted that Africa was the region with the highest number of active conflicts in 2016 (19) followed by Asia (15). Therefore, the permanent members of the Security Council and the developing world should have a shared security perspective.
While many scholars argue that providing space for frequent informal consultations can obviate the need for reforming the Security Council, it must be underlined that formal membership in the council may be an important source of domestic legitimacy for the government involved. More importantly, a reformed Security Council based on the security needs of developing countries would be able to initiate action on problems that might be considered crucial to long-term peace.
The activities of the permanent members cannot be limited to stopping action from being taken. Peace is not mere absence of or upending the course of war; rather, it indicates a continuous process of socio-economic restructuring and democratic transformation of societies in the developing world so that wars in these countries can be prevented before they arise.
Second, developing countries affected by incessant civil wars would need long-term socio-economic assistance in the post-war scenario that can prevent them from lapsing into civil-war conditions again.
While the UK, France and Russia have witnessed steady declines in their military and economic power, developing countries such as India, South Africa and Brazil saw a graphical rise in their power. As making sensible use the military and economic power in the context of civil wars in the developing world is imperative, the developing countries with fewer hard-power resources may fare better in this regard than many powerful countries.
The fact that needs to be underlined is that the geographical representation of Third World countries assumes significance not merely for the sake of accommodating aspirations of different regions; rather, it is vital in view of the changing power realities and notions of security.
The UN operation in Somalia in the 1990s pointed to the Western troops’ incapability and impatience in understanding socio-economic and political problems confronting the people there, which eventually led to the withdrawal of US and other Western troops and turned the operation into largely a Third World–led effort. Similarly, while there was hardly any effort to contain genocide in Rwanda, Afghanistan was allowed to continue to boil until American security came under direct threat from extremists.
In Bosnia, differences in perspectives on the use of military power between the UN and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization became clear, with NATO stressing the effective use of military power and the UN emphasizing observation of restraint.
Post-war scenarios in countries such as Iraq, Libya and Syria explain how civil-war conditions needed a more nuanced approach to dealing with the ground realities rather than hard-hitting responses from the US and NATO.
Reforms at the UN Security Council would go a long way in addressing differences in security perspectives that are primarily allied to the issue of representation of the developing world.
China as representative of the developing world
For most of its evolution as a prominent economic and military power, China was barely inclined to identify itself formally with the largest multilateral bodies of the developing world such as the Non-Aligned Movement and Group of 77. China’s contentment with observer status within the NAM and major statements being issued as position papers on behalf of “G77 and China” point to this fact.
The letter and spirit of what Deng Xiaoping said to his party cadre way back in 1990 pointed to China’s individualistic aspirations at the time. He said: “Some developing countries would like China to become the leader of the Third World. But we absolutely cannot do that – this is one of our basic state policies. We cannot afford to do it, and besides, we are not strong enough. There is nothing to be gained by playing that role. We would only lose most of our initiatives.”
These remarks were at odds with the developing countries’ expectations of the most populous country of the world representing the largest landmass of the developing world as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. For the most part, China during that period considered UN peacekeeping operations to interfere with national sovereignty and disparaged them.
In the first decade of this century, while Beijing’s contribution to peacekeeping operations surpassed that of most Western countries, it still lagged far behind other developing countries such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh or Nigeria. For instance, China committed 2,200 peacekeepers while it maintained a standing army of more than 2 million in 2009.
China is transforming its image, as it has not only significantly enhanced its contribution to the UN peacekeeping budget from 3% in 2013 to 10.25% by 2018, it has a standing peacekeeping force of 8,000, comprising six infantry battalions, three companies of engineers, two transport companies, four second-grade hospitals, four security companies, three fast-reaction companies, two medium-sized multipurpose helicopter units, two transport aircraft units, one drone unit, and one surface naval ship, which make it the largest troop contributor of the five permanent members of the Security Council.
It has not only contributed to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) worldwide, according to a UN Development Program report, it has also offered its mediating role in the Afghan peace process as well as the settlement of the Rohingya refugee issue between Bangladesh and Myanmar as a regional peace broker. Beijing also announced a new package of aid and loans to more than 50 African leaders visiting Beijing for the seventh Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC).
As China chose to rise as an insular power, for the most part, its climb to economic and military prominence and upsurge in engagements with the international community has aroused scepticism in several quarters. While Beijing’s far-reaching influence in the African continent has been acclaimed as benign in China and among many African countries, its declaration of aid without any strings attached has aroused suspicion among many other countries and observers.
There have been allegations that Chinese aid has been channelled to realize various political objectives, such as gaining continued legitimacy for its Communist Party leadership and support for its one-China policy. Rather than concentrating more on building human-resource capacity in Africa, China allegedly directed its engagement in building heavy infrastructure, which engendered perceptions that these might be used for strategic purposes.
Beijing’s claim that its deployment of nuclear submarines in the Indian Ocean was targeted at anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia, and its establishment of its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017, further corroborated such suspicions over Chinese intentions.
Even while China has taken up an enhanced peacekeeping role as evidenced in Mali, South Sudan and Darfur, Chinese state media chose to project it as a Chinese achievement, showing a tinge of nationalistic pride. According to Logan Pauley of the Stimson Center, a think-tank in Washington, China’s embrace of a larger role in UN peacekeeping has raised suspicions that it might be training and preparing its troops by “providing them opportunities to improve its military operations other than war (MOOTW) and modernize its security forces.”
The debate must continue on including leading countries from the developing world such as Brazil, South Africa and India as permanent members as a way to make the UN Security Council more democratic, representing developing countries’ security interests as well as the changing power realities.
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