More than 35 years ago, when we started Operation Lifeline Sudan, my children asked why the UN doesn’t stop the war in Sudan. Here is what I said:
“The UN is a meeting. Delegates from many countries meet and discuss their grievances and disputes. The UN Secretariat facilitates the meeting, but it cannot guarantee that the parties agree to a solution.”
Securing peace is the most important task. Participants at the UN meeting do this by reading out statements, voting, vetoing, signing declarations, and going about their daily business.
Imagine you are a delegate to the General Assembly (GA) or the Security Council (SC). You will be surrounded by representatives of dictators, of war mongers, un-elected religious or ideological fanatics, hypocrites, misogynists, sycophants, and confidence tricksters. A minority of the heads of states represented at the meeting got democratically elected.
Below is the categorization of 167 countries according to the 2023 Economist Democracy Index, but feel free to use any other democracy index of your liking. Since 2016, the United States has been considered a flawed democracy that has not proven itself good enough to prevent a maniac from becoming president.
Voting in the General Assembly
I am convinced that if every person on earth could cast a vote, the majority of people would vote for peace. The problem seems to be the presence of nations and governments.
Democratic representation and voting rules are a complicated matter that often defies logic. You don't have to be a demographer to see that the voting system in the General Assembly is worryingly out of whack.
Tuvalu has become the 189th member state by UNSC Resolution 1290. With 11,000 citizens, Tuvalu has one vote in the UN, the same as India which has hundred thousand times more people. Take it from me that the math is approximately right.
This is not my understanding of democracy. The voting system in the GA is tantamount to letting each Tuvaluan vote 100,000 times while every Indian just has one vote. If there is a split in a number of countries of very different sizes, then the vote of a very small country is like the toss of a coin.
Don’t get me wrong. In a true democracy, the voices of minorities and those hidden from view must be heard, they need to be given space to explain their concerns, their grievances must be considered, and they should be part of the solution. The GA is exactly the place where causes of international conflicts, questions of fairness and justice, adherence to globally agreed standards, and the imbalances in international relations can and should be discussed – with a view to create greater understanding for the positions of others and resolving differences.
General Assembly resolutions are non-binding and have little overall consequence. Rather than discussing the causes of a conflict and seeking compromise and solutions, GA resolutions are the primary means of representing one's interests, demonstrating loyalty to one's favorite superpower, and supporting what benefits themselves. For your entertainment, you can count the votes for or against a resolution and those who have no opinion. But given the unequal representation of voting members, the total number is not what matters; we want to know who voted for what and why.
Voting in the Security Council
That the GA is too unwieldy to solve any problems must have been clear to the founders. It probably has dawned on almost everyone else by now. To cut out the noise and speed up life-saving decisions, the founders created the Security Council. Since its inception almost 80 years ago, it has met 9865 times, and adopted 2774 resolutions. In its recent Resolution 2774, the UNSC reduced itself to mourn the loss of life (without saying who attacked whom) and to urge a lasting peace in the Ukraine war - exactly what my neighbour down the street said two years ago. He should be nominated to the Security Council.
If the Security Council would be designed from scratch today, nobody in his right mind would agree to the present construct. Regardless whether you add another 5 or 10 more members to the club, it still would be marred by a conflict of interests – especially when members clash with each other, or are becoming the source of violence themselves.
Perhaps, if all major powers are united in their views and determination to act, a warlord or rogue state could be stopped; with the exception of the Taliban and the M23 or some rebels in Sudan, who seem unimpressed by all the hype. But it is absurd that anyone, including a permanent member of the Security Council, can start a war without asking anyone else, but that consensus is necessary to stop this war.
The Veto is routinely identified as the culprit preventing world peace. For example, the Guardian claims – as do many UN staff - that the veto system at the SC is compromising the democratic nature of the General Assembly. After decades of dilly-dallying, we know that the veto power is irrational because it allows one party to get away with murder.
Now, Resolution 2774 was adopted without any veto by the Security Council, while the General Assembly had voted for a more substantive resolution, pointing at the territorial integrity of the Ukraine, among other things. Clearly, the main protagonists in the UN Security Council care little about the world opinion. The veto is not the decisive issue – it is the entire set up that was built on the erroneous assumption that the good ones will always be in the lead.
As the biggest obstacle to change in the Security Council are the rules that the victorious powers of the time had given themselves, securing their own regulatory authority, the best thing you can do is to ignore it.
Politically, I want nothing more than peace for the Ukraine. But I do not believe that the United Nations and its Security Council should be used to legitimize the plundering of Ukraine's resources and the sharing of the spoils of war by the United States and Russia.
Let’s face it
Decisions on how many rockets to buy, or who aligns with whom, or how many people should die in the Ukraine, Gaza or Sudan are not made in the General Assembly in its present form, and not in the Security Council. The much-needed dialogue, for a better understanding of the interests and beliefs of other cultures and political systems and nations, and the search for acceptable compromise remains and needs to take place at other levels. I do see a role, radically different from today, for specific UN agencies, as emissaries of peace in the international arena and the voice of reason. I struggle to articulate it. Perhaps you have an idea.
The imbalance of voting power that you point out between Tuvalu and India is fascinating. I wonder what would be a good and fair system of vote distribution by population/size, that would also allow for a meaningful voice and contribution from smaller places like Tuvalu? It would need to ensure that larger countries couldn't just dominate decisions because of their size.
ReplyDeleteThere is no voting system that can do justice to small minorities (or small states). Hence voting at the level of the United Nations is irrational. It lends itself to abuse by misguided leaders (with or without veto).
Delete"Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for - and no religion too. Imagine all the people, living life in peace ..." - John Lennon.
ReplyDeleteI`ll go for the Lennon/Morgan solution.
DeleteEveryone agrees that the UN and its Security Council need root and branch reform, but many might add that retired UN aid workers would be well advised to stay with their knitting. After all, there's ample room for reform when it comes to aid. Africa is relatively poorer today, after trillions of dollars in aid, than it was when aid started to flow 60-70 years ago. If any of us has any expertise, it should presumably be in aid. It may also be more doable to reform aid than the General Assembly and the Security Council. The urgency is there considering the closure of USAID and the reduction in aid contributions from many donors.
ReplyDeleteI think the term development assistance is used very broadly to cover everything from humanitarian assistance, a sort of global first aid, to more complex interventions, over the years we have been through many iterations of development assistance. If we take countries that have over the past 30 years created bigger economies and higher standards ofof living for citizens -- then both India and China took the classic planned economy dams, steel mills route, but diverged with India's push coming with leaps in the knowledge economy ( software) and the PRC's in classic manufacturing and becoming for a historic period, the factory of the world. Both countries were able to provide political stability and overall systems to facilitate and maintain these trajectories. They were also for the accumalative phase of their developments autarchies, which allowed some protection for naescent industries. Interesting question posed about Africa ( can it be reduced to one typology?) and the sugeestion that development assistance stymied development.
ReplyDeleteAt the end of the day, politics matter in as much as they shape and provide the context for economic, social, cultural development. Ironically, the most robust examples of development assistance producing results perhaps comes from the US engagement with Japan and later Korea, after the war. Mc Arthur was enough of a visionary to realize that causing any dimunition to the status of the Emporer would be counter productive resisted that pressure. But then one can argue that Japan had developed its capacities since the early part of the 20th CE, its defeat of a Russian Fleet off Port Arthur in 1905 sent frissons of excitement across the colonized parts of Asia. Now we are in a new era, with the abandonement of the global post WW ll order by its till now chief back stop: the USA. We are all scrambling. Old verities are now in flux. Just sat in on a event around Trans National Repression here in Ottawa, the overhang in the room was the realities of how quickly the strands of what was until a year ago, realities around foreign relations, values, allies are vaporizing. Just two days ago, Russia and the U.S muscled through a statement on war in Ukraine, with the UK, France and other one time partners in the rear view mirror. The fanciful musings and fantasies of a egomanical Real Estate tycoon, are now the inputs into what passes for policy. Dear friends: Global Winter is now on us, we need to survive like some forms of life that shrivel and subsist on very little, until the spring when we can re-generate. Its going to be a long 5 years. My secret and vey unBuddhist sentiment is for one EM to take his trip to Mars with 100 of likeminded toxic wonks, on a one way ticket.