A Real 'Fork in the Road'? Dilemmas in UN Security Council Reform

In the aftermath of World War II, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson said that the task facing the international community was `only a little less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis.to create a world out of chaos'. The task before the United Nations today is less cosmic but equally challenging. The questions of whether, how and for what purpose the UN Security Council should be reformed, stand as some of the most vexing issues in the broader debate on UN reform that has emerged since the US' 2003 decision to go to war in Iraq without Security Council support. While many proposals for Council reform have been offered, the international community has yet to arrive at a solution which balances the need for representation of today's great powers with effectiveness and good decision-making. The obstacles to reform are a combination of structural and political considerations. Excessive focus on structural reform detracts from the development of the political consensus that the Council needs to adapt to an era in which the primary threats to international peace are stateless and/or asymmetrical. The future legitimacy of the Council will rest on its ability to address these challenges head-on.

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As Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute in Sydney put it, Security Council reform is the `alpha and omega' of the UN reform process. Although most states agree that the Council's present composition is badly unbalanced, given that it is a snapshot of the global power structure circa 1945 and thus excludes newly emerging powers, there is little agreement over how to rectify the situation.

Australia, China and the UN in Asia-Pacific Security

The issue of representation on the Security Council has direct implications for Australia which, as a middle-power in a region that is fast becoming the locus of world politics and the heightening of regional strategic tension that may involve, has a distinct interest in the maintenance of a rules-based international order. However, Australia's recent intervention in the Solomon Islands has shown its willingness to operate outside the UN framework even when the stated goal, to save a failing state, is in line with UN principles.

Importantly, hardly any of the region's security challenges, North Korea, the Taiwan Strait, or Indo-Pakistani confrontation, ever come before the Council. UN observers estimate that about 70% of the Council's time is spent on the Middle East and Africa with East Timor as the only Asian issue to make it onto the Council's agenda with any regularity.

To some extent, this situation is indicative of the cast-iron attachment of many Asian states to sovereignty and non-intervention. This is often a reflection of residual but powerful memories of Western colonialism. The result is an instinctive aversion to institutionalising regional problems. Australia, however, has increasingly pursued intervention in its immediate region in recent years, and it is sometimes seen to be clashing with this regional norm. In such a context, there is a big question mark hanging over the Security Council's ability to apply itself in the region.

The key factor likely to close the gap between the Asian emphasis on sovereignty and Australia's local interventionism is the changing role and rise of China. Michael Fullilove argues that although China continues to be wary of humanitarian interventions and regards host-country acquiescence as non-negotiable it is ever more concerned about its international image. China is increasingly demonstrating its good global citizenship-such as its donation of money to tsunami relief-and fulfilling the expectations attached to it as a great power. China is currently the 5th largest contributor to UN peacekeeping operations. And the number and type of operations it supports has increased. Chinese diplomacy at the UN is now characterised by much greater confidence, flexibility and activism within UN agencies. Indeed, Columbia University's Samuel Kim notes that whereas Chinese diplomats once tried to isolate themselves from outside forces, they now actively try to build their soft power at the UN, particularly in the Security Council.

China's new position has great implications for the UN's role in Asian security and Australian policy in particular. Chinese diplomacy should be encouraged to take a more broad-minded trajectory. China may well use its new-found clout at the UN and its permanent status on the Security Council to provide some leadership on issues not related to the security problems on its doorstep. However, that same dynamic might also suggest that China will be able to deflect Council attention away from the North Korean and Taiwan issues as any great power might resist international supervision of its local disputes. This might be helped at present by American overstretch, but China will soon feel the weight of the increasing expectations of the international community. This is particularly true with regard to pressuring North Korea towards denuclearisation, but it also holds on issues such as China's relationship with the Iranian and the Sudanese governments. China should recognise that its great-power aspirations have been fulfilled, but as a consequence, it will be held to a higher standard of behaviour and responsibility. China's bargaining position is certainly strong given the huge risk of escalation that would attend even limited US military operations in the region. As such, the international community should encourage China to accelerate its good global citizenship inclinations so that more political space is opened in Asia for humanitarian and security operations, and so that China is in a position where it is nurturing the system it aspires to lead.

A Structural or Political Problem?

Although the Bush administration's eventual decision to ignore the position of the Council in the lead-up to Iraq seemed to deal a very damaging blow to post-World War II project of subjugating military force to international legal oversight, Secretary-General Annan's declaration that the world had come to a `fork in the road' should invite debate. Annan's formation of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change was intended to inject new substance into the issue and stimulate major structural reform of the Council. The key principle of the Panel's findings was that expanding the membership of the Council would improve its legitimacy and its effectiveness.

Under either model of two models, the question of how many seats should be held by permanent members remains a salient issue. Under Model A, however, nearly half the council would be occupied by permanent members. Under Model B, states such as Japan, Nigeria, Brazil, and Germany may well be re-elected several times and thus become virtually permanent members, but this configuration would still remain possible for the four regions to rotate members and thus mollify, if not fully satisfy, their states' aspirations.

Ultimately, Model B is better because it offers more flexibility. Yet even this still runs into many problems. This otherwise admirable attempt to make the Council more representative is plagued by the difficulty that such a large number of voices may render the Council completely ineffective due as a greater number of national interests come into play. Indeed, Columbia University analyst Edward Luck has observed that due to the concentration of expeditionary military capacity in North America and, to a lesser extent, western Europe, expanding the Council to accommodate `global realities' won't actually add more force to the Council's resolutions, and may actually detract from their significance. Although supporters of Council expansion correctly argue that the authority of the UN is based not on its coercive powers but on its ability to grant legitimacy to military actions, the problem of credibility remains. If consensus requires more than 20 states, then it is unlikely that it will be able to pass any resolutions at all. Consequently, the Council would be seen as being even more impotent than it is now.

The most important thing for any reform strategy to incorporate is that the Security Council was created not merely to be a representative body, but also a responsible one. Permanent members were given veto rights but in return, they were expected to shoulder a greater burden in maintaining peace and security. Consequently, representation on the Council should take into account the relative size of the state's contribution to UN operations. Given that Security Council-mandated operations necessitate extensive political, financial, and military commitments from its members, the credibility of the Council's resolutions will be undercut if the capacity and willingness to meaningfully contribute are not taken into account if membership is expanded.

Yet while the capacity to contribute military forces seems like a sound criterion for new membership, it creates a second hurdle for Security Council reform: geopolitical rivalry. If the size of commitment to UN operations was taken into account, there would be, for example, a powerful case for Japanese permanent membership of the Council. Not only does Japan contribute 19.5% of the UN's total budget, it is also an increasingly active and responsible member of the international community, not to mention a leading economic player. Yet given that Japan generally votes as part of the Western bloc at the UN and that under either of the Panel's proposed models Asia would receive only one additional seat, states such as Pakistan or Indonesia would almost certainly feel disenfranchised. Indeed, China has already demonstrated considerable alarm at the prospect of Japanese membership and has protested vigorously. China cites contention over the content of Japanese history textbooks, but more fundamentally, the dispute is a result of the two states' aggressive regional competition.

Ultimately, the question should be seen as one of realpolitik: how will Council members define a threat and under what circumstances will states deem interventions to be in their interests? It cannot be sensible to denounce the pursuit of narrow national interests while admitting that there is little spare capacity amongst the world's leading militaries, given that capable states must be willing to justify the risk to their domestic constituencies. The very divisions that Annan sought to heal with institutional reform were, in reality, products of the deeper divisions within the international community, particularly the post-9/11 direction of US foreign policy and a lack of agreement over how to define and respond to the changing nature of security threats. These divisions ensured that no political consensus would emerge over reform, scuttling Annan's efforts. Given the pressing nature of threats like nuclear proliferation and energy security, institutional reform needs to be conceptually separated from the furore over Iraq. In fact, as the genocide in Darfur demonstrates, there is an urgent need for new mechanisms to allow both humanitarian interventions and better security enforcement.

Defenders of humanitarian intervention argue that while it is sometimes difficult to assess where military action could actually help, in many cases, such as Darfur, it is essential to have forces on the ground. However, it will most likely be even more difficult to authorise such interventions with a substantially enlarged Council. The world may be forced to continue to rely on non-UN operations, like NATO's actions in Kosovo, for humanitarian interventions into the future, with the Security Council becoming even more irrelevant as a result.

As Michael Glennon recently wrote in the Chicago Journal of International Law, there is no transcendent reason why ideals such as the `responsibility to protect' or `collective security' are or will ever be shared by all states. Therefore, the challenge facing the international community is empirical and practical: states must engage in the slow work of forging common ground and working out what is feasible. The solution to Security Council reform thus lies not in simply resuscitating the institution, but in building a level of political integration and consensus such that the institution can work as originally intended, as the applicator of legitimacy to the use of force.

Regionalism: the way forward?

If, then, there is no emerging 'norm' towards a `responsibility to protect', the Security Council must develop a new relationship with regional organisations. In addition to carrying substantial legitimacy (as in the case of the African Union in Darfur), regional responses can offset the logistical difficulties and slow-response time associated with humanitarian and security interventions. Already a dramatic expansion of regional diplomatic architecture in Asia is taking place, particularly in the form of the East Asia Summit. As the transnational nature of contemporary threats inexorably erodes the argument for overly individualistic state behaviour and broadens the definition of national interest, failing or recalcitrant member states will gradually have less reason to rely on their neighbours 'closing ranks' around them. Intervention will still only occur in exceptional circumstances, but at least the political climate will be shifting. While one could argue that, with the exception of NATO, regional organisations are relatively weak militarily, this may be the only solution given the preoccupation of that organisation and the United States with crises in certain regions of the world and not others. Perhaps, then, future Council resolutions on intervention should formally hand mandates to regional bodies as it deems appropriate. Similarly, the Council might provide oversight and support to an operation, so that there is less reliance on the Western permanent members and no suggestion of imperialism. Undoubtedly, it is difficult to make broad recommendations of this nature given the myriad political considerations that come into play for each state concerned in each instance. Yet, new thinking is required and more localised solutions may be a start.