The Abandoned Seats of the UN Security Council
Do Not Reform the United Nations Security Council — just Press its Members to Deliver on What They are There for
This is the true picture of the UN Security Council:
The UN Security Council was perfectly designed as the World’s Headquarters of Peace and Security. But there is no one there. And there has never been anyone there since the organization was established in 1945
The United Nations Organization was established in a unique civilizational moment of truth — immediately after WW2, which was the biggest anthropogenic disaster in human history so far. Those circumstances contributed to making the perfect design of the UN Security Council in terms of preventing international conflicts, loss of human life and material or intangible civilizational values. Article 24, 41 and 42 of the Charter of the United Nations stipulate the unprecedented power entrusted by the international community into the hands of this unique organ: “In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf”; “The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.”, and, finally, the military instrument that no single country in the world has the resources to challenge: “Article 42: Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.”
The big question then is why, despite the reality that the aggregated political influence, economic and financial instruments and military power capabilities of UN Security Council permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have more than enough capacity to ensure that any of the Security Council resolutions is unconditionally materialized and any disturbance of security character anywhere in the world is promptly and uncompromisingly resolved, this doesn’t happen?
The five UN Security Council members have had this capacity 70 years ago, and they have this capacity now. Why, then, we still have so many violent conflicts, bloodshed, and destruction all over the world?
The future of peace at that time was in the hands of the political leaders — the heroes who achieved the victory in the WW2, starting with Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and De Gaul — they all were great military minds, but they had a poor vision how to build peace. It was not their fault — they were military, and some of them the war made them military: with mindsets dominated by wars, battles, weapons, and enemies. As Maslow noted, “If the only tool you have in your hands is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” As typical representatives of the tribal thinking, they had no mental corridor of thinking other than raising again the flag of the next primitive tribal era in the history of human civilization. That marked the death of humanity’s hope for lasting world peace and international security.
Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, and De Gaul were the right people to win the war, but they were the wrong people to build an international security system for Humanity’s future of peace. Thus, a unique opportunity for implementing a potentially highly effective tool for conflict resolution, for maintaining international order and for establishing new rules for the people in the world to live together, was missed.
Gradually, all the Security Council permanent members abandoned their duties as Guardians of peace and international security and started fighting with each other. Only a few months after, all major countries got engaged in a new ideological confrontation and in a new struggle for world domination. As a result, the whole global system of international relations degenerated back to the point where the WW2 started: confrontation for spheres of influence, for resources and markets.
With one new feature: betraying the trust of the international community, the “Big Five” — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, practically nationalized the extraordinary powers they were given in order to maintain international peace and security and started illegitimately applying them as a powerful extension of their own national foreign policy.
Most of the other countries were involved in the newly formed global battlefield in a variety of ways: by allying with “the leader of the gang”, through proxy politicians, proxy revolutions and proxy democracies, proxy oppositions and proxy governments, waging proxy wars. Those practices became ubiquitously applied all over the world, and the political destiny of many political leaders and their parties in many countries was practically negotiated, in terms of obedience, with the big powers, and not with the citizens of that particular country. This reality evolved into deep erosion of the fundamental principle of democracy in the meaning governments representing the interests of their citizens (see the American “Declaration of Independence”). With the time the processes of separating the executive power from the interests of the people grew more and more intensive and lead to one of the gravest problems in the world we are having today — the crisis of democracy.
And here is an interesting paradox related the power of veto. The power of veto which is now considered by many as an obstacle in settling international issues was granted by the international community to the five permanent members of the Security Council as an expression of trust, and as an additional instrument of authorization for these five countries to maintain international peace and security. In fact, in the reality where permanent members started politically behaving as enemies to each other, it was only the power of veto which prevented effective alliances to be formed within the Security Council itself, thus decreasing the possibility of large scale global military conflicts emerging with the formal legitimization through the United Nations Organization.
Now that there are many discussions on reforming the UN, I am convinced that what we need is not reform but restoring the authenticity of how the UNSC functions. To bring it back to what it was designed for, and for what 193 countries empowered the UNSC for: conflict resolution.
The solution should not be difficult: If everybody agrees that something has to be urgently changed, then the only urgent and radical reform that must be done in order to bring more peace and to downgrade the current intensive political violence worldwide, is to denationalize the decision-making process within the UN Security Council member countries themselves.
The current practice through which UN Security Council member countries form their foreign policy positions on issues of international security is that this is ubiquitously done in branches that are an integral part of their respective departments or ministries of foreign affairs. This must be completely abandoned because those organs of their sovereign national government are by definition designed to protect and advance exclusively the national interests of that country, and they naturally function in such mode. And because if you have an apple tree you cannot expect mango fruits to appear growing there, the decision-making output of the current UNSC is in fact nothing but a mechanical modulation of its members’ national interests.
The key to solving international conflicts and for maintaining peace and security is to establish in each member of the UNSC (both permanent and non-permanent) a new type of structure — e.g. “Agency global security policies”, focused on the long-term benefits of conflict resolution for their national interests, and generating its policy and positions for the UNSC in a mode unrelated to that country’s diplomatic service activities. Creating a government agency that is supposed to disregard the policies of other government structures of the same country might seem to be a radical and unprecedented solution, but in the current intensive superposition of the two layers of security factors: the global, and the nation-state, this could be the only viable approach to solving international conflicts.
If truly functioning in denationalized mode, every Agency for global security policies would be a completely new animal that has never been seen before: the foreign policy decisions made in such organ must be generated on the hypothetical presumption that the Agency for global security policies is a part of some supranational authority in charge of global peace and security.
An Agency for global security policies will have to work with visions beyond the narrowly defined immediate national interests of its own country; to state firmly and in transparent mode how exactly that particular position of the country will contribute to preventing violence, saving human lives and avoiding destruction of material values; and to resist the consequences naturally coming from the pressure of other national organs and actors as a result of disregard of immediate national interest. Its priority focus must be on long-term and indirect benefits for the country, including the by-products coming through the existence of stable, peaceful and predictable international political and security environment. For such a structure there must be a well functioning sophisticated system of subordination with its own government, as well as rules for dialogue with the traditional foreign policy service of the same country. A mechanism that can process, evaluate and separate two complexly intertwined, imaginary and most possibly often contradicting models of sovereign state behavior: one with the classic national foreign policy line, and one associated with the same country’s positions as a member of the Security Council, respectively the international community in general, must be invented. Even if such dual foreign policy exercise has never been comprehensively done yet, in a world where global and nationally relevant processes and interests are becoming more and more interrelated, the corresponding methodology should naturally come into existence within a short time.
Now International Security is the Mirage of the Impossible. We have to go through it.
Would that be a price too high to pay for humanity willing to construct its civilized world?
