The UN needs real, radical reform, not sticking plaster solutions for its problems, writes Edward Horgan.
Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, will be globe-trotting to support Kofi Annan's plans to "un-reform" the UN Security Council.
The UN has been crippled, almost since its foundation, by Charter provisions that give five states a stranglehold over all security actions undertaken the UN. These five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US, effectively gave themselves the power of veto and special privileges when they virtually imposed the UN Charter on the world in 1945.
The idealism contained in the preamble to the Charter is undone by the "realism" of the veto system. Not only does the veto give each of these five states the power to decide what the Security Council does; it also gives each the power to do what they like themselves with impunity, as the US did in Vietnam, the USSR in Afghanistan, Britain/US in Iraq, and France in Rwanda and throughout Francophone Africa.
Mr Ahern justifies his stance in throwing in the towel on UN reform on the basis that "obviously those who already have a veto are not going to play ball and allow a diminution of their powers". There can be no real reform of the UN without first reforming the veto system.
The proposals for real UN reform have not just been watered down, they are already being abandoned. The only justification for special privileges at the UN should be on the basis of population, living people. India, with 18 per cent of the world's population, will probably be offered second-class permanent membership, while both Britain and France, each with 1 per cent of the world's population, will retain their first-class veto membership. British and French permanent memberships should be combined into one European Union membership.
Any proposals to expand Security Council membership should be based on limiting the existing powers of veto, and ensuring that any expansion of membership is based only on the criteria of population. A 25-member EU still has less than half the population of India. Incomprehensibly, a third EU state, Germany (1.3 per cent of world population) is also likely to be offered one of these second-class permanent memberships, as is Japan (2 per cent).
Token club membership may be offered also to Third World states such as Nigeria and Brazil. The fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia, has not figured in any proposals. Britain, France and the US, the majority of the UN veto powers, account for only 6 per cent of the world's population.
The supposed justification for the predominance of western economic powers in the UN is that they ostensibly pay for the UN. The reality is that the US has used its economic power to blackmail the UN and starve it of resources whenever it dares to challenge US global actions. Mary Robinson, one of the UN's few effective leaders in recent decades, paid the price for challenging the veto powers on issues of human rights. A UN economic agency, the World Bank, will now be presided over by Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war. Democracy does not exist at the UN, oligarchy and oligopoly do.
The UN system is therefore inherently unjust and is being used to prevent a more equitable distribution of world resources. Ireland, by supporting these flawed proposals for "un-reform" of the UN, is hindering long overdue reform of the international system.
There is a further problem with UN reform that may mean that the UN is doomed in the long term. The veto system has a double-locking device. Any of the five veto powers can veto every attempt to remove this veto from their states, or to give it to another.
The Iraq war and occupation have been the ultimate abuse of the UN Charter by two of its veto powers. Why has Mr Ahern not challenged the participation of EU states in the Iraq war within the EU, and why has he not been promoting a Security Council seat for the EU? The unlawful killing of over 100,000 people in Iraq, for which Ireland abandoned its neutrality, was in direct contravention of the UN Charter.
Because the prospects for real reform of the UN are now so bleak, humanity should already be looking beyond the UN and towards the establishment of a more democratic system of global peace, justice and governance.
The urgent need for UN transformation or replacement had already been clear from its catastrophic failures to prevent or stop genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia, and the UN's culpability in the deaths of half a million children due to UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq. Each of the five veto powers played a role in these disasters by direct complicity or by neglect.
The altruistic and far-sighted foreign policies of Frank Aiken and others are being replaced with a short-term stratagem that can only damage Ireland's long-term interests. This could be a last chance for overdue UN reform. Ireland should be aligning itself with other small states and with developing states and the EU to ensure international law is not only respected, but undergoes constant updating and improvement.
The UN should be the kingpin of global jurisprudence. Instead, it is becoming the convenient scapegoat for an inherently unjust and unsound international system. The US has no wish to replace or reform the UN because it benefits most from the inequalities of the post-second World War status quo, copper-fastened by the UN Charter.
If these latest UN reforms turn out to be sticking-plaster solutions, as is likely, then the UN will be beyond reform. Humanity will then need to look beyond the present anarchic international society to a more interdependent global governance system that must supersede the UN.
Edward Horgan is a Government of Ireland scholar, completing a PhD research programme on UN reform at the University of Limerick