Wretchard of Belmont Club has a typically excellent post on the UN reform report including a summary of key recommendations and reactions from international news sources. I’d also like to draw your attention to a program that I heard as I was making my appointed rounds yesterday on my local NPR station on the same subject. You can listen to it here. The discussion included Paul Kennedy—J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, Yale University and Erik Voeten—Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University.
Paul Kennedy made an excellent point. There are producers of security and consumers of security. The UN Security Council is a forum for producers of security.
If you go back to my post on this subject from yesterday, What is a community?, it’s unclear which of the present security council permanent members other than the United States and the United Kingdom are security producers. Which of the report’s proposed new permanent members are security producers? I don’t see any. Which of my proposed new members are security producers? I can’t discern any practical or theoretical advantage in the new members proposed other than to make the Security Council more democratic i.e. to make it more like that paragon of success, the UN General Assembly.
The problem with this, of course, is that, as John Courtney Murray observed many years ago, democracy requires consensus—shared values—and the evidence that the nations of the world have the kind of consensus that makes democracy possible is slim, indeed.
The original creators of the United Nations envisioned a bi-polar world that had just emerged from a long world war, had spent ten years contending with the depression of the 1930’s, and would soon face a re-militarized Germany and Japan. They had absolutely no notion of the one great power of today, economic globalization, global terrorism, or international drug and sex trafficking. Their construct of more than 50 years ago is showing its age and putting more tinsel on the old Christmas tree won’t make it any prettier.
