Wednesday 10 November 2010

India in the Security Council: better or worst?

To answer the second question of this post, i should consider the purpose if the Security Council. Now I could be wrong, but I believe it is to ensure peace, international stability and the compliance of UN parties to their international commitments and responsibilities.
There are 3 problems from my point of view.

Unanimity
The first is the need for unanimity from the 5 permanent member states. This complicates decisions, due to preference differences.

Intergovernmentalism: The cooperation problem
Secondly, even if it were the case that not a single member state would have a veto (which would be the preferable case) it would still be very difficult to get things done, because this is a purely intergovernmental arrangement. There is no security council secretariat that proposes motions, to my knowledge. The initiative resides completely with the members of the council. If the secretariat was responsible for monitoring security issues in the world and if it's proposals were carried unless there was a blocking minority or no available funds, then the UN would be much more active. As it is, the standard outcome is deadlock and status quo.

Arbitrarity: Why not someone else?
My last concern is that the creation of a permanent seat and veto for India is even more arbitrary than the attribution these properties to the winnersof WWII. At least they won. Why should India get a seat rather than Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Canada.

No veto and no permanent seats: a new formula
My point is that no one should have a permanent seat and no one should have a veto. The security council should have votes attributed as a proportion of income/capita and or as a proportion of population size. There should be elections at the General Assembly level, to select a certain number of members of the security council. Each would then be given a number of votes proportional to the support they received in the general assembly. Thus the votes that the EU would have if it sat on the security council wouldn't be the result of it's size, but of the total size of it's support. 15 representatives should be diverse enough a number. Probably 7 would have been fine but I didn't want to seem cheap.

May be if the aliens invade, after WWIII, if we learn to exploit dark energy or at least nuclear fusion this will be put in place, but I doubt otherwise that the status quo will change.

Anyway giving India a permanent seat in the Security Council seems to only make things worse.


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