Shashi Tharoor - Pax Indica - India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

So far, the other three permanent members have been somewhat more lukewarm about reform. Russia is officially pledged to support it, and has explicitly backed the claims of Germany, Japan and India to new permanent seats, but it is a matter for debate as to how enthusiastic Moscow really is. Its permanent seat on the Council was the one asset that, even during the shambolic years of the 1990s, allowed Russia to ‘punch above its weight’ in international affairs. Few Russians really want to see that position of privilege diluted by having to be shared with several new countries.

The United States and China are even more sceptical. China shares Moscow’s reluctance to see its stature diminished, but this is all the more true since it now sees itself, quite justifiably, as having no peer in the world other than the United States, whose economy it is on course to overtake within the next two decades. As for the United States, it is still the sole superpower, and its isolation in recent years on various issues, notably relating to the Middle East, makes the American administration profoundly wary of giving new powers to countries that may stand in its way. It was striking that Washington’s support of a seat for Germany faded away in the wake of Germany’s vocal opposition to the 2003 Iraq war, and it took years to formally endorse India’s bid, because it was conscious that New Delhi votes more often against Washington in UN forums than with it. (It finally did so in November 2010 during a visit to New Delhi by President Obama that was aimed at sealing a strategic partnership whose credibility would have been undermined by continued reticence on a Security Council seat for New Delhi. But there has been no indication whatsoever of the United States proceeding to ‘action’ its commitment by instructing its ambassadors, for instance, to lobby for a permanent seat for India or even for a swift resolution of the impasse over Council expansion.) In addition, the United States likes a Council it can dominate; Washington is conscious that a larger body would be more unwieldy, and a bigger collection of permanent members more difficult to manage, than the present Council. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ American diplomats like to say.

But for much of the rest of the world, the Security Council is indeed ‘broke’, and the more decisions it is called upon to take that affect many countries — authorizing wars, declaring sanctions, launching peacekeeping interventions — the greater is the risk that its decisions will be seen as made by an unrepresentative body and therefore rejected as illegitimate. The United Nations is the one universal body we all have, the one organization to which every country in the world belongs; if it is discredited, the world as a whole will lose an institution that is truly irreplaceable.

But that could happen. And my worry, as an old UN hand, is that if Security Council reform drags on indefinitely and inconclusively key countries could begin to look for an alternative. Five years ago, as a candidate for Secretary-General, I asked in a speech: ‘What if the G8, which is not bound by any Charter and writes its own rules, decided one day to expand its membership to embrace, say, China, India, Brazil and South Africa?’ That is precisely what has happened since, with the establishment of the G20, albeit as the premier global macroeconomic forum, rather than the peace and security institution that the Security Council is. Nonetheless, China aside, the other countries could well say, ‘Well, we’re now on the high table at last — why not focus our energies on this body and ignore the one which refuses to seat us?’ The result could be a UN dramatically diminished by the decision of some of its most important members to ignore or neglect it, while the G20 could well arrogate political responsibilities to itself, unrestricted by any constraint other than its own self-restraint. If that were to occur, the loss will be that of the rest of the world, which at least today has a universal organization to hold it together under the rules of international law — which is vastly preferable to a ‘ directoire ’ of self-appointed oligarchs that a politically empowered G20 could become. So those small and medium-sized countries that are throwing up petty obstacles to reform are being rather short-sighted, not only because they fail to address the fundamental problem that I described as the ‘diagnosis’, but because their opposition, if it succeeds, could potentially undermine the very institution that many of these countries, now in the forefront of opposition to reform, have long seen as a bulwark for their own security and safety in an unequal world.

Of course, some answer that the UN is increasingly irrelevant as a world organization, and that it therefore makes little sense to clamour for a role of prominence in the Security Council. Such things have been heard in the West for a while, but the critics are wrong. Those of us who used to toil every day at the headquarters of the United Nations — and even more our colleagues on the front lines in the field — had become a little exasperated at seeing our institutional obituaries in the press. The UN’s problems over Iraq had led some to evoke a parallel to the League of Nations, a body created with great hopes at the end of the First World War, which was reduced to debating the standardization of European railway gauges the day the Germans marched into Poland. But Iraq proved conclusively that even where the UN was rendered irrelevant to the launching of a war, it became indispensable to the ensuing peace, and the rebuilding that followed. As Mark Twain put it when he saw his own obituary in the newspaper, reports of the UN’s demise are therefore exaggerated.

Since the best crystal ball is often the rear-view mirror, I hope I may be permitted a personal reminiscence into the question of change at the United Nations. For the UN has not just changed enormously in those first sixty years, it has been transformed in the career span of this one former UN official. If I had even suggested to my seniors when I joined the organization in 1978 that the UN would one day observe and even run elections in sovereign states, conduct intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, impose comprehensive sanctions on the entire import — export trade of a member state, create a counterterrorism committee to monitor national actions against terrorists, or set up international criminal tribunals and coerce governments into handing over their citizens (even sometimes their former presidents) to be tried by foreigners under international law, I am sure they would have told me that I simply did not understand what the United Nations was all about. (And indeed, since that was in the late 1970s, they might well have asked me—‘Young man, what have you been smoking?’)

And yet the UN has done every one of those things during the last two decades, and more. The United Nations, in short, has been a highly adaptable institution that has evolved in response to changing times.

My firm view therefore remains that despite the heated criticism the organization has faced from some quarters in recent years — much of it ill-founded — the UN is as necessary today as it was in 1945, and it will be even more necessary tomorrow. Our search has been, and must continue to be, for a renewed, not a retired, UN. And it is in this context that the question of Security Council reform must be examined.

So what’s the answer for India? In 2010, the G4 took the debate away from the feckless Open-Ended Working Group into the General Assembly plenary, and persuaded the facilitator of the process, the ambassador of Afghanistan, to come up with a text for discussion. Though his efforts have been hailed by enthusiasts as heralding a genuine breakthrough in the process, his text is still replete with square brackets, revealing entrenched and irreconcilable positions. Continued tinkering with a reform resolution will continue, but no resolution can attract enough votes unless the fifty-four-member African Union (AU) is persuaded to step off the fence it has been straddling for years. African opponents of Council reform have adroitly manoeuvred the AU into an impossible position under the label ‘the Ezulweni Consensus’ (named for the Swazi town at which the formula was agreed). The Ezulweni Consensus demands two veto-wielding permanent seats for Africa in a reformed Council, a demand couched in terms of African self-respect but pushed precisely by those countries which know it is unlikely ever to be granted. The AU’s rules mean that African positions are adopted by consensus, thus taking fifty-four potential votes out of the equation in favour of a political compromise.