UN endures, but in the shadow of big powers

Decades on, the UN endures but its dilemmas as regards the major powers continue unresolved. The latest development in international politics that helped highlight this problem is the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year. It is plain to see that the UN is helpless in the face of the invasion in which human costs in particular are staggering.

Reservations notwithstanding, the more sensible sections of world opinion would readily agree that the UN, which celebrated yet another anniversary of its establishment on October 24 this year, is doing a commendable job particularly in terms of helping millions of ordinary people all over the world through its specialized agencies. No thinking individual would disagree with the sentiment that the UN should live long and continue to be of service to humans everywhere.

However, there is no denying that the UN faces an uphill task on the question of bringing peace to the world’s conflict and war zones and in establishing its authority over such areas. For instance, the majority of UN member states have decried the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the relevant theatre of war, but this call has gone unheeded by Russia.

The international community’s helplessness on this score extends to the crucial organ which is the UN Security Council, where initiatives to denounce the Russian invasion and bring normalcy to Ukraine consensually are being vetoed by Russia and its close ally China. Consequently, the blood-letting in Ukraine continues. Big power politics, thus, render the UN an almost passive onlooker of the compounded tragedy which is Ukraine.

The UN’s seeming inner paralysis in the face of big power armed intervention in the trouble spots of the global South in particular has been clearly manifest over the past few decades. Western armed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, were clear violations of the sovereignty of the states concerned, but the UN proved helpless in the face of these violations of International Law. However, UN specialized agencies, such as the FAO, the WHO and UNICEF, to name just three such bodies, have been bringing relief to the populations concerned and this is a notable victory for humanity.

There are no immediate or simplistic solutions to this tangle of the big powers continually frustrating the peace-making capabilities of the UN. However, the question needs to be asked as to whether the current Permanent Members of the UN Security Council are accurately reflective of the prevailing international distribution of power. Even a cursory assessment of current global power configurations would reveal that this is not so. Considering that many more countries have reached big power status over the past three decades, it could be said that the UNSC, as it stands, fails to mirror prevailing international power realities.

Clearly, India should be a Permanent Member of the UNSC, considering its multi-dimensional strengths, and the same goes for Brazil. If these states are inducted into the UNSC, India would be in a position to represent the interests of South Asia, while Brazil could do so in the case of Latin America. However right now, the composition of the UNSC is such that it could be said to represent predominantly the interests of the West, while other important geographical regions wield little or no influence within the organ.

China and Russia, it could be argued, are well-positioned to represent Southern interests within the UNSC but they suffer from the deficiency of being authoritarian states. Whether they could be effective advocates of the crucial interests of the ordinary people of the South is open to question. Hopefully, they would prove this columnist wrong on this score.

Accordingly, UN reform needs to be speeded up in view of the fact that the current composition of the UNSC is not fully representative of the present international distribution of power. The potential of the UNSC to ensure global peace and security equitably would be strengthened through a widening of the organ’s membership to include those countries that have reached major power status over the years, while remaining representative democracies.

This urgent reform measure could go some distance in rectifying the unrepresentative nature of the UNSC. This process is bound to be controversy-ridden and long drawn out, but it needs to be gone ahead with.

Going forward, the UN would need to figure out as to how it could more effectively protect the sovereign rights of the people in those countries under authoritarian governance or in those states where democratic institutions are weak and not well entrenched. This is particularly true of Myanmar and Afghanistan. The UN has done well to ensure the wellbeing of the people of these democratic-deficit countries to the best of its ability but how does it intend to strengthen the people’s self-governing rights in such crisis-hit states?

The UN would need to evolve answers to posers such as this in the days ahead if it intends to remain relevant and vibrant in the international system. No longer could the response be made that these questions relate to the internal affairs of countries and so the international community should steer clear of these states, because people are being subjected to immense suffering by the relevant authoritarian and anti-democratic regimes on a continuous basis. It is not possible for the UN and kindred sections of the world to ‘look the other way’ in the face of the horrors being unleashed on civilian publics in these repressive states.

Maybe the UN could think in terms of redoubling its efforts to nurture in incoming generations worldwide respect for democratic values and institutions. More and more UN-led public education programs need to be geared to these aims. The UN could be proactively involved in such medium to long term projects, thereby ensuring the emergence of politicians and decision-makers in particularly Southern states who would be promoters and sustainers of democratic governance.

However, in the short term the UN would need to take on itself the task of initiating and facilitating the clamping of economic sanctions on anti-democratic and anti-people regimes. It would need to do this in consultation with those states that are vibrantly democratic. Besides, the UN should look at ways of isolating those regimes that are adamantly anti-democratic and repressive. These, no doubt, are huge, complex challenges but delays could prove fatal for the democratic way of life.