The year 2022 marked a turning point in the public perception of the crisis of the international order: it ceased to be the order as we knew it—or thought we knew it. We’ve seen how the United Nations time and again proved itself incapable of fulfilling its primary responsibility to protect peace and security. Those who wished to see more decisive action from the United Nations were disheartened. One could even say that the Security Council is starting to create more problems than it can address. That is why today discussions of the UN’s crisis are becoming the norm. Just under a century ago, the first international organisation, the League of Nations, failed to keep the peace in a similar situation. The world plunged into the Second World War, and the dissolution of the League of Nations was one of its outcomes. It might be said that the UN is undergoing a ‘League of Nations moment’ of its own.
What is going on with the UN? Why aren’t necessary decisions being taken? The Security Council is the only legal body that can make binding resolutions. 5 of its 15 members—United Kingdom, China, Russia, the USA, and France—are permanent and have veto power. The decisions of the Security Council are recognised as international law. However, neither in the case of the Russian-Ukrainian nor the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does the Council issue binding resolutions. In the former case, Russia vetoes all resolutions condemning its military action on the territory of another sovereign state; in the latter, the United States blocks any decision that would curb Israel's freedom of operations. With no existing mechanism to override such vetoes, all efforts at peace regulation fall into a procedural trap and are kept hostage to the interests of countries that gained their privileged status after the Second World War.
In many ways, this pitfall was predictable from the early days of the UN, which partly became the reason for the General Assembly to adopt the "Uniting for Peace" resolution in 1950. The resolution stated that alongside the Security Council, the General Assembly also bears peacekeeping responsibilities. The problem with the Security Council and the Organisation as a whole is that their efficiency depends on the will of different States to sacrifice their interests for the common cause. In that sense, it would be more appropriate to deem the current crisis not as one of the UN but as a crisis of relations between the States that bear the peacekeeping responsibilities. In the context of the leading powers’ political polarisation, the Security Council is simply unable to function as a body tasked with regulating international affairs. The current climate is such that it is hard to imagine any cooperation between the United States and China, and even more so with Russia and the United States. These three states exercise their power of veto the most.
Yet the Security Council has seen better days. Perhaps those were the years after the collapse of the USSR and the Russia-US rapprochеment that followed. Over the course of the 1990s, the veto was only cast nine times, which is less than the beginning of the 2020s has already seen. The 1990s and 2000s were marked by the establishing of important sanctions regimes, e.g. in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone. All these decisions were supported by Russia.
The efficacy of the Security Council waned as Russia's relations with the United States and other Western countries deteriorated. The ‘decline’ began with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then came the NATO operation in Libya in 2011. The operation followed a Security Council resolution, although there were serious disagreements between Russia and the member countries concerning its interpretation. This was followed by Syria in 2012 and Crimea in 2014. In both cases, the members of the Security Council, unsurprisingly, failed to reach a consensus.
The year 2022 has exposed the Security Council’s fundamental predicament: what is to be done when one of the permanent members of the Security Council becomes an offender? The UN Charter does not offer a solution since the five States have both executive and judicial powers at the international level that are embodied in their power of veto. Understandably, no State that chooses to violate the existing rules would be willing to punish itself at the same time. This is a well-known fallacy of international law in peacekeeping matters – the forces responsible for upholding the peace excuse themselves from complying with the regulations.
For good reasons, most countries see this legalised inequality as a relic of a bygone era. Not only do states find themselves in an unequal position, but this whole arrangement demonstrates peak dysfunctionality. This attitude manifested itself in the result of the General Assembly vote as the majority of countries condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Already at that point, it was clear that this war would trigger a new wave of discussion of the UN reform. This issue deserves the attention of the international community, and especially the Russian opposition. Curiously, even at the beginning of the war, the U.S. representatives were very cautious when giving comments on the UN reform. However, already in 2023, the sentiment began to change. At the September 2023 General Assembly, President Biden spoke of the need to reform the Security Council; the American ambassador to the UN consulted with other delegations, discussing the possible course of the reform. Ahead of the 2024 General Assembly, the American vision of reform took a clearer form as they proposed to expand the Council with two new permanent members representing the African continent. In his final address to the General Assembly on September 24th, President Biden reiterated the proposal, lending it further weight. Whether or not this initiative will be able to gain support, it signals a strong intention to kickstart the transformation process.
In fact, reform of the UN Security Council has been formally discussed in the General Assembly since 2008. However, virtually no progress has been made thus far. This is underscored by the ongoing dispute on whether it’s time to move on from the oral discussions to at least tackle the possibility of outlining a written draft of the reform. The latest of these discussions took place in the summer of 2022. But at that point, China, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Syria, South Korea, Venezuela, and Belarus deemed it premature to move on to discussing the draft. However, the reform agenda has been pushed with varying degrees of urgency by various national alliances. From time to time, such calls have been coming from the BRICS or the Group of Four (G4: Brazil, Germany, India, Japan). Intensification of the discussion at the moment of the UN's crisis, given the support of a key member of the Security Council and its Trust Fund, has a chance, however small, to result in actual reform.
And yet, it is critical to understand the direction in which the discussion on reform is headed. The current outlook is less than optimistic, especially in light of Biden's proposal. Most of the proposals aim to address the problem of 'representation.’ One popular suggestion is to grant bigger powers to the obvious world leaders, like Brazil, Germany, Japan, or India. Others, such as the American proposal, suggest securing a stronger representation for Africa since most UN programs are targeting the region. The assumption behind it is that increased representation will allow fairer representation of alternative voices. The main issue of these proposals is that they do not consider changes to the veto procedure (such an expansion by two members from the African continent would be an expansion without granting the power of veto). Alas, without reform of the veto principle, these changes will push the organisation further into a debating club incapable of solving real problems. In the long run, countries that choose to resolve their problems by force may find that increased representation could play to their advantage since the issue at hand can always be obfuscated by lengthy discussions, and if the issue cannot be talked around, the veto will come to the rescue. Given Russia's central role in the current crisis of global governance, the Russian opposition is also responsible for formulating a vision for the future world order, including projects for radical reform of the UN. One must also be aware that mere promises to restore the old order, whether coming from the current regime or from those who seek to replace it, will no longer be of much interest to anyone since the old order itself is considered inadequate to the realities of the 21st century. India, Russia's BRICS partner, shares this view, as do many other states that point out the unacceptable inequality of countries enshrined in the power of veto.
This endeavour is politically challenging, especially since the objective of collective action is much more pressing in the international arena than at the national level. The solution will depend on how convincing the forces that aspire to take power in Russia—even hypothetically—will manage to be. The intellectual efforts of academia and centres of expertise may at last be invested not in analysing the practices of the past but rather in outlining possible solutions for an alternative and more equitable future.
After all, the efforts to establish global peacekeeping organisations—from the Hague Conferences to the UN—were also in line with a type of vision of politics and the future commonly known as idealism. The problem with the current debate on UN reform is that it narrows the scope of the issue down to the representational nature of the organisation and thus reveals its conservative nature and fails to address the problem at hand. There are many alternatives to this approach. For example, an approach discussed at the Institute for Global Reconstitution puts the principle of state sovereignty at the centre. However, unlike the trivial interpretation of sovereignty as freedom from interference in domestic affairs, this approach considers both the historical experience of international policymaking and the notion of sovereignty as the freedom to make any kind of decisions, including the decisions that involve restricting their own freedom.
The history behind the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the League of Nations, and the United Nations shows that in order to solve pressing international problems, states partially restrain their powers. With our colleagues at the Institute, we assume that the agenda for overcoming the crisis that Russia could propose shall be based on the idea of self-restraint. There is nothing extraordinary in this idea, and historically, as we can see, it is not unique. In the current situation, it could mean reforming veto power. As it happens, this resonates with certain statements of, for example, the US administration, as Biden has previously spoken on the need to exercise the veto responsibly, or France, which prides itself on the fact that it has cast the least vetoes in the entire history of the Security Council (and not once since 1989). France's history of utilising its veto power gives it the moral authority to take the initiative in reforming the veto principle itself. Since 2013, France has been promoting the idea for permanent members of the Security Council to voluntarily limit their veto power in cases of genocide or high numbers of civilian casualties.
Today, it is clear to many that Russia's eventual emergence from its current state—given all the ifs and buts—will involve constitutional reform. In this regard, the country could set an example of how self-restraint in foreign policy, especially in the use of military force outside the state’s own territory, could be enshrined in the constitutional order. Moreover, the constitutional self-restraint of the sovereign could be attached to the judgement of the international community expressed in resolutions of the Security Council or the General Assembly to minimise the bias and arbitrary decisions on the use of armed forces.
This solution would be in line with the current deliberations on the veto powers within the UN, including the French proposals. In April 2022, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 76/262, according to which a meeting of the General Assembly must be called whenever a veto is cast in the Security Council. In essence, this is merely a chance for a permanent member of the Security Council to explain their reasoning to all members of the Organisation, and for the other members, should it be necessary, to voice their concerns. This is not a veto override procedure. However, it is understandable that many UN members wished to see the organisation evolve in this direction. The idea of sovereign self-restraint could give the example of one (or two, in the case of coordination with France) of the permanent members: firstly, to show how a state could legitimately revoke its veto in the instance of a negative judgement by the majority of UN members; and secondly, and most importantly, to minimise the chances of the state itself to become the subject of condemnatory resolutions in the Security Council or the General Assembly.
Of course, tying internal self-restraint to formally expressed judgements of the international community significantly increases the responsibility of all UN members. In a situation similar to what we see today, one must be prepared to counter the will of the nuclear powers, if not by force, then at least by unanimous economic and symbolic restrictions. And while we could imagine such legal moves being enforced against Russia, it is much more difficult to imagine this when it comes to China or the United States. Nevertheless, moving in that direction seems more just and adequate to the modern world. This is not only about ensuring security for everyone but also about supporting the efforts of peoples to solve the problems of climate, poverty, healthcare, the environment, and economic cooperation.
This is a revised version of the text at Republic.ru
