Reforming the UN

The New Year presents huge challenges for the international community. Many countries continue to be bogged down in crisis and conflict, including Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the problem of global warning appears no less daunting than it did before the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December.

The UN weathered a lot of criticism in the aftermath of Copenhagen: The organization was accused of being too slow and cumbersome in decision-making. Criticism of the body's inability to act is nothing new - for more than a decade, experts have called for fundamental reforms to make the international organization more efficient.

But while there is general agreement on the urgent need for change, the discussion surrounding what reforms should mean in practice is highly controversial. While some want the UN to play a greater role in world affairs in the future, others want its role confined to humanitarian work.

Resuscitating the UN

The structures and operational procedures of the United Nations have long been out of sync with the requirements of today's geopolitical realities. Current UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's statement in favor of reform is given top billing on the UN's reform website:

"I am determined to breathe new life and inject renewed confidence into a strengthened United Nations firmly anchored in the 21st century, and which is effective, efficient, coherent and accountable."

According to Professor Andreas Paulus from the Institute of International Law at the University of Goettingen, the challenge lies in defining what shape these reforms would take.

The reform agenda is both huge and very complex, he told Deutsche Welle, highlighting the fact that the UN Security Council is not supposed to pass any laws.

"Many say that the Security Council has some kind of legislative power, and in parts it has really exercised this power," Paulus said.

"That means that the Security Council – which you could call an institutionalized idea of the major powers – is no longer legitimate.”

An obsolete model

The members of the UN Security Council reflect the power structure of the world as it was in 1945, after World War II. There are five permanent members; France, Great Britain, the US, China and Russia, as well as 10 non-permanent members elected for terms of two years. But this has little to do with the realities of the 21st century, Paulus said.

In 2005, former UN secretary general Kofi Annan called for the Security Council to be expanded from 15 to 25 members. Yet nothing has changed in the past five years.

"The reform process is much, much slower than Kofi Annan himself believed it would be," Paulus said.

"All in all, I believe that United Nations has no other chance to deal with global problems but to become more democratic."

Yet this frequent demand for more democracy raises fundamental questions about the role of the UN. After all, the UN is not a world government directly elected by the world's citizens, but a forum for sovereign states to debate issues and determine collective courses of action.

Dependence on unanimity

Professor Thomas Jaeger, a political scientist at the University of Cologne, thinks the question of democracy within the UN is one of the key issues when it comes to reform.

"The UN depends on consensus among its members. And there are fundamentally different interests among particular countries,” Jaeger told Deutsche Welle.

In practice, more democracy might mean that majority decisions could decide courses of action for the UN. That would go against the current system that requires all UN members to agree on decisions, effectively granting each nation a veto right.

"As long as there is dissent, as long as there is no consensus among the members, no decision will be taken. And it is under this requirement that the United Nations, as an institution, is stable,” Jaeger said.

Achieving stability through a cumbersome decision making process sounds paradoxical, but if unanimous decision making were dropped, it could spell the end of the United Nations, he said.

Jaeger argued that even the Group of Eight (G-8) countries, which comprise the seven leading industrialized nations and Russia, have lost a lot of their importance in recent years. At the same time, the G-20, which brings together industrialized states and emerging economies, has gained importance.

"Some even speak of a G-2, namely the United States of America and China. That means there is a small group of people, who are not democratically legitimized, making the decisions that cannot be made by the United Nations.”

At the end of 2010, the next round of UN-sponsored climate talks will take place in Mexico. It remains to be seen where the UN reform process will stand at that point and whether the international community will indeed be more democratic or effective than it was at the Copenhagen conference.

Author: Michael Borgers (sjt)
Editor: Sam Edmonds