Global Policy Forum

By Jeffrey Laurenti

Jeffrey Laurenti is executive director of policy studies at the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA). He presented this paper in his personal capacity at a symposium in Tokyo on March 17, 2003, on "What is expected of United Nations diplomacy now?—Seeking peace and prosperity in the 21st century," sponsored by the United Nations University and the Japanese Foreign Ministry, as part of a panel on "The U.N. Security Council and Japan."

Today's symposium has wisely focused first on the United Nations' work in controlling conflict and underpinning a durable peace--the fundamental measure to the world at large of its "relevance" (if I may use that word); then on the U.N.'s role in addressing the economic and social conditions that have such a major impact on the lives of billions of the world's people; and only then to the question of Security Council representation--which is, let us be frank, a "political insiders'" issue. Those are, I think, the right priorities.

For this subject, I'm afraid I've been invited to be the skunk at the party, putting the issue in its international context.

For a decade, Japan's Foreign Ministry and increasingly influential sectors of Japanese political opinion have been pressing hard for a restructuring of the United Nations Security Council. In a sense, they have sought to reclaim the international status that Japan had first gained at the Paris peace conference in 1919, as an on-again, off-again member of the Council of Five that labored to hammer out the peace settlement after the world war. But, like Italy, it fell from grace—and from the Council of the League of Nations--when the ultranationalist right hijacked its politics and dragged the nation and much of the world into another devastating war.

A resurgent Japan hoped in the 1990s to get written out of the United Nations Charter as an "enemy state" and, much more importantly, get written in as a permanent member of the resurgent Security Council. But the window of opportunity for that appears to have closed, and it's very hard to find anyone in New York today not on the Gaimusho payroll who believes that Security Council revision is going to happen anytime soon. What went awry in the 1990s, and what needs to be done differently to bring Security Council reform back onto the front burner?

Of course, Tokyo had wanted a permanent seat long before the Security Council had become a socially useful body. Thirty years ago, when the Council was a world-class metaphor for hopeless paralysis, Japanese officials pressed the Nixon administration to endorse a permanent seat—which a cynical president found a cheap balm to salve the wounds inflicted by the several Nixon shokku: it cost nothing to feign support for a structural adjustment to a dysfunctional body--a proposal that was certain to go nowhere anyway.

At the time it seemed that the Gaimusho--which had no obvious agenda for international peace and security that it wanted to promote or that the Security Council could remotely be expected to accomplish--was simply engaged in political symbolism. it seemed to want a permanent seat on the Council for the same reason people crave admission to an exclusive country-club: more for status than to do anything socially useful. but the Gaimusho turned out to have been much more shrewdly far-sighted about the future prospects for the world order than was the Nixon administration. It would take only the arrival of a Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union to end the Council's paralysis, and things began to change.

The awakening of the Security Council from its long Rip-van-Winkle slumber may be dated quite precisely to the Council's successful flexing of long-atrophied muscles in order to shut down the Iran-Iraq war in 1987-88. (Yes, it seems Iraq keeps turning up as a mile marker in the Council's development.) By extraordinary coincidence, during that biennium the elected membership of the Security Council included all three leading states of the last world war's broken Axis--and these countries proved critical in the decision-making on the economic penalties that the Council would impose on Iran for continuing the war. That threat of sanctions, olf course, is what finally forced Ayatollah Khomeini to "drink the bitter cup" of an end to the war without achieving an end to Saddam Hussein. This experience with a Council of heavy-weights -- Brazil also was on the Council at that time -- remains relevant to the Council reform debate.

By the early 1990s the Council had become an effective engine for mobilizing the world community to repel aggression, manage conflict, and maintain peace. Now more than ever, being on the Council mattered. And the new cooperation also meant that both the human and financial resources required for U.N. peace operations soared—and of course the Council members' tangible contributions to peace and security are an ingredient of the debate.

The first Bush administration, which so intelligently joined in reviving the U.N. Security Council, had no interest in changing it. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" was its motto. But President Bush by his own admission had trouble with "the vision thing," and the Clinton administration that replaced his was more daring. In January 1993 it declared its support for Security Council revision, and after initially expressing openness to "semipermanent" seat alternatives it decided in 1995 that Japanese and German permanent membership would be its bottom line requirement.

Japanese officials viewed this as a decisive event, as if the United States could deliver the General Assembly on Council reform. For decades, though, Washington has had to work hard to achieve any successes in the world body, and the Clinton administration was not going to invest much of its political capital in Security Council reform. Nor did it have much capital to invest. It felt itself already besieged on U.N. policy (and much else) by the rabid dogs of the right, especially after very conservative Republicans gained control of the Congress. When these abruptly quadrupled U.S. arrears to the U.N. in one biennium, American ability to press reform initiatives in the General Assembly plummeted. The impact was also felt in the Security Council, where Washington's distemper led the Clinton administration to freeze U.N. peacekeeping missions after the wind-up of the operations in Bosnia and Eastern Slavonia.

The arrears problem did motivate Clinton's second permanent representative in New York, Bill Richardson, to make Council reform an active priority for U.S. diplomacy: The administration had acceded to the demand of the Senate's foremost isolationist, Jesse Helms, for a reduction in the U.S. assessment, and it needed to find volunteers willing to pick up some of that cost—and the Gaimusho was willing to deal. Richardson made a Herculean effort to gain approval of a plan to add five so-called "permanent" seats, with Japan and Germany spared the indignity of election and the other three seats going to whatever Council "wannabes" could win an improbable endorsement from their regional groups.

But the plan eventually stalled out, unable to satisfy the contradictory aspirations of the different member states. The vast majority of small or weak states were more interested in increasing their own chances of getting on the Council, or at least in continuing to be courted for their vote by the big boys, than in giving large states a free ride on the Council, without even a pretense of accountability to them. Many larger states were also galvanized. A so-called "coffee club" of influential states—"cappuccino club" might be more descriptive, since its prime mover was a wily Sicilian—was determined to block permanent seats for somewhat larger regional rivals, and proved remarkably effective at immobilizing the Open-Ended Working Group on Security Council reform.

With the collapse of the Richardson plan, the air hissed out of the Security Council balloon. Dick Holbrooke was able to browbeat a reluctant General Assembly into granting Jesse Helms' demand for a reduced U.S. assessment without delivering any more for Japan and Germany's hopes for Security Council seats than a restatement of the Clinton administration's support and a tantalizing hint of flexibility. The debate in the "never-ending" Open-Ended Working Group has so decayed into ritualistic recitations of familiar positions that delegates' most intense struggle is to avoid dozing off during their own speeches on the subject. The working group has moved on to advancing useful procedural reforms, but the issue of the Council's make-up is in deep freeze.

Especially for the United States. True, the Bush administration has not formally disavowed the Clinton position on Council revision. Perhaps one should be grateful, since it has not hesitated to repudiate Clinton positions on countless other U.N.-related issues, from "Kyoto" to the nuclear test ban treaty to the International Criminal Court. But it is clear that the Bush administration came to power with little interest in changing the status quo on the Council, and its current exasperation with the Council on Iraq would lead it in the opposite direction: The only reform in which it could really feel invested would be one reducing the number of permanent members, preferably to one.

For the remaining lifetime of the Bush administration, we may safely predict, the United States will not lift a finger to help Germany get a permanent seat on the Council. Moreover, the President patently does not like having to make phone calls pleading for a vote from lesser heads of government of countries he has never seen and barely heard of. The experience of trying to persuade, induce, and cajole six reluctant Council members to support his Iraq initiative creates a strong disincentive to add another five or six countries to the President's "call" list, as the most limited Council expansion would require.

Japan, interestingly, has parted ways from Germany in the Iraq crisis. After months of carefully cultivated inscrutability, the government of Junichiro Koizumi has come down firmly on the U.S. side. As the Japanese press reported this past week, he Gaimusho is even offering helpful seconding speeches in contact with wavering Council members on behalf of the American campaign.

Obviously the government's principled position in support of the prospective war reflects concerns about global order far more important than whether an additional seat can be squeezed around the now famously televised Council table for Japan. And in calibrating where Japan should come down on the Iraq question, the prime minister, at least, would be unlikely to view the possible impact on Japan's prospects for permanent Council membership as a major consideration. Still, Koizumi's endorsement of Bush's program for Iraq may have some impact on future discussion of Council revision. It may well be seen as casting Japan's lot in with the United States on an issue of utmost priority to Washington's policymakers today—one that is a defining moment for many other governments and publics around the world as well. Japan has adroitly positioned itself to retain one important vote it already had. Whether this helps or hurts its prospects for gaining support it doesn't have is not clear, but I would hazard an uninformed guess: the regions where the support for a permanent seat for Tokyo is tepid or weak are those where resistance to unilateral American war-making is strong.

Of course, I have already indicated that Security Council revision is unlikely to be taken seriously before the end of George Bush's tenure, by which time all the unpleasantness about Iraq will be forgotten if not forgiven anyway. The more interesting question is what it will take to revive an issue that has exhausted the U.N. community and which seems apparently insoluble. Simply reviving a plan that collapsed even when it had a fair amount of momentum behind it—as much momentum as this issue will ever likely have—does not have much prospect of success. When the goal is to get preferential treatment for one's own country, one can find up to 191 claimants.

My own modest guess is that the only way to get Security Council revision back on the global agenda is to approach it in a fresh and different way—to redefine the issue as one of renewal for 21st century effectiveness. Arguably, to refresh this issue requires a new concept of "permanency." A single Charter amendment could combine an interim arrangement, adding a few specified seats (perhaps including unelected ones), to be superseded by a fundamental reform to kick in twenty years down the road. The reform formula would provide for periodic recalibration by quantifiable measures, perhaps every ten years, of the five member states that currently have the greatest capacity to support the Council's work of maintaining peace and security—and that have, in the decade just passed, provided such support. Presumably the main measures of that capacity and support would be: (1) the financial resources provided in support of U.N. peace and security operations; (2) the personnel provided in support of peace and security operations authorized by the Security Council; and (3) the logistical and force capabilities that the member states have and may make available to support U.N.-authorized operations.

This plan is not a "quick fix"—that stratagem has already failed because of its inherent political limitations. Rather, it represents a vision for long-term reform that benefits the entire United Nations rather than particular capitals. The fact that some capitals might achieve national objectives in the interim period, before the new formula enters into force, could be an added boon, but is not the main selling point for the world at large. Rather, the international community has a fundamental stake in renewal of the ranks of the Council's leading powers—and in periodic renewal without the immobilizing trauma of a Charter amendment battle whenever the alignment between power in the real world and power in the Council get too badly out of whack.

(This would, incidentally, also address the other disjuncture noted by Kamalesh Sharma this morning: that the Council's current permanent members often feel little motivation to contribute personnel or voluntary reconstruction aid to the U.N. operations whose mandates they set. If renewal of your privileged status on the Council depends in part on your relative aggregate contributions of personnel and money to Council-authorized missions, you have a powerful incentive to be an active participant in those missions--lest at the next reapportionment a more engaged country supplants you.)

For the United States, whether under the leadership of liberal internationalists or conservative nationalists, there are a few core concerns:

(1) that the Council not be so large and unwieldy that it specializes in talk rather than decisions—and at 15 it is already dangerously close to that point; and

(2) that the will of the international community not be thwarted by a single member that in the real world does not have the power or will to block action by an purposeful global coalition.

I am not talking here about France, the ally that American nationalists most love to hate, in spite of the rage that its defiance of the Bush administration's Iraq policy has earned it in certain patriotic quarters: At least France can point to a high rate of effective participation in international peace operations and tangible support for them. The problem lies with those countries that would veto proposed actions but can't meaningfully contribute men or money even for what they support, much less interpose them to resist our collective action.

This last is important, because the most compelling argument in the American debate about breaking out the Charter's strict regulation of the use of force by the Security Council ultimately comes down to other countries' veto power. We saw it in the Kosovo crisis, with the first rupture of the Charter framework for enforcement action, and it has surfaces less benignly today. American policymakers chafe at, and will bypass or breach, a system in which "has-been" powers that can't contribute to solutions nonetheless enjoy the artificial power to block solutions.

If we are going to keep the United States on the U.N. reservation, Security Council reform needs to assure that capable states are at its core. This presumably has implications also for the weighted voting known as the veto, Stalin's indelible fingerprint on the U.N. Charter, which I have not addressed in these remarks but which cannot be ignored in the Council reform debate. The same quantification of capacities that should guide the renewal of unelected members of the Council could presumably guide a revised conception of the weighted voting within the Council.

Japan's current and future roles in the international security arena—whether supporting the military side of authorized operations, supporting peace-building, or crafting from inside the Council the political terms that affected parties are expected to respect—might usefully be considered in this light.

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