The Security Council

The failure of the member states of the United Nations (UN) to reform the Security Council has been a thorn in the organization’s side for almost a decade and a half. Clearly, its membership is no longer reflective of the contemporary configuration of international political power. Yet its composition has barely altered since 1945, when the UN was established. An Open Ended Working Group on the Council’s reform has met more or less consistently since 1993. Its deliberations have produced no tangible results. In 1997 a special panel, under the chairmanship of Razali Ismael, produced a thoughtfully composed, draft resolution recommending significant changes to the Council’s membership and working methods after having engaged in a comprehensive consultation with all member states (Luck, 2004a, 391).1 The panel’s recommendations ran into a wall of opposition from middle-ranking states, concerned that their regional rivals might obtain permanent membership, and from the five permanent members (P-5), who were equally unenthusiastic about sharing their existing powers and privileges with others. The Razali resolution was shelved (Zacher, 2004, 217). In the Millennium Declaration, the member states again reaffirmed their desire to see the Security Council comprehensively reformed. Nothing happened. Since that time, no great momentum had seemed to attach to Security Council reform despite an apparent consensus among the UN’s membership that a makeover of some kind was clearly desirable. This situation altered sharply in 2003. In the wake of its acrimonious

debate about whether or not to authorize the invasion of Iraq, the Security Council’s performance (or non-performance) and the perceived deficiencies in its structure and methods of operation leapt swiftly to the top of the international political agenda. Suddenly, no-one was happy with it. In the eyes of those opposing the invasion, the Council had failed miserably to prevent the US and its coalition partners from acting unilaterally in instituting the

military intervention, thus badly denting its credibility. From the opposite perspective, the Council had failed egregiously in not taking decisive action to enforce its own resolutions, leaving itself open to charges of indecision and weakness. The feeling in the corridors and meeting halls of the UN was that something urgently needed to be done to repair the damage, even if the desirable direction of change was then far from clear (Malone, 2004a, b, 644; Broinowski and Wilkinson, 2005, 33; Malone and Cockayne, 2006, 1; Thakur, 2006, 223). This sentiment was given active voice by the Secretary-General in his ‘fork

in the road’ speech to the General Assembly in 2003.2 In that speech, the Secretary-General impressed upon members his strong belief that it was incumbent on the Security Council rapidly to regain the confidence of the international community. That confidence, he suggested, would return only if the Council could demonstrate its capacity to deal quickly and decisively with international crises by reforming its structure so that it might become more representative of the international community. He linked political and structural reform to a number of problems that had arisen in consequence of the Iraqi invasion. The Council, he argued, would need to consider how, in future, it should respond to the prospect that states may use force ‘pre-emptively’ in order to counter perceived threats to their national security interests. New thought needed to be given to the development of criteria that might govern when, and in what circumstances, early coercive measures should be taken to prevent threats arising from terrorism or nations’ possession of weapons of mass destruction. The Council should define and refine its strategies with respect to genocide and other mass violations of human rights, given that its recent responses had been wholly inadequate. In all this, the Secretary-General averred, the Council’s own composition and working methods were central. These required immediate reform in order for the Council to recover its standing and legitimacy as the pivotal international body responsible for preserving global peace and security. The task of reform was one that the membership needed to address with seriousness and dispatch. In retrospect, it was unfortunate that the Secretary-General linked reform

of the structure of the Security Council so closely to the events surrounding the Iraq invasion. His subsequent proposals for changes to the Council’s composition and procedures were interpreted widely, in consequence, as an attempt to constrain the exercise of American power. This was to the considerable detriment of the subsequent negotiations on the Council’s reform. Nevertheless, few doubted that reform was necessary and if the moment could be seized there was, it seemed, a realistic prospect that it might also be achieved. In the remainder of this chapter, then, I track the progress of negotiations

around Security Council reform both before and after the World Summit in 2005. It is well known that no reforms to the Council have yet been agreed upon or implemented. This discussion explains why.