By Professor Andrew K P Leung, SBS, FRSA
Andrew K P Leung– Elected Member, Royal Society for Asian Affairs; Governing Council, King’s College London (2004-10); Think-tank Research Fellow, Zhuhai Campus (2017-20); Advisory Board member, The e-Centre, European Centre for e-Commerce and Internet Law, Vienna; Visiting professor, London Metropolitan University Business School; Post-graduate qualifications, Cambridge University; Law Societies of Hong Kong and London; PMD, Harvard Business School. Hong Kong Silver Bauhinia Star (SBS). UK’s Who’s Who since 2002.
Abstract
With Great Power rivalry, new powers emerging, and regional flashpoints, the World Order has become fractured and perilous. The existing United Nations Security Council structure including five Permanent Members with unique veto-powers has become outdated, non-representative, and largely ineffectual as a bulwark for global peace and stability. This paper outlines the main causes for this worsening World Order and offers innovative proposals making the Security Council structure more inclusive and effective, catering for the security concerns of all, including the developing world. It also suggests a practical mechanism for early conflict resolution through dialogue, negotiation and mediation involving regional or sub-regional blocs.
Keywords
Security Council, Permanent Members, Global South, regional organizations, early conflict resolution
Fractured World Order – tour d’horizon
Until the dawn of the 21st century, the Post-Cold War era witnessed a relatively stable World Order underpinned by hegemony of the United States. America’s military, economic, technological, financial and dollar dominance reigned supreme, along with its popular culture, absent any credible challenger.
This goldilocks period saw the former Soviet Union disintegrated. Barely emerging from decades of abject poverty, China had been lying low, ‘hiding and binding” its time. Barring localized military flare-ups here and there, global geopolitical tectonic plates were reasonably held in place, buttressed by America’s ideologically-compatible Western allies.
Meanwhile, the “Global South” of developing and less developed countries had relatively limited bargaining power. “Petrodollar” economies in the Middle East and beyond were tied to America’s massive banking and financial muscle, exercised through its all-powerful “military-industrial complex”.
Free trade, privatization, liberalism and democracy have become the bywords for stability, growth and prosperity. The whole world seemed to be converging towards the American model, the “City upon a Hill” (1), prompting American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man”, as if no other model of governance could ever evolve.
Now everything seems to have been upended. A more self-assured China has become what is perceived by the United States as its near-peer challenger, or even an “existential threat” on multiple fronts, economic, technological, diplomatic, geopolitical, and by good measure, military, with growing gravitas across the globe.
At the same time, the Global South has found strength in economic development. According to New York-based The Conference Board, by 2035, emerging economies will grow to make up 61 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, on purchasing power parity terms. (2)
Along with economic growth, the bargaining power and influence of the Global South continue to expand. It has formed collective groupings like the African Union, the Arab League, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Recently, regardless of geography, more and more developing nations are clamoring to join the BRICS-Plus and SCO, signifying a desire to protect their own sovereignty against US hegemony through like-minded groups.
Meanwhile, the discovery and rapid growth of American shale oil and gas has resulted in the United States becoming a net energy exporter, no longer beholden to Arabian energy sources. At the same time, thanks to Climate Change, ecological awareness and growing need for energy security, renewable energies have become the name of the game.
This has spelt the end of the so-called “petrol-dollar” dominance and the Arab world’s marriage of convenience with the United States, which has now become an energy exporting competitor. No surprise that both Saudi Arabia and Iran are tilting closer to China, the world’s largest energy customer, who brokered a historic rapprochement between these two Middle East adversaries.
Militarily, the possession of nuclear deterrence is being courted as the best self- defense insurance policy against far more powerful adversaries. North Korea is a case in point. Yet, with long-range stealth hypersonic strike capabilities, nuclear proliferation could easily tip global stability towards the abyss.
Short of nuclear conflict, the United States continues to flex military, economic, financial, and diplomatic muscles to push forward its own agenda. It is trying to stifle China’s rise through a high-end-semiconductor stranglehold with across-the-board tariffs and sanctions on key products and technologies. It is intensifying military encirclement of China in the Western Pacific with a new Japan-Korea partnership in the North and a reinforced Indo-Pacific strategy combining the QUAD alliance (Australia, Japan, India and the United States) with the AUKUS (Australia, UK, and US) nuclear-powered submarine pack.
Recent softer diplomatic exchanges notwithstanding, there is no let-up in pointing fingers to China’s alleged human rights transgressions, perceived assertiveness in the South China Sea, and “attempts” to change the status quo in Taiwan, as well as China’s perceived lack of reciprocity in trade and investments.
Adding a never-ending anti-Russia proxy war over Ukraine, a potentially explosive humanitarian and geopolitical crisis over Gaza, worsening internal partisan divide, skyrocketing national debt, growing domestic inequalities, rampant drug abuse, and crumbling infrastructure, America is finding it more and more difficult across the globe to call all the shots all the time, while pressing global issues like nuclear proliferation, Climate Change and borderless pandemics demand a more stable, sustainable and inclusive Global Order.
A great deal of global instability during the coming decades is likely to persist, resulting from what John Mearsheimer calls The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (3), thanks to the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China beneath the surface of softer optics and rhetoric.
Reasons behind the US-China rift
Reasons are many fold, not least is a groundswell of anti-China sentiments across a broad spectrum of the American public. According to a Gallup poll of February 2023 (4), China has been gradually falling in the U.S. public’s esteem in recent years, down a total of 38 points since 2018. More than eight in ten U.S. adults have a negative opinion of China, including 45% who view it very unfavorably and 39% mostly unfavorably.
There is a general feeling that China has not been playing fair with market access and intellectual property; its actions and territorial claims in the South China Sea are considered excessive and its alleged repression of dissent and civil society, regressive. What is more, China’s rapid rise is seen to be eating America’s lunch. Gone are the days when cheap, labor-intensive, and polluting manufactures were profitably outsourced to China. Now China is not only dominating virtually the entire swathe of consumer goods, hollowing out America’s manufacturing industries, but is challenging the United States in various cutting-edge technologies.
Coupled with China’s expanding global economic and military gravitas, there is a deep-seated fear across the aisle that China is squeezing America’s geopolitical and geo-economic space in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Such fear has been fed by respected American academic narratives such as Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” (5) and Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (6).
Behind it all is the West’s non-acceptance of the legitimacy of Beijing’s model of governance, let alone China’s ascent to challenge America’s global hegemony.
From China’s perspective, however, there is no question that the Chinese Communist Party has hard-earned its legitimacy amongst the Chinese people, whose lives including its burgeoning middle class have been miraculously transformed for the better over the past four decades. Over 800 million people in China have been lifted out of poverty, contributing to three-quarters of global poverty reduction.
The most recent findings from the Harvard Kennedy School (7), the New-York-based Edelman Trust Barometer (8), and the Paris-based IPSOS research center (9) all point to Beijing enjoying the highest level of trust from its people, multiple ranks above the United States and many other Western democracies.
Moreover, the rhetoric that China wants to rule the world is flawed. Witness America’s unrivaled scientific lead, frontier technological breakthroughs, entrepreneurial excellence, financial depth, global military reach, network of friends and allies, and global cultural soft power.
China’s governance model takes account of its unique history, geography, development trajectory, ethnic and regional diversity, and relatively scarce water resources. China is not exporting its model, nor can it be replicated. Apart from its China Dream of national renaissance, all China wants is world peace, development, win-win cooperation, mutual respect, coexistence with other countries and cultures, and conflict resolution through dialogue rather than unilateral coercion.
Nevertheless, in the final analysis, when a panda grows to be a thousand-ton creature, however benign, it inevitably breeds fear amongst neighbors in a global village.
Rise of other powers and the Global South
According to S&P Global, having surpassed China as the most populated nation, India is on track to become the world’s third largest economy by 2030. (10) In various global spheres, India is pulling its weight.
Despite initial lack-luster performance over the war in Ukraine, as the world’s most nuclear-armed nation and the largest landmass rich in energy and agricultural resources, Russia is unlikely to fade away from the world power stage anytime soon. Pushed towards China by anti-Russia aggression over the Ukraine impasse, Russia’s economy is symbiotic with China’s, the world’s largest customer for energy and agricultural products.
Likewise, the Ukraine War is moving Iran closer to Russia (11). An “anti-hegemonic triangle” of China, Russia and Iran is in the offing, “united not by ideology but by complementary grievances”, which is likely to be fatal to American hegemony in Eurasia and beyond, so warned the late US geopolitical doyen Zbigniew Brzezinski in his famous tome The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (12)
Brzezinski argued that global politics is destined to become increasingly incompatible with a situation in which one country has exclusive hegemonic power.
His insight was prescient, considering the advent of hypersonic-enabled intercontinental nuclear weaponry, China’s global ubiquitous economic connectivity, borderless e-commerce, 5G, 6G, and Internet of things (IoT), the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions, and common challenges of Climate Change, global pandemics, international terrorism, and drug diffusion, where a rising Global South has much to play.
The Global South comprises a large swath of less-developed, developing, or middle-income states stretching from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands all the way to Latin America. Fed up with decades of marginalization by Western powers including their development needs, these countries are beginning to pull their collective weight through alliances such as BRICS-plus, SCO, African Union, Arab League, and Mercosur (South American states) (13)
Failings of the existing World Order organizations
Thanks to World War II outcomes, five Permanent Members, the United States, China, Russia, United Kingdom and France continue to dictate decisions of the United Nations Security Council by virtue of their respective single-vote veto.
This structure fails to reflect the substantially changed distribution of global power with rising contestants since World War II; nor does it adequately cater for the legitimate security concerns of Africa and Latin America. For example, it failed to prevent the United States’ unilateral decision to wage a disastrous war on Iraq on trumped-up charges of possessing weapons of mass destruction. It could not stop Russia from annexing Crimea or invading Ukraine. Nor has it been successful in maintaining peace in Palestine.
The reality remains that Security Council Permanent Members tend to act in their own national security interests rather than represent the wishes or priorities of other United Nations member states, or what is best for the World Order as a whole. Many sensible motions have fallen by the wayside blocked by a single veto.
Voices for Security Council reform have long been heard for many decades without any meaningful progress. Existing Permanent Members guard their inherited veto privilege very jealousy. Different proposals for reform, for example, increasing the number of Permanent Members with veto power, creating a class of Permanent Membership without veto powers, greatly expanding the number of non-Permanent Members, or making greater use of the UN General Assembly to name and shame, have all ended up in wild-goose chases, more sound and fury than actual substance, beset by hard-headed rivalry between global power blocs or between various contestants for elevation. (14)
Deficiencies of the UN Security Council
Foremost deficiencies fall into two broad categories: legitimacy and efficacy.
Regarding legitimacy, the current five veto-wielding Security Council Permanent Members (United States, China, Russia, United Kingdom and France) fail to reflect the security interests of the developing world including Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Nor do they cater for the security interests of new global powers including India, Japan, Germany, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa.
As for efficacy, Chapter VII of the UN Charter enables the Security Council to take coercive action to counter threats to “peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression”. (15) Chapter VI provides for Peaceful Settlement of Disputes (Articles 33(2), 36(1), 37 (2), and 38) (16) while Chapter VIII details Regional Arrangements (Articles 52 and 54) for dispute resolution. (17).
Despite provisions in the UN Charter, there is clearly insufficient working mechanism to encourage and facilitate early resolution of conflicts through dialogue, negotiation and mediation. When matters come to a head for a coercive decision by Permanent Members, the conflict may have festered for a long time beyond immediate resolution. As a result, Permanent Members often have to veto the proposal to protect its own narrow national interest.
As part of the UN Secretary General’s mission to reform the United Nations, the Security Council held an open debate on 20 October 2023 on the contribution of regional, sub-regional, and bilateral arrangements to the prevention and peaceful resolution of disputes. (18)
Various opinions and expressions of support were ventilated for Chapter VI and Chapter VIII arrangements, auguring well for creating a momentum towards peaceful conflict resolution. However, sustaining this momentum requires concrete reform to address the proven failings of the current out-of-date Security Council structure.
Reform proposals for the UN Security Council structure
In drawing up the following proposals, I have struggled to strike a realistic balance between idealism and practicality.
In particular, existing veto-holders are very unlikely to give up readily their powerful inherited privileges, while each existing Permanent Member has a lot to contribute towards the maintenance of a positive World Order. However, a moderate realignment of vetoing power cannot be avoided if the security interests of the developing world are to be genuinely addressed.
What is more, the provision of only ten Security Council Non-permanent Members by rotation every two years hardly meets the security concerns of 193 UN Member States.
I also set great store on the role of regional and sub-regional organizations in early conflict resolution through dialogue, negotiations and mediation.
With the above thoughts in mind, my tentative proposals are as follows-
(a) Expand the veto-wielding Permanent Membership from five to seven Members, to include the African Union and the Arab League, but replace France by the European Union. The United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union but has an important role to play with the British Commonwealth of 56 sovereign states. So the proposed veto-wielding Permanent Members would be: US, China, Russia, EU, UK, African Union, and the Arab League.
(b) Confer new Permanent Member status (without veto power) to a number of influential regional/sub-regional organizations e.g. NATO, G20, ASEAN, Union of South American States (UNASUR), BRICS-plus (with all admitted new entrants), and SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
(c) Keep the rotation system for Non-permanent Members but increase the quota from ten to twenty UN Member States every two years.
(d) Set up a permanent high-powered UN Early Conflict Resolution Committee to promote Chapter VI and Chapter VIII actions, nipping potential conflicts in the bud through dialogue, negotiation, and mediation. This is to be staffed at a very senior level with all Permanent Members (including non-voting ones) as ex-officio committee members. It should be convened at least annually plus regular exchanges and ad-hoc urgent meetings at short notice.
The above are mere initial ideas to throw a sprat to catch a mackerel. Subject to further debate, buy-ins, modifications and refinements, it is hoped that an innovative UN Security Council reform would serve to repair the fractured World Order to realize peace, stability and prosperity for all.
References
Author: Professor Andrew K P Leung, SBS, FRSA