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The Struggle For A Permanent Seat At The Security Council: A Critical Assessment Of The Contestants In 2012
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1.5 LITERATURE REVIEW
This
review focused primarily on those documents and commentators that
comments and contributes to the on-going debate on the reformation,
reorganisation and expansion of the United Nations Organisation
especially as it relates to the call to reform United Nations Security
Council both in composition, representation and in voting pattern
because the use of Veto by a select few is causing disquiet among the
rest of the world.
The Politics of Veto in United Nations Security Council (Uses and Abuses of Veto Power)
One
of the most distinctive features of the UNSC is that it is the only U.N
organ in which there is a formal rule of unanimity or ‘right of veto’.
The UNSC is part parliament and part secret diplomatic conclave. As
Beigbeder (1994:18) asserts, “the Charter declares that decisions of the
Council shall be by the affirmative vote of nine members and that,
except for procedural matters, the votes shall include the concurring
votes of the permanent membersâ€. The only exception to this Charter rule
is that in decisions relating to the pacific settlement of disputes, a
party to a dispute shall abstain from voting. Thus, if nine or more of
the 15 members vote in favor of a proposal but one of the five permanent
members votes `no’, the proposal will be nullified. The UNSC can veto
virtually any decision including the proposals by the UNGA as a whole. A
closer analysis however, reveals that there is no reference in the U.N
Charter to the ‘right of veto’. What is called the ‘right of veto’ is
intrinsically linked to permanent membership. Article 27 (3) of the U.N
Charter merely calls for the ‘concurring votes’ of the permanent members
when the UNSC takes substantive decision.
The model on which the U.N
was built has been proved to be too ambitious. The U.N Charter had been
drafted on the assumption that the victors of the WWII would continue
to co-operate as they did during the hostilities. Paradoxically, from
the beginning, the U.N had been unable to function as designed. The
working of the UNSC, a body designed to ensure the strong beat of the
heart of the U.N Charter and its collective security provisions has over
the years attracted widespread criticism. Instead of fostering
co-operation, it became apparent in the early days of the U.N that the
Post-War differences that had developed between the U.S and the then
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) significantly limited the
ability of the UNSC to take action. As Chopra (2001:42) argues, “The
superpowers were inevitably on opposite sides of most issues and the U.S
controlled the votes in the councilâ€. The USSR’s interests being
frequently threatened, and because of its conspicuous minority position
in the UNSC, it was left with the veto as its sole weapon within the U.N
machinery to thwart any action it considered injurious to its
interests.
Since the U.N originated from a coalition of victorious
wartime allies, “the organization faced for roughly several decades
questioning on how those ‘converted’ to the antifascist side of peace
might be admitted to the club†(Beigbeder 1984:45). Over the years,
vetoes have been cast to block the admission of member states as well as
nominations for the U.N Secretary General. As argued by Rourke
(2002:34), “Despite all 14 other UNSC members having supported Boutros
Boutros Ghali, the U.S veto ended his tenure as the U.N Secretary
Generalâ€. As the Cold -War evolved, within an economically and
ideologically diametrically opposed world, the U.S and the USSR
approached this issue of new U.N membership, not from the viewpoint of
who sided with whom during the WWII, but rather who sided with whom in
the Cold-War.
Thus, the U.S ensured that USSR allies applying for
membership were denied the required UNSC majority. On the USSR side, in a
bid to keep out Western- sponsored applicants, it used its veto
recurrently (Canton 1986). In the early days of the U.N as Barry
(2003:38) argues, “The USSR Commissioner and later Minister for Foreign
Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov said `no’ so many times that he was known as
`Mr Veto’.†Vyacheslav Molotov regularly rejected bids for new
membership because of the U.S refusal to admit the Soviet republics.
This state of affairs led in 1955 to a compromise deal which resulted in
the admission of sixteen members of the U.N. As Kegley (1985:128)
asserts, “This compromise between the superpowers allowed the great
powers to support a politically balanced package of applicants,
including pro-Easterners, pro-Westerners, and neutralsâ€. The compromise
deal opened the floodgates and by 1980, the U.N had more than 150
members, roughly three times the original number.
It is apparent that
the U.S and USSR would probably not have accepted the creation of the
U.N without the veto power. This is because some exceptional privileges
denied to Great Powers in the days of the League of Nations or in other
security associations, the veto represents that right which was
prerequisite of all sovereign states in the pre-UN world not to be
overruled by other members. As Roskin argues:
Stalin at Yalta in 1945
insisted on the veto provision, Churchill and Roosevelt went along.
Stalin felt [correctly] that the USSR would be so outnumbered by
non-Communist countries that it would suffer permanent condemnation. On
the same basis, Stalin got the bizarre provision giving three UNGA votes
to the USSR, whose constituent republics of Ukraine and Beloroussia
were counted as U.N members. (Roskin, 1993:362)
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]This work set out to investigate the struggle for Permanent Seats At The Security Council: A Critical Assessment of the Contestants in 2012. While observing that there exists a fundamental need to reform and enlarge both the membership and voting pattern in the Security Council in order to reflect geopolitical realities of the 21st Century by making both the organisation and the Security Council in particular to appear democratic while at the same time enhancing its efficiency and legitimacy aro ... Continue reading---
