The Council has increased the representation of emerging powers in informal ways. Potential candidates for permanent seats and their regional counterparts are committed as elected members, peacekeeping contributors or within the Peacebuilding Commission, MADELEINE O. HOSLI and THOMAS DÖRFLER write in ‘The United Nations Security Council: History, Current Composition, and Reform Proposals’ published by the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies.
“The Council, moreover, has reacted to global security challenges through working methods reform, expansion of sanctions regimes and involvement of non-state actors.”
The changing global order created new conditions for the Security Council to operate in, the authors stress. Simultaneously, the nature of conflicts has changed tremendously over time in terms of types of war and conflict, challenges such as terrorism and new forms of threats to societies. Increasingly, peace missions involve complex patterns of collaboration with regional organizations, aiming to create synergies and exploit benefits of joint operations.
Formal reform of the Council, in practice, is a difficult enterprise, HOSLI and DÖRFLER state. “ [A]ny proposal to change the composition of Security Council needs to strike careful and intertwined balances, such as ‘the balance between practicality and vision’, the balance ‘between power (or effectiveness) and legitimacy (or justice)’, and, perhaps most importantly, the ‘balance of interests’.”
When the United Nations was founded, the members of its Security Council and the permanent members in particular were to have the responsibility to secure and enforce peace. However, to fulfill this task, the member states represented in the UNSC also needed to have the resources to do so. Initially, this reasoning led to the creation of permanent seats for those UN member states that would be able to fulfill this task.
Clearly, in today’s world, the distribution of power and influence is quite different from what it was just after World War II. Accordingly, since the creation of the UN in 1945, there has been a debate about who should be represented as Council members. The discussion on possible reform of this institution became even more intensive after the end of the Cold War, when the Security Council had overcome superpower blockade, which created new possibilities for global action, the authors state.
Due to the diverse nature of UN membership, common notions of fairness or shared values and linked to this, the decision on who should ‘legitimately’ be represented in the Council, are hard to come by. In combination with the high institutional hurdle for change, adapting the composition of the Security Council therefore constitutes a considerable challenge and explains why there appears to be a seemingly endless debate on Security Council reform.
However, the debate about the (failure of) Security Council reform overshadows the gradual change in how the Council operates. “In fact, the Security Council of today is very different to the Security Council twenty-five years ago, even though its composition remains the same,” HOSLI and DÖRFLER state.
While formal representation is not inclusive and certainly biased, given today’s global power distribution and the dominance of the current permanent members, Council decision-making is increasingly embedded into new forms of informal governance in which experts and representatives of various nations not formally represented in the Council do have a ‘voice’.
“This system is far from ideal, but at least avoids some of the largest drawbacks of the lopsided ways in which the Security Council formally represents today’s structures of global governance.”
Further reforming the working methods of the Council, driven by its own members, and creating institutional novelties may be a promising avenue to find answers to current global governance challenges and to make its members more accountable, its decisions more transparent and its impact greater.
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