India, Security Council reactions
Matt Yglesias thinks Obama’s smart to endorse India’s candidacy, and he’s chock full of other ideas (some good, some not so good) on restructuring the Council: India and Japan should have permanent Security Council seats. Brazil too. We should work something out with Africa. The EU should have some kind of consolidate seat instead of ...
Matt Yglesias thinks Obama's smart to endorse India's candidacy, and he's chock full of other ideas (some good, some not so good) on restructuring the Council:
Matt Yglesias thinks Obama’s smart to endorse India’s candidacy, and he’s chock full of other ideas (some good, some not so good) on restructuring the Council:
India and Japan should have permanent Security Council seats. Brazil too. We should work something out with Africa. The EU should have some kind of consolidate seat instead of separate ones for France and the UK. There shouldn’t be unilateral vetos of UNSC resolutions [snip] Will it happen? Not in the short-term, that’s for sure. But let China and France be the spoilers here.
The great thing for the other permanent members is that nobody has to be the spoiler here; the General Assembly’s disunity is the spoiler. Until a consensus plan emerges, the big five can stand by and piously wait.
Both Yglesias and scholar Erik Voeten (who’s done some fantastic work on the Council) argue that the alternative to reform may be a slow slide into irrelevance. Voeten suggests that the G-20 could emerge as a de facto competitor.
U.N. institutions typically reform much more rapidly when they are challenged from the outside. There is some evidence that the G-20 is increasingly becoming a place where security issues are discussed. The G-20 does not vote on resolutions with legally binding effects but it may increasingly become the place where the actual bargaining is done. If this practice evolves, then the pressures for reform could evolve with it.
I’m not so sure. I don’t see much sign that the G-20 is ready to tackle security issues or that it will become a convenient place for brokering security deals in the near future. Nor am I convinced that the Council’s ananchronistic structure poses an immediate danger to the institution. Reform has been stalled for years now, and it’s hard to argue that the Council’s place in international politics is slipping. The last years of the Bush administration were actually some of the busiest in recent Council history. The amount of attention Obama’s India announcement has received — and the emphasis that even major countries place on securing a Council seat — suggest that its status is fairly secure.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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