THE 37th SHRI RAM MEMORIAL LECTURE

by Dr. Shashi Tharoor,
former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations,

on
The United Nations and India’s Security Council Quest

30/Apr/2009 : PHD House, New Delhi

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Friends,

Thank you very much for that kind introduction.  It is indeed a privilege to be addressing you as part of the Shri Ram Memorial Lecture Series, and I am pleased to see so many internationalist-minded Delhiites here today.  Lala Shre Ram wanted Industry to grow and develop to attain the heighest order in all the field. He was truly an innovator.

I am delighted to address a Lecture in his name and specially after looking at the list of speakers at the prior lectures, I am honored to be a part.

It is particularly gratifying that there is still so much interest in the subject of the United Nations.  After all, as a recent former UN Official, I am keenly aware that there are some people elsewhere who, in recent times, have dismissed the importance of the United Nations.  Indeed, in March 2003, as the debates were raging in the Security Council over Iraq, a BBC interviewer rather glibly asked me, “so how does the UN feel about being seen as the “I” would – irrelevant ?” He was about to go on when I interrupted him.  “As far as we’re concerned, “I retorted, “the “I” word is “indispensable”.
   
It was’nt just a debating point.   Those of us who used to toil every day at the Headquarters of the United-Nations-and even more our colleagues on the front lines in the field – has become a little exasperated at seeing our institutional obituaries in the Press.  The UN’s problems  over Iraq had led some to evoke a parallel to the League of Nations, a body created with great hopes at the end of the First World War, which was reduced to debating the standardization of European railway gauges the day the Germans marched into Poland. Such comparisons are hardly fair.  As Mark Twain put it when he saw his own obituary in the newspaper, reports of the UN’s demise are exaggerated. And yet we live with a paradox.  In the world’s only superpower, the United States, independent public opinion polls over many years have consistently found that ordinary Americans have great faith in the UN and in multilateral solutions to world problems.  Even today-after all the troubles of the past few years 55 percent of American respondents to a recent PEW poll expressed support for the organization. However, no one could doubt that US leaders and legislators have not always shared their constituents’ faith.

On a visit to Washington DC last year, I asked a distinguished Washingtonian what lay behind all the hostility and criticism we keep hearing towards the UN: didn’t critics understand what we were all about; was it ignorance or was it apathy? He replied: “I don’t know, and I don’t care”.

Which rather explains the problem.  And in today’s world, a problem with the sole superpower is a big Problem.

He stated in his historic speech to the two US Houses of Congress after the Yalta Conference, the UN would be the alternative to the arms races, military alliances, balance-of-power politics and all the arrangements that had led to was so often in the past.

His successor, President Harry Truman, put it clearly.  “You have created a great instrument for peace and security and human progress in the world”, he declared to the assembled signatories of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco of June 26, 1945”…If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those have died in order that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it.  If we seek to use it selfishly-for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations-we shall be equally of that betrayal”.

That was then, of course, and this-63 years later – is now.  How many of today’s critics of the United Nations would recognize the voice of an American President in Truman’s speech that historic day?  “We all  have to recognize, “ he declare, “no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.  No one nation…can or should expect any special privilege which harms any other nation…unless we are all willing to pay that price, no organization for world peace can accomplish its purpose.  And what a reasonable price that is !”

I suspect that there are many in Washington today who would not agree that this is indeed a reasonable price for the world’s only superpower to pay in the interests of something as amorphous as” world peace”, especially in a era of terrorism.

There is, of course, a more fundamental American Critique of the place of the United Nations in today’s world.  The notion has gained ground of late, particularly in the wake of Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, that the elemental issue in world affairs today is the incompatibility of the American and European diagnoses of our contemporary geopolitical condition.

It is important to remember that the UN Charter was the work of victorious Allies of the Second World War converting their wartime alliance into a peacetime organization. They saw the Hobbesian world of the preceding three decades, and vowed “never again”.  But the Leviathan imagined by the visionary statesmen of  that era (notably FDR himself) was not a single power; it was a system of laws that would ensure that the world of the second half of the 20th century would be a better place than the one that had barely survived the first half.

So great was the perceived American stake in such a system that the US  became its principal financial contributor, paying as much as 50% of the United Nations’ regular budget  in the first years of the Organization ( a figure astonishing to recall at a time when so much American diplomatic energy was recently invested in reducing its current share from 25% to 22%).  Gulliver was to lead the Lilliputians, not feel tied down by them: they provided him with a springboard, not a rack.

But world peace is not the whole story of the UN,  As global governance has evolved, the UN System has become the port of call for innumerable “problems without passports”- problem that cross all frontiers uninvited, problems of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of contagious disease and chronic starvation, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement.  Such problems also require solutions that cross all frontiers, since no one country or group of countries can solve them alone.

Global institutions benefit from the legitimacy that comes from their universality.  Since all countries belong to it, the UN enjoys a standing in the eyes of the world that gives its collective actions and decisions a legitimacy that no individual government enjoys beyond its own borders.

And the institutions of global governance have been expanding beyond the UN itself.  There are selective inter-governmental mechanisms like the G-8, military alliances like NATO, sub-regional groupings like the Economic Community of West African States, one-issue alliances like the Nuclear Suppliers Group.  Writers connect under International PEN, soccer players in FIFA, athletes under the International Olympic Committee, mayors in the World Organization of United Cities and Local Governments, Bankers listen to the Bank of International Settlements and businessmen to the International Accounting Standards Board.  The process of regulating human activity above and beyond national boundaries has never been more widespread.

Indeed, today I think it is fair to say that even those countries that once felt insulated from external dangers—by wealth or strength or distance—now fully realize that the safety of people everywhere depends not only on local security  forces, but also on guarding against terrorism; warding off the global spread of pollution, of diseases, of illegal drugs and of weapons of mass destruction; and on promoting human rights, democracy and development, and on eradicating poverty and illiteracy.

Jobs everywhere depend not only on local firms and factories, but on faraway markets for products and services, on licenses and access from foreign governments, on an international environment that allows the free movement of goods and persons, an on international institutions  that ensure stability – in short, on the international system constructed in 1945.

An so, in 2008, I would argue that the need for central universal means for global governance, a mechanism for international cooperation –indeed, let us call it by its name, for a United Nations—is stronger than ever.

Of Course, the UN has never been, and will never be, a perfect body.  It has acted unwisely at times, and failed to act at others,  We can each think of  examples of the UN’s setbacks.  When I was running for the job of UN Secretary-General in the summer of 2006, protestors in Beirut had just smashed and tried to set fire to the UN office there in the wake of the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah.  But in Israel, the UN was being attacked as the home of anti-Israeli opinion.  In 2003, just after the Iraq war, a Pew Poll taken in 20 countries after the fall of Baghdad showed that the UN had suffered a great deal of collateral damage over Iraq.  The UN’s standing had gone down in all 20 countries.  The UN’s credibility was down in the  US because it did not support the US Administration on the war, and in 19 other countries because it did not prevent the war.  So once again, the UN, as usual, got hit from both sides of the debate.

But the United Nations, at its best and its worst, is mirror of the world: it reflects not just our divisions and disagreements but also our hopes  and convictions.  As the great second Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, put it, the United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell. And that it has.  We must not forget that theUN has achieved an enormous amount in its 63 years.  Most important of all, it prevented the Cold War from turning hot-first, by providing a roof under which the two superpower adversaries could meet and engage, and second, by mounting peacekeeping operations that ensured that local and regional conflicts were contained and did not ignite a superpower clash that could have sparked off  a global conflagration.

Over the years, more than 170 UN-assisted peace settlements have ended regional conflicts.  And in the past 15 years, more civil wars have ended through mediation than in the previous two centuries combines, in large part because the UN provided leadership, opportunities for negotiation, strategic coordination and the resources to implement peace agreements.

More than 300 international treaties have been negotiated at the UN, setting an international framework that reduces the prospect for conflict among sovereign States.  The UN has built global norms that are universally accepted in areas as diverse as decolonization and disarmament, development and democratization. 

And the UN remains second to none in its unquestioned experience, leadership and authority in coordinating humanitarian action, from tsunamis to human waves of refugees.  When the blue flag flies over a disaster zone, all know that humanity is taking responsibility –not any one Government—and that when the UN succeeds, the whole world wins.

In all of this, the security Council remains the key instrument to determine policy, to bring about a convergence of world opinion on burning questions of peace and security, and to guide and supervise the organization’s action. It is only natural that India, which has come a long way since it first joined the UN as a British colony in 1945, should expect a place at the high table while these questions are being discussed.

Which leads me to the key question before us.  How can the Security Council be reformed?

The need for reform became clear as a result of global reactions to the divisions at the UN over the Iraq war.  Those divisions let to a crisis of confidence in the international system.  But they speak a lot of languages at the UN.  And my Chinese friends tell me that in their language, the Chinese  character for”Crisis” is made up of two other characters – the character for “danger” and the character for “opportunity”.  There is a real danger that the Organization will again be seen as increasingly irrelevant to the real world over which it presides.  And yet there is an opportunity to reform it so that it is not only relevant, but an essential reflection of  what our world has become in the first decade of the 21st century.  I believe strongly that the UN needs reform, not because it has failed, but because it has succeeded enough to be worth investing in.

Even though it’s been more than years since I left the service of the United Nations, the one question people have still not stopped asking me in India is when India is going to become a Permanent Member of the Security Council.  The short answer is, “not this year, but there are so many misconceptions in our country about this issue that longer answer is clearly necessary.

The problem of reforming the Security Council is rather akin to a malady in which a number of doctors gather around a patient; they all agree on the diagnosis, but they cannot agree on the prescription.  The diagnosis is clear-the Security Council reflects the geopolitical realities of 1945 ant not of today.  When the UN was founded in that year, the Council consisted of  eleven members out of a total UN membership of 51 countries, in other words, some 22% of the members were on the Security Council.  Today, there are 192 members of the UN,  and only fifteen members of the council-fewer than 8% .  So many more countries, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the membership, do not feel adequately represented on the body.   The composition of the Council also gives undue weight age to the balance of  power of those days: Europe, for instance, which accounts for barely 5% of the world’s population, still controls 33% of the seats.  And the five Permanent Members (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China) enjoy their position, and the privilege of a veto over any Council resolution or decision, by virtue of having won a war 63 years ago.  (In the case of China, the word “won” needs to be placed within inverted commas).

So clearly the Security Council is ripe for reform to bring it into the first decade of the 21st century.  The UN recognized the need for action as early as 1992, when the open-Ended Working Group of the General Assembly was established to look into the issue, in the hope of having a solution in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the world organization in 1995,  But the open-Ended Working Group soon began to be known, in the UN Cooridors, as the Never Ending Shirking Group.  Instead of identifying a solution or moving compromise, the Group remains in existence, having missed not only the 50th anniversary of the UN, but even the 60th.  Left to their own devices, they will be arguing the merits of the case well past the UN’s centenary.

The problem is quite simple: for every state that feels it deserves a place on the Security Council, and especially the handful of countries who believe their status in the world ought to be recognized  as being in no way inferior to at least three if not four of the existing Permanent Members,  there are several who know they will not benefit from any reform.  The small countries that make up more than half the UN’s membership accept that reality and are content to compete occasionally for a two-year  non-permanent seat on the Council.  But the medium-sized and large countries which are the rivals of the prospective beneficiaries deeply resent the prospect of a select few breaking free of their current second-rank status in the world body.  Some of the objectors, like Canada and Spain, are motivated genuinely by principle: they consider the existence of permanent Membership to be wrong to begin with, and they have no desire to compound the original sin by adding more  members to a category they dislike.  But many of the others are openly animated by a spirit of competition, historical grievance or simple envy.  Together they have banded together into an effective coalition to thwart reform of the membership of the Security Council.

Let us remember that the bar to amending the UN Charter has been set rather high.  Any amendment requires a two thirds majority of the overall membership,  in other words 128 of the 192 states in the General Assembly.  An amendment would further have to be ratified by two-thirds of the Member states (and ratification is usually a parliamentary procedure, so in most countries this means  it’s not enough for the government of the day to be in favour of a reform: its parliament also has to go along with a change)  This means that the only “prescription” that has any chance of passing is one that will both persuade two-thirds of the UN member states to support it and not attract the opposition of any of the existing Permanent Five )or that  of a powerful US Senator who could block ratification in Washington).  That has proved to be a tall order indeed.

After all, who would countries want to see on an expanded Security Council? Obviously, states that displace some weight in the world and have a record of making major contributions to the UN system.  Japan and Germany are the second and third largest financial contributors to the UN (though the Charter, drawn up in 1945, still calls them “enemy states”, since the UN was set up by the victorious allies of World War II).  But when they began pressing their claims to permanent seats, the Foreign Minister of Italy wisecracked, “what’s all this talk about Japan and Germany?  We lost the war too.”  Adding these two to the Council would, of course, further skew the existing North-South imbalance, so they would have to be balanced by new permanent members from the developing world.  But who would these be?  In Asia, India, as the world’s largest democracy, its fifth-largest economy and a long-standing contributor to UN peace-keeping operations, seems an obvious contender.  But Pakistan, and to some extend Indonesia, are unalterably opposed. In Latin America, Brazil occupies a place analogous to India’s in Asia, but Argentina and Mexico have other ideas.  And in Africa, how is one to adjudicate the rival credentials of the continent’s largest democracy, Nigeria, its largest economy, South Africa, and its oldest civilization, Egypt? (And neither China nor South Korea is keen on Japan,  with its record of atrocities seven decades ago, being rewarded today.)  No wonder a two-thirds majority has proved elusive for any reform prescription.

But I do still believe the Security Council has to change sooner or later.  The best argument for reform is that the absence of reform could discredit the United Nations itself.  I remember the late British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, saying in 1997 (on his first visit to the UN in that capacity) that if the Council was not reformed without delay, his own voters would not understand why.  Mr Cook, a fine statesman and a man of principle, did not realize that he not destined to see any reform in his lifetime, let alone his term of office.  And yet he understood that reform was essential, because what merely looks anomalous today will seem absurd tomorrow.  Imagine in 2020 a British or French veto of resolution affecting South Asia, with India absent from the table, or of one affecting Southern Africa with South Africa not voting: who would take the Council seriously then?

There is perhaps another reason why the British and the French are genuinely keen on seeing the Council reformed right now.  Currently, everyone is only speaking of expanding the Permanent Membership of the Council, not replacing the any of existing Permanent Members.  If reform is delayed by another decade, there is a real risk that the position of London and Paris will not be so secure then; the clamour for replacing then with one permanent European Union seat would mount, and could prove irresistible.

So far, the other three permanent members have been somewhat more lukewarm about reform.  Russia is officially pledged to support it, and has explicitly backed the claims of Germany, Japan and India to new permanent seats, but it is a matter for debate how enthusiastic Moscow really is.  Its permanent seat on the Council was the one asset that, even during the shambolic years of the 1990s, allowed Russia to “punch above its weight” in international affairs.  Few Russians really want to see that position of privilege diluted by having to be shared with several new countries.

The US and China are even more sceptical.  China shares Moscow’s reluctance to see its stature diminished, but this is all the more true since it now sees itself, quite justifiably, as having no peer in the world other than the United States,  whose economy it is on course to overtake by mid-century.  The US is still the sole superpower, and its isolation in recent years on various issues, notably relating to the Middle East, makes the US Administration profoundly wary of giving new powers to countries that may stand in its way.  It was striking that Washington’s support of a seat for Germany faded way in the wake of Germany’s vocal opposition to the 2003 Iraq war, and it is yet to formally endorse India’s   bid, because it is conscious that New Delhi votes more often against it in UN forums than with it.  In action, the US likes a Council it can dominate; a larger body would be more unwieldy, and a bigger collection of permanent members more difficult to manage, than the present Council.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, American diplomats say.

But to much of the rest of the world, the Security Council is indeed “broke”, and the more decisions it is called upon to take that affect many countries – authorizing wars. Declaring sanctions, launching peacekeeping interventions – the greater the risk that its decisions will be seen as made by an unrepresentative body and therefore rejected as illegitimate.  The United Nations is the one universal body we all have, the one organization to which every country in the world belongs; if it is discredited, the world as a whole will lose an institution that is truly irreplaceable.

But that could happen.  And my worry, as an old UN hand, is that if Security Council reform drags on indefinitely and inconclusively, key countries could begin to look for an alternative.  What if the G-8, which is not bound by any Charter and writes its own rules, decided one day to expand its membership to embrace, say, China, India, Brazil and South Africa?  China aside, the other countries could well say, “well, we’re now on the high table at last – why not focus our energies on this body and ignore the one which refuses to seat us?”  The result could be a UN dramatically diminished by the decision of some of its most important members to ignore or neglect it.  And the loss will be that of the rest of the world, which at least today has a universal organization to hold it together under the rules of international law, which is vastly preferable to a “directoire” of self-appointed oligarchs that an expanded G-8 could become.

So what’s the answer?  Continued tinkering with reform resolutions and feeble attempts to win over enough deeply-divided African countries to make up a two-thirds majority are unlikely to get anywhere soon.  The key to breaking the logjam lies in Washington.  Most of the naysayers are US allies who have been given a free hand by Washington’s own lack of enthusiasm for reform.  If a new US administration could be persuaded that it is in America’s self-interest to maintain a revitalized United Nations, credible enough for its support to be valuable to the US and legitimate enough to be a bulwark of world order in the imminent future when the US is no longer the world’s only superpower, Washington could bring enough countries in its wake to transform the debate.  That is a task that the Security Council  “aspirants” – and notably the government of a transforming India – are well positioned to perform.   They should spend a few months this year honing a joint approach, which they should take to the new US President, Bqrack Obama, before his maiden UN speech in late September.  Only then can there be any serious prospect of a permanent seat for India in the foreseeable future.

Why does all this matter at all?  Today, whether you are a resident of Delhi or Dar-es-Salaam – whether you are from Thiruvananthapuram or Toronto – it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of your own country.  Global forces press in from every conceivable direction.  People, goods and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed and ease.  We are increasingly connected through travel,  trade, the Internet; what we watch, what we eat and even the games we play.

What happens in South America or Southern Africa – from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS - can affect our lives wherever we live, even here in India.  And your choices here – what you buy, how you vote – can resound for away.  As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downsteam.

In this interconnected world, we need an effective and representative United Nations, in all our interest, [practice/theory joke].  Since it has worked in practice, my view of the UN of the future is that it most be firmly anchored in its own experience, even as it sails onward.  But as one who was once the Indian candidate for the Secretary-Generalship, you will forgive me for quoting Mahatma Gandhi, who famously said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”  The UN is no exception.  To change the world, the UN must change too. I am convinced there is much that can be accomplished with the UN as the lynchpin of our system of global governance.

I am not talking about world government; we all know that such an idea would be deeply unwelcome in many places, and is neither practical nor desirable in today’s world.  India is not alone in being proud of its sovereignty and unwilling to dilute it. But I mean laws and norms that countries negotiate together, and agree to uphold as the “rules of the road”.  And I mean a forum where sovereign states can come together to share burden, address common problems and seize common opportunities.  That forum is the United Nations.  And its Security Council remains at the pinnacle of the institution.

I have, I hope, pained a picture of the UN of the future as firmly anchored in its achievements, but eagerly engaged in transforming itself in the light of  changing circumstances.  A refurbished UN, built on the strong foundations laid down in 1945, buttressed by the innovations and achievements of the last sixty-three years,  and renovated to take account of the problems that have been uncovered in the course of dealing with the real challenges of the changing world outside.

So much for the architecture.  But, as the old saying goes, a house is not a home.  Something more-something extremely important, although not  quite so tangible – is needed before we can be happy  that the United Nations is all it can be in the twenty-first century.

The new UN must encapsulate the 21st century’s equivalent of the spirit that informed it founding. It must amplify the voices of those who would otherwise not be heard, and serve as canopy beneath which all can feel secure.

The UN is, and must continue to be, a forum where the rich and powerful can commit their strength and their  wealth to the cause of a better world.  And it must continue to provide the stage where great and proud nations, big and small, rich and poor, can meet as equals to iron out their differences and find common cause in their shared humanity.

The UN of the future must never forget that it is both a child and a source of hopes for a better world-hopes that all human beings share. This is why I am proud to use the other “I” word-and to affirm the UN’s indispensability, as the only effective instrument the world has available to confront the challenges that will remain when even Iraq and Gaza have passed from the headlines.

Some Indians, despairing of the delays in reforming the Security Council, have begun to ask why we should  bother.  To them I can only recount a favourite story of that old Soviet warhorse, Ambassador Yakov Malik: (Adam and Eve).

This is the only UN we have, and we need to do our best to ensure our rightful place in it.

Thank you,

Dr. Shashi Tharoor