Normatively, and in reality, the United Nations was never on paper a club of equals.
This past week, I participated in a round-table debate on transitional justice in Toronto, Canada. As intellectual pugilists, we had contrasting takes on the normative legal, political, and economic structural edifice constructed by the West, led by the United States, in the wake of the so-called World War II.
Some debaters were optimistic about it than others. I was decidedly pessimistic. In my view – and I am an advanced student of law and politics at the international level – the post-1945 global order is obsolete. This obsolescence is a function of the order’s inequity, injustice, and ineffectiveness. Some of the norms that underpin the system have been in irreversible fatigue for decades. They lack imagination and cannot anymore regenerate global happiness.
The most important, and I dare say, magical, global institution to come out of WWII was the United Nations. Never before had the world been governed through a seemingly effective and outwardly equitable institution. Never before had states big and small, powerful and powerless, African, European, Latin American, Asian, and Pacific Islander, sat at the same round-table – each with a single equally weighted vote to deliberate on the most serious challenges facing the globe. Small Belize would sit across from the mighty US or China and stare them down.
Argue as juridical equals. Even shame them for their excessive or illegal conduct. A country without a standing army like Costa Rica could condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
International governance
UN or affiliated specialised agencies such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Environmental Program, and the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, among others have come to intervene in virtually every country. The WHO, for example, became a leading tool for mitigating against disease around the globe. Without these institutions, many fragile countries in the Global South would have literally gone to hell. The UN system became a lifeline for many.
On human rights, both the UN Security Council and UN human rights institutions often stood between state tyranny and hapless populations. However, that “golden era” of international governance has died, or barely registers a heartbeat.
What has changed? Where did the idealism and naiveté of democratic and equitable global government go? After all, all members of the UN, including the US, had given up parts of their national sovereignty to the new order. Who stole the virginity of the UN?
First, let me stipulate that the UN system and the global order it oversaw, were congenitally flawed at the very start. At the G7 Summit this year, President William Ruto said the UN was no longer “fit for purpose.” I agree. He could’ve gone further and argued that even in the euphoria of its conception in 1945, the UN was fatally flawed. It’s pretense of juridical equality among nations was at best a happy legal fiction.
Club of the alpha dogs
There’s more. Normatively, and in reality, the UN was never on paper a club of equals. Let’s take the two most important institutions under its umbrella. Structurally, both the Security Council and the UN General Assembly sit atop the food chain. But the Security Council is the club of the alpha dogs – US, UK, Russia, China, and France. These five are the only ones that matter in the UN to the exclusion of the other ten members of the Security Council. These states wield veto power on the most important issues of peace and war and the UN itself. The UNGA on the other hand – where every one of the 195 UN members sit – is a mere talking shop. Its actions are generally not binding, while those of the Security Council are.
That’s why I wasn’t exactly on board when Kenya fought so hard and expended so much to get on the UNSC. It’s not nothing, but it wasn’t worth all the hoopla. It’s only the P5 – the big dogs – who with a single vote can torpedo any agenda – including anything adopted unanimously by the UNGA. The UNGA is a moral body, while the UNSC is the actual power.
It has the force of law. That means each of the P5 has more power than all the 195 UNGA members combined. That’s how you spell inequity and hegemony. It means that the entire world can be held hostage by the whims of one leader and the domestic prerogatives from only one of the P5. How is that justice?
Remarkably, even if we assume that the P5 were the most powerful states coming out of WWII, this certainly is no longer the case. Nor do they represent the largest majorities on the planet. Four of those countries are majority white and Western – US, UK, France, Russia. Only one – China – is Asian, or non-white. No African country, or India, Brazil, or a single Arab state. Today, the UN is irrelevant in global affairs. Totally irrelevant.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. On X:@makaumutua
