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The Security Council, from its very inception, has been controversial. In part, this has stemmed from the prevalent perception that the Council has been the one place in the UN system that really matters. In part, it has derived from the pervasive frustration that the Council has never fulfilled the overly high expectations many people and governments have had for it. And, importantly, it reflects an unresolved tension between the sharply but somewhat narrowly defined concept the convening powers had for how the Council should func- tion and the more inclusive and participatory model favored by the UN’s larger membership. These differences were as vigorously contested at the founding conference in San Francisco as they have been in the successive rounds of deliberations on Council reform that have since absorbed so much high-level attention in capitals as well as in the General Assembly Hall.

Round one: San Francisco

Franklin Roosevelt knew what he did and did not want in the way of a Security Council. He and the leaders of the other three convening countries, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China, were determined not to repeat the high-principled, low-performance experience of the League of Nations. The League’s Council did not suffer from a democracy deficit: it boasted equal rights, consensus rules, and a growing membership. The League’s Council, however, did not get better as it got bigger: it reached its greatest girth in the mid-1930s, on the eve of the Second World War.

Instead of going this failed route, Roosevelt turned to what had worked: the great-power alliance that had led the resistance to the aggression of the Axis powers. His vision revolved around the “four policemen” – later five when France was added at San Francisco – who would, he hoped, band together to enforce the peace and prevent the outbreak of a third world war in the twentieth century.1 To be certain that the others could not gang up on any of these core countries, the decision to use collective force would have to be

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taken by unanimity – hence each would have a veto – a sine qua non provision from Moscow’s perspective and presumably from the US Senate’s as well. Surely there would be room on the Council for a few lesser members of the alliance, for they too had played their part in defeating the Axis powers, but their place in the peace, as in the war, was deemed to be of secondary impor- tance. Indeed, the draft Charter presented by the four convening powers to the San Francisco conference included no criteria for the election of non-perma- nent members. The key was to perpetuate the security ties among the four policemen for as long as possible into the postwar era, so they were to have permanent seats in the Council. The first test of their capacity to stick together amidst the competing pressures and disparate voices of multilateral forums came, as Chapter 2 chronicled, in San Francisco. At issue, naturally, were the prerogatives that they had reserved for themselves in the Council.

Clearly, the plans for the Council presented by the four convenors to the San Francisco preparatory conference were anything but representative, demo- cratic or equitable. As a result, many of the invited delegations were not about to accept the draft as a fait accompli without a fight over those missing values. Vigorous challenges were voiced in San Francisco to the size of the Council (many preferred fifteen to the proposed eleven); to the notion of permanent seats set aside for the self-selected few; and, most adamantly, to the veto or unanimity provision.2 More elaborate criteria for the non-permanent, or elected, seats were suggested by several delegations, as was the concept of reserving these places for countries chosen by their regions to represent them.3

Though the Big Five – the four convening powers plus France – rejected the notion of regional seats, they did propose an amendment to the Dumbarton Oaks language to add the criteria for non-permanent members that now appears in Article 23(1) of the Charter. The phrase “equitable geographical distribution” was deliberately chosen to avoid any implication that elected members would carry the weight and the burden of representing their neighbors in Council deliberations. According to the official summary of the deliberations in San Francisco, it was also “pointed out that the members of the Security Council should be regarded as trustees of the whole Organization and not as representatives of different world regions” and that those “who could help to preserve peace and security should be elected to non- permanent seats.”4 The geographical criterion, therefore, was also placed last in 23(1).

Through all the debates, however, the convening powers remained largely unified on these core issues, conceding little and insisting, on many grounds and on many fronts, that their vision was the only acceptable vision for the new Council. The challengers had to make do with the promise under Article 109 for a “General Conference of the Members of the United Nations for the purpose of reviewing the present Charter” to be held by the General

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Assembly’s tenth session in 1955. By that point, however, with the world body deeply divided by Cold War tensions, the Assembly and Council wisely decided to let that opportunity pass.5 Nevertheless, the Council reform agenda first framed at San Francisco before the Charter was adopted has been pursued, with varying degrees of energy, ever since.

Round two: 1955–65

During the 1950s and 1960s, the UN’s substantive pursuits may have been repeatedly frustrated by the Cold War divide, but the influx of new members proved unstoppable. Spurred by the UN’s facilitation of the process of decolo- nization, the world body’s membership more than doubled from 1945 (51) to 1963 (114) (compared to today’s 192 members). Only three African and three Asian countries were represented at San Francisco, yet more than half of the membership by the early 1960s was from those two developing regions.6

Pressures for enlarging the Security Council were inevitable and, following the admission of twenty more members over the two previous years, the calls for expansion became more urgent and vocal in 1956. The “gentleman’s agree- ment” on the geographical distribution of non-permanent seats, that had held for a decade was, by that point, becoming untenable. To the socialist and newly independent countries, Latin America and Europe appeared to be over- represented on the Council to the disadvantage of the new majority. The Soviets called for redistributing the six non-permanent seats, while the consti- tutionally dubious practice of splitting the two-year terms for some of the seats was employed as a temporary measure. For its part, Washington faced two unattractive options: expanding the Council or watching the seats of its Latin American friends and Western European allies continue to be squeezed.

At the eighteenth General Assembly session in 1963, following eight years of frustration, the issue of amending the Charter to permit Council enlarge- ment finally came to a head.7 Earlier that year, the very first summit resolution from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had called for Council expansion. By that point, there was little doubt that a large majority in the General Assembly supported such an enlargement, but the Council’s five Permanent Members – whose satisfaction would be required for Charter amendment – were still not on board. Each, in fact, had asked for further consultations before the matter was put to a vote.8 When the vote was never- theless taken on 17 December, of the five only China – then represented by the Taipei-based Republic of China – gave its assent.9 France and the Soviet Union voted no, and the United Kingdom and United States abstained. The developing countries were not deterred, however, and Resolution 1991 (XVIII) to expand the Security Council from 11 to 15 members (and the Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC, from 18 to 27 members), to increase

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the super-majority required to pass non-procedural matters from seven to nine, and to indicate the geographical distribution of the ten non-permanent members passed easily, by a vote of 97 to 11, with four abstentions. So, for the first time, the Assembly had voted to amend the Charter.

The battle then shifted to member state capitals, where any of the five Permanent Members could have killed the measure by failing to ratify the amendment by 1 September 1965, the deadline specified in the resolution. Yet none chose to do so. First the Soviet Union, then China, France, the United Kingdom, and finally the United States relented. Why the change of heart? No doubt Cold War politics and the East-West competition for influ- ence among the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia had a lot to do with it. There may well have been a temptation to free-ride as well, i.e. to leave the onus of going against the tide to Washington. With disunity among the five, the political costs for any one capital to block the will of the rest of the membership would have been substantial.

Another factor appeared to weigh quite heavily in Washington’s recalcula- tions. The world body was facing a potentially fateful constitutional and financial crisis triggered by the refusal of the Soviet Union, France, and a number of developing countries to pay their assessed contributions for the pathbreaking UN peacekeeping missions in the Sinai and the Congo, despite Assembly resolutions and a decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calling on them to do so.10 Under Article 19 of the Charter, the Soviet Union should have been penalized with the loss of its vote in the Assembly in 1964 for being two years behind in its dues payments to the UN, but it threatened to quit the Organization instead. A shaky compromise was reached instead by which no formal votes were taken during that Assembly session, the Soviet and French arrears were set aside, and the US asserted that it too had the right to withhold payments in the future if its supreme national interests required. Concerned about whether the UN could withstand any additional political shocks, and faced with the retreat of the other convening powers, the Johnson administration reversed course and called on the Senate to consent to the rati- fication of the Charter amendment to expand the Council. By a 71 to zero vote with little debate, the Senate did so on 3 June 1965.11 Thus, on 31 August 1965, a day before the deadline, the amendments to Articles 23 and 27 enlarging the Council and changing the numbers required for non-proce- dural votes duly came into force, closing the second chapter in the continuing reform saga.

Round three: 1993–7

Following the enlargement of the Council in 1965, pressures for further expansion eased for a number of years. Cold War tensions insured that the

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expanded Council remained largely on the sidelines during some of the most serious crises of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, such as the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, and recurrent tensions in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Much of the reform energies focused on enhancing the UN’s capacities for addressing development, economic and social issues. ECOSOC was enlarged in 1973 for the second time, to three times its original size (18 to 27 to 54), with no net gain for its authority, reputation or effectiveness. The General Assembly, and to some extent the Security Council itself, became a battle- ground for North-South, as well as East-West, struggles over the shape, norms and agendas of global negotiations.

Perversely but understandably, the clamor for reforming the Council returned not during its relatively unproductive years over the last two decades of the East-West contest but rather after its work pace and output surged in the early 1990s with the end of the Cold War. When the General Assembly’s Open-Ended Working Group on the Question of Equitable Representation and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council was created in 1993, the Council was busier than ever, whether gauged by resolutions passed, presidential statements made, or number of blue helmets and peacekeeping operations deployed in trouble spots around the world.12 At that point, moreover, no veto had been cast over the previous three years. Questions of equity, representation, trans- parency, and accountability were being raised once again precisely because the Council had become so active, so consequential, and potentially so intrusive in the political and security affairs of the member states. The Council’s redis- covery of its Chapter VII enforcement tools gave a renewed urgency to questions of how, why, and by whom its decisions were being made. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some also began to ask, less directly, whether the remaining superpower would not begin to dominate the Council’s proceedings.

After a few years with scant results, however, many delegates and pundits began to refer to the Assembly Working Group with the impossibly long title as simply the “never-ending Working Group.” They had forgotten that the last Council reform round had taken a decade to produce a result. The Working Group divided its mandate in two: Cluster One was to address the higher-visibility issues of membership, including enlargement, the veto and voting procedures, while Cluster Two was to consider how to enhance accountability and transparency by adjusting the Council’s working methods and decision-making procedures. The first cluster has produced more rhetor- ical flourishes and surface concurrence about the urgency of enlargement than convergence about how to do this and who should occupy any additional seats. To date, the second cluster has proven to be the more productive of the two, though it is widely agreed that reform should eventually encompass both clusters.

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The first effort to accomplish a simultaneous breakthrough on both fronts came when Razali Ismail of Malaysia was President of the General Assembly in 1996–7. Teaming with the co-chairs of the Working Group, Razali consulted individually with almost all of the member states in an effort to identify a set of reform steps, including both enlargement and working methods, that could gain the support of most of them. The resulting formula had several elements: (1) the addition of five more permanent and four more non-permanent seats, for a total of 24; (2) a date by which the members of the General Assembly would have to select the five Permanent Members according to a specified geographic and economic distribution; (3) a provision that the new Permanent Members would not have veto power and the current ones would be asked to exercise restraint in their employment of that essen- tially negative instrument; (4) a rule that new and original Permanent Members would be subject to the same calculations in terms of paying a premium surcharge for peacekeeping assessments; (5) the elimination of the enemies clauses in the Charter; (6) the convening of a review conference after ten years to assess the implementation of these reforms; and (7) a raft of eigh- teen alterations of the Council’s working methods to enhance transparency, accountability and inclusiveness.13 Having received the assurances of two thirds of the membership that they would support this package, Razali submitted his plan to the Working Group for consideration on 20 March 1997.14 At that point, however, it turned out that only a handful of delegates were willing to endorse the plan publicly and it soon became apparent that there was insufficient political momentum to move forward. As so often in UN reform efforts, another bold initiative had stumbled over the palpable caution, even intransigence, with which most member states approach ques- tions of institutional change.

Round four: 2003–5

This hot-cold pattern was repeated in the most recent round of deliberations, which peaked in mid-2005 with the airing of several alternative proposals, none of which were put to a vote. Once again, the vast majority of member states endorsed the notion of enlargement in theory, but in practice far fewer favored putting any particular formula to a vote. For a number of years, those large countries with ambitions for attaining a permanent seat have been increasingly restive over the slow pace and indecisive deliberations of the Working Group. Sensing their growing frustration and concerned about the Council’s performance in the run-up to the use of force in Iraq in the spring of 2003, Secretary-General Kofi Annan decided to highlight Council enlarge- ment in his call that September for a “radical” overhaul of the UN’s inter-governmental machinery.15 Though his predecessors had resisted the

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temptation to become personally involved in the unending tug of war among the member states over the size and shape of the Council, Annan declared an “urgent need” to make it “more broadly representative of the international community as a whole, as well as the geopolitical realities of today.”16 With a flair for drama, if not historical accuracy, he cautioned the member states that “we have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded.”

To chart the implications of a range of emerging security threats for the member states and for the world body, the Secretary-General commissioned a High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (HLP).17 Much of its December 2004 final report spoke to the interconnections among threats from pandemics to terrorism, from proliferation to poverty, as the security agendas of the North and the South have begun to merge in important respects.18 But among its diverse collection of 101 recommendations, those few relating to the reform of the Security Council, not surprisingly, gained by far the most public, press, and governmental attention.19 The Council, the Panel found, had indeed become more active and effective since the end of the Cold War. In its view, however, the Council’s decisions had too often lacked realism, equity, and consistency, resulting in inadequate follow-up and implementation by the UN’s membership as a whole.20 To enhance the Council’s credibility and capacity, the Panel offered a series of four principles to guide its enlargement, which it termed “a necessity.”21

Not unlike the member states, however, the Panel could not agree on a single formula for accomplishing this. Instead, it put forward a Model A and a Model B.22 In several respects, both models resembled the Razali Plan of seven years earlier: they called for an expansion to twenty-four, a geographical distribution of seats, a more equitable North-South balance, the denial of veto power to new members, an appeal to the current Permanent Members to exer- cise restraint in employing this tool, and a review conference (in 2020). The new plans, however, omitted Razali’s emphasis on working methods, instead praising how much the Council had already accomplished in this area.23

Model A called for six new permanent seats – two for Africa, two for Asia and the Pacific, one for Europe and one for the Americas – and three more non- permanent, two-year, non-renewable seats. Model B, on the other hand, envisioned no additional permanent seats, but rather the creation of a new category of eight four-year, renewable seats, plus one more two-year, non- renewable seat.

Three and a half months later, on 21 March 2005, Secretary-General Annan issued his own reform report, with scores of recommendations for consideration by heads of state and government, at a September 2005 global summit. In some areas, the findings of this new report, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, differed from those of

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the High-level Panel.24 In the case of the Security Council, however, he simply endorsed the conclusions of the Panel and urged the member states “to consider the two options, models A and B, proposed in that report . . . or any other viable proposals in terms of size and balance that have emerged on the basis of either model.” He called for agreement prior to the September summit, by consensus if possible, “but if they are unable to reach consensus this must not become an excuse for postponing action.”25 He reiterated his conviction that “no reform of the United Nations would be complete without reform of the Security Council.”26

In some respects, the Secretary-General’s rationale for Council reform covered familiar ground: its composition needed to be adjusted “to make it more broadly representative of the international community as a whole, as well as of the geopolitical realities of today, and thereby more legitimate in the eyes of the world.”27 But he also offered some novel perspectives. The founders, he noted, had created three Councils to address security, economic and social matters, and trusteeship, respectively. However,

the division of responsibilities between them has become less and less balanced: the Security Council has increasingly asserted its authority and, especially since the end of the Cold War, has enjoyed greater unity of purpose among its Permanent Members but has seen that authority ques- tioned on the grounds that its composition is anachronistic or insufficiently representative.28

His conclusion: “we need to restore the balance.”29 Presumably his inten- tion was not to suggest that the Security Council should be enlarged until it becomes as ineffective as the other two Councils have been. However, as Chapters 2 and 3 above explain, the founders had no intention of equating the three Councils, whose powers, prerogatives and procedures were to be on very different levels. On the one hand, it may seem curious that the Secretary-General did not celebrate the post-Cold War unity and assertive- ness of the Security Council. On the other hand, however, this apparent wariness did reflect the tenor of much of the Council reform debate, as member states not on the Council watched its revival with some hesitation and ambivalence.

Among the member states, Models A and B each had their following, though the latter had a less impressive one. Others looked for an alternative model: either one that would be smaller than twenty-four or one that would put more emphasis on working methods and that would speak more directly to the needs of smaller states. Four large aspirants for permanent seats, Brazil, Germany, India and Japan, known as the G-4, put forward a variant of Model A for consideration by the Assembly.30 Like Model A, the G-4 proposed

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adding six more permanent seats: two from Africa, two from Asia, one from Latin America and the Caribbean, and one from the Western European and Others Group.31 The G-4, however, called for an increment of four more non- permanent members, not three, for a total of twenty-five members in the enlarged Council. The G-4 also hedged a bit in terms of the veto, vowing that “the new permanent members shall not exercise the right of veto until the question of the extension of the right of veto to new permanent members has been decided upon in the framework of the review” called for fifteen years after these amendments enter into force.32 While the Razali Plan had called for a review conference after ten years and the High-level Panel for one in 2020, neither contemplated any reconsideration of the decision not to extend veto power to the new Permanent Members.

The G-4 countries have not been the only would-be reformers to be vexed about what to say or do about the veto. As noted earlier, this was the single most divisive issue at San Francisco. The five Permanent Members insured, in the hurdles established for amending the Charter, that they would retain a veto over relinquishing the veto. Though the veto has few defenders among the 192 member states, other than the five, of course, the best that its detrac- tors can do is raise the political costs of its use. Indeed, as Figure 1.1 illustrates, the veto has been employed much less frequently since the end of the Cold War, only seventeen times in the fifteen years from 1991 through 2005. There apparently has been some degree of self-restraint. Calling its use “anachronistic and undemocratic,” the Razali Plan urged “the original perma- nent members of the Security Council to limit the exercise of their veto power to actions taken under Chapter VII of the Charter.”33 The High-level Panel asked “the permanent members, in their individual capacities, to pledge themselves to refrain from the use of the veto in cases of genocide and large- scale human rights abuses.”34 The Secretary-General, no doubt wisely, passed on the issue.

In 2004–5, as in 1996–7, the notion of expanding the number of Permanent Members was opposed by a geographically diverse group of countries that had qualms about one of their larger neighbors achieving this status and/or concerns about how Council members for life could ever be held accountable. In Razali’s time dubbed the “coffee club,” this loose coalition of mostly middle powers, such as Pakistan, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Canada and Turkey, took on the more attractive mantle of “uniting for consensus” in 2005. Their draft resolution proposed doubling the number of non-permanent members from ten to twenty, thereby expanding the Council to twenty-five members as well.35 They would also amend Article 23(2) of the Charter to permit non-permanent members to be “eligible for immediate re-election, subject to the decision of their respective geographical groups.”36 Under this plan, decisions of the Council would require the

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affirmative vote of fifteen of its twenty-five members, compared to fourteen of twenty-five under the G-4 proposal and fifteen of twenty-four under the Razali Plan.

With the encouragement of the Secretary-General and the summit approaching, the long-simmering politics of Council reform and expansion reached a boiling point in the spring and summer of 2005. The general membership, however, remained deeply divided over core structural issues, such as whether to add more Permanent Members or to give them the veto, as well as over choosing which states should move up the status ladder. Neither the G-4 nor uniting for consensus plans, therefore, could gain the requisite two thirds vote in the Assembly. Like Razali, they found the uphill climb simply too steep to be completed. Indeed, in several respects the politics of 2005 were even more difficult than those of 1997.37 China, which had been remarkably quiet during Razali’s quest, vigorously opposed a permanent seat for Japan during the latest round. Beijing, faced with (or encouraging) street demonstrations against a Japanese seat, made frustrating Tokyo’s ambition a top foreign policy priority.38 Arguing that differences among the member states were “further expanding instead of narrowing down” and that they “need more time” for dialogue and consultation, the Chinese Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Wang Guangya, stressed in July 2005 that “China is firmly opposed to setting an artificial timeframe for Security Council reform.”39

US concerns about expansion had also hardened since 1997. The Clinton administration had supported an expansion to twenty or twenty-one members and had endorsed the bids of its two allies, Japan and Germany, for permanent seats. It also favored permanent seats for unnamed developing countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as reflected in the Razali Plan.40 By the next round, however, the Democrats were no longer in control in Washington and the Bush administration had already experienced some trying times in its relations with the world body. In that regard, it is ironic that the very 2003 debate in the Council over the use of force in Iraq that had triggered the Secretary-General’s push for Council expansion, had the opposite effect in Washington DC.

In his September 2003 speech to the Assembly calling for the radical over- haul of the Council, the Secretary-General also bemoaned the “unilateral and lawless use of force” without the Council’s authorization.41 It required no stretch of the imagination for US policy-makers to interpret the call for a much larger Council with a raft of new permanent members as an effort to dilute US influence in the Council and to increase the number of members that might oppose future US plans to employ its dominant military assets in the pursuit of narrow objectives. It had been only months before, in the debate over Iraq, that some members of the Council had suggested that one of

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the purposes of the body should be to counter-balance the ambitions of the last superpower. Given these developments, it is not surprising that the Bush administration did not share its predecessor’s enthusiasm for providing a permanent seat for Germany.42

Though not submitting a detailed plan, the US did articulate several elements of one. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured the General Assembly that the US “is open to expanding the Security Council” and believes that it should “reflect the world as it is in 2005 – not as it was in 1945.”43 She and other US officials consistently stressed that the Council’s effectiveness should be the prime criterion. To this end, the US proposed a series of criteria “to measure a country’s readiness for a permanent seat.”44

It insisted that Japan met these criteria and suggested that it would “support adding two or so new permanent members based on those criteria.” It would also “endorse the addition of two or three additional non- permanent seats, based on geographic selection, to expand the Council to 19 or 20.”45

In extremis, of course, either Beijing or Washington could have killed an amendment to enlarge the Council by refusing to ratify it. But in 2005, the advocates of expansion still could not surmount the first hurdle of gathering a two thirds majority in the Assembly. Africa, much more than in 1997, proved to be the elusive key. Though the largest regional bloc in the world body, with fifty-three members, Africa, like Latin America and the Caribbean, has no permanent members in the Council. Under Model A or the G-4 plan, there would be two permanent members from Afria. But which two? In order to preserve trans-African unity to the extent possible and to encourage any new African permanent member to feel some obligation to try to represent the region as a whole on the Council, Africa was the only region to attempt to select regional candidates to serve permanently on the Council. As of mid- 2006, it has not succeeded. The most widely discussed possibilities were South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, with several smaller states nominating themselves. Rather than join the G-4 campaign to make it a more appealing G-6 effort, in the end the potential African candidates concluded that African unity, at least at that point, was a higher priority.46

Forty-three African member states did introduce a draft resolution as a third option.47 It differed from Model A and the G-4 plan in two important respects. One, it insisted that the new permanent members should be accorded “the same prerogatives and privileges as those of the current perma- nent members, including the right of veto.” Two, it contended that Africa should receive two more non-permanent seats – not one as in the other plans – as well as the two permanent seats. This would enlarge the Council to twenty- six members, not the twenty-four contemplated by Razali or the twenty-five by the High-level Panel, seven of these from Africa alone. At a rump summit

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of the African Union Assembly at the end of October 2005, these demands, as a matter of equity and justice, were reaffirmed.48 Given the African, US, and Chinese positions, as well as the continuing stalemate between the G-4 and uniting for consensus, the prospects for Council enlargement appeared as murky and doubtful in mid-2006 as they did at the release of the High-level Panel report a year and a half earlier.

Working methods

While most of the headlines and high-level attention in capitals has been focused on who sits around the Council’s horseshoe table in its formal Chamber, many insiders have understood that the reform of its working methods is every bit as essential to improving Council performance. Indeed, for most member states the matter of Council working methods would have a more immediate impact than would enlargement. In an organization of 192 member states, relatively few would have realistic chances of becoming a permanent or even semi-permanent member of the Council even if its current membership was doubled or tripled. Composition concerns formal member- ship, while working methods address how those members relate to and seek to “represent” the much larger membership outside the Council circle. Even an awkwardly large Council would not be representative unless new working methods to assure greater transparency, accountability and inclusiveness were also introduced.

Over the dozen years that the Assembly’s Working Group on Security Council reform has been in business, there has been far greater progress on Cluster Two (working methods) than on Cluster One (composition, veto) issues. This is somewhat paradoxical, because the Assembly has no authority over how a parallel inter-governmental body, the Security Council, conducts its affairs. Where it does have authority, over proposing amend- ments to the Charter, it has been unable to find a political basis for action. On the one hand, the two reform clusters are related substantively, in part because deficits in working methods would be even more apparent in an expanded Council. Politically, on the other hand, the impetus for working methods reform could well ebb once the Council is expanded, particularly if the number of permanent members is enlarged. Recognizing this polit- ical reality, as well as the fact that a change in working methods requires neither Charter amendment nor an Assembly resolution, while enlargement requires both, a number of smaller states, led by Switzerland, have been trying to keep working methods reform high on the change agenda.49 Their efforts have seen some success, as both the G-4 and uniting for consensus draft resolutions contained a series of suggestions for modifications in working methods.50

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In explaining why it would have little to say on the subject, the High-level Panel commented that, “in recent years, many informal improvements have been made to the transparency and accountability of the Security Council’s deliberations.”51 Like other UN organs, the Council has proven to be much more adept at adaptation to changing circumstances than at formal reform. Necessity becomes the mother of invention. For the Council, it is reasonable to assume that the accelerating pace and changing profile of its activities, more than pressures from the Assembly Working Group, induced it to alter its working methods in a number of respects during the 1990s and, to a less dramatic extent, during the early years of the new millennium. Among the modifications undertaken were the following:

• Under the Arria formula, a member of the Council invites the others to meet, outside of the Council Chamber, with one or more independent experts for a candid exchange of views on a pressing issue before the Council. This practice, which permits more direct input from civil society and encourages Council members to reflect on the complexities of the choices facing them, was once considered to be quite innovative, but has now become standard operating behavior. Now there are frequent informal and formal meetings with agency heads and others with knowl- edge of developments in the field.

• The Council has also participated in a number of retreats, away from headquarters, with the Secretary-General, other UN officials, and sometimes leading independent experts. For the last three years, for example, the Finnish Mission has sponsored a “Hitting the Ground Running” workshop at which the fifteen current and five incoming members of the Council discuss the Council’s work, working methods and plans off site.52

• The Council members have undertaken a number of missions to visit areas where developments are of particular interest or concern to the Council. This has allowed much more extensive contact with government officials, non-governmental groups, and UN personnel on the ground in regions of crisis. Some of these have been co-sponsored by ECOSOC.

• The Council has met a number of times since the end of the Cold War at either the foreign minister or summit level, including to discuss counter- terrorism at the time of the September 2005 global summit.

• To assist transparency and accountability, it has become common practice for the President of the Council to brief non-members, and often the press, on the results of informal (private) consultations.

• Tentative monthly forecasts and the provisional agendas for the Council’s upcoming work are now provided regularly to non-members, as are provisional draft resolutions.53

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• Consultations among Security Council members and troop contributors, along with key secretariat officials, are now held on a more regular basis.

• As the Council’s agenda and responsibilities have grown, so has its reliance on subsidiary bodies. Mostly chaired by non-permanent members and operating by consensus, several of the currently 25 subsidiary bodies have developed expert staffs, receive reports from member states, and undertake fact-finding, monitoring, and capacity-building missions around the world. (For a list of the subsidiary bodies as of February 2006, see Box 3.1 in Chapter 3 above.)

• Through the work of its subsidiary bodies, as well as in plenary, the Council has begun to include non-members in its work on a more regular and substantive basis.

While acknowledging the progress that has been made on working methods, most member states contend that it has not gone nearly far enough. For example, the ten non-permanent members of the Security Council called for the institutionalization of the steps that had been taken, for taking several of them further, and for more public meetings and fewer informal consultations.54 It is questionable, however, whether all of the transparency and reporting measures called for would result in a more efficient or effective Security Council. The bulk of the negotiations among the members are bound to be carried out in private, and the public sessions of the Council have become highly formal and ritualistic, largely as opportunities for restating official positions and for public rationalizations. Even non-members of the Council frequently complain of the number and repetitiveness of the speeches given in the formal, public sessions. While it would aid accountability to require states to explain why they cast each veto, and the Council could be more analytical and forthcoming in its reports to the General Assembly, excessively detailed or frequent reporting could make it that much harder for an already overburdened Council to devote sufficient time and attention to its wide-ranging substantive work.

Unanswered (unasked?) questions

In his September 2003 speech to the General Assembly urging “radical” reform of the Security Council, Secretary-General Annan sounded reassuring, almost sanguine, about the prospects. “Virtually all Member States agree,” he noted, “that the Council should be enlarged, but there is no agreement on the details.”55 As the “never-ending” Working Group has discovered after a dozen years of earnest deliberation, however, in this case the devil lies indeed in the details. Moreover, as this chapter has related, the so-called “details” involve a host of political and security matters that deeply concern capitals. Reforming

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the Security Council has not languished for lack of attention from national decision-makers. Quite the opposite: it has proven difficult precisely because member states appreciate the importance of what the Council does or fails to do. Though virtually every member state complains about the way the Council functions or who makes its decisions, they keep giving it more and more work to do.

Even the bitterness of the 2005 debate over expansion testified to the centrality of the issues at stake. “Every potential solution,” Thomas G. Weiss and Barbara Crossette observe, “brings as many problems as it solves.” This debate, in their view, “presents a microcosm of a perpetual problem: the UN is so consumed with getting the process right that it neglects conse- quences.”56 While much of the debate understandably has revolved around questions of equity, balance, access and representation – things that matter in assessing the legitimacy of a political decision-making body – ultimately the Council will be judged on how well it performs its core function of main- taining international peace and security. The unanswered questions are myriad. On what basis should the Council’s performance be assessed? Is it getting better or worse? Is the prognosis so bleak that the only option is radical surgery? Which reform steps would lead to better performance, not just improved process? Have the flaws in the Council’s procedures and compo- sition begun to undermine its performance, for example, by reducing its credibility, authority and legitimacy? Or are such claims merely pretexts for advancing narrow status and power interests of those ambitious states that want to be part of a good thing?

Does size matter? On the one hand, would a Council of twenty-four or twenty-five be so much more unwieldy or so much slower to respond than one of fifteen, nineteen, or twenty? On the other hand, what UN inter- governmental body has become stronger or more effective as it has been enlarged? Is it fair to assert that there is an iron law that UN bodies expand until they can no longer perform effectively? In an organization with 192 members, will there not always be pressure for expansion, whatever the extent of the most recent increment? ECOSOC, for example, has been enlarged twice and now the same is being asked of the Security Council.

In an organization composed of independent, sovereign countries, what do terms like “representative” and “accountable” mean in practice? The founders seemed to be of two minds about such things. According to Article 24(2) of the Charter, the Council “shall act in accordance with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.” Yet nowhere does the Charter employ terms like “democratic,” “representative” or “accountable.” The notion of naming the convening powers (plus France) as permanent members of the Council with special privileges and responsibilities, but with no explanation or justification, certainly does not speak of accountability. Today’s candidates

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for permanent status, in the name of equity, would claim the right to be just as unaccountable, just as unrepresentative. While many member states resent the exalted position of the current P-5, what would they gain from increasing the size of a charmed circle from which most of them are permanently excluded? Short of instituting some system of wider consultations, informa- tion exchange, and/or review between members and non-members of the Council, how could the representative character of the Council be enhanced? Is the latter a property more of composition or working methods (or both)?

The High-level Panel has contended that an enlargement of members would bring a corresponding expansion both of the resources available to implement Council decisions and of the will of countries – on or off the Council – to do so.57 Which resources, which member states, and why? Would this only be true to the extent that large, wealthy, and militarily potent states are brought onto the Council? If so, how much room should be left on the Council for their smaller or poorer neighbors? There is no doubt that there have been serious problems of inadequate resources and will to implement Council resolutions. What is less clear is whether this has been the result of the ebbing legitimacy and authority of the Council due to its anachronistic composition, of its increasingly ambitious, intrusive and frequent resolutions, or of shifting strategic conditions well beyond its control. Perhaps mixed responses are endemic to its line of work, as the expe- rience of the League’s Council would suggest. What is the evidence, in fact, that implementation rates or enthusiasm for assisting the Council in its work are declining?

Academics have no surer answers to such tough questions than do policy- makers and diplomats. In fact, there is nothing close to a consensus diagnosis of what ails the Council. Without some shared sense of what is wrong with the Council, the prospects of agreeing on the best course of treatment are dim. Two points, however, are clear. One, those advocating radical reform need to do a much better job of explaining why an expanded Council would be a better Council, producing different decisions and enhanced results. Two, those who have repeatedly claimed that the time was not ripe or the proposals for reform were not right need to be much more specific and forthcoming in responding to two queries: one, if not now, when? And two, if not this, what? Reform cannot, and should not, be postponed indefinitely. If reform is good for the rest of the UN, then surely it must be good for the Council as well.

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