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Ten Balances for Weighing UN Reform Proposals Author(s): Bruce Russett Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 111, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 259-269 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2152321 Accessed: 18-09-2021 22:16 UTC

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Ten Balances for Weighing

UN Reform Proposals

BRUCE RUSSETT

This is a time, following its fiftieth anniversary, for renewed interest

in reforming, restructuring, and reinvigorating the United Nations. By some

reasonable standards, parts of the UN have worked well much of the time, and others have not. The challenges facing the organization have changed, with new emphasis on civil conflict within rather than between states,' population growth, massive voluntary and involuntary migrations, environmental degradation, eco- nomic justice, expanded concepts of human rights, and belief in the possibility and the necessity of representative government. The resources the UN commands, and the will of its member states to employ the organization, are inadequate to

meet those challenges.

Consequently, several major comprehensive proposals to restructure the UN have been put forth, as well as many partial ones.2 Even at its creation, the UN was, for all the realism attached to its new institutions of collective security, also in substantial degree a liberal internationalist project in the sense derived from the vision of Immanuel Kant's essay, Zum Ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual

BRUCE RUSSETT is Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations and director of United Nations

Studies at Yale University and editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution. He is the author most

recently of Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World, and editor and

contributor for the forthcoming volume, The Once and Future Security Council.

Political Science Quarterly Volume 111 Number 2 1996 259

' Donald C. F. Daniel and Bradd C. Hayes, eds., Beyond Traditional Peacekeeping (New York:

St. Martin's, 1995); Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993).

2 Major ones include Erskine Childers with Brian Urquhart, Renewing the United Nations System

(Uppsala, Sweden: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 1994); South Commission, Reforming the United Nations: A View from the South (Geneva: South Centre, 1995); Commission on Global Governance,

Our Global Neighborhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Independent Working Group

on the Future of the United Nations, The United Nations in Its Second Half-Century (New York: Ford

Foundation, 1995).

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260 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

Peace). That vision, for which we last year marked the 200th anniversary, saw peace as built on a solid tripod of free political institutions, networks of economic interdependence, and international law and institutions.3 The vision was reflected, for example, in the Bretton Woods financial institutions, the United Nations Development Programme, the Commission on Human Rights and the Center for Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice.

The vision was also, in current terms, one of "human security";4 that is, the security of states and of their peoples from mortal danger, a vision attentive to a broad range of human rights-political, social, and economic. In this vision, the element of international law and organization is quintessentially represented by the United Nations. The UN in turn can do more than just directly support a regime for peace and security from violence; it can indirectly undergird peace by promoting and helping to manage economic interdependence, and by sup- porting and protecting the political rights of representative government. With sympathy if not full acceptance of this vision, therefore, it is appropriate to judge reform proposals with these Kantian or liberal internationalist criteria in mind: criteria that inform the contemporary discourse on the United Nations even more than they did for the organization's founding. These criteria are subversive of autarchic and authoritarian definitions of state sovereignty, in the interest of popular sovereignty in control of states. They, therefore, provide the basis for supporting and actively promoting the production of representative governments in the global system. Sovereign liberal nation-states would serve as components of liberal global institutions that would have enough teeth to defend themselves against illiberal challengers.

To evaluate proposals one must decide how well they should and do strike various balances-or, perhaps, how well any proposal synthesizes various oppo- sites, or Hegelian dialectics. Some degree of balance is needed not merely because everyone will bring different values and perspectives to the task, but because of the complexity of the social phenomena at issue. Rarely can any balance be successfully tipped all the way in one direction. In the spirit of stimulating discus- sion, I propose ten balances for consideration. The number 10 is fortuitous rather than intentional. However, any effort to design global institutions is a bit like playing God, so perhaps the number is not totally coincidental. Sometimes I will illustrate the effort to strike a balance with reference to the report I know best,

3 Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles fora Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); John Oneal, Frances Oneal, Zeev Maoz, and Bruce Russett, "The Liberal Peace: Interdependence, Democracy, and International Conflict, 1950-1985," Journal of Peace Research 33 (February 1996): 11-28.

4 This term is used explicitly by the Commission on Global Governance and the Independent Working Group (see fn. 1); also United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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TEN BALANCES FOR WEIGHING UN REFORM PROPOSALS | 261

namely that of the Independent Working Group on the United Nations.5 But in

doing so, I do not intend to offer a full explication, let alone defense, of the

particular balances achieved in that report. The purpose is rather to offer a set of criteria for evaluation, leaving it to every reader to make her own or his own

judgment on where a balance should be struck, and where it was struck in any individual proposal. These balances are interrelated, often closely. None operates

apart from others.

1. The balance between the interests and perspectives of states, and those of broad-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other nonstate actors

While typically multinational in execution, writing of such reports is unavoidably an elite enterprise. The majority of participants usually come from public sector backgrounds (for example, service in elective, appointive, or administrative of-

fice) and therefore usually give large consideration to the interests of the state.

Even those whose personal backgrounds are predominantly from civil society or NGOs are usually highly privileged members of their societies. Nonetheless, they must try and at least partially succeed in transcending their elite and statist

perspectives, reflecting wider and somewhat less top-down views. This is not just for the sake of wider appreciation in the subsequent public dialogue, but

because state elites simply do not have all the answers. While speaking the realities

of power, the participants must also speak a wider version of "truth" to power.

2. The balance between the preservation and the erosion of state sovereignty

Ever since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which marked the end of the Thirty Years' War, state juridical sovereignty has been the fundamental legal and ideolog- ical principle (and also myth) undergirding the world system. The United Nations

is an organization comprising sovereign states; it is neither a world government nor an assembly of peoples. Elites understandably want to retain the sovereignty of the states they control, as do most of their citizens. No reform proposal that

fails to preserve and in some ways even to strengthen state sovereignty can hope for a favorable reception from those who have the power to enact the proposal.

I I served, with Paul Kennedy, as co-director of the Secretariat of the Working Group. For that reason I avoid commenting at all on the particulars of other reports. A Kantian vision certainly underlay

my contributions, and whereas I believe Kennedy and most-perhaps all-of the members of the

Working Group implicitly shared that vision in some degree, neither they nor the Ford Foundation,

which funded the effort, are responsible for any of the remarks in this article. Nor would I pretend

that all of the balances proposed here were ever considered overtly or consciously; they are, however,

relevant both to post hoc evaluation and to any effort to synthesize recommendations from the various

studies and reports.

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262 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

The reform must be acceptable to the vast majority of governments, as consistent with their sovereignty.

Yet, at the same time, states' practical sovereignty has in many areas been eroded in the modem world.6 Some of these erosions have happened consciously and voluntarily - most strikingly in the case of the European Union, in other instances by a variety of treaty commitments binding states to common legal norms and procedures. Some others have been intended but involuntary, as when extreme repression or humanitarian distress becomes the basis for international intervention in what would normally be the domestic affairs of a state (for ex- ample, Iraq, Haiti). Still others have been both involuntary and unintended, as when states lose to international banks and currency speculators much of their ability to control their national budgets and foreign exchange rates, or their ability to manage the effect of transnational flows of pollution or the erosion of resources in the global commons. Humanitarian disasters and massive refugee flows from civil conflict may defy the practical ability of a state to insulate itself and its policies from events in its neighbors. Indeed, the collapse of civil authority in a country such as Somalia may mean that there is no government capable of exercising the practical rights of sovereignty to which the country may still nominally be entitled.

In these and other instances, the role of an international organization may well come down to that of helping to strengthen or even rebuild civil authority, and hence enabling the government to exercise certain of its sovereign rights (to manage its economy, to limit the effects of pollution, to restore a system of public order and justice), which it could not otherwise exert. International organi- zations must therefore strike some balance between replacing and building the sovereignty of their member states. This is true even when the proponents of a particular reform consciously wish to diminish state sovereignty in certain areas. No other course will be acceptable.

The delicate nature of this balance is illustrated by the problem of "collapsed states," or, as it is called more tactfully in the Report of the Independent Working Group, of "coordination of efforts to rebuild weakened societies under stress."7 In such cases the UN or other legally sanctioned external actors must try to rebuild the administrative, political, judicial, and economic structure of the state so it can again exercise its legal sovereign rights - but in a form that respects human rights broadly and that involves some supervision based both on an international consensus and some agreement between the international organization and those

6 See Hedley Bullard and Adam Watson, eds., The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1994); Mark Zacher, "The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian System" in Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James Rosenau, eds., Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992); D. J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Michael Barnett, "The New UN Politics of Peace," Global Governance 1 (January 1995): 79-98.

7 Independent Working-Group, United Nations, 53.

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TEN BALANCES FOR WEIGHING UN REFORM PROPOSALS | 263

local authorities that do function. It implies some mixture of at least temporary voluntary and involuntary surrender of formal sovereignty for the sake of re- gaining essential elements of real sovereignty later.8

The mechanism proposed by the Independent Working Group for coordinating the rebuilding of a "state under stress" is a new Social Council, working in collaboration with a new Economic Council. Both would be new principal organs of the UN, replacing the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC); the member- ship of each would be chosen with regard to accepted international principles of representation.) But the Social Cou"ncil would be empowered to act only "with the consent of the local government if it retains authority,"9 or, if not, as authorized

by the Security Council and some political groups within the country concerned. Obviously this is a very difficult balance: the UN must not be seen as a neocolonial usurper of state sovereignty, but as ultimately restoring it. And if weak states are to permit it to assume certain conservancy functions, it must have at its disposal-from the international community-the very substantial human and material resources needed truly to restore effective and humane government.

3. The balance between practicality and vision

Here the balance is between what should be done and what can be done. What will states more or less readily accept, and what can they successfully be persuaded to accept, by other states or by their own constituents and civil society? How much should they be subjected to higher aspirations, even if those aspirations are not readily or plausibly achievable in the midterm future? "Visionaries" are by definition "impractical," yet some of both qualities are necessary to make any reform worth pursuing.

A relevant illustration here is the Independent Working Group's treatment of financing the UN. The report makes all the right more-or-less practical noises about the need for greater efficiency in the UN's use of existing resources, the need for states to pay their legally mandated assessments in full and on time, and the need for revision of the assessment formula to mitigate existing perceived inequities. Yet it admits that the requirements of enforcement, peacebuilding, development, human rights, preservation of the commons, and so forth are likely vastly to exceed what member states will be willing to pay as assessments.

Thus the report also creatively calls for "additional sources of funding that are not dependent on the political and budgetary constraints under which most governments operate,"'0 to take the form of "some sort of levy on the utilization of the global commons." It recognizes that it will be very hard to decide what

8 Steven Ratner, The New UN Peacekeeping: Building Peace in Lands of Conflict after the Cold War (New York: St. Martin's, 1995); I. William Zartman, ed. Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995).

9 Independent Working Group, United Nations, 38. '0 Ibid., 48.

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264 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

form that tax might take. " Any global tax will face enormous resistance, from

those on whom it is levied, on political grounds, and from problems of administra-

tive difficulty. In the current environment of domestic politics in many countries, instituting any form of tax seems unthinkable.

It is not just a matter of cost. A reasonable case can be made for tight fiscal control over any organization. The need always for the UN to persuade member

governments to pay their dues provides a powerful restraint on the UN; imposition

of some type of global tax could dissolve states' existing fiscal control over the UN. In proposing such a tax, therefore, the Working Group puts an important and even necessary idea on the agenda for discussion, but also pushes the envelope

of practicality. Serious attention to maintaining some adequate power of the purse on behalf of those who in one way or another will pay most of the bills is essential. A solution, possibly keyed to functions of the proposed Economic Council, need not be beyond reach.

4. The balance between power (or effectiveness) and legitimacy (or justice)

This balance is closely related to the previous one. Nothing can happen without

the capability or power to do it and the willingness to exert that power. In the global arena, major UN activities must have the approval, and usually the active

participation and support, of the most powerful states in the system. Although the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund owe their existence to the needs of economic justice, they cannot violate the wishes of the states that provide

their principal funding. The Security Council cannot, given the veto, embark on an operation against the wishes of a Permanent Member. Nor should it do so without assurances of financial and military commitment from the major powers whose active participation in some form will be necessary. Power talks and acts.

And power will not act in circumstances wherein the major states in the United Nations do not deem the action to be worthwhile in terms of the way they define

their national interest (broad or narrow, immediate or long-term). No action in the absence of adequate power will be effective.

On the other hand, power cannot long be exercised in raw form, divorced from

concepts of equity and legitimacy. Despite all the Security Council's necessity to represent power, and to maintain the procedures and small size required for

timely and judicious action, its legitimacy will be questioned to the degree it is seen as no more than a concert of great powers-especially of rich industrial ones. In the long run, its composition must change and it probably must be

expanded. It must reflect the financial power of the states essential to the organiza- tion's fiscal health and to its peacekeeping operations in particular. (Japan and

I For some possibilities, see the special issue, "The UN at Fifty: Policy and Financing Alternatives,"

Futures: The Journal of Forecasting, Planning, and Policy 27 (March 1995); and Dragoljub Najman

and Hans d'Orville, Towards a New Multilateralism: Funding Global Priorities (Paris/New York:

Independent Commission on Population and Quality of Life, 1995).

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TEN BALANCES FOR WEIGHING UN REFORM PROPOSALS | 265

Germany are now the world's second and largest contributors to the UN's budget.) But if it adds those states as permanent members, it is hard to see how, without also adding some major less developed countries, it can retain legitimacy in the eyes of the great majority of UN member states. In turn, however, the more numerous and diverse the permanent members wielding veto power, the more difficult it will become to act promptly and effectively when the world community wants action. 12 An ineffective Security Council will not retain legitimacy either. Hence the need, however great the resistance of powerful states to relinquishing any of their privileges, to think about some restriction of the scope of the veto, such as limiting it to the realm of military action that might threaten a great power's vital interest-as wished by most of the UN's American and British founders.'3

5. The balance between particularity and universality

Here is the dilemma between on one hand respect for national and subnational cultural values, including different priorities and conceptions of human rights, and on the other the proclamation and widespread acceptance of the principle that there are universal human rights and substantial (if often vague, contested, and incomplete) agreement as to what those rights comprise. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its subsequent conventions, protocols, and agreements have been widely ratified, and embodied in the documents emanating from major UN conferences. Despite the protests of Asian authoritarians, reli- gious fundamentalists, and rich country postmodernists, there is a real degree of consensus.

Nonetheless, the need to respect cultural and political diversity, to balance individual rights with conceptions of group rights, within states as well as between them, lies at the core of intrastate and interstate peace. Devising principles, procedures, and institutions to do so requires a never-ending and ever-contestable balancing act. States need some protection from the threat of disintegration. But minority rights need protection from the potential tyranny of the majority -even sometimes from a democratically-chosen majority. For any proposed increment in the powers and purposes of international institutions, this balance is crucially related to the sovereignty balance.

6 The balance between civil and political rights on one end, and economic rights on the other

This balance is closely related to the preceding one. A widespread claim is that especially for poor countries, satisfaction of economic rights (basic material

2 Bruce Russett, Barry O'Neill, and James Sutterlin, "Breaking the Security Council Restructuring Logjam," Global Governance 2 (January-April 1996): 65-80.

1' Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

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needs) must come first; civil and political rights are luxury goods to be obtained only later- if ever. This view was common in Marxist regimes and remains powerful in rapidly developing capitalist systems operating in strong states. Of course, there must be some room for the determination and application of priori- ties; all good things do not go together in lockstep. Most rich countries are democratically governed, and many poor ones are ruled by authoritarian regimes. Yet there are numerous exceptions in both groups. Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates have higher per capita incomes than do Canada and France. India has experienced decades of substantially democratic rule while ranking among the lowest income countries, as have other states. But systematic empirical evidence of the necessity of sharp trade-offs of economic against political and civil rights simply does not exist. The notion that political opposition must be repressed in the interest of development is, as a generalization, a lie. An excellent review of the scientific literature on political and economic development summa- rizes the situation well:

There is no evidence that, on average, a democracy with civil liberties is costly in terms of economic development. If anything it may be the other way around, that a democracy with civil liberties promotes economic development.... But establishing democratic institutions is not the "deus ex machina" that resolves all the problems of development. A sound and stable political-economic development is essential.14

Representative government can facilitate balanced and equitable economic development in the following ways: an equitable distribution of income and political stability are important contributors to successful growth. '5 By providing stable, legitimate governance and a restrained rule of law, representative govern- ment strengthens the property rights necessary to encourage long-term invest- ment.'6 By providing a base of widespread access to the political system, it discourages the engorgement of inefficient state monopolies and prevents secret environmental abuses of the kind that have emerged from the communist era in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It offers some check on corruption by officials operating behind opaque barriers of state security and without any inquiry by free public media. (Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko exemplifies the kleptocracy of a leadership whose interest in economic development extends

" Alberto Allesina and Roberto Perotti, "The Political Economy of Growth: A Critical Survey of

the Recent Literature," World Bank Economic Review 8 (September 1994): 354-55.

Is Ibid., 351-74; also Ross Burkhart and Michael Lewis-Beck, "Comparative Democracy: The

Economic Development Thesis," American Political Science Review 88 (December 1994): 903-910;

Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, "Political Regimes and Economic Growth," Journal of

Economic Perspectives 7 (Summer 1993): 51-70; John F. Helliwell, "Empirical Linkages between

Democracy and Economic Growth," British Journal of Political Science 24 (April 1994): 175-98;

Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

16 Mancur Olson, "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development," American Political Science Review

87 (September 1993): 567-76.

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TEN BALANCES FOR WEIGHING UN REFORM PROPOSALS | 267

only to enriching itself.) Mass famines occur only in political systems where information can be suppressed and protest repressed. '7

In particular instances there will always be an element of contradiction be-

tween some kinds of rights and others. But they are not inevitably in any kind of severe dialectic. The elements of complementarity on the whole outweigh those of contradiction. Those times when they do come into conflict and are not sufficiently mutually reinforcing may be precisely the times for international organizations to use their influence to preserve a balance, for example standing up for the principles of representative governments as well as the necessity for achieving decent material living conditions.

7. The balance between enforcement and neutrality

The idea of an international organization empowered to enforce the protection of basic human rights rightly causes fear, not only among those judged guilty in a particular instance but among weak states everywhere. But it also represents the hope of many vulnerable individuals and oppressed peoples. This tension cannot be avoided in any discussion of human rights and is, of course, integrally related to the sovereignty balance. In the area of the UN's traditional operations for peace and security, peacekeeping (where the UN forces were on the ground with the consent of the parties, were authorized only to shoot in self-defense, and were not supposed to take sides or otherwise become a party to the conflict) the balance was overwhelmingly on the side of neutrality. Yet sometimes neutrality effectively would mean taking the side of the strong against the weak, without regard to judgments about justice. The UN has also operated (more rarely to be sure, but with Korea and Iraq the prime exhibits) as an agent of collective security, coercing a named aggressor and trying to enforce a settlement that manifestly favored one side.

"Peace enforcement," as it emerged in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's An Agenda for Peace, represents a precarious effort to balance enforcement and impartiality, using force as "a provisional measure" when deemed necessary to avert large-scale humanitarian disaster.'8 The need arises in the context of increasingly common civil wars and breakdowns of order, and requires an immensely difficult balancing act. Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia all illustrate in different ways the hazards. Perhaps most of the time the UN will lack the consensus, the will, and even the capability to engage in peace enforcement. Writing - and if necessary adjusting - the mandate for every such activity offers a formidable challenge. But sometimes the international community, acting through its designated institutions, will decide it to be necessary. The Independent Working Group, for example, calls for establishing a small UN Rapid Reaction Force, available for urgent deployment by the Security Council to prevent certain dangerous political conditions from

'' Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

18 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992), 26.

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deteriorating into chaos and disaster. The force would be capable not only of a peacekeeping mission, but (limited however by its size), able to "provide security for UN personnel; hold an airport . . .; establish one or more safe areas for the civilian population; limit escalation and assist in ending the violence.... "'9 These are in large degree peace enforcement tasks, not those of traditional peacekeeping. They are also distinct from collective security enforcement by heavily-armed units, which the UN dare undertake only when its key members are confident they are prepared to stay the course.

8. The balance between specificity and plasticity of the Charter

The UN Charter has proved to be a reasonably flexible instrument. For instance, it has been possible to stretch the charter for purposes of maintaining "international peace and security" to modify in de facto fashion the Article 2 (7) prohibition of intervention "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state"20 and to invent the institution of peacekeeping despite the absence of any explicit charter authorization for it. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to amend the charter formally, since amendments require ratification by two- thirds of the member states, including approval by all five permanent members of the Security Council. Over its fifty-year history, the only amendments to make it have been for one enlargement of the nonpermanent membership of the Security Council, and two stages of enlargement of ECOSOC. The problem remains how to write-or now, when and how as necessary to modify-a foundational document that will preserve the foundation while underpinning a structure that can expand, contract, and change its form and function in response to new and unforeseen power realities and challenges.

9. The balance between coordination and uniformity ofpurpose, and diversity

A common criticism of the UN has been of the uncoordinated nature of its various units and specialized agencies. Indeed, they not infrequently pursue conflicting goals, whether as part of a peacebuilding effort in El Salvador or in delivering humanitarian relief in Africa.2' At best, the result is the waste of very limited resources; at worst it is outright failure. It seems intolerable to have different organs working at bureaucratic cross-purposes.

'9 Independent Working Group, United Nations, 22.

20 Article 39 becomes the escape clause to permit intervention: "The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken . . . to restore international peace and security."

21 See Alvaro de Soto and Graciana del Castillo, "Obstacles to Peacebuilding," Foreign Policy 94 (Spring 1994): 69-83; also Eva Bertram, "Reinventing Government: The Promise and Perils of Peacebuilding," Journal of Conflict Resolution 39 (September 1995): 387-418.

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Yet some diversity of goal and doctrine has its value. In the arena of economic development the UN and the members of the economic profession who advise or comment on its policies have yet to come up with a coherent, unified theory of economic development. It is not much more attractive to imagine all economic development assistance to be administered on the model of the World Bank than on the model of the UN Development Programme. Nor can we ever expect to see complete agreement on concept or practice between the rich states from which development funds must come and the poor ones which constitute the locus and object of development projects. The Independent Working Group's proposal for a new Economic Council contains a built-in and unavoidable tension. It would be charged "to integrate the work of all UN agencies and international institutions, programs and offices engaged in economic issues, . . . promote the harmonization of the fiscal, monetary and trade policies of Member States and encourage interna- tional cooperation on issues of technology and resources, indebtedness, and the functioning of commodity markets."22 Yet it also encourages different develop- ment approaches. Some increased integration and harmonization is surely desir- able. Very much is surely not desirable nor, in a world of sovereign states, possible. How and where the balance will be struck lies in the realm of a continuing political process that will always also reflect the competing claims of the balance of effectiveness and legitimacy (justice).

10. 77Te balance of interests

Governance of and by the UN is, like all instances of governance, a political process in which numerous interests exert claims and can resist claims. The UN's constitutional structure guarantees a plethora of actors with de facto if not de jure veto power. Hence any reform proposal will have to have something to please most everyone, as well as in the best satirical tradition, something to offend most everyone. The trick is to get the balance right, not just in any single reform proposal (expand the Security Council, create a new Economic Council and a new Social Council, institute some new mode of financing the organization), but in a package of proposals. No single reform recommendation can be consid- ered in isolation. Nor will any large acceptable package be put together without long negotiation and intense public debate around the world. The task of reforming and renewing the United Nations is at heart a political task, as arduous as it is essential.

22 Independent Working Group, United Nations, 52.

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