Part 1 - What is P5, the UNSC, and the Veto?
In a grand and well-lit room is a horseshoe table adorned with flags, microphones and name cards. All around the table in cloth padded seats, the type you find in the expensive office supply catalogues, sits perhaps threescore men and women in suits and smart clothes. At the table, fifteen members sit facing each other, their agendas hanging on their faces. A man stands up, he holds a paper at his waist and looks under his glasses, the blue-grey eyes frayed with strands of red. It's been a long day, but it isn’t over yet. This man, the president of this global cabal, clears his throat to quieten the silent room.
“The draft resolution has not been adopted, owing to the negative vote of a permanent member of the Security Council”.
Not one person in the room is surprised, they already knew. They knew even before the open voting took place, but the announcement etches the vote in the eternal record. The majority of the room is still disappointed, but they get into cross-town cabs and head to their hotels and bars and evening events. In the crowd, a man who came to speak on behalf of his battle-torn nation stares at the colossal oil painting on the wall. Its drab colours remind him of home. Because of this vote, the war will continue and another wave of innocent victims will be subjected to misery and death. The graveyards will continue to grow, bound by bound, day by day - this man’s country will be torn apart.
This could be any day in midtown New York City, on the banks of the East River between East 42nd and 48th Street. This is the United Nations, a megalithic structure that represents unity and global governance. In the 73 years since it began making global decisions, the UN has seen 211 vetoed draft resolutions. Cumbersome, complex and confusing, I have spoken on the UN before, but will recap briefly: created in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, the UN was established to become a global intergovernmental authority after the apparent ineffectiveness of the League of Nations. The UN brings together two irreconcilable positions; the need to accept realities of great power politics and the necessity to acknowledge the sovereign equality of all member states. We are post-Westphalian and the UN attempts to create objective governance for states and nations because of this, all whilst respecting national differences. It is also the floor for mediation on conflict, violence and war.
When soldiers are fighting on the Shat al-Arab in the Suez and Sarajevo, when there is a proto-genocide in Kampala, Kinshasa or Khartoum, when a political revolution is in the streets of Caracas, Cairo or Colombo - the rooms and corridors of the UN bustle and rush with diplomats, state representatives and sometimes celebrities. From all this buzzing, the UN acts to stabilise a nation or to salvage international peace. Resolutions are drafted, voted and acted upon to get peacekeeping troops on the ground to stem the blood - in theory. Often there is something that prevents approval of the resolution, some sort of deadlock. When this occurs the entire world has to watch as the UN stands still and through non-action allows the blood to flow. Why would there be a deadlock? How could any international actor let this all happen?
Well, I guess my first argument is that the UN is not an actor, it is a theatre for actors to perform in. The UN does not make decisions, it creates decisions from the consensus - which seems democratic until you dig a bit deeper.
It is not a true democracy in the sense that the majority rules. There are 193 member states in the UN and in a pure democratic world, 97 would be able to command a majority. But this is not how the UN works. Instead, a small group called the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) hold votes on issues that the entire UN, and therefore the world, adopt. Seems a little less democratic, but ok. The UNSC is a selection of fifteen states that take turns to bring resolutions and governance to the world, it is therefore charged with the maintenance of international peace and security.
Out of the fifteen states, only ten are rotational, the other five are permanent. Why? The UN was formed by what one could call the victors of the Second World War - because that’s what winners do. The USA, the UK, France, the USSR and China were the victors so they all decided they should steer the ship out of storms. They seated themselves as the Permanent Five or P5, and in fairness, they were the global powers at the time. Other powerful states had been defeated, i.e. Germany and Japan, and a lot of states were yet to be created in a pre-decolonisation era. Brazil, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, Nigeria, Indonesia; many large independent populations and economies had yet to emerge and the world.
You’d think it unfair not to rotate all nations in power so as to ensure that there was a fair proportion of states who created resolutions. But would it be “fair” if 15 states all with a population of fewer than 500,000 people (for which there are 27, not including the Vatican) were in charge of all the other countries with a total population of over 7 billion? Would it be fair if it was just the largest population that controlled the rest? Fairness is complicated and not objective.
So the P5 sits at the dinner table and ensure no one can bully the others out of their bread rolls, at least through the UN - you can still bully people unilaterally. Each P5 state is a referee who also plays the game and this can cause great frictions when they are opposed to each other. Thankfully, the USA, Russia, France, UK and China never disagree - just kidding. Due to the disagreements and the opposing views on global affairs, the UN has fallen ineffective when dealing with great power clashes, particularly over Cold War divisions, in the Middle East and increasingly on separatist issues. When a draft resolution is tabled in the UNSC that one of the P5 doesn't like, their vote against it means that it is vetoed. Any of the P5 can prevent any resolution for any reason, even in the other fourteen UNSC members voted for it.
In every case involving great power aggression during the Cold War, the UN was ineffective due to the Soviet veto or smaller states’ unwillingness to risk position - Henry Kissinger
The P5 members’ are trusted to steer the ship straight and prevent one of them from overthrowing the others. But it also means that those things that are not in the interest of one state may be blocked. Such as a ceasefire, land dispute or a trade conflict. No one P5 member can ruin the others, and between them, they are the world gatekeepers. Green lights all around the P5 (or at least no red lights) are required for any UN activity that involves peacekeeping, peace enforcement or observer missions.
Let’s look at a few examples of how the veto has been used;
Georgia. During the opening of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, Russia invaded Georgia - there is a complex history to this - but I don’t think it is contentious to say that the Russian military entered the sovereign nation of Georgia, and aided in the creation of the breakaway pro-Russian states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The point is that a UN mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), that had been there since 1993 was able to monitor the conflict, at least until June 2009, when Russia voted against extending the mandate of the observer mission, essentially closing the door to all future UN participation. A great power vetoed the UN agency in a conflict in which they were a participant.
Nicaragua. In 1986, in the case of Nicaragua v. the United States, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that the US had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their rebellion against the Sandinistas. When the UN sat down to vote on a resolution calling for full and immediate compliance with the judgment of the ICJ, including obligations to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua and immediately to cease illegal activities - the US voted against this. This meant that the ICJ judgement was just that, an unenforceable judgement. A great power vetoed the UN agency in a conflict in which they were a participant.
This is how we end up with frozen and unresolved conflicts in so many parts of the world. Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Kosovo, Georgia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen, Cyprus, Kashmir, Myanmar, Zimbabwe to name a few. All subjugated to what appears to be perpetually unresolved conflict, violence, and sometimes abject war.
The opposition in me also thinks that war and violence are not always solved by interventionism, which can often have catastrophic effects, this is also the argument of Vladimir Putin. One may make the conceptual argument that violence is natural in the formation, evolution and life of a nation and that if Western Europe was allowed to go through thousands of years of conflict, so too must other regions. Of course, genocide is harder with a longbow, which is the ultimate argument against modern post-Westphalian conflict. The UN tries to save human life, and to let a conflict burn out at the cost of countless lives is not palatable.
So this is the main issue with the P5; objectivity and fairness. One of the states can prevent meaningful international dialogue and conflict resolution if it isn’t in their geopolitical interest. This is a vetocracy.
Another issue is the conversation of relevance. Let us not argue who is and isn’t a great power and who is and isn’t relevant to global affairs. It’s a long conversation over strong coffee as to the sources of a state’s power and how to measure and compare them. Most of us can agree that the is something to be said for Pakistan and India to have more than a temporary seat at the table owing to their nuclear arsenal, but this may invite Iran and North Korea also. What comparative rights as a global power do France and the UK have over that of Germany, and Italy and even Poland and Turkey? Do Africa and South America not deserve a permanent deciding vote in their future?
Is there another way to ensure that all nations are equally represented in the United Nations? No - this is the simple answer. International relations doesn’t deal in absolutes, no one system will benefit everyone equally and someone has to be in charge. There is the reality of power to consider and some states have more than others; global powers yield global power - this is a harsh fact and the UN has to deal with it. How this is managed in the power shifts of the future is unknown but one thing is certain, however, the only way the P5 will change is if they all agree to do so, which seems unlikely.
Part two of this article looks at the data of how states have actually used their vetoes, and how this has changed in the shifting global eras.