US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The reform of the UN Security Council (UNSC) emerged as one of the most contentious and polarising issues under negotiation in the lead-up to the Summit of the Future, held in New York from 20 to 23 September.
The intergovernmental negotiations framework, which compiled the outcome document, effusively billed as the UN “Pact of the Future”, essentially kicked the can down the road as far as undertaking any concrete decisions on UNSC reform is concerned.
Twenty years ago, the Africa Union (AU) adopted a common position on the the reform of the security council, known as the Ezulwini Consensus, in which member states demanded two permanent seats on the UNSC, “with all prerogatives and privileges of current members”, including the right to invoke the veto.
For the two intervening decades, all the permanent five members of the UNSC — the US, UK, France, China and Russia — have paid lip-service to the idea of UNSC reform, and Africa’s inclusion as a permanent member, and rejected any genuine attempts to place the issue on the agenda.
This status-quo-maintenance strategy of the permanent five appears to have been disrupted by an announcement by US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who proudly revealed that the US was prepared to consider two seats for Africa as permanent members of the UNSC, with a significant snag being that the two seats would exclude veto powers.
In effect, the US “non-proposal” would relegate the African continent of 1.4 billion people to the category of “permanent” second-class citizens, without any significant decision-making power, on a UNSC that allocates 60% of its agenda to issues relating to Africa. The continent would once again be confined to the status of “spectator” in UNSC decisions that affect the lives of its people, repeating the historical exclusion of African countries in June 1945 when the UN was formally established in San Francisco.
The fact that the US proposal excludes the veto is a strategy that Washington’s foreign policy mandarins have carefully calibrated and calculated as opening gambit purposefully designed to precipitate rejection from African countries and provoke widespread opprobrium from China, Russia and the Global South.
An all-out rejection of the US’s “non-proposal” would be the desired response from those who would like to maintain the status quo. In the aftermath of widespread rejection, Washington’s foreign policy establishment can throw its hands up in the air, in moral lament, and castigate the Global South for rejecting a perfectly reasonable proposal of permanent membership of the UNSC — without any permanent rights.
The world is at an inflection point and convoluted attempts by Washington’s foreign policy mandarins to maintain and defend the status quo by any means necessary is a flawed strategy in the medium to long term.
The insistence on maintaining the status quo, which has its supporters not only in Washington, but also London, Paris and Brussels, will only push countries from the Global South away from decaying and dysfunctional multilateral institutions, such as the UNSC, to seek alliances in emerging geopolitical groupings, such as Brics and the Non-Aligned Movement, which will ultimately lead to the formation of parallel, and competing, institutions.
The UK and France, both with populations of 67 million people, when contrasted with 1.4 billion Africans, are a decayed part of the UNSC furniture. The “permanent” presence of the British and French on the UNSC echoes the dying throes of a dysfunctional system in terminal decline and resembles the gold-plated statues of dead and discredited colonial conquerors of a bygone imperial era.
This is also the reason why London and Paris generally tend to avoid using their veto powers unilaterally because they know that they have no credibility to sit as veto-wielding members of the UNSC.
The US “offer” to the African continent is analogous to a back-handed slap with a leather glove, an act that European nobility would practise on antagonists they considered not worthy of physical contact. Washington has set the status-quo cat loose among the pigeons of change and might be surprised to find that these birds will not fly!
The pursuit of a global order that advances the idea of equality among humanity is viewed with scepticism by the agents of US-Western hegemony. The thinking that informed the disingenuous non-proposal to reform the UNSC will only contribute to a more polarised and dangerous world. Beyond merely moving the deck chairs around the planetary Titanic as it sinks, Washington’s mandarins need to consider a mindshift, go back to the drawing board, and frame the discussion through a different prism.
The UN Summit of the Future was billed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine global governance for the 21st century. The fact that the deliberations leading up to it were mired in vacuous and unimaginative 193-state controlled inter-governmental reaffirmations, that excluded any meaningful participation and diverging opinions from the worlds 8 billion people, generated a Pact of the Future that is set up to have absolutely no impact on the state of the planet for decades to come.
The US “non-proposal” on UNSC reform as regards Africa is symptomatic of a failure by Washington’s mandarins to identify with their fellow human beings and will stand out as a pivotal missed opportunity to recognise and acknowledge that the world has changed significantly and that efforts to continue to pursue the enforcement of yet another American century could tilt the planet and humanity into even deeper crisis.
Professor Tim Murithi is a research associate at the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa at the University of Cape Town.