IMPROVED SECURITY THROUGH THE UN? IT’S A LONG SHOT BUT IT MIGHT JUST WORK.

Here’s a thing: we won the war (Hurrah!) in 1945 so we got a veto on the UN Security Council the following year. We then went into steady relative decline and other countries, including our pesky former foes Japan and Germany, have come to the fore in the world and quite reasonably seek a bigger voice on the world stage. Gordon Brown’s radical, forward thinking solution is therefore to, er, retrench the divide between the ‘have-vetos’ and the ‘have-not-vetos’ by doubling the number of countries with a veto to include those two as well as Brazil, India and South Africa.

It would be wonderful for someone in Whitehall to do a bit of strategic thinking and to recognise that the world has changed an awful lot and that the old fashioned system is more full of holes than a broken collander. The almost deified Robert Fisk has pointed out in his excellent but utterly depressing book, The Great War for Civilisation, that almost all of the world’s fissures, from Israel/Palestine to Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland emerged from the debris of the eponymous war and that people have spent the last 90 years trying to stick plasters on the top of the various problems while thousands were impoverished, tortured, raped, blown up, or otherwise killed as a result. A major contributor to that inertia over these intractable problems has been the UN, which was tied up from day one by the need to have the insular USA on board. Hence the focus on what scholars of international relations might term a ‘realist’ model which puts states at the heart of the organisation rather than seeing the organisation as somehow more than the sum of its parts.

I still curse when I think of the unbelievably ignorant former US Foreign Secretary, Madeleine Albright, referring to the UN as ‘international civil servants’ because they wouldn’t do what she wanted them to. Well, good for them and shame on her for not even attempting to understand the system she should have been working within.

But back to the point: giving other major countries more of a say in the UN is of course entirely appropriate and the fact that neither Brazil nor India have a full role there is a scandal. However, giving more vetos isn’t likely to improve the way the Securtity Council works, I would humbly suggest. In particular, that serial veto-er [Sorry, English language…], the USA, will not change its behaviour any time soon and the result will be that the other countries given vetos are likely to respond by obstructing various votes in their own way.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see someone recognise that we are part of the EU and that three of the proposed countries which would have vetos under the new system – Germany, France and us – could be accommodated by a single veto for the EU. I can almost hear the cries of alarm and protest ringing round the shires. However, this would be an eminently practical way to reduce the probable log jam that would arise from up to 10 countries trying to assert themselves with their little vetos and it would force the major countries in the EU to work much more closely together internationally.

One way of sweetening what would be a bitter pill both here among our career obstructers at the Foreign Office and among the even more venal ‘enarques’ at the Quai d'Orsay would be to agree such a policy and them to allow Britain and France to share the Security Council seat for, say, 20 years, with the President of the EU as a formal consultee on all decisions.

Sure its controversial but it would strengthen one of the key international institutions which have done so much for our modern world, in spite of the countless attempts by various states to try to kill them off at various times. I do hope some Tories read this post!