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Article Excerpt
The need to expand the UN Security Council is usually justified as necessary to update Council membership in light of changes in world politics. The mismatch between the existing membership and the increasingly diverse population of states is said to delegitimatize the Council. This rests on an implicit hypothesis about the source of institutional legitimacy. This article surveys reform proposals and finds five distinct claims about the connection between membership and legitimacy, each of which is either logically inconsistent or empirically implausible. If formal membership is indeed the key to institutional legitimacy, the causal link remains at best indeterminate, and we may have to look elsewhere for a theory of legitimation. We must also look for explanations for why the language of legitimation is so prevalent in the rhetoric of Council reform. KEYWORDS: legitimacy, Security Council reform, United Nations, diversity, inequality.
Among the competing proposals for reforming the UN Security Council, one theme is a near constant: that the Council's legitimacy is in peril unless the body can be reformed to account for recent changes in world politics. This consensus is driven by a number of developments: geopolitical changes (in the distribution of military and economic power), systemic changes after decolonization (which multiplied the number of UN members), and normative changes (in the value given to diversity, equity, and representation). The result, summarized in the New York Times, is that the Security Council "is indisputably out of date." (1) Most arguments in favor of Council expansion identify the gap between Council membership and international realities as a threat specifically to the legitimacy of the Council. The gap is an objective fact, but the link to legitimacy is what gives it its political salience and has made it a controversial matter in world politics. This article investigates this link. Conventional wisdom holds that the Council's outdated membership causes delegitimation but the causal mechanics behind this delegitimation are rarely explained.
The process by which institutions become legitimized or delegitimized is a hotly contested matter among organizational sociologists, and yet in the Council reform debates the connection between legitimacy and membership has been treated as unproblematic, even self-evident. I set out below a number of potential causal mechanisms for delegitimation of the Council, which I derive from existing proposals for Council reform. Behind every proposal for Council reform is a different model for how legitimacy, effectiveness, and membership fit together. Comparing these models is important to understanding the stalemate in Council reform and the utility of legitimation claims in world politics.
This article compares the various claims made in Council reform proposals regarding the effects of membership change on the legitimacy of the Council. Its goal is to isolate the discrete elements that make up these claims and assess their logical consistency. All Council reform claims contain hypotheses about the effects of membership change on Council effectiveness. The first section defends my claim that the conventional wisdom is that the current membership structure constitutes a legitimacy crisis for the Council. The second section extracts five distinct empirical hypotheses about the relationship between membership and legitimacy as put forward in defense of Council expansion. It typologizes these claims according to their underlying theory of legitimacy. These are all, in principle, testable, though the difficulties inherent in measuring legitimacy or its effects mean that perhaps in practice the most we can do is look for logical consistency. The third section addresses the question, Which among these claims are empirically plausible and logically sustainable? In conclusion, I speculate about the political interests that motivate these arguments and suggest implications about trade-offs, rhetorical entrapment, and legitimacy in international organizations.
Council reform proposals often look transparently political and self-serving. For instance, it is entirely predictable that Italy would oppose a new German permanent seat and would put forward the case for a collective European Union (EU) seat. (2) But by virtue of being made in the international public sphere, the interests that these arguments serve must be presented in reference to generalizable values of the community. (3) My goal in this article is not to find empirical evidence by which we might test theories of legitimation. Rather, I seek to compare the logic of the legitimacy claims themselves, taking advantage of the fact that they are cast in terms of generalizable principles. As such, I necessarily leave aside several interesting questions. For one, I do not examine the connection between the effectiveness of the Council and its legitimacy. That these two are mutually implicated is obvious but the link between membership and legitimacy is conceptually prior to, and separate from, the connection between legitimacy and effectiveness. For another, I do not focus on the privileges of permanent over nonpermanent membership, including the veto. The role of the veto for new members is important in the debate on enlargement, but it is generally kept out of the framing of the legitimation problems of the Council. No states link a defense of the veto for new members to arguments about legitimacy. For that reason, and because the High-Level Panel, among others, have largely set it aside as well, the veto does not play a large role in my analysis. (4) In focusing on the internal logic of the claim that changing the Council's membership will affect its legitimacy, I seek first to understand the causal mechanisms implicit in such a claim and then to chart the implications that arise from those mechanisms.
Legitimacy, Inequality, and Council Reform
Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution says, "Reform of the Security Council has long been high on the international agenda, but the only thing everyone agrees on is that the current arrangement is deeply flawed." (5) Brent Scow croft agrees: "Almost all our institutions are structured for a world that has departed." (6) Ed Luck says that "calls for radical overhaul" of the Council "qualify as common wisdom." (7) What is wrong with the existing membership of the Security Council that "everyone agrees" is a problem? (8)
By far the most common malady identified at the Council is that the membership of the Council contains such inequalities that it threatens to delegitimize the body as a whole. The High--Level Panel said that "the effectiveness of the global collective security system...depends ultimately not only on the legality of decisions but on common perceptions of their legitimacy" (9) and that the anarchonistic structure of membership rules "diminishes support for Security Council decisions." (10) "The Security Council needs better credibility, legitimacy, and representation to do all that we demand of it." (11) Kofi Annan has expressed "the view, long held by the majority, that a change in the Council's composition is needed 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." (12) The Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) reported in 1995 a pervasive view among delegations that "an increase in the permanent membership would strengthen the United Nations and increase its legitimacy through bringing the organization closer to present-day global realities." (13) Changing the formal membership, it is said, is a necessary step to increasing, or to halting the loss of, the legitimacy of the Council and of its resolutions.
These claims treat the Council's legitimacy as a precious resource that is important to its effectiveness. Being seen as legitimate is important to the Council because, it is said, it increases the likelihood that states will respect the decisions it makes. (14) A more legitimate Council might be better at encouraging states to implement economic sanctions, or to contribute resources to peace missions, or to accept a Council-mandated solution to a dispute. Without coercive resources or financial power of its own, the Council must rely on its legitimacy to increase state compliance with its decisions. (15)
Legitimacy is rarely defined by those who use it to justify Council reform. As I use it here, it here, it refers to the belief by states that the Council has the right to...
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