The Foreign Service Journal, September 2006

worst form of government — except for all those others,” then we ought to aspire to democracy at every level of human governance. Many schemes have been put forth over the decades for modifying the veto. Perhaps it could be limited to only the most vital matters the Security Council consid- ers — rather than extending to everything on its docket. Perhaps for other matters it could be transformed into a supermajority requirement — say, three of the five per- manent members and nine of 15 total members. In American elections, after all, 60 percent is usually con- sidered a landslide. It’s often declared as self-evident that the U.S. “would never give up the veto” — that is, give up our ability to prevent the rest of the world from doing something we don’t want it to do. But the veto’s existence also allows other countries to keep us from doing something, too. Consider an initiative Washington wants very much to pursue, which garners the support of 10 or 11 or even 14 Security Council members. If it is Russia, China, Britain or France that stands opposed, the U.S. is forced to choose between dropping the initiative or pursuing it without council authorization and in defiance of interna- tional law. This, of course, is why curtailing Iran’s nuclear program has been so difficult, because the five have con- sistently had very different ideas about how to proceed. This is what happened in early 2003, when the U.S. abruptly dropped its efforts to secure a resolution autho- rizing a U.S. invasion of Iraq, and launched such an inva- sion anyway — illegally, in the view of most international lawyers. Inextricably intertwined with the question of the veto is the question of the composition of the Security Council. Few things could be more profoundly anachro- nistic than a body owned and operated by the five victors of a war that ended in the first half of the last century. Many schemes for democratizing the council have been put forth over the decades. There is little point in rehash- ing the respective merits of various plans here, beyond noting that virtually all of them focus on bringing a small number of new great powers to the table, to provide a voice to presently unrepresented regions. Perhaps one day we will see the emergence of enough political will to actually bring one of these schemes into existence. If humanity wants to avoid some of the cataclysmic scenarios that are all too easy to conjure today, we must try to envision much more dramatic changes in our glob- al public policymaking processes — changes that will bring a much larger transformation in representation, legitimacy, accountability and universality. A Broader Democratization Some have described the often-ineffectual U.N. General Assembly as embodying the principle of “one nation, one vote and no power.” Surely the time has long since come to give serious consideration to a weighted voting system in the General Assembly — similar to those already used in the International Labor Organization, the European Union and the international financial institu- tions. One longstanding idea is the “binding triad” proposal, promoted for years by the late Richard Hudson of the Center for War/Peace Studies, under which vote tallies would calculate not only the number of states voting for some measure, but also the number of people represent- ed by those states and the number of dollars contributed by those states. Consider how much legitimacy would be conferred on initiatives that had secured support from a majority of states, a majority of people, and a majority of those paying the bills. In Hudson’s vision, such a system of three simultane- ous majorities would have enough credibility to grant to the General Assembly the same kind of power to enact binding international law over other matters that the Security Council now possesses over war and peace mat- ters: the ability to legislate. Professor Joseph Schwartzberg of the University of Minnesota has done elaborate mathematical analyses of how both the binding triad and other weighted voting schemes might actually operate in practice. Nongovern- mental advocacy organizations ought to start counting and promoting those tabulations now— to illuminate the simple proposition that the mechanism for representa- tion decided upon in San Francisco in 1945 is not the only possible kind. Another advantage of this approach is that it would provide a tangible incentive for nations to fulfill their funding obligations to the U.N. promptly and consistent- ly. The more you pay, the greater your clout. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the suzerainty of Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a few years back, might not have been so quick to withhold our dues to the U.N. had our voting power there been directly diminished as a con- sequence. F O C U S 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 6