Reengineering the UN (was Re: [extropy-chat] urban sprawl as defense)

Brett Paatsch bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au
Sat Aug 28 09:32:18 UTC 2004


"J. Andrew Rogers" wrote:
 
> On Aug 27, 2004, at 5:49 PM, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> > If your going to have 5 permanent security council members
> > I think you have to have the US, China and Russia's power and 
> > populations give them a place, and the last two could be any 
> > number of countries but the UK and France are as good as any
> > other so far as I can see.
 
> I think one could make a reasonable argument that one of the 
> permanent European countries should be replaced by Japan, which
> has a military, economy, and population that is at least as large or
> larger than any of  them.  But there is the problem of appearances.

That wouldn't be unreasonable, in theory, I accept that Japan or
Germany might be as good or better than France, but there is no way
within the UN Charter to remove an encumbent permanent security
council member.

Article 6 allows for expelling members from the UN upon the 
recommendation of the SC but the only recommendations the SC
makes are in the form of resolutions and a permanent SC member
would certainly veto any resolution aimed at its own removal. 

To remake the UN with different permanent security council members 
or with a differently tiered structure as you suggest you'd really have to
break it properly (ie. completely) and come up with a UN V.3 like the
UN is sort of a version 2 after the League of Nations.  

The problem with all this is it takes an enormous amount of political
will to do something like that.  It would normally be beyond what a 
democratically elected politician (even a US President on a 4 year 
term) could politically dare to take on (even if he/she wanted too). 

It took a world war to provide a failure conspicuous enough to end
the League of Nations. 

Brett Paatsch





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