RW Johnson: Africa’s UN demands, veto included, make no sense

The debate over whether African states should hold veto powers if they secure permanent seats on the UN Security Council has sparked significant controversy. Some African commentators argue that without veto rights, Africa would be treated as second-class. However, the realities of power show a significant gap between African states and established Great Powers, both economically and militarily. Moreover, expanding veto powers could create paralysis, with even rising nations like Germany and India unlikely to receive such authority..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..By RW Johnson .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Listen to the full story.There has recently been an outburst of what one can call pre-emptive indignation over the question of whether African states, if invited to take up permanent seats on the Security Council, should have veto powers or not. Several local black journalists have written angry columns saying that if Africans are not offered veto powers this would be tantamount to their being told that they are second class citizens. And, accordingly, they should refuse to serve on the Council at all. .This is putting several carts before the horse. The suggestion made by the British and American delegates is that the Security Council be enlarged to include – as permanent members – Germany, Japan, Brazil and India plus two African states which would represent Africa as a whole. The first thing to note about this is that Japan and Germany have the third and fourth largest economies in the world, that India is the world's most populous nation and the fifth largest economy and that Brazil is the giant of Latin America, the world's eighth biggest economy and 215 million people. In other words, these are chosen as Great Powers, joining the five Great Powers already on the Security Council. In addition there are ten non-permanent members (currently including three African states)..There are many definitions of what a Great Power is. The Chinese scholar, Peng Yuan, director of China's Institute of American Studies, provides ten criteria: Population, geographic position and natural resources; military muscle; high tech and education; cultural/soft power; cyber power; having multiple allies; geopolitical strength – ie. the ability to project force internationally; high intelligence capabilities; intellectual power from universities, think tanks etc; and strategic power based on a global strategy. Peng Yuan argues that only the US fulfils all these criteria at present, Nonetheless, the point is clear – and all five of the present Security Council Great Powers have nuclear arms, sizeable or large populations, large economies, considerable soft power, and the ability to project force internationally with aircraft carriers. They all have very strong intelligence and tech capabilities, top universities and the Western powers all have multiple allies..Read more: 🔒 The Economist: Unveiling at BRICS Summit – Putin's plan to defeat the dollar.It will be seen immediately that African states are a long way behind on these criteria. Under apartheid South Africa had very considerable military power and intelligence capabilities and the ability to project force throughout the Southern African region. It had also built its own nuclear weapons. Since 1994, however, all these capabilities have collapsed: today South Africa has no nuclear weapons and has lost the ability to build them. It also fails even to maintain the modern weapons and aircraft that it has purchased. .South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt have the largest economies in Africa (though none of them are growing much) and they all have substantial populations, but militarily the strongest states in Africa are Egypt and Algeria and in both Nigeria and South Africa state failure remains a clear possibility. No African state can manufacture high tech aircraft or other sophisticated weaponry, so all African states rely on being able to buy these things from Great Powers. .There are no African universities in the world's top 100 and African states have little soft power. The most widely spoken languages in Africa are English, French, Arabic, Portuguese and Swahili, a fact which shows how thoroughly Africa is still the subject of others' soft power. And, of course, Africa is divided into 54 very diverse states and despite the lip-service paid to Pan-Africanism the pressures for Africa's states to sub-divide are stronger than any desire to unite..The UN has, of course, its own history. Originally, the term "United Nations" was used by Roosevelt and Churchill to mean all those countries which had joined the alliance against the Axis powers and, indeed, UN membership was reserved to those states who had declared war on the Axis. It was seen as axiomatic that for any international body to work the special position of the Great Powers had to be acknowledged and reflected in its structure. Moreover, if push came to shove, only the Great Powers had the strength to solve crises and keep the peace. Stalin made it clear that the USSR would only participate if it had a veto: Britain, France, the US and Chiang Kai-shek's China were all anti-communist powers and Stalin could not risk them ganging up on him. But it was agreed that none of the Great Powers could risk its vital interests being trampled on, so each of them had a veto. .Read more: 🔒 FT's Gideon Rachman: What the world thinks of Harris versus Trump.None of the black journalists whom I have read have paid attention to the fact that Great Powers have existed throughout history. The UN tries to cope with this reality by giving all states equal rights in the General Assembly but preserving Great Power rights in the Security Council. This was done not only because no other arrangement was workable but because without it, Great Powers would not have joined the UN at all. That had happened to the League of Nations and had doomed that body to irrelevance, a fate which the UN's founders were desperate to avoid..A second point is that as yet no one has suggested that the new permanent Great Powers – India, Japan, Germany and Brazil – should have veto powers. Indeed, it seems certain that this won't happen. First, because having nine states with vetoes would virtually guarantee permanent paralysis. Second, because any reform has to be acceptable to the present Great Powers – if not, they'll veto it..The Great Powers who will feel most threatened by this reform are Russia and China. Japan and Germany are part of the Western bloc. The rise of China is gradually pushing India towards alliance with its region's countervailing powers – the US, Japan, Australia and South Korea (and India is siding with Israel against "Islamic terrorism"). Brazil. Too, generally wants good relations with the US. So the addition of these four states potentially weakens the position of Russia and China. If these two states can be prevailed upon to accept the US-UK proposals, the least they'll want is that the new permanent members don't get vetoes but that they keep their own..Note that there are currently 193 member states in the UN. Only five have vetoes. The notion that that means that the other 188 are all second class citizens is just not tenable. And if even Germany, Japan, India and Brazil don't get vetoes, how can one possibly argue that two African states should ? There are, after all, no Great Powers in Africa or anything remotely near to that. .Let us be frank about this. Many African states are way behind in paying their dues to the UN and even to the African Union. President Gaddafi used to pay the membership dues of many African states so that he could control their votes. (In 2011 well over half the AU budget was contributed by "International Partners", particularly the EU. Five countries – SA, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt and Libya – contributed three quarters of what remained. This left the other 49 African countries to find only $30 million between them, but many of them still defaulted.) .Read more: 🔒 The Economist: Why Donald Trump has moved ahead in our election forecast.In addition many African states are ruled by military regimes or by long-standing dictatorships and many of them (including South Africa) have such pathetically weak armed forces that they are unable to contribute effectively to peace-keeping missions. (The tiny Rwandan army has had far greater success in cleaning up Cabo Delgado than did the SADC military mission, which included South Africa.).Then there is the question of which two African states would represent the continent ? It's most unlikely that Africa's many little states will agree that the Big Three (Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa) should monopolise those places. So we might end up with Africa being represented by, say, Gabon and Sierra Leone. In which case the idea of either of these countries having a veto is just laughable. And Africans tend to assume that the AU would elect the states that sit on the Security Council – but that is surely wrong. The AU is poor, dodgy and corrupt. It is kept going by subsidies from a number of Western countries. Which means that Russia and China, for fear of stealthy Western influence, would almost certainly not accept that the AU should do the choosing. In any case the UN does not delegate the election of membership of its institutions to other bodies: all UN members get to vote on which states are to have the non-permanent Security Council seats, for example. So one may be sure that the choice of African countries would be made by the UN General Assembly – with its non-African majority..The UN has in the past served the African cause rather well. It has been the sounding board for campaigns for independence, against British, French, Belgian and Portuguese colonialism, and against apartheid. But now that that is behind us, many African states feel dissatisfied with the UN. Together they have 54 votes but most African states are poor, weak and African diplomats have a poor reputation. This tendfs to make them policy-takers rather than policy-makers. Moreover, the Security Council is often blocked by the exercise of vetoes. .Something like 60% of the UN's business derives from African crises of one sort or another but none of the Great Powers is keen to get involved in African peace-keeping missions. Developed countries know all too well that the reason for most African crises lies in failures of governance of one sort or another. No external force can solve those failures of governance and sixty years on from the era of independence the same problems keep recurring. Inevitably, many diplomats from developed countries simply throw up their hands in despair at this incorrigibility. Frustrated by this, Africans have reacted by demanding more power. This is a mirage. They may increase their representation but they will only really have power when Africa manages to produce its own Great Powers..Read also:.Africa's energy crisis: Wakanda's Afro-futurist dream is more remote than ever🔒 FT: Why the west should be paying more attention to the gold price riseCol. Chris Wyatt: Musk & Trump, AGOA & the GNU & those elite sex scandals…

RW Johnson: Africa’s UN demands, veto included, make no sense

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