UN for sale?

When I first stepped into the United Nations headquarters at 405 East 42nd Street in New York a decade ago, my first impression was one of disorientation and ambivalence. Even then, existential institutional exhaustion was already palpable.

To an outside observer, it may represent a world government or an emblem of collective security, but inside it is anything but. It is a fractured world of countless national silos. And to an average New Yorker, why even an average American, it is not a symbol of global representation but an island of privilege. Its diplomatic immunity runs counter to the egalitarian spirit of a democracy. No wonder many prominent Americans, some say even the incumbent US president, have toyed with the idea of evicting the UN from New York. In many eyes, the value of the property beats the properties of values espoused by the UN.

To be honest, it has outlived expectations. A product of post-war optimism, it had to contend with the dark exigencies of the Cold War. Before post-Cold War relief and a return to foundational principles could take root, 9/11 happened. The global war on terror gave way to hostile multipolarity and the rise of hyper-nationalism. When chips are down, everyone considers you broken and claims to want to fix you. But the real desire is to institutionalise leverage, dominance and privilege. So efforts are underway to "reform" or "fix" it. In this bizarro world, every claim means the opposite of the stated intent.

The reform debate, running since 2008 through the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN), keeps circling the same four positions: the Group of Four (G4) wants permanent seats for itself and two for Africa, the African Group wants two permanent seats with full veto rights, France and Mexico want the five permanent members (P5) to refrain from using the veto in mass-atrocity cases, and Uniting for Consensus (UfC), led by Pakistan and Italy, wants more elected seats instead.

As a Pakistani citizen, my first instinct is to demand a veto and permanent seat for Pakistan and be done with it. But privilege is privilege, and national exceptionalism has brought us to this day.

The rich and powerful have always had a different relationship with privilege. They call it their due. The weak and poor have little to offer except the moral argument that privilege itself is wrong. The UN was supposed to be one of the places where that argument counted.

If regional representation is the aim, why does Germany need one when Europe already has two? Why do India and Japan need separate seats when Asia already has China? Countries want their own voice and power. But that is not regional representation. It is redistribution of dominance.

India is a particularly clear example. For a long time, India's neighbours have complained about its overbearing foreign policy and penchant for dictating terms, often at the expense of their sovereignty or interests. And because of its size and economic weight, it has the wherewithal to continue doing so even without the UN's help. Forget Pakistan. Ask Bhutan, ask Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh.

There is also a more fundamental problem. The UN Charter is built on the formal equality of sovereign states and the equal dignity of human beings. India's caste system sits uneasily with that ideal. A society built on inherited hierarchy should give us pause before we reward the state that represents it with permanent institutional privilege.

In South Asia, it is not about representation. It is about giving cruelty a licence to crush the little guy. And if you are still labouring under the delusion that India can work as a counterweight to China, you are fooling yourself. Through its actions, India has made it plain that while it may participate in propaganda against the People's Republic for short-term gains, one country it will never seek a fight with is China.

And this is where the German case becomes important. Germany is an economic powerhouse and supporter of multilateralism. I do not quarrel with its record in the way I have with India's. But if Europe already has two permanent seats, why should it get a third? If regional representation is the argument, Germany does not correct an imbalance. It adds another layer of national privilege.

Why expand the veto at all? One permanent member can block a substantive resolution even when every other member supports it. Yet the answer is often to give more countries the same power. What can go wrong? Why not make the veto collective instead? If the great powers must retain a safeguard, why should one of them alone exercise it? A majority of the P5 could preserve a great-power check while making unilateral obstruction harder. However, any such change would require amending the Charter, a two-thirds General Assembly vote and ratification by two-thirds of UN members, including all five P5.

Ideally, a veto-less UNSC ought to be subservient to the General Assembly, not an overlord. But we know that won't happen. If more countries need a voice, why not add elected members with a timeline to shift authority towards the General Assembly? Why should elected members have different tenures? Give them equal terms and let the General Assembly decide who gets another turn. That would widen representation without creating more permanent privilege.

That may be the ideal. It is unlikely to be the deal. The more countries acquire permanent privilege, the more countries acquire a vested interest in keeping it. Reform becomes harder, not easier. A new permanent member is not another voice in the room. It becomes another owner of the room.

I would go further than UfC. All elected seats should have equal tenure and genuine rotation. More seats would widen participation and make the veto politically more costly without creating new permanent powers.

There is danger in reforming the UN simply because everyone agrees it is broken. The US is showing less patience with multilateral institutions. Political extremes are gaining ground in several P5 countries. Russia has shown what happens when a permanent member puts national interest above collective will. China is becoming an ever stronger distinct pole. Tinkering with the bargain that has held the Council together since 1945 may be playing with fire.

So on closer inspection, the push for reform looks little more than a power grab by regional heavyweights and a desperate attempt by their less influential neighbours to escape the irreversible ossification of regional hegemonies. The irony is that the net result of these opposing efforts might be the indefinite continuation of the status quo. After all, treating your collective inheritance as loot and fighting to divide the spoils just when the enemy of hyper-nationalism is at the gate is not merely counter-intuitive. It is suicidal.