The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
of the world.
The problem is compounded – and this is not commonly understood – by the fact that the powers of the Security Council are not confined to the administration of peace. The UN Charter also grants the five permanent members vetoes over constitutional reform of the United Nations.* Even if every other member of the General Assembly votes to change the way the institution works, their decision can be overruled by a single permanent member. Any one of the five can also block the appointment of the UN Secretary-General,† the election of judges to the International Court of Justice, and the admission of a new member to the United Nations.36
Those who benefit from this system argue that it simply reflects the realities of power: if the five permanent members were not using their vetoes to force other states to do as they bid, they would find some other means. This is undoubtedly true; but the problem with the way the council is established is that, rather than moderating the realities of power, it compounds them. It offers an immediate and painless means for a permanent member to prevent the rest of the world from pursuing peace or justice, whenever it suits its interests to do so. These special powers have rendered the UN General Assembly, in which every member state has an equal vote, all but irrelevant. The 186 member states which do not occupy permanent seats on the Security Council can huff and puff about how the world should be run, in the certain knowledge that real power lies elsewhere.
But even if the Security Council were to be disbanded tomorrow, and the supreme powers it possessed vested instead in the Assembly, the United Nations would still be far from democratic. Many of the member states are not themselves democracies, and have a weak claim to represent the interests of their people. Even those governments which have come to power by means of election seldom canvass the opinion of their citizens before deciding how to cast their vote in international assemblies. There is, partly as a result, little sense of public ownership of the General Assembly or the decisions it makes. At public meetings, I have often asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they know the name of their country’s ambassador to the United Nations. Seldom, even at gatherings of the most politically active people, do more than two or three per cent claim to know; on one occasion an audience of 600 mostly well-read, middle-class people (it was a literary festival) failed to produce a single respondent. In turn, many of the ambassadors, who are appointed, not elected, appear to be rather more conscious of the concerns of their nations’ security services than those of the citizens whose part they are supposed to take.
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